Episode #212 - Was "The Man Called Intrepid" a Fraud?

Have you ever heard of the butcher of Prague?

If you were going to make a top 10 list of the most evil, most irredeemable people to have lived in the last 200 years, Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Prague, might just make the list.

Heydrich was a Nazis Nazi.

As a member of Hitler's inner circle, he was arguably one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.

His resume reads like a brisk summary of many of the most outrageous Nazi crimes.

As the chief of Reich's security main office, he worked with Heinrich Himmler to oversee many of the most brutal wings of the Nazi police state.

The SS, the SD, and the Gestapo were all part of his purview.

As head of the SD, Heydrich was empowered by the so-called Night and Fog Decree to arbitrarily arrest in secret anyone who was deemed a threat to the Nazi regime.

He personally oversaw the disappearance of thousands of people who were discreetly arrested, often at night, and were rarely seen again.

Heydrich is considered by many historians to be one of the key architects of the Holocaust.

He was one of the main organizers of the pogrom known as Kristallnacht in 1938.

Throughout Germany, synagogues and Jewish businesses were robbed, vandalized, and then often set on fire.

An estimated 20,000 Jewish Germans were rounded up and sent to camps in a mass arrest that is often pointed to as a dark turning point in the history of the Holocaust.

In the same year, under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich formed and directed the infamous Einsatgruppen.

These were the paramilitary SS death squads who carried out mass executions of Jews, Romani, socialists, anti-Nazi intellectuals, and suspected resistance fighters, along with a long list of other civilians who may or may not have fit into any of those categories.

At the 1961 trial of one of Heydrich's close associates, the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Reinhard Heydrich was described like this: quote: The satanic forces which were Nazism constructed their own instruments of rule with thoroughness and cunning.

Heydrich was the fiendish brain of the party and the state, end quote.

Now, historians have pointed out that there were, of course, other top-ranking Nazis who might be considered the quote-unquote fiendish brain of the state, but there's no denying Heydrich's deep involvement in many of the regime's atrocities.

He earned his charming nickname, the Butcher of Prague, in 1941, after being appointed by Hitler as the new Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.

In other words, he was sent to occupied Czechoslovakia to stamp out Czech resistance, which the Nazi leadership believed had been emboldened by the lenient approach of the previous Reich Protector in the region.

Immediately upon arriving in Prague, Heydrich made it obvious why he had been chosen for this task.

On his first day, he declared martial law and set about arresting suspected Czech and Slovak partisans en masse.

In the first five days after his arrival, 142 people were executed.

Over the next five months, an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 people were arrested and imprisoned, including the Czech Prime Minister.

Of those, roughly 500 were executed.

Over 2,000 were sent to the Mauthausen-Güssen concentration camp, where the vast majority of them died as a result of their treatment.

The Butcher of Prague, indeed.

But by June of 1942, Heydrich would also be dead.

In late May, two assassins from the Czech Resistance managed to ambush Heydrich while he commuted to his headquarters in the north end of Prague in his unmissable green, open-topped Mercedes.

The assassination was nearly botched when one of the resistance fighters' machine guns jammed at a crucial moment when Heydrich was in their sights.

But they managed to lob a modified anti-tank grenade at the car before the butcher of Prague could escape.

The attack had been sloppy, but it had done the job.

Shrapnel from the explosion mortally wounded Heydrich, and he died from his injuries in hospital a week later.

The death of Reinhard Heydrich would go down as the most high

assassination of a Nazi leader at any point during the war.

Now, if you're a World War II history buff, it's quite likely that you already know the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

But what you may not know is that this entire operation may have been dreamt up by a Canadian.

At least, according to one book.

That book was the best-selling 1976 biography titled A Man Called Intrepid.

The titular Man Called Intrepid was actually Sir William Stevenson, a Winnipeg-born businessman who during the war became the head of a secret British intelligence agency known as the British Security Coordination, or BSC.

Given the clandestine nature of the BSC's activities, little was known about it or its head, Little Bill Stevenson, for years after the war.

But in 1976, the best-selling biography, A Man Called Intrepid, changed that.

Now, it was not the first biography of Sir William, but it was the juiciest.

In many ways, it read more like a World War II spy novel than a stodgy, carefully footnoted biography.

In it, the author claimed that not only was Sir William Stevenson, codename Intrepid, the head of a significant wing of British intelligence, he was right at the center of many of the war's most significant moments.

This so-called quiet Canadian was secretly behind the scenes orchestrating war-winning feats of espionage, and for years he had gone completely without credit.

According to a man called Intrepid, one of those war-winning feats quietly set in motion by William Stevenson was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

In the book, the author recreates a conversation that allegedly took place in Stevenson's New York office in 1941.

We're told that Stevenson took a meeting with an unnamed English official with the appearance of a rumpled Oxford professor.

This visitor was advocating for the elimination of the butcher of Prague.

The conversation, as related in the book, went like this, quote,

Stevenson asked, what are the arguments for getting rid of Heydrich now?

It will warn the slave masters, give the people hope, replied the visitor.

Hitler will strike back at the very people whose support we need.

