Intrepid: Silhouette of a Secret Agent (Sunday Times, October 21, 1962)
“In the higher ranges of Secret Service work the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true. The Chief and the High Officers of the Secret Service revelled in these subterranean labyrinths, and pursued their task with cold and silent passion.”
— Sir Winston Churchill in Thoughts and Adventures.
By Ian Fleming
In this era of the anti-hero, when anyone on a pedestal is assaulted (how has Nelson survived?), unfashionably and obstinately I have my heroes. Being a second son, I dare say this all started from hero-worshipping my elder brother Peter, who had to become head of the family, at the age of ten, when our father was killed in 1917.
But the habit stayed with me, and I now, naively no doubt, have a miscellaneous cohort of heroes, from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh through Sir Winston Churchill and on downwards to many Other Ranks, who would be surprised if they knew how much I admired them for such old-fashioned virtues as courage, fortitude, and service to a cause or a country. I suspect—I hope—that 99.9 per cent. of the population of these islands has heroes in their family or outside. I am convinced they are necessary companions through life.
High up on my list is one of the great secret agents of the last war who, at this moment, allowing for the time factor, will be sitting at a loaded desk in a small study in an expensive apartment block bordering the East River in New York.
It is not an inspiring room—ranged bookcases, a copy of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen, the Cecil Beaton photograph of Churchill, autographed, a straightforward print of General Donovan, two Krieghoffs, comfortably placed boxes of stale cigarettes, and an automatic telephone recorder that clicks from time to time and shows a light, and into which, exasperated, I used to speak indelicate limericks until asked to desist to spare the secretary, who transcribes the calls, her blushes.
The telephone number is unlisted. The cable address, as during the war, is INTREPID. A panelled bar leads off the study, and then a bathroom. My frequent complaints about the exiguous bar of Lux have proved fruitless. The occupant expects one to come to see him with clean hands.
People often ask me how closely the “hero” of my thrillers, James Bond, resembles a true, live secret agent. To begin with, James Bond is not in fact a hero, but an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government, and though he is a meld of various qualities I noted among Secret Service men and commandos in the last war, he remains, of course, a highly romanticised version of the true spy. The real thing, who may be sitting next to you as you read this, is another kind of beast altogether.
We know, for instance, that Mr. Somerset Maugham and Sir Compton Mackenzie were spies in the first world war, and we now know, from Mr. Montgomery Hyde’s The Quiet Canadian, that Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., D.S.O., M.C., a member of White’s and the St. James’s, formerly of Eton and the Life Guards, was head of the Secret Service in the last war—news which will no doubt cause a delighted shudder to run down the spines of many fellow-members of his clubs and of his local hunt.
But the man sitting alone now in his study in New York is so much closer to the spy of fiction, and yet so far removed from James Bond or Our Man in Havana, that only the removal of the cloak of anonymity he has worn since 1940 allows us to realise to our astonishment that men of super qualities can exist, and that such men can be super-spies and, by any standard, heroes.
Such a man is “the Quiet Canadian,” otherwise Sir William Stephenson, M.C., D.F.C., known throughout the war to his subordinates and friends, and to the enemy, as “Little Bill.”
To strip him to his bare and formidable bones, he was born on January 11, 1896, at the junction of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, just outside Winnipeg, where the Scottish Highlanders established the first British settlement in the name of the Hudson’s Bay Company towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It was from one of these early Scottish settlers that “Little Bill” was descended. He was good at mathematics and boxing, but before he could choose a career it was August, 1914, and he went straight from school into the Royal Canadian Engineers, and was commissioned before his nineteenth birthday.
In 1915 he was badly gassed and invalided back to England, but during his convalescence he was seized by the flying bug and in due course received his wings in the Royal-Flying Corps. By the time he was shot down (in error by the French) he was credited with twenty German planes, including that of Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the famous German ace. These exploits earned him the M.C., D.F.C. and the Croix de Guerre with Palm.
Before he was shot down and captured by the Germans (he escaped, of course, from Holzminden), in his spare time, and fighting for the R.F.C., he won the Amateur Lightweight Championship of the World (he retired from the ring, undefeated, in 1923).
After the war, having built up a bit of capital, he went into business for himself in various technical companies, for one of which he invented a new system for the transmission of radio pictures and for another of which, in 1934, he entered the winning aircraft in the King’s Cup air race. In the City of London he will be particularly remembered for his connection with Sound City Films, Earl’s Court, Alpha Cement and Pressed Steel, and it was through private intelligence work in Germany connected with the latter that he was able to give his old friend Winston Churchill the figure of a German expenditure on armaments amounting to £800 million annually. This figure was used by Churchill in a Parliamentary question to Neville Chamberlain and was not denied by the latter.
