The Secrets Of Camp X: Spy Training School! Plus: Lusitania Bombshell!
Now it can finally be told to American audiences - the secret camp in Canada that trained spies.... many of whom you may not have known were spies!
When "Inside Camp-X', by Lynn Philip Hodgson was released the author sent out this press release about the espionage school set up for training British and American spies during the war. This was the crossroads of the 2 countries working together. The story of Camp X is still classified- or lost is more like it as the records were destroyed at the end of the war! Now, are you ready for this? Guess when the school was started? December 6th, 1941. That’s right, the day before Pearl Harbor! For months before this school was planned and built! If there was ever a smoking gun that FDR was preparing for war while telling the public we wouldn’t get involved, this would be it.
I will let Lynn Philip Hodgson take it from here and I highly recommend his book. If you have ever wondered what it was like to be a spy during World War 2, this book is a must.
Unofficially known as Camp-X, the paramilitary training installation was officially known by various names: as S25-1-1 by the RCMP (the Royal Canadian Mounted Police file name), as Project-J by the Canadian military, and as STS-103 (Special Training School 103) by the SOE (Special Operations Executive), a branch of the British MI-6. It was established December 6, 1941, on the Whitby/Oshawa border in Ontario, Canada through co-operative efforts of the British Security Co-Ordination (BSC) and the Government of Canada.
The BSC’s chief, Sir William Stephenson, was a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and a close confidant of the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, who had instructed him to create “the clenched fist that would provide the knockout blow” to the Axis powers. One of Stephenson’s successes was Camp-X!
The book, Inside Camp-X, and the story begin, “Lieutenant-Colonel Roper-Caldbeck, the first Commanding Officer of Camp-X, stopped, stared over the rolling fields, picturesque Lake Ontario, and the newly erected buildings and thought to himself, “Everything is ready!”
The Date: December 6th, 1941!
That date was most significant. Had the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour been executed six months earlier, there would never have been a Camp-X. The Camp was designed for the sole purpose of linking Britain and the United States. Until the direct attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States was forbidden by an act of Congress to get involved with the war. How timely that Camp-X should open the day before the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese.
Even the Camp’s location was chosen with a great deal of thought: a remote site on the shores of Lake Ontario, yet only thirty miles straight across the lake from the United States. It was ideal for bouncing radio signals from Europe, South America, and, of course, between London and the BSC headquarters in New York. The choice of site also placed the Camp only five miles from DIL (Defense Industries Ltd.), currently the town of Ajax. At that time, DIL was the largest armaments manufacturing facility in North America.
Other points of strategic significance in the Camp’s locale include the situation of the German Prisoner of War Camp in Bowmanville, the position of the mainline Canadian National Railway, which went through the top part of Camp-X, and that of General Motors on the eastern border of the Camp. The Oshawa Airport which was a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) / Royal Air Force (RAF) Commonwealth air training school at the time was only a short drive from Camp-X. Each of these points will be delved into in more detail throughout the book.
The Commanding officers of the Camp soon realized the impact of Camp-X. Requests for more agents and different training programs were coming in daily from London and New York. Not only were they faced with training agents who were going to go behind enemy lines on specialized missions, but now they had been requested to train agents’ instructors as well. These would be recruited primarily from the United States for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and for the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). Soon there were trainers training trainers for new Camps that would be set up in the U.S., primarily at RTU-11 in Maryland.
To ease the demand for trained trainers, Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Brooker, a British SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) man, established a particularly successful program of weekend courses for OSS executives. (When Camp-X opened, the OSS was officially known as the Co-Ordinator of Information (COI) and did not become the OSS until June of 1942).
The psychological aspect of the training was most critical. As crucial as the agent’s training in silent killing and unarmed combat was the development of his ability to quickly and accurately assess the suitability of a potential “Partisan”. He had to be able to recognize a would-be recruit by being alert at all times and in any situation. He was trained to listen for a comment about the government, about the Nazis or about how the war was progressing, and to subsequently engage the individual in conversation, perhaps offer him a drink or buy him a meal. In this manner he could further identify the individual’s philosophy and thoughts about the war.
Paramount among the objectives set for the operation, including the training of Allied agents for the entire catalogue of espionage activities (sabotage, subversion, deception, intelligence, and other ‘special means’), was the necessity to establish a major communications link between North and South America and European operations of SOE. Code named ‘Hydra’, the resulting short-wave radio and telecommunications centre was the most powerful of its type. Largely “hand-made” by a few gifted Canadian radio amateurs, Hydra played a magnificent role in the tactical and strategic Allied radio networks.