The time will come when we will have to take that risk, said the professor with flowing locks, fight terror with terror.

Stevenson stared right through him.

We have to become monsters to destroy monsters, said the visitor.

Stevenson shook his head.

No.

Now, despite the ambiguous end to that conversation in the book, we're told that Stevenson eventually did see the wisdom in moving against Heydrich.

So we are told that two Czech resistance fighters living in Britain, Josef Gobschik and Jan Kubysch, were recruited and then shipped to Canada, where they underwent a grueling training program at a facility known as Camp X.

This was a secret installation on the shores of Lake Ontario, just east of Toronto, near the town of Whitby, Ontario.

There at Camp X, these Czech assassins trained on a mock-up of the streets of Prague, designed by set designers pulled from the world of filmmaking.

We're told that even Heydrich's Green Mercedes was recreated down to the last detail.

So, if we believe a man called Intrepid, then Gobchik and Kubysch, two men who would go down as the greatest heroes of the Czech resistance, had been selected, trained, and pointed at their target by a quiet Canadian who even had them trained in Canada.

The only problem

is that we should not believe a man called Intrepid.

After its publication in 1976, the book raised the ire of many historians and former World War II intelligence agents, who argued that the biography was filled with inaccuracies, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods.

Critics took exception with a number of the grandiose claims in the book and sneered at its novelistic style.

The chapter dealing with the assassination of Heydrich was a perfect example of the problems with this book.

It was very unlikely that Sir William Stevenson and the BSC had anything to do with the assassination of the butcher of Prague.

It's since been demonstrated that the assassins, Joseph Gobschik and Jan Kubysch, were recruited in Britain by the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, an elite wartime espionage agency headed by Brigadier Colin Gubbins.

These men were not trained at Canada's Camp X.

Instead, there's lots of evidence that demonstrates that they prepared for their mission in Scotland.

In fact, given that Kubis was a late replacement who was brought in after another potential assassin was injured during training, the trip to Canada would have been literally impossible.

The best evidence tells us that the plot was initiated by the Czech resistance in exile in Britain and then brought to life with the assistance of Colin Gubbins and the SOE.

There is really nothing to suggest that Canada's Sir William Stevenson had anything to do with it.

And yet, in the pages of A Man Called Intrepid, you will learn that this dramatic moment in the war was not only orchestrated by Sir William Stevenson, he was the only one asking humane and pertinent questions about the fallout from this operation.

He morally insisted that the Allies would not become monsters in their quest to overcome Nazi monstrosity.

But that conversation I quoted earlier, so filled as it was with gravitas and moral righteousness, was an invention.

It was something cooked up by the author to make his book all the more riveting.

The irony of the book A Man Called Intrepid is that it hugely elevated Sir William Stevenson's profile among casual readers of popular history.

while simultaneously doing serious damage to his reputation among historians and aficionados of World War II espionage.

Given the obvious problems with the 1976 biography, some of Stevenson's most vocal critics started questioning his entire career.

Who was this obscure Canadian?

Had he done any of the things written about in A Man Called Intrepid?

If he lied about the Heydrich assassination, Could anything else about him really be trusted?

Was this guy even called intrepid?

And what was all this talk about him inspiring the character James Bond?

The book's critics were eager to see Sir William humbled, but did they go too far when they called him an intrepid fraud?

It is true that Sir William's best known biography is untrustworthy, but does that mean that his entire career should be dismissed?

Finding out the truth about a man who was a professional liar is a tall order.

But let's give it a shot today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five.

Episode number 212.

Was the man called Intrepid a Fraud?

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major, and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

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I noticed in that chat, one of the patrons actually suggested the topic that we are covering on today's show.

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This week, we are turning our attention to the shadowy world of World War II spy craft.

This one is also for my fellow Canadians who often ask ask that I cover more Canadian history on the show.

I keep promising to do it, but then I get distracted by other topics.

But I think this story is a perfect bit of Cancon because it's actually an international tale that just happens to have a Canadian right at the center of the story.

But as we shall see, Winnipeg, Manitoba's Sir William Stevenson is a bit of an enigma whose whose role in the history of World War II remains hard to fully grasp.

This is largely due to the fact that he was a spy.

There's apparently an old spy adage that goes, quote, Espionage is a combination of information and disinformation, loyalty and betrayal.

Believe nothing, but remember everything, end quote.

I like that because it's my sincere belief that most of human history is a stew of information and misinformation.

Believe nothing, but remember everything

is actually a helpful mantra when I'm researching this podcast.

No fact should be taken for granted.

And similarly, no lie should be forgotten.

Because often we can learn things from the lies, or at the very least, be entertained by them.

But the thing about tracing the history of spies, or intelligence agents as they like to be called, is that their misinformation tends to be a bit more sophisticated.

Cover stories are supposed to be believable and forgettable, which is the opposite of the most colorful myths that I explore on this show.

What's more, once we start exploring the period when espionage was professionalized by intelligence bureaucracies, the very documents that one would use to verify a story are not always trustworthy.

Intelligence agencies are experts at creating fake documents that support a cover story.

