Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

You’ve probably never heard of a man named William Stephenson, in fact I hadn’t either until I read the book “A Man Called Intrepid.” It turns out he was one of those behind the scenes people who helped coordinate important actions in WWII.

Stephenson was a Canadian back when Canada was part of the British Empire. He served in WWI and after Hitler started his rampage of Europe in the 1930s he could see another war coming that would envelope Europe including Britain.

He became involved in intelligence and soon had the ear of both soon to be Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The British set up the British Security Coordination office in Rockefeller Center in New York in the 1940. A camp for training British spies was set up on the north side of Lake Ontario, which is in Canada. It had to be in Canada because the U.S. was still neutral regarding the war in Europe.

Literally thousands of British spies came in and out of New York. The site in New York was chosen because if Germany invaded Britain, which seemed very likely at some point in Hitler’s rampages, all the secret lists of spies and other data could fall into Hitler’s hands.

Stephenson himself was pretty active himself. In 1937 he managed to obtain Hitler’s secret summary of German high command plans for conquest of Europe and Britain.

In 1938 he obtained plans for Hitler’s take-over of Czechoslovakia.

In 1939, after Hitler had invaded Poland, Stephenson organized the theft of the German Enigma coding machine from Poland. It took years to finally understand completely how the machine worked but it began giving Stephenson and others a chance to listen in to communications between German military units.

In 1940, after learning that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb Stephenson went to the heavy water plant in Norway where heavy water, a key ingredient in the bomb the German’s were trying to create, was made.

Over the years several attempts were made to destroy this plant, which was taken over by the Germans. The weather was always terrible and many died of weather related issues in the isolated area where the plant was located. It wasn’t until 1943 that a group was able to get into Norway, and actually get to the plant.

That story is told in the movie “The Heroes of Telemark” which starred Kirk Douglas and Richard Burton. And apparently the movie was mostly accurate with Douglas’s and Burton’s characters actually an amalgam of several actual people involved in the raid.

Shortly after that raid Niels Bohr, at atomic scientist then working in Denmark was flown to Britain in a secret operation arranged by British security personnel to slow work on a German atomic bomb.

During the war Germany launched its infamous V1 and later V2 rockets towards England. This was in the days before the modern navigation equipment and controls we have now. The rockets would be aimed at a place like London but their distance was controlled by the amount of fuel they carried, when they ran out of fuel they crashed to the ground.

The rockets did hit London but the British didn’t want Germany to know how successful they were so they created radio chatter they suspected would be overhead by German spies that said the rockets were landing elsewhere to confuse the Germans and hopefully get them to aim elsewhere.

During this time Stephenson was crossing the Atlantic working with both Roosevelt and Churchill on security matters and coordinating with William Donovan, whom he met in WWI, in the creation of what is now the Central Intelligence Agency.

It is an interesting story!