A Man Called Intrepid Read online

  Copyright © 1976, 2014 by William Stevenson All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  eISBN: 978-1-62914-360-6

  With love and admiration for

  Mary French Simmons,

  of Springfield, Tennessee,

  in recognition of her

  courage and devotion,

  and who, as Lady Stephenson,

  made INTREPID possible

  CONTENTS

  POINT OF DEPARTURE

  A FOREWORD BY INTREPID

  A BREAK IN THE SILENCE

  A HISTORICAL NOTE BY CHARLES HOWARD ELLIS

  SIGNIFICANT DATES

  I IN TIME OF PEACE

  II FIGHT ON

  III IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES

  IV CRY, “HAVOC!”

  V AN ORIGINAL AND SINISTER TOUCH

  VI THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  EPILOGUE

  A VIEW FROM ANOTHER ISLAND

  VALEDICTION

  POINT OF DEPARTURE

  A Foreword by Intrepid

  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported a secret war against tyranny for two years when the United States was formally at peace. Then, attacked without warning, the United States replaced the staid costume of diplomacy for the combat fatigues of war. The enemy—Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and their puppets—was at last out in the open. But the secret war continued in secrecy.

  For cogent reasons, the fundamental facts of that hidden activity have never been fully revealed. The complete facts have been known to few; some have not been committed to any documents; the written records have been totally inaccessible; and for thirty-five years they were under the rigid restraint of Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Even now, a few matters must remain undisclosed for reasons that, of course, will not be obvious. But in terms of history—what really happened and why—nothing significant need now be concealed.

  In 1940, supplied all but daily with evidence that Hitler’s scheme of world domination by terror, deceit, and conquest was undeniably underway, Roosevelt recognized that the defeat of embattled Britain would be prologue to an ultimate attack upon the United States. Intelligence was given to him by me or through me as Winston Churchill’s secret envoy and as chief of British Security Coordination. BSC, the innocuous-sounding organization with headquarters in New York, was, in fact, the hub for all branches of British intelligence. Roosevelt was acutely aware that America, psychologically isolated since World War I and relying wistfully upon geographical insularity, was woefully unprepared to meet or counter the onslaught of newly developed military, propaganda, and espionage techniques. He desperately needed time to alert his nation and to arm it without plummeting into war. Churchill was in far more desperate need of arms and supplies to grant severely battered Britain even a modest hope of resistance and a slim chance of survival. Only a leader who could extend his vision of national self-interest to the belief that a union of free people was the real defense against totalitarian aggressors would wager on Britain at such unattractive odds. Roosevelt was such a rare gambler.

  With Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and, within a few days, Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States, all diplomatic sham abruptly ceased. Military and naval operations, however covert their planning and launching, became dramatically public upon execution, frequently reported in eyewitness accounts by daring war correspondents. But the secret war, burgeoning in intricacy to immense proportion and purpose, remained by its very nature obscure and unknown. With few exceptions, the crucial events have remained so.

  After all these years, why tell about them now? In my view, there are compelling arguments for disclosure.

  In the most personal sense, I consider this account a tribute to the gallant women and men of many nations who volunteered to fight in unconventional ways. They assumed frightful risks, had no protection or privilege of uniform, carried the responsibility of countless lives in the solitary missions they accepted on trust, and often were forced to make lonely decisions that could mean merciless death to their families and countrymen. Many of these agents and resistance fighters lie in unmarked or unknown graves. Relatively few have gained recognition beyond mention in confidential archives. Most of those who survived returned to peaceful pursuits, unable to receive honors or rewards. Those who are named in this narrative are but a few of the vast hidden army to whom the free world owes a debt that cannot be repaid.

  But there are less personal, more acute reasons for these disclosures.

  With the surrender of the shattered Axis Powers in 1945, BSC dismantled its labyrinthine apparatus and silently passed out of existence. Its furious life had seen the tide of battle turn from near-fatal defeat to overwhelming victory. The Grand Alliance had prevailed in a fiery test. The Holocaust provided eleven million ghostly voices deafeningly raised against the malignancy of modern barbarism. The wreckage of London, Berlin, Hiroshima, and other landmarks of civilization stood as massive reminder of the monstrosity of the new concept of war that recognized no noncombatants, neither the infant, the infirm, nor the helpless. Yet the incipient United Nations promised an international commitment to comity and reason. And the imminent ordeal of Nuremberg seemed to signal the long-sought awakening of world conscience and the recognition of responsibility for crimes against humanity. We looked with yearning upon a planet in the springtime of safe coexistence.

  The weapon of secret warfare, so terrifyingly effective, forged out of necessity in the crucible of combat, had no place in the pastures of peace. To my profound relief, INTREPID ceased to be the code name for the chief of an intelligence network. I closed the books on BSC, never, I hoped, to open them again.