On top of that, the very documents that might hold something approximating the truth are often classified.

or, in some cases, have been destroyed in the name of secrecy.

When it comes to the history of espionage, especially over the last century and a half, the primary sources are about as sketchy as they come.

Or, as our subject today, Sir William Stevenson once quipped, quote, nothing deceives like a document, end quote.

Now, some of you may already be familiar with Sir William Stevenson as the man called Intrepid.

A quick Google, and you may discover that Intrepid is often cited as the inspiration for fiction's most beloved spy, James Bond.

The creator of James Bond, the British author Ian Fleming, served with Stevenson during the Second World War and would later contribute a preface to the American edition of a 1962 biography of Stevenson called The Quiet Canadian.

In that preface, Ian Fleming goes to great lengths to explain that James Bond is not a real guy, and maybe isn't even a good guy.

He writes, quote, 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 servicemen and commandos in the last war, World War II, he remains, of course, a highly romanticized version of the true spy.

The real thing, who might be sitting next to you as you read this, is another kind of beast altogether, end quote.

But then Fleming goes on to write that if there was one spy he would call heroic, it would be Sir William Stevenson.

He writes, quote, Such a man is the quiet Canadian, otherwise Sir William Stevenson, known throughout the war to his subordinates and friends and to the enemy as Little Bill.

He 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 any one ready to follow him to the ends of the the earth.

End quote.

So, Canadians, perhaps we shouldn't get too excited when we start saying that the real James Bond was from Winnipeg.

But it is clear that Ian Fleming admired William Stevenson.

And Fleming was not the only person of note to recognize Stevenson.

In 1945, no less a figure than Winston Churchill recommended Little Bill Stevenson for knighthood.

Apparently beside his name on the official recommendation, Churchill added in his characteristic green ink, quote, this one is dear to my heart, end quote.

The next year, in 1946, the American General William Wild Bill Donovan, the first head of the OSS, the wartime precursor of the CIA, presented Stevenson with the Presidential Medal for Merit, the highest civilian award in the United States at the time.

Stevenson was the first person to receive the award who was not an American citizen.

In 1983, when Stevenson was being decorated yet again by the Americans, he received a letter from none other than President Ronald Reagan, praising a career that, quote, adds up to one of the great legends, one of the great stories of personal valor and sacrifice for the sake of country and fellow men.

All of those who love freedom owe you a debt of gratitude.

⁇

So, who was this man code-named Intrepid?

What did he do to earn such effusive praise from so many of the 20th century's most recognizable names?

Well,

this is where things get complicated.

You see, depending on who you ask, Sir William Stevenson was either the most important Allied spy master during the Second World War, the central figure in a secret war that contributed significantly to the defeat of the Nazis,

or he was a fraud, a Winnipeg con man who perhaps did some espionage work for the British, but later exaggerated his own importance to credulous biographers who sold his myth to a public thirsty for spy stories.

One critic famously called him an intrepid fraud, while another concluded that, quote, it is now difficult for the serious historian to give Sir William Stevenson credit for anything, end quote.

So, for the rest of this episode to make sense, I think I need to give you a sense of the scope of Sir William Stevenson's accomplishments.

Some might say alleged accomplishments.

To do this, I'm going to be drawing from Sir William Stevenson's more reliable biographies, and I'll do my best to highlight what still remains contentious.

Now, what I'm really interested in here is the controversy around Stevenson's reputation.

So we're going to be flying through a fairly storied biography pretty quickly.

I'm also going to assume that you folks listening have a general understanding of the big events and key figures in World War II.

Apologies if some of this stuff is new for some of you, but I'm going to trust that this crowd can keep up.

All right, let's get into it.

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Trying to reconstruct the early life of Sir William Stevenson has been a famously hard thing to do.

The first two biographies of William Stevenson, 1962's A Quiet Canadian and 1976's A Man Called Intrepid, were both deeply inaccurate when it came to his youth.

This may have been because Sir William himself purposefully obscured his background in Winnipeg, Manitoba to make himself harder to identify during his spying career.

Either way, both books misidentified Stevenson's parents.

Neither book mentioned that young William had been adopted as a child.

Similarly, neither book mentioned that he had come from Winnipeg's Icelandic Canadian community.

He was incorrectly said to have had Scottish ancestry.

It would not be until 2001 when Stevenson's most rigorous biographer, the Canadian journalist Bill MacDonald, was finally able to set the record straight.

In A Man Called Intrepid, the author even claimed that Sir William attended Winnipeg's Argyle High School and quoted a teacher that claimed that little Bill had been a bookish young man except for his love of boxing.

Seems reasonable until you learn that Winnipeg did not have an Argyle high school.

In fact, Sir William never attended high school.

He didn't even finish junior high.

As for the quoted teacher, Bill MacDonald isn't even positive she ever existed.

Little Bill, who, by the way, was legitimately short, only growing to a full height of around 5'3 inches, worked as a delivery boy and a telegram carrier in his hometown of Winnipeg until the outbreak of the First World War.

Like many young Canadians, he enlisted and ended up fighting alongside Britain and her allies as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

At the tender age of 18, he was shipped to England where he trained as a pilot.