When one steps back and looks at the 1940 grand picture, one can see exactly why Canada was so important to the SOE as a base for their agents: if the agents were to be recruited in Canada, why not train them there? Soon the BSC had large populations of French Canadians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Chinese, and Japanese at their disposal and in a concentrated geographical area. It was easier to send a few instructors over to Canada then it was to send 500 or 600 potential agents to Britain only to find that they were not Secret Agent material and afterward have to send them home. One must remember that the British were still an invasion target to the Germans. Such an invasion, if successful, would be the end of the SOE Training Schools in Britain. Thus, Camp-X became the assembly line for ‘special agents’ and subsequently the SOE.
The agents trained at Camp-X would have no idea whatsoever as to their future mission behind enemy lines, nor for that matter would the instructors and/or the Camp Commandant. Camp-X’s sole purpose was to develop and train all agents in every aspect of silent killing, sabotage, Partisan work, recruitment methods for the resistance movement, demolition, map reading, weaponry, and Morse Code.
It was not until the agents completed their ten-week course that the instructors and commanding officers would assess each individual for his particular expertise and subsequently advise the SOE in London of their recommendations. For example, one agent might excel in the demolition field while another might be better at wireless telegraph work. Once the agents arrived in Britain, they would be reassessed and would be assigned to a Finishing School where their expertise would be further refined. Once this task was completed, another branch of the SOE would take over and develop a mission best suited for each individual agent.
Eric Curwain, Chief Recruitment Officer of the Canadian Division of the British Security Co-ordination, wrote about Canada’s significant contribution to the war effort in his unpublished manuscript, Almost Top Secret.
“Previous visits to Canada could not prepare a wartime visitor for the vast war effort that at once became visible on leaving the port of Halifax to take the train for Toronto. Any Allied national from Europe must have been thrilled to see those long lines of loaded freight cars, lying in sidings, awaiting the day to pour their weaponry into the hundreds of ships that Germany’s ever-increasing hordes of submarines could never defeat.”
As part of my research into Camp-X, I have been in constant contact with London, England, and specifically the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office). One interesting piece of information from London I would like to share with you now. The following is an excerpt from a letter, which I recently received from Duncan Stuart, SOE adviser, FCO.
Photo: Sir William Stephenson
“First of all, I should say that virtually no records have survived over here about STS-103. As I am sure you know, there was a bonfire of all of the New York and Canadian records at STS-103 at the end of the War. And, in any case, Bill STEPHENSON (sic) was not much in the habit of informing SOE HQ of the details of what he was up to, so there was never much information on American or Canadian matters in HQ. Moreover, SOE’s Training Section over here destroyed all its training records at the end of the War.”
Thus, it will be books such as Inside Camp-X that we will have to rely upon to tell the real story of what went on behind those barbed fire fences. To meet this end, I have accumulated forty hours of taped interviews with the men and women of Camp-X as well as the neighbours of the Camp. I personally spent hundreds of hours investigating and researching in order to produce Inside Camp-X.
Author Ian Lancaster Fleming’s inspiration for the name of his fictional MI-6 secret agent, James Bond, might have had its origins in Toronto, Canada.
When British Naval Intelligence Commander Ian Fleming was invited by Sir William Stephenson, Intrepid, to observe and participate in the SOE subversive warfare training Syllabus at STS 103 (Camp-X), he was billeted at a private home on Avenue Road, Toronto, as at the time the Camp was at capacity.
A pre-war journalist of some repute with Reuters, Fleming, then personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI), had of necessity become a serious student of the minutiae of daily life. As a VIP guest of Sir William’s, a staff driver chauffeured Commander Fleming to and from the Camp. Clearly visible across Avenue Road when entering or leaving his temporary residence was a large sign at the front entrance of Saint James Bond United Church.
When, in 1952, having undertaken to write a spy novel (Casino Royale) as a release from the rigours and responsibilities of entering married life with fatherhood imminent at the age forty-four, it is suggested that he noticed a favourite book on exotic birds lying on the coffee table, by the American ornithologist James Bond.
Which was it then… the book or the church… or both? We’ll never know.
Regarding his hero Bond’s ‘license to kill’ i.e. 007… That’s another story with Toronto implications.
Paul Edward Dehn, (b. 1912, d. 1976), noted film critic, lyricist and Oscar winning co-writer, screen story, with James Bernard of Seven Days to Noon, 1950 (awarded 1952) was in fact Major Dehn, SOE, the Political Warfare instructor at Camp-X, 1942 – 1944.