  Perhaps it was foolhardy to suppose that in real life we could undo what had been done, cancel our knowledge of evil, uninvent our weapons, stow away what remained in some safe hiding place. With the devastation of World War II still grimly visible, its stench hardly gone from the air, the community of nations started to fragment, its members splitting into factions, resorting to threats and, finally, to violence and to war. The certainty of peace had proved little more than a fragile dream. “And so the great democracies triumphed,” Sir Winston Churchill wrote later. “And so were able to resume the follies that had nearly cost them their life.”

  Prophetic as he was, Churchill did not foresee the awesome extremes to which these follies would extend: diplomacy negotiated within a balance of nuclear terror; resistance tactics translated into guidelines for fanatics and terrorists; intelligence agencies evolving technologically to a level where they could threaten the very principles of the nations they were created to defend. One way or another, such dragon’s teeth were sown in the secret activities of World War II. Questions of utmost gravity emerged: Were crucial events being maneuvered by elite secret power groups? Were self-aggrandizing careerists cynically displacing princip
le among those entrusted with the stewardship of intelligence? What had happened over three decades to an altruistic force that had played so pivotal a role in saving a free world from annihilation or slavery? In the name of sanity, the past now had to be seen clearly. The time had come to open the books.

  Barriers stood in the way of so simple-appearing a task. A treasury of misinformation had already been gathered and widely distributed in the decades since the war. Much of this came from commercial exploiters who sought popularity at the expense of any semblance of truth. But many serious efforts, backed by exhausting (although hardly exhaustive) research, produced incomplete, thus unintentionally inaccurate reportage. Zealously preserved secrecy naturally thwarted the most dedicated investigator. And, ironically, some of the deliberately false concoctions we created to mislead our adversaries were still generally accepted as genuine. (If truth was not served by that, vanity surely was!) Adventure and sensationalism frequently were fictively injected into accounts that, were the real facts known, would have been infinitely more intriguing. Enforced silence prevented the correction of or even mild comment on these misrepresentations. Could these entrenched misconceptions and undenied speculations now be exploded?

  The BSC Papers cover an enormous and complex sweep of events. The writer and historian Cornelius Ryan had been asked to consider a chronicle of the secret war and had consulted the papers of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the American equivalent of BSC. Ryan reported in the New York Times of September 17, 1972: “Stepping even briefly into that mysterious world was enough to convince me of the awesome task awaiting the historian. . . . Because of the many faces of intelligence itself, to reach the truth, to separate fact from fiction, the historian might well need as many trained researchers as there were operatives in the OSS.”

  Fortunately, BSC historians had consolidated their own papers to provide a summary “to be consulted,” I wrote at the time, “if future need should arise for secret activities of this kind.” These papers consisted of many thick volumes and exhibits, covering five years of intense activity and thousands of operations across the world.

  While this summary eased somewhat the task that fell to William Stevenson, my friend and former colleague, it did not lift from his shoulders the staggering burdens of investigation and selection from such vast records. He is a painstaking researcher and drew on many other sources. Our shared interests made it inevitable that he should produce this chronicle. Yet he is too strong-willed and independent to borrow my views. (Despite the similarity of our names, we are not related.) I played no part in his selection of the material. I have read the manuscript and vouch for its authenticity. I willingly answered all the author’s many and probing questions, for they are part of the larger question that must be answered now and in the future: Will the democracies consent to their own survival?

  We failed to face that critical question prior to 1939. Not one of the democracies honestly confronted the obvious threats to its survival. They would not unite, rearm, or consider sacrifices for individual or collective security. There were those who argued that the sacrifices were not necessary. Today, parallel arguments are heard, similar responses given.

  We are rightly repelled by secrecy; it is a potential threat to democratic principle and free government. Yet we would delude ourselves if we should forget that secrecy was for a time virtually our only defense. It served not only to achieve victory, but also to save lives in that perilous pursuit.

  The weapons of secrecy have no place in an ideal world. But we live in a world of undeclared hostilities in which such weapons are constantly used against us and could, unless countered, leave us unprepared again, this time for an onslaught of magnitude that staggers the imagination. And while it may seem unnecessary to stress so obvious a point, the weapons of secrecy are rendered ineffective if we remove the secrecy. One of the conditions of democracy is freedom of information. It would be infinitely preferable to know exactly how our intelligence agencies function, and why, and where. But this information, once made public, disarms us.

  So there is the conundrum: How can we wield the weapons of secrecy without damage to ourselves? How can we preserve secrecy without endangering constitutional law and individual guarantees of freedom?