He became a fairly accomplished fighter pilot at a time when being a fighter pilot was kind of a brand new thing.

But then he was shot down over enemy lines in 1915.

He survived the crash, was captured, and spent some time in a German POW camp.

He eventually escaped from that camp and was decorated for bravery.

After the war, he went back to Winnipeg and started a short-lived company that sold housewares.

Now, one detail that biographer Bill McDonald discovered was that Stevenson's first business was based on a can opener that he stole from the German POW camp where he had been held.

Apparently, William Stevenson earned a bit of a reputation as an accomplished thief at the camp.

One of the things he managed to steal from his captors was an elegantly designed can opener.

Apparently, it had a stamp on it that showed that it had been patented only in the central powers of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey.

He apparently smuggled out that can opener and then patented it in North America after the war to start his first business.

According to Bill McDonald, this was a story that Little Bill may have been embarrassed by and purposely kept out of his earlier biographies.

But honestly, I think that's awesome.

Anyway, by the early 1920s, that can opener business had failed.

Stevenson was unable to pay his mounting debts, so he left Canada, more or less as a fugitive from his creditors.

He then moved to England, where he reinvented himself as an inventor.

In England, he became best known for his work on a device that sent pictures via telegraph, kind of like an early version of the fax machine.

It's also considered one of the precursors to television.

Now, biographer Bill MacDonald admits that this is one of the strangest jumps in Stevenson's biography.

How did this kid who didn't finish middle school quickly distinguish himself as an inventor on the cutting edge of technology?

He may have been naturally brilliant, or perhaps there's more to this story that still remains opaque.

Nevertheless, it's clear that by the early 30s, William Stevenson was in England patenting some remarkable new devices.

After having some success with these devices and marrying a wealthy woman, he then diversified his business portfolio.

And by the mid-1930s, he owned a dizzying array of companies in the UK.

Stevenson was involved in everything from steel manufacturing to medical equipment to the design and manufacture of airplanes.

He even owned a small film studio.

All of this made Stevenson a very wealthy man and smoothed his way into British high society circles.

While socializing with the rich and connected in Britain, Stevenson eventually became acquainted with Winston Churchill.

Over the 1930s, it's clear that Stevenson and Churchill became friendly.

Now, just how friendly is a matter of some debate.

But it seems that as their relationship developed, Stevenson started passing Churchill, who was not yet prime minister, information about German rearmament in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

Stevenson's knowledge of steel manufacturing had made him aware that huge amounts of steel were making their way to Germany, now under the control of the Nazi party.

This seems to have earned him the trust of Churchill.

as it suggested that he had the skills, connections, and low profile that would make him an effective intelligence agent.

Flash forward to the outbreak of war in 1939.

A year into the conflict, around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, Stevenson was tapped by Churchill, now Prime Minister, to head up something known as the British Security Coordination, or BSC, in New York City.

Now, the how and the why of this appointment is still fairly contested and hard to explain with any clarity, but all the evidence shows that it happened.

Stevenson was given the cover of being a British passport control officer, but in reality, he was running an important North American wing of British intelligence out of a suite of offices in Rockefeller Center.

In the first few years of its operation, the BSC's primary goal was to bring the United States into the war on the side of the British.

The biographer Bill MacDonald quotes from the BSC Secret History, which tells us that Little Bill's assignment was to, quote, do all that was not being done and could not be done by overt means to assure sufficient aid for Britain and eventually bring America into the war, End quote.

Now, a quick aside, that book I just mentioned, the so-called secret history of the BSC, is a nearly mythical manuscript.

Some have questioned if that book even exists.

So let's just put a pin in that and come back to it later.

Those first two years in New York, the BSC was focused on actively undermining American isolationist groups and the cause of isolationism generally in the United States.

This meant spying on and disrupting the American Nazi Party and a movement eerily known as America First.

It also meant creating propaganda for the interventionist cause.

This involved recruiting sympathetic newspaper columnists and even subsidizing a radio station in New York State that would take a pro-British interventionist editorial stance.

The BSC also monitored the foreign embassies of Axis powers in the United States.

There's also considerable evidence that Stevenson worked closely with Wild Bill Donovan, the key founder of the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, the precursor to America's CIA.

There's good evidence that the two men worked together during America's period of official neutrality to get American aid to Britain.

In particular, the two men worked closely on a deal that would allow the Americans to transfer around 50 aging naval destroyers to Britain without violating America's Neutrality Acts.

Around the time that the BSC was formed in 1940, the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, also came together in Britain.

The SOE was most focused on information collection, sabotage, and the aid of resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Now, this is also contested, but there is evidence to suggest that Stevenson worked in close connection with the SOE and acted as a key coordinator of SOE activities in North America.

Now, one of the things emphasized in the 1962 biography, The Quiet Canadian, was how William Stevenson's very Canadian-ness helped make him an effective spy in the United States.

The BSC was also largely staffed by Canadians, many of them Canadian women recruited from Toronto.

The stereotype that Canadians are friendly and somehow harmless was a great cover for a man man actively trying to pull America into a war by way of propaganda and covert action.

