William Stephenson was born William Samuel Clouston Stanger in Winnipeg in 1897 and left school to work as a telegrapher. He joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1916, flew Sopwith Camels with the Royal Flying Corps, scored 12 victories and won the Military Cross and Distinguished Flying Cross before being shot down in July 1918 and held at the Holzminden prisoner of war camp. A hardware venture built around a can opener taken from the camp failed, but in 1924 he co-patented a system for sending photographs wirelessly that paid 100,000 pounds a year in royalties. He expanded into radio, aircraft, cement, car bodies and Shepperton Studios, and by 1936 used his industrial contacts to tell Winston Churchill the Nazis were hiding 800 million pounds in military spending.
In June 1940 Churchill sent him to New York to run British Security Coordination from Room 3603 at Rockefeller Center, serving MI6 and the Special Operations Executive. The BSC fed stories to columnists Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, read transatlantic mail in Bermuda, trained agents at Camp X in Ontario and ran the HYDRA transmitter. Stephenson took no salary, could read raw Ultra decrypts, and urged Roosevelt to put William Donovan in charge of what became the OSS. The 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid drew sharp criticism from historians including Hugh Trevor-Roper.
- His medal citations describe flipping an enemy staff car into a ditch and stampeding transport horses.
- About 1,200 censors at the Princess Hotel in Bermuda steamed open mail and helped expose the Joe K spy ring.
- Professor Pat Bayly built the Rockex, a one-time cipher telex used into the 1970s.
- Nigel West argued Intrepid was the BSC’s telegraphic address rather than a personal code name.
- He was knighted in 1945, and in 1946 became the first non-American to receive the Medal for Merit.
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