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William Stephenson was born in Winnepeg, Canada on 11th January, 1896. He joined the Canadian Corps on the outbreak of the First World War. Promoted to the rank of sergeant he was badly wounded during a gas attack in 1916.
In August, 1917, Stephenson transferred to the Royal Flying Corps where he joined the 73 Squadron. Flying a Sopwith Camel he scored 12 victories before he was shot down and captured by the Germans on 28th July 1918. During the war Stephenson won the Military Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Stephenson joined the Secret Service and in 1940 he was sent to New York as head of the British Security Coordination. Over the next few years he worked closely with William Donovan, the chief of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS).
He was also the channel for intelligence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Stephenson was responsible for the arrest of Alan Nunn May and 18 others in 1946.
After the war Stephenson and William Donovan founded the World Commerce Corporation. William Stephenson died on 3rd January, 1989.
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(1) William Stephenson's Military Cross citation (22nd June, 1918)
When flying low and observing an open staff car on a road, he attacked it with such success that later it was seen lying in the ditch upside down. During the same flight, he caused a stampede amongst some enemy transport horses on a road. Previous to this, he had destroyed a hostile scout and a two-seater plane. His work has been of the highest order and he has shown the greatest courage and energy in engaging every kind of target.
(2) William Stephenson, head of the British Secret Intelligence Service in the United States, report on Reinhard Heydrich (1937)
The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm. Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy.
Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin's sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.
The Soviet chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.
(3) William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid (1976)
Churchill stumped up and down Reynaud's bedroom. There was "the great probability that Hitler will rule the world," he said. We must think together of how to strike and strike again, no matter what the cost nor how long the trials ahead." He faced the French Premier and then sat down heavily. His changing moods raced like clouds across his baby face. He was in turn sulky, tearful, and violent. None of it did any good. Reynaud in reply chanted the pace of Hitler's victories: Poland in twenty-six days, Norway in twenty-eight days, Denmark in twenty-four hours, Holland in five days, and Luxembourg in twelve hours. He turned sad luminous eyes on Churchill. "Belgium is finished. Now France."
(4) Conversation between William Stephenson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (February, 1943)
Roosevelt: "Could Bohr be whisked out from under Nazi noses and brought to the Manhattan Project?"
Stephenson: "It will have to be a British mission. Niels Bohr is a stubborn pacifist. He does not believe his work in Copenhagen will benefit the Germany military caste. Nor is he likely to join an American enterprise which has as its sole objective the construction of a bomb. But he is in constant touch with old colleagues in England whose integrity he respects."
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