Being Canadian also meant that he didn't present as conspicuously British, which was helpful considering that he was effectively a British agent meddling in American politics.

But after Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war, Stevenson's BSC started working with their American counterparts in more concrete ways.

One of the projects Stevenson was involved in that is of particular interest to students of Canadian espionage history was the creation and operation of Camp X, also known as Special Training School No.

103.

In December of 1941, on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attacks, a facility on the shores of Lake Ontario just east of Toronto between the towns of Oshawa and Whitby, started operations.

Camp X would effectively become a training site for spies and saboteurs called from the ranks of a number of intelligence and police services from allied countries.

Agents from the SOE, the FBI, the OSS, and Canada's Royal Canadian Mounted Police, RCMP, trained at Camp X to undertake all sorts of covert actions.

Biographer Bill McDonald sums up the curriculum at Camp X as, quote, self-defense, lockpicking, safe blowing, second story entry, map reading, explosives and incendiaries, radios, listening devices, and codes and ciphers, end quote.

Honestly, pretty badass.

Research has also suggested that Stevenson used his connections in the world of filmmaking to bring set designers to Camp X.

They were used to design and build realistic facsimiles of locations in Nazi-occupied Europe that SOE and OSS agents would be expected to parachute into.

So, even though we can confidently say that the story of the Czech assassins training on movie-like sets at Camp X is a historical myth, it was based on some reality.

Other secret commandos did train at Camp X on Hollywood-like mock-ups of occupied Europe.

Camp X also became the site of a radio transmitter known as Hydra and acted as a communication center between Washington, Ottawa, New York, and London.

The Canadian government would later describe the installation as, quote, an essential tactical and strategic component of the larger Allied radio network.

Secret information was transmitted to and from Canada, Great Britain, and other Commonwealth countries and the United States.

But if I may say, code-naming something Hydra, while uh kind of badass, makes it sound incredibly sinister.

There's a reason that the secret Nazi bad guys in Captain America are called Hydra.

It's a spooky name taken from a horrifying mythical monster.

Man, spies, stop being so spooky.

Anyway, I digress.

The list of Stevenson's wartime exploits goes on from there, but they become more controversial and contested beyond that point.

William Stevenson may or may not have passed on intelligence warning the United States of the Pearl Harbor attack.

But that's not clear and is hotly disputed.

Stevenson was likely likely involved in the covert smuggling of Danish physicist Niels Bohr out of Sweden to Scotland in 1943.

Eventually, that famed scientist would become a part of the Manhattan Project.

Depending on who you ask, Stevenson either personally directed that mission or he was barely involved.

It's also been suggested that William Stevenson and his American collaborator, Wild Bill Donovan, were involved in a covert action in Yugoslavia.

This allegedly contributed to a coup d'état in that country in the spring of 1941 that installed new anti-Nazi leadership.

This coup and subsequent Nazi response is often pointed to as one of the reasons why Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, was delayed until later that year.

If that one is true, then it may have been one of the most significant acts of espionage in the entire war.

But evidence for the truth of that story is vanishingly scarce.

Now, as you are probably grasping, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Intrepid's service record.

His most robust but also controversial biography, 1976's A Man Called Intrepid, fills nearly 500 pages with tales of intrigue and covert action.

Obviously, the full contents of that book and the other notable Stevenson biographies are beyond our scope here today.

Hopefully, that greatest hits package of Sir William Stevenson's life has given you a sense of the type of career this Canadian had in espionage.

Maybe.

You see, being at the heart of a secret organization engaged in highly sensitive operations meant that Stevenson's story essentially became a state secret.

While Stevenson quietly picked up a knighthood and a Presidential Medal of Merit for his efforts, the story of the BSC was, for many years, not part of the story of World War II.

When the BSC was officially shuttered in 1946, the organization's files were transported to Camp X in Canada.

There they were summarized and compiled into an official history of the organization.

Stevenson himself went on the record saying that this secret history should only be read by select people.

Quote, should future need arise for secret activities and security measures of the kind it describes, end quote.

This secret history was not meant for the public.

It was meant to be a guidebook for future spies.

According to biographer Bill MacDonald, only 20 copies of this book were ever printed.

Former BSC agent Tom Hill would remember that 10 copies were sent to high-profile dignitaries, including Churchill and the heads of various Allied intelligence organizations.

The other 10 copies were stored by Hill in a safe in Montreal until Sir William directed him to destroy them, at which point he burnt the ten extra copies on a farm in Quebec.

This means that the most essential source for understanding the full scope of BSC operations, sometimes nicknamed the Bible, has become the ultimate rare book, so rare, in fact, that some have even questioned its existence.

As time went on after the war, Stevenson became more amenable to the idea that his story should be told.

The result were two major biographies of Sir William that were released in the 1960s and 1970s.

These books turned the very obscure and naturally secretive William Stevenson into the celebrated man called Intrepid, the real life James Bond.

This is where the myth-making really begins.

So,

let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll explore how the Sir William Stevenson biographies and subsequent controversy affected the reputation of Little Bill.

In 1962, after around 15 years of near total obscurity, the now knighted Sir William Stevenson decided that now was the time for his story to be told.