The Oxford educated Dehn’s prolific post war production included more than a dozen principal or co-screenwriting credits garnering him Writers’ Guild nominations and/or Edgar Allan Poe awards for The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1965, The Night of the Generals, 1967 and Murder on the Orient Express, 1974. Paul Dehn co-produced and co-scripted a thriller, Fragment of Fear, 1970. Between 1970-1973, he wrote two screenplays and is credited for two motion picture stories in The Planet of The Apes ‘franchise’.
In 1964, Paul Dehn collaborated with Ian Fleming on the screenplay for Fleming’s Goldfinger. Why should this be of more than passing interest? Major Dehn and Commander Fleming met and became friends at Camp-X, during the short period while British Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming was visiting the Canadian SOE/BSC special training school.
Of the twenty-one and counting, pure or ‘knock-off’ Bondian films at time of writing, Goldfinger is generally regarded by legions of fans as one of the five all time best, and arguably superior to the book. Sean Connery’s, Honor Blackman’s and Gert Frobe’s portrayals are memorable. However it is the writing: relatively tightly plotted, with sharply written, witty dialogue, full of self deprecating humour and classic deadpan double entendres, that stands as a tribute to the producers’ astuteness in pairing these two men as co-writers whose backgrounds in intelligence and their shared remembrances of unconventional warfare training, albeit experienced briefly at Camp-X, yielded box office gold.
When Ian Fleming visiting Camp-X during the summer of 1942, the camp was at capacity and there was no room for visitors. The camp commandant encouraged visitors, J. Edgar Hoover, Wild Bill Donovan, and others to stay at local hotels such as the Blue Swallow and the Genosha in Oshawa. In Fleming’s case, he had friends who lived on Avenue Road in Toronto and elected to stay with them.
Each morning Fleming would sit on the porch with a cup of tea while waiting for a staff car from the camp to pick him up. What did he stare at every morning while waiting for his lift, St. James Bond United Church, directly across the street!
Often Fleming and other instructors would go into Oshawa to the Genosha Hotel for some entertainment. Parking was at the back of the hotel and could only be entered by, you guessed it, ‘Bond Street’! When asked Ian Fleming would say the name came from the author of a book on birds. Cover story? Camp X was still classified when he wrote the first Bond story!
Sterling (Stirling) Hayden (b.1916, Jersey City, New Jersey, as Sterling Relyea Walter? John Hamilton? Credited after 1947 as Stirling Hayden, d. 1986, Sausalito, California). Stirling Hayden is remembered for his early screen portrayals as a handsome, complex, archetypically hard bitten noir B-movie ‘wrong–side-of–the–law’ loner (e.g. The Asphalt Jungle 1950, The Killing 1956). By the mid ‘60’s, Stirling Hayden had become a first rate A-list actor, creating memorably ‘off kilter’ characterizations with Directors Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove 1964, Coppola in The Godfather Part 1 1972, and Altman in The Long Goodbye 1973.
Hayden, the seaman/ship’s captain/adventurer, maritime historian, acclaimed author (Wanderer, autobiography 1963, Voyage, novel 1976) and reluctant film star abruptly quit his Hollywood career to join the USMC. In 1941, Lieutenant Hayden transferred to Office of Strategic Services (OSS), quickly winning promotion, and assuming the nom de guerre Captain Hamilton. Captain Hayden was subsequently awarded the Silver Star for his work in running guns and materiel through the Axis blockade of the Adriatic to supply Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans.
Sterling Hayden saved many airmen’s lives who had been shot down but unknown to the military he also saved hundreds of Jewish refugees which had he been caught, could have resulted in his court martial. You can read more about him here:
The first commandant of Camp-X was scheduled to be none other than ‘Kim’ Philby! Yes, the British/Soviet ‘mole’, Harold Adrian Russell Kim Philby, of MI-6/KGB notoriety. ( Although in the U.S. it is taught he was a victim of McCarthyism, around the world it is acknowledged he was a Soviet spy).
Kim Philby had briefly served as an instructor at Beaulieu, the top notch SOE ‘finishing school’ in England. He was stationed there along with fellow KGB conspirators Guy Burgess and Donald McLean. While at Beaulieu, Philby contributed to the writing of SOE Syllabus, or training manual. Whether upon instructions from Moscow, or of his own accord, or both, Philby managed to convince his superiors in MI-6 that he was of far greater value to the British in England than he ever could be in Canada.
Had MI-6/SOE insisted upon Philby’s transfer, how vastly different might the ‘secret wars’ of 1940 to 1963, and beyond, have played out?
Behind the paywall: Camp-X: Training WWII Secret Agents, Roots of 007, and Canada v Nazis w/ Lynn-Philip Hodgson
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