  Perhaps the story of BSC can help. It is common knowledge now that enemy codes were broken; that secret cadres were created within the enemy camps; that new technology was put at the service of agents and guerrillas. Equally true but possibly not so evident, is an important characteristic of BSC—it consisted of volunteer civilians convinced that individual liberty lies at the root of human progress. We were amateurs steeped in the traditions of freethinking individuals. Sometimes I wonder how we managed to win, considering the conflicts of opinion within our ranks. And then I conclude that success was possible because we were of sound but independent mind. Harsh decisions were made in agony; Roosevelt surely killed himself in the process, and isolated agents had to weigh singlehanded actions against the reprisals that would be taken against their kinsmen. Battles were won because we had advance knowledge of enemy plans, could influence those plans, and could anticipate enemy actions by methods heretofore concealed. Other struggles, no less decisive, were finally won by the resistance armies, a name for the people in occupied lands who loved freedom and, quite simply, were willing to fight for it against any odds.

  When the history of World War II is revised in the light of the secret war, this may be the most striking element: the great engines of destruction did not determine the outcome. The invincibility of free people and the ingenuity of free minds did. I believe this as I believe today that the spirit of human resistance refuses to be crushed by mere technology.

  Perhaps a day will dawn when tyrants can no longer threaten the liberty of any people, when the function of all nations, however varied their ideologies, will be to enhance life, not to control it. If such a condition is possible, it is in a future too far distant to foresee. Until that safer, better day, the democracies will avoid disaster, and possibly total destruction, only by maintaining their defenses.

  Among the increasingly intricate arsenals across the world, intelligence is an essential weapon, perhaps the most important. But it is, being secret, the most dangerous. Safeguards to prevent its abuse must be devised, revised, and rigidly applied. But, as in all enterprise, the character and wisdom of those to whom it is entrusted will be decisive. In the integrity of that guardianship lies the hope of free people to endure and prevail.

  It has been claimed that human progress depends on challenge, that individuals and nations have the need to believe in causes and struggle for them. Some theorists have extended this application of instinctual behavior to account for the periodic wholesale slaughters we call “war.” The merit of such concepts is a matter for study by psychologists and historians. What seems poignantly evident to me is that humankind already has awesome enemies to engage—poverty, disease, and ignorance, for example—and in such common cause there is reward and glory enough for all.

  Sir William Stephenson

  Bermuda

  A BREAK IN THE SILENCE

  A Historical Note

  From New York, while the United States was at peace and at war, Britain ran the most intricate integrated intelligence and secret-operations organization in history. Could such activity be kept secret?

  I had been twenty years in the professional secret-intelligence service when in 1940 London sent me to British Security Coordination headquarters in New York to help maintain that secrecy. BSC networks were manned by amateurs, and it was thought that my special experience was required there. Such concern proved unwarranted. The British Secret Intelligence Service had been rendered useless in Europe when our professional agents were cut down almost in a single stroke after conventional armed resistance to the Nazis ended on the Continent and Hitler entered Paris. But the amateurs who flocked to replace the professionals were well able to take care of themselves.

  I was soon re
quested to draft a blueprint for an American intelligence agency, the equivalent of BSC and based on these British wartime improvisations. “Intrepid” did it himself—further demonstration that secret operations in the free world can be handled exceedingly well by men and women who have acquired their skill and proved their integrity in successful civilian careers.

  Detailed tables of organization were disclosed to Washington. I have prepared for this book a simplified version of one of them, which portrays the main lines of command and, more particularly, clarifies the extraordinary relationship Intrepid maintained in utmost secrecy between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

  With headquarters at Rockefeller Center, thousands of our agents and experts passed under the statue of Atlas on Fifth Avenue, yet their identities and activities remained effectively masked. But as an increasing number of Americans also passed Atlas and entered the crammed BSC offices, the probability of exposure increased substantially. To our astonishment, the secret endured.

  Then, in the 1960’s, the outer wrapping of protection, designed back in 1940, was suddenly stripped away. BSC’s and Intrepid’s operations were partially revealed, defined principally as playing a supporting role in the American effort to frustrate Nazi subversion in the Western Hemisphere. The fact that this fractional truth did not leak out until 1962 is a striking tribute to the discretion of many outstanding Americans who, knowing some or most of BSC’s and Intrepid’s full activities and purposes, nonetheless recognized that silence had to be maintained if the liberty of the democracies was to be successfully defended against increasing totalitarian stratagems of every sort.

  In 1962, I was working on a study of Soviet imperialism when a special watchdog committee of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office in London discussed the wisdom of a partial leak. This took the form of a book, The Quiet Canadian (Room 3603 in the U.S.), by the distinguished historian H. Montgomery Hyde, himself a most resourceful BSC officer. I was able to demonstrate that I had been given instructions by “higher authority” to disclose certain matters. These matters were, of course, a carefully limited disclosure of BSC’s “secret” role. In no way did it reveal the full extent of the organization’s prime purposes or most sensitive activities.