But of course, even in the early 60s, there was much about the story of the BSC that could not be told, as it was still considered top secret by a number of governments.

Nevertheless, Stevenson started giving the okay to biographers who wanted to make Little Bill and the BSC a part of the popular understanding of the war.

The first of these biographies was 1962's modestly successful The Quiet Canadian, released in the United States as Room 3603.

It was penned by Stevenson's wartime associate and BSC alumni H.

Montgomery Hyde.

Now, Now, that book is hardly perfect, as biographers like Bill MacDonald have demonstrated, especially when it comes to Stevenson's early life.

But to this day, it's still largely recognized as a mostly reliable overview of Sir William's life and career.

But 14 years later, the quiet Canadian was entirely eclipsed by the best-selling and much more discussed biography, A Man Called Intrepid.

This 1976 book was authored by a man very confusingly also named William Stevenson.

I know, right?

Now, the author, Stevenson, spelt his name differently than the biography's subject.

But still, this weird coincidence would cause all sorts of mix-ups in reviews for the book.

Still, the publication of A Man Called Intrepid gave Sir William Stevenson a new level of fame, especially among history buffs, World War II aficionados, and significantly, interested Canadians who largely embraced the idea of a Winnipegger being a secret war hero.

The Intrepid story was then amplified by a CBC documentary and a beloved six-part television miniseries that dramatized A Man Called Intrepid, starring none other than David Niven.

This was then cut into a two-hour theatrical release simply called Intrepid.

The once obscure Canadian spy was now something approaching a household name.

The issue was that the book that this had all been based on, A Man Called Intrepid, was considerably juicier, more dramatic, and frankly, more novelistic than its predecessor, The Quiet Canadian.

As a result, it attracted considerably more critics.

One of the most vocal of these critics was the controversial British historian Hugh Trevor Roper.

Now, Trevor Roper has come up before on this podcast, often as a bit of a villain.

He was an infamously catty and unforgiving critic who seemed to relish tearing down his colleagues.

He also had some of the worst takes on African history that I have read from a historian of his era, but today that's beside the point.

Anyway, Hugh Trevor Roper famously panned a man called Intrepid in the New York Review of Books.

He wrote, quote, this book is from start to finish utterly worthless, end quote.

He also called it, quote, egregious and filled with, quote, grotesque claims, end quote.

Trevor Roper insisted that the biographer must have been taken in by his subject, who had either knowingly lied to the author about his exploits or, in his dotage as an 80-year-old retiree, had sincerely come to believe a fictionalized version of his life.

Trevor Roper then doubled down on his criticism of Stevenson after Sir William's death in 1989, when he wrote a scathing article for England's Sunday Telegram titled, The Death of an Intrepid Fraud.

The subheadline declared that Stevenson was, quote, a fraud who fooled the world into believing he was a master spy, end quote.

Trevor Roper, who himself had been an officer in Britain's radio and security service of the Secret Intelligence Service, conceded that Stevenson had played an important role as head of the BSC,

but that many of the anecdotes in A Man Called Intrepid made it seem like he was right in the center of the action when in fact he was not.

Trevor Roper specifically called out meetings with Churchill referenced in the book that demonstrably did not happen.

Further, Trevor Roper argued that one of the main reasons that the myth of Intrepid had been so powerful is because Canadians, hungry for a national hero, embraced the story told in A Man Called Intrepid and defended it out of a sense of misguided patriotism.

Trevor Roper wrote, quote, Only a brave man would stand in the way of such a triumphal juggernaut, especially in Canada.

As for the success of the myth in Canada, perhaps the best explanation was given to me by a Canadian lady who flatly refused to believe any criticism of Sir William, however well documented.

Canada, she said, was a country without a national hero.

Now at last it had found one and invested in him, and he must not be devalued.

End quote.

Hmm.

Was this anonymous Canadian informant right?

Had my countrymen accepted a hero uncritically because we really wanted a hero?

Well, maybe,

but you could argue that Canada was actually late to the game when it came to fetting Sir William Stevenson.

He was knighted and received the Presidential Medal of Merit decades before a long campaign led to him receiving the Order of Canada in 1980.

Also, I couldn't help but notice how in that passage Hugh Trevor Roper pats himself on the back for being a, quote, brave man who stood up to all these unnamed Canadian zealots.

Honestly, this guy sucks.

Trevor Roper may have had some points to make, but it should come as no surprise that, as the London Times reminds us, he has been called, quote, snobbish, arrogant, and malicious.

End quote.

But Hugh Trevor Roper was not the only critic who argued that Intrepid's role in wartime espionage had been exaggerated.

Historian of World War II espionage David Stafford was another loud critic of Stevenson's biographies.

In particular, he took umbrage with the suggestion that Sir William Stevenson sat at the top of the British intelligence pyramid during World War II.

and was some sort of espionage mastermind.

For this reason, he was not fond of the depiction of Sir William in either Hyde's Quiet Canadian or Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid.

In a 1987 article for the Journal of Contemporary History, he wrote,

Hyde's book presented Stevenson as a virtually independent operator, initiating policy of his own across the broad spectrum of intelligence activities within the wartime Anglo-American alliance.

