Camp X

Camp X was established December 6, 1941, by the chief of British Security Co-ordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba and a close confidant of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The camp was originally designed to link Britain and the US at a time when the US was forbidden by the Neutrality Act to be directly involved in World War II. On the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war, Camp X had opened for the purpose of training Allied agents from the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intended to be dropped behind enemy lines for clandestine missions as saboteurs and spies. However, even before the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, agents from America's intelligence services expressed an interest in sending personnel for training at the soon to be opened Camp X. Agents from the FBI and the OSS (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA) secretly attended Camp X in early 1942; at least a dozen attended at least some training. After Stephenson established the facility and acted as the Camp's first head, the first commandant was Lt. Col. Arthur Terence Roper-Caldbeck. Colonel William "Wild Bill" Donovan, war-time head of the OSS, credited Stephenson with teaching Americans about foreign intelligence gathering. Camp X was jointly operated by the BSC and the Government of Canada. In addition to operating an excellent document forging facility, Camp X trained numerous Allied covert operatives. Reports indicate that graduates worked as "secret agents, security personnel, intelligence officers, or psychological warfare experts, serving in clandestine operations". Many were captured, tortured, and executed; survivors received no individual recognition for their efforts." Another group operated Station M for developing and making covert devices for the British Security Co-ordination. Casa Loma in Toronto is often stated as the location of this station, claiming that the book Inside Camp X is the source. In 2015, however, author Lynn Philip Hodgson rejected this in an interview with the Toronto Star. "Nobody knows where Station M was. You won't read where it was in any book." It is more likely, though not certain, that the Casa Loma stables housed the development and production of ASDIC sonar devices for U-boat detection. Gustave Biéler, a Montrealer of Swiss origin, worked with SOE agents and French Resistance in Northern France before the D-Day invasion. "The group destroyed railways, bridges, troop transports and gasoline stores and hampering enemy movement and supplies," according to a CBC report. He was captured and executed by the Nazis in 1944. After the US entered the war, the OSS operated an "assassination and elimination" training program that was dubbed "the school of mayhem and murder" by George Hunter White. William Donovan later started similar programs in Maryland and Virginia, as well as in Cairo, Egypt. The Virginia Quantico training center was initially based on Camp X programs. == Hydra ==

equipment invented by Benjamin deForest Bayly One of the unique features of Camp X was Hydra, a highly sophisticated telecommunications relay station He also invented a very fast offline, one-time tape cipher machine for coding/decoding telegraph transmissions labelled the Rockex or "Telekrypton". The book Inside Camp X indicates that the facility was located on Lake Ontario, 30 miles across from the U.S., because it was an ideal location for receiving radio communications from Europe and South America via the U.S. The camp was an appropriate location for the safe transfer of code due to the topography of the land; it was also an excellent site for picking up radio signals from the United Kingdom. A news article also indicates that "HAM Operators at Camp X used transmitters to send and receive coded messages from Britain behind enemy lines". The Hydra station was valuable for both coding and decoding information in relative safety from the prying ears of German radio observers and Nazi detection. After use by the Canadian Forces during the Cold War, the transmitter was scrapped in 1969. == Post-war use ==

One of the trainees, or at least a visitor, may have been Ian Fleming, later famous for his James Bond books, according to the book Inside Camp X by Lynn Philip Hodgson. (While in Toronto, Fleming stayed at a hotel near St. James-Bond United Church, but many believe the name was borrowed from a noted American ornithologist.) The character of James Bond was "a highly romanticised version of the true spy" William Stephenson, and what Fleming once learned from him. After it had closed in the fall of 1945, Camp X was used by the RCMP as a secure location for interviewing Soviet embassy cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko, who had defected to Canada on 5 September and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation in the country. Gouzenko and his family spent two years at the facility. Artifacts from the spy camp are still occasionally found in the park. In August 2016, a hobbyist with a metal detector uncovered a rusty World War II smoke mortar round, triggering a visit from Canadian Forces Base Trenton's bomb disposal team. Joint Task Force X, the Canadian Armed Forces’ human intelligence unit, traces its name and lineage to Camp X and the clandestine operations conducted by the Special Operations Executive during World War 2. Memorial The historic plaque erected at Intrepid Park commemorates the school, which taught the techniques of secret warfare, and Hydra, which became an essential communications centre. An adjacent plaque is dedicated to the memory of Sir William Stephenson. File:Camp X - Plaques.jpg|Plaque and memorial at the site of Camp X File:Camp X - Monument.jpg|Monument at the site of Camp X in Whitby, Ontario == In the media ==

Camp X has been featured in movies and television programs, including the CBC series of X Company, three seasons, 2015 to 2017, and the History Channel's documentary Camp X: Secret Agent School, July 2014, by Toronto's Yap Films. The latter included recreations of scenes and featured interviews with actual individuals who had been associated with the camp. == References ==