bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1987) — Spring 1987 // Printemps 1987, p. 37
Camp X: Canada’s School for Secret
Agents, 1941-45, by David Stafford. Lester
& Orpen Dennys, 327 pp. $22.95.
David Stafford has produced an interesting, scholarly and seemingly authoritative history of Camp X, a British training camp for saboteurs, spies and guerilla fighters, set up and operated by the British near Whitby, Ontario, between 1941 and 1946.
Happily, the author has done much more than reveal the story of Camp X, or Special Training School No. 103 as it was officially known. He has made a useful contribution to the history of the early development of cooperation in intelligence and security matters between the United States, Britain and Canada. It was a remarkable co-operative effort which has endured to this day, in some measure, at least, because of Camp X and Hydra, the wireless facility located within the camp, used for transmitting and receiving top secret intelligence material sent in high grade cypher between North America and Britain.
Without the initial assistance and continuing help of Norman
Robertson, Mike Pearson, Tommy Stone, Arnold Heeney and George Glazebrook, Camp X and Hydra could not have been born and flourished.
The book will have a special interest for the Department of External Affairs since it reveals the key roles played by some of its members in the establishment of Camp X and Hydra. Indeed, it is clear that without the initial assistance and continuing help of Norman Robertson, Mike Pearson, Tommy Stone, Arnold Heeney and George Glazebrook, Camp X and Hydra could not have been born and flourished.
The author unearthed in London, Washington and Ottawa a good deal of hitherto unpublished material. He is to be congratulated for his perseverance, and for having arranged such a wealth of material in a more or less coherent and entertaining manner. The narrative does not always run smoothly, but it cannot have been easy for the author and the editors to know how best to present so much diverse material.
Stafford makes clear that unfortunately there is a good deal of additional documentation which remains inaccessible to historians and others. I find it difficult to believe there are many papers concerning World War Il intelligence operations, the publication of which now could seriously affect the security of any nation. For example, I can see no grounds for not publishing most of the official history of British Security Coordination, written in 1945 on William Stephenson’s instructions. Eventually only ten copies of the history appear to have been circulated. The copy sent to Norman Robertson has become lost, and the remaining copies are not accessible for one official reason or another.
In Chapter Two the author states, “Mackenzie King almost certainly knew nothing about it (Camp X)”. I would be inclined to be a bit less categorical on this score. Having worked closely with Robertson on security and intelligence matters for four years (1958-62), I think it more than likely that he told the Prime Minister about Camp X and Hydra, albeit obliquely, as only he could do. Alas, only Norman Robertson and Mackenzie King can really settle the question.
In Chapter Eight, entitled “Blood and Tears”, concerning the activities of Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents in France, Stafford, dealing with the involvement of French Canadians, writes: “Both d’Artois and Archambault were graduates of Camp X. Unlike Beauregard, who had been recruited from the Canadian forces in Britain and therefore trained at SOE domestic schools, they had been recruited in Canada. Along with Leonard Taschereau, another French Canadian working for a resistance circuit near Troyes, in Champagne, they were the only success stories from a major effort in 1943 to recruit French Canadians for the shadow war.”
I believe the author meant his comment to refer only to the recruitment of French Canadians in Canada, since I can think of several French Canadians recruited in England in 1942-43 who were outstandingly successful. I had dealings with a number of them while I was a junior officer with Canadian Military Intelligence Headquarters in London, and my duties included searching for likely recruits and attending to certain administrative details once they were taken on by SOE, e.g., if they happened to be noncommissioned officers or of lesser rank, arranging for them to be commissioned as officers in the Canadian army in the faint belief this somehow might afford them greater protection should they fall into the hands of the Gestapo’s Sicherheitsdienst. The exploits of these extraordinarily brave men have been well recorded by Roy MacLaren, a former Foreign Service Officer, in his book, “Canadians Behind Enemy Lines” and by Lucien Dumais, “The Man Who Went Back”. London, Leo Cooper, 1975, and “Un canadien Français face a la Gestapo”. Montreal: Editions du jour, 1969.
In a chapter entitled “Final Secrets”, dealing principally with the Gouzenko case, the author reiers to an attempt by William Stephenson, in January 1946, to persuade the Canadian authorities to, “set up and run a new intelligence agency”. “. For the purpose he enlisted the help of Charles Vining, who had been Stephenson’s first representative in Canada. Vining’s attempt to sell the idea to Norman Robertson and Arnold Heeney is said to have been unsuccessful.
It is not clear to me exactly what kind of new Canadian intelligence agency Stephenson may have had in mind. Elsewhere in the book, within this context, reference is made to, “a BSC type organization”, but I always had the impression from Tommy Stone, who was one of my first bosses in External, that Stephenson more likely had in mind a Canadian Secret Intelligence Service, modelled on MI6, or the British SIS. If so, while Stephenson may have been the first to make the suggestion he was not the last. Coming from many different quarters, the suggestion that Canada have its own secret agency for the collection of intelligence outside the country has been repeated in various forms over the last forty years.
If Stephenson and Vining proposed a “BSC type organization” it is not surprising that Robertson and Heeney were unenthusiastic. The BSC was established to meet certain specific wartime needs. To try to emulate such an organization in a post-war setting would not have been something which either of them would have thought wise or necessary. On the other hand Stephenson may have had in mind the continuation and expansion in peacetime of Canada’s wartime communications security and incient scis maya case, in successful, since it was about the same time that the decision was taken to continue Canada’s SIGINT activities and, for the purpose, the Communications Branch of the National Research Council was established
“Camp X” is a good read. Perhaps there will be readers who would have preferred the book to be more like Ian Fleming’s “From Russia with Love” or “Moonraker” Some readers may even deplore Stafford’s exposé of Fleming the author, which he accomplishes with wit, gentle scorn and the skill of an accomplished historian. However, I think Stafford is to be commended for the unsensational approach he has taken in telling the story of Camp X, which, he writes, “in reality played a modest but intriguing part in the story of American-British- Canadian co-operation during the Second World War”
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1987) — Spring 1987 // Printemps 1987, p. 37. Read the rest of this issue →