Later on, Stevenson's book would go even further and portray the other Stevenson as the man who controlled London.

It was a version so extravagant that in dismissing it, many critics have overlooked the fact that even the more moderate picture painted by Hyde presents something of a caricature.

End quote.

Stafford argued that Intrepid was not nearly as important in the spy hierarchy as these books claimed.

Further, in his 1986 book On Camp X, Stafford argued that Stevenson played only a peripheral role in the creation and operation of that facility.

It was in that context that he concluded, quote, it is now difficult for any serious historian to give Sir William Stevenson credit for anything, end quote.

Now, part of the reason why some of Stevenson's critics were so harsh was that some of the claims in both the 1962 and 1976 biographies were presumably supported by the BSC Bible,

that secret history that was inaccessible to reviewers.

Historians like footnotes, clear references to sources that can be checked.

A secret book is frankly pretty sketchy.

In particular, the historian A.J.P.

Taylor complained in his review of a man called Intrepid, quote, great play is made with the BSC papers.

It's not explained what they are or where they are, end quote.

To be honest, that is a reasonable point.

Citing a secret book is not good history.

Some critics even argued that the idea that William Stevenson was code-named Intrepid was an exaggeration.

The author Nigel West, who has written extensively on British secret intelligence agencies, pointed out that Intrepid was just the cablegram address for William Stevenson's New York office, and it doesn't seem to have been used by anyone as a codename.

Even Ian Fleming, one of Stevenson's vocal admirers, noted that Sir William Stevenson was, quote, known throughout the war to his subordinates and friends and to the enemy as Little Bill, end quote.

One wonders if a biography titled A Man Called Little Bill would have sold as well.

Now, there's no doubt that the name Intrepid was a cablegram address, but there is a little bit of evidence that some people may have used it as a codename.

For instance, when the former SOE Chief Major General Colin Gubbins read a draft of a man called Intrepid, he wrote the author, quote, what a tremendous job you have done matching up to the occasion of what Intrepid achieved.

And I'm so glad, too, for Intrepid's sake, that all that really matters for him has been told, end quote.

So, Colin Gubbins, the head of the SOE, an important man close to the events in question, used the code name Intrepid to refer to Sir William.

At least in that letter.

So there's at least some reason not to completely jettison the Intrepid name.

Take that for what it's worth.

But if a man called Intrepid overly inflated Sir William's reputation, then the wave of criticism that came in its wake let the air out just as dramatically.

By the time of Stevenson's death in 1989, obituaries were split between glowing reminiscences of a hero and caustic rehashings of the criticisms of a man called Intrepid, the most obvious example being Trevor Roper's Death of an Intrepid Fraud.

But thankfully, that was not the last word on Sir William Stevenson's place in history.

The Canadian journalist Bill MacDonald, who I have been referencing throughout this episode, has truly done the Lord's work when it comes to accurately assessing the role of Sir William Stevenson and the BSC.

MacDonald's book, The True Intrepid, now stands as the most rigorous and reliable book on Stevenson's life and career.

MacDonald's biography has done much to restore Sir William's historical reputation.

MacDonald's research into Stevenson has been exhaustive, and notably, he also managed to get access to sections of that elusive BSC secret history, albeit provided to him by a shadowy figure who chose to remain anonymous.

In The True Intrepid, MacDonald pushes back against critics like Hugh Trevor Roper and David Stafford, who he believes were overzealous in their quest to humble Sir William.

MacDonald argues that these historians had legitimate reasons to criticize the book, A Man Called Intrepid, because it was guilty of many of the crimes it was accused of.

However, in doing so, they were ready to throw the entire career of Sir William under the bus with it.

This, he believes, was not fair.

Now, to be clear, there were a number of inaccuracies in A Man Called Intrepid.

For instance, the author claimed that Sir William acted as a liaison directly passing communication between Churchill and American President FDR,

making him the key man in Anglo-American cooperation.

This has been demonstrated by many historians who have studied the relationship between FDR and Churchill to be a massive exaggeration.

Even Sir William himself felt the need to back away from that claim publicly.

In the preface to the book Secret Intelligence Agent, the memoirs of his colleague and quiet Canadian author H.

Montgomery Hyde, Sir William wrote, quote, Whatever may have been written or said about me by others, I can state here categorically that I never at any time claimed to provide a secret liaison between the British Prime Minister and the American President, end quote.

It turns out even William Stevenson was a little embarrassed by the type of exaggeration that was common in a man called Intrepid.

The author, who, as I said, was confusingly also named William Stevenson, often chose to put his subject at the center of of episodes where perhaps his participation was more peripheral.

For instance, in the book The Dramatic Episode with the Physicist Niels Bohr culminates with the man called Intrepid waiting to greet the scientist in a field in Scotland after his clandestine flight from Sweden.

Many critics pointed out that moments like this are ridiculous.

Bill MacDonald writes, quote, as chief of a huge organization based in North America, one wonders how Stevenson found time to loiter in Scottish fields waiting for night flights.

Did he have nothing better to do?