“Little Bill” developed his sources of intelligence in Scandinavia and Germany, and it was quickly arranged that the fruit of these should be passed to the Secret Service with which, from then on, he became ever more closely associated , until he was appointed—by the then Colonel Menzies—Head of the British Secret Service for all the Americas. In the end it was Churchill who gave him his marching orders. Churchill told him, “Your duty lies there. You must go.”
He went. Well, that is the man who became one of the great secret agents of the last war, and it would be a foolish person who would argue his credentials; to which I would add, from my own experience, that he is a man of few words and has a magnetic personality and the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. (He also used to make the most powerful Martinis in America and serve them in quart glasses.)
I first met him in 1941 when I was on a plain-clothes mission to Washington with my chief, Rear-Admiral J.H. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, the most inspired appointment to this office since “Blinker” Hall, because, when the days were dark and the going bleak, he worked so passionately, and made his subordinates do the same, to win the war. Our chief business was with the American Office of Naval Intelligence, but we quickly came within the orbit of “Little Bill” and of his American teammate, General “Wild Bill” Donovan (Congressional Medal of Honour), who was subsequently appointed head of the O.S.S., the first true American Secret Service.
This splendid American, being almost twice the size of Stephenson, though no match for him, I would guess, in unarmed combat, became known as “Big Bill,” and the two of them, in absolute partnership and with Mr. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I, as a formidable full-back, became the scourge of the enemy throughout the Americas.
As a result of that first meeting with these three men, the D.N.I, reported most favourably on our Secret Service tie-ups with Washington, and “Little Bill,” from his highly mechanized eyrie in the Rockefeller Centre and his quiet apartment in Dorset House, was able to render innumerable services to the Royal Navy that could not have been asked for, let alone executed, through the normal channels.
Bill Stephenson worked himself almost to death during the war, carrying out undercover operations and often dangerous assignments (they culminated with the Gouzenko case that put Fuchs in the bag) that can only be hinted at in the fascinating book that Mr. Montgomery Hyde has, for some reason, been allowed to write—the first book, so far as I know, about the British secret agent whose publication has received official blessing.
“Little Bill” was awarded the Presidential Medal of Merit, and I think he is the only non-American ever to receive this highest honour for a civilian. But it was surely the “Quiet Canadian’s” supreme reward, as David Bruce (today American Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, but in those days one of the most formidable secret agents of the O.S.S.) records, that when Sir Winston Churchill recommended Bill Stephenson for a knighthood he should have minuted to King George VI, “This one is dear to my heart.”
It seems that other and far greater men than me also have their heroes.
Note: This article was actually a reprint of Fleming’s introduction to the 1962 book The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson, by H. Montgomery Hyde (published in America as Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York during World War II). Hyde had worked as a wartime censorship officer attached to BSC.
Rear-Admiral J.H. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence was the “real” M, and General “Wild Bill” Donovan was the spymaster who gave Fleming the .38 Police Positive Colt revolver inscribed “For Special Services,” either as a reward for lobbying for Donovan’s selection as head of the O.S.S. or for writing that organization’s charter.
The “Gouzenko case that put Fuchs in the bag” refers to Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko (1919 – 1982) a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada. He defected in 1945 with treasure trove of documents that revealed the extent Soviet espionage activities in the U.S. and Canada and helped kickstart the Cold War.
The Canadians were initially skeptical of Gouzenko–an exception was William Stephenson, who argued strongly for taking in Gouzenko before his life was endangered. Stephenson arranged for Gouzenko to be taken into protective custody and transferred to Camp X, where the SOE and OSS trained their agents for secret service work.
Among the spies rumbled by Gouzenko was Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988), a German theoretical physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project and at Las Alamos. After the war Fuchs moved to Britain and head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment. In 1950 he was convicted of supplying information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union (to whom he’d given the principal theoretical outline for creating a hydrogen bomb) and imprisoned.
According to John Pearson, the shooting of the Japanese cipher expert in Casino Royale was inspired by one of Fleming’s adventures with Stephenson. A Japanese cipher expert, on the staff of the Japanese Consul-General in New York, was located in an office in Rockefeller Center on the floor below Stephenson, who had the Consul’s office cased and the movements of the cipher expert studied. After duplicate keys were prepared, Stephenson and Fleming, along with two assistants, entered the office at three in the morning to make microfilms of the Japanese code books.
Andrew Lycett notes that “Stephenson, in his dotage, made much of his claim that Fleming was a graduate of Camp X…Ian, according to his mentor, was supposed to have been the camp’s star pupil. He passed the key agent’s initiative test–placing a bomb in the main Toronto power station–by bluffing his way into the complex and disarming everyone with his plummiest Old Etonian accent. He did the self-defence and unarmed combat courses, and performed an arduous underwater swim at night from the camp to an old tanker moored offshore, where–shades of James Bond in Live and Let Die–he fixed a limpet mine against the hull. But the historian David Stafford, who examined these claims, found no evidence that Ian had ever completed a course at the camp. Ian may have taken a day-trip to view an important establishment and may even have participated in some training.”