Many point to such instances to ridicule Stevenson and to question his honesty or mental stability, end quote.

As MacDonald points out there, the assumption by many critics was that Sir William fed his biographers this especially dashing version of his life story.

It was argued that he was either lying or in his old age he had come to believe that he had met Niels Bohr in a field.

Hugh Trevor Roper was particularly offended by these kinds of obvious exaggerations.

In his takedown of a man called Intrepid, he makes a meal out of debunking a claim in the book that Churchill had sent Sir William a letter inviting him to his house.

It was then demonstrated that this letter clearly never existed or was a forgery.

Trevor Roper insisted that, quote, such a document could have only been provided by Sir William.

The implications of this forgery, which Sir William has chosen to ignore, are disquieting, even sinister, end quote.

But once again, biographer Bill MacDonald has pushed back against the idea that these exaggerations, and in some cases, blatant historical errors, were seeded by Sir William himself.

He places much of the blame with the author of A Man Called Intrepid and the book's editors.

In other words, he doesn't believe that the reading public was misled by William Stevenson.

He believes they were misled by William Stevenson, the author.

Honestly, it should be illegal to write a biography of someone whose name is a homophone of your own.

Not allowed.

Anyway, it's McDonald's contention that the biographer, under pressure from the editors, made a number of choices to make his book more exciting and more readable.

In fact, a similar process also occurred with The Quiet Canadian, whose writing was taken over by Montgomery Hyde after an early draft was criticized as being too dry.

In the case of a man called Intrepid, Bill MacDonald's research unearthed a number of telling letters between the author, Stevenson, and his subject, Sir William, where the author hinted at some of the liberties he was going to be taking before the publication of the book.

In one letter from 1973, the author writes, quote,

you have a natural role at the heart of the story, and it should be told through your eyes.

This does not mean, of course, quoting you.

It simply means that events are recounted in relation to your activities.

This requires that I reconstruct these events in the well-tried manner of the recorders of other recent history, end quote.

Bill MacDonald suggests that it was was the author's intention to place Sir William at the center of the action wherever possible, which was why it was not best to quote him.

In a second letter discovered by MacDonald, discussing the editing process of an early draft of the book, the author, Stevenson, writes that the book's editor, quote, is entirely in sympathy with the philosophical thrust of the book, but wishes there were more anecdotes.

He believes the density of the material demands lighter touches.

The second look is my responsibility.

It means scissors and paste, re-jigging actions, writing tighter historical bits, keeping you in the middle of events.

End quote.

McDonald believes that these correspondences suggest that those moments in the book that were later raked over the coals by critical reviewers came as the result of the so-called second look referenced by the author in that last letter.

The author's rewriting, rejigging, and work with

scissors and paste in the service of keeping Sir William in the middle of events eventually led to a less reliable narrative.

In other words, absolute historical accuracy was sacrificed in service of creating a more readable book.

So, should we blame the author of A Man Called Intrepid for the creation of the Intrepid Myth?

Well,

it certainly seems like he contributed to it.

And then, when his book was adapted into a film and a TV miniseries, the myth took on a life of its own.

But, perhaps we shouldn't let Sir William entirely off the hook when it comes to how the story of his life has been presented over the years.

Trying to write an accurate biography of the man has always been a challenge, because,

like a good spy, he was an enigma.

He seems to have been more like the name of his first biography, The Quiet Canadian, than the man called Intrepid.

He was famously unassuming.

He was described by many as being likable, but also forgettable, which

honestly makes him sound like the perfect spy.

As such, he was an accomplished liar.

While many of the exaggerations about his service during the war were likely ginned up by his biographer, Sir William is largely to blame for the confusion surrounding his life before the war.

He lied about his past, potentially to protect his family, but also potentially to hide some embarrassing failures and even crimes committed in Manitoba.

He let his biographers believe that he was Anglo-Scottish Canadian, when actually he was from one of Canada's often overlooked ethnic communities, Manitoba's somewhat surprising Icelandic community.

He made himself hard to trace.

On top of all that, the most accurate assessment of his wartime activities were recorded in a secret book only accessible to a handful of people.

This was a man who was good at not being known, which makes his flashy 1976 biography seem all the more unusual.

In the end, the work done by Bill MacDonald has demonstrated that the details of William Stevenson's biography that I laid out earlier in this episode are largely accurate.

He was the head of the BSC from 1940 to 1946.

In that role, he played a significant part in the covert side of World War II.

He may not have been as close to the middle of the action as a man called Intrepid would have us believe, but that doesn't mean his entire record should be pitched out.

Was Sir William Stevenson an intrepid fraud?

I've been convinced by the work of Bill MacDonald that many of his achievements were real, significant, and an important part of the history of the Second World War.

But

he was a fraud

because

all spies are frauds.

The question isn't if he lied, but how much and about what?

If the mark of a good spy is his ability to be untraceable, unknowable, and shrouded by a cloak of misinformation, then perhaps Sir William Stevenson was one of the best.

Three biographies deep, and the man is still a riddle.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time time when we will explore an all-new historical myth.

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to

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My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, five.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Dialed in on the thermostat.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratches from the California lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.