Camp X
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Camp X was the unofficial name of a World War II paramilitary and commando training installation, on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario between Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. The area is known today as Intrepid Park, after the code name for Sir William Stephenson, founder of the Special Operations Executive and its successor, MI-6.
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[edit] Overview
Camp X was established December 6, 1941 by the BSC's chief, Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba and a close confidante of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The camp was first opened for the purpose of training American COI (forerunner to the CIA) agents to be dropped behind enemy lines as saboteurs and spies, at a time when the US was forbidden by the Neutrality Act to be directly involved in World War Two.
Camp X was jointly operated by the British Security Coordination (BSC) and the Government of Canada. The official names of the camp were many: S 25-1-1 by the RCMP, Project-J by the Canadian military, and STS-103 (Special Training School 103) by the SOE (Special Operations Executive), a branch of the British intelligence service MI-6.
Camp X trained over five hundred Allied units of which 273 of these graduated and moved on to London for further training. Many secret agents were trained here. The Camp X pupils were schooled in a wide variety of special techniques including silent killing, sabotage, partisan support & recruitment methods for resistance movements, demolition, map reading, skilled use of various weapons, and Morse code.
[edit] Hydra
One of the unique features of Camp X was Hydra, a highly sophisticated telecommunications centre. Given the name by the Camp X operators, Hydra was invaluable for both coding and decoding information in relative safety from the prying ears of German radio observers. The camp was an excellent location for the safe transfer of code due to the topography of the land; Lake Ontario made it an excellent site for picking up radio signals from the UK. Hydra also had direct access via land lines to Ottawa, New York and Washington for telegraph and telephone communications.
[edit] Postwar
Legend has it that the trainees included Ian Fleming, later famous for his James Bond books, though there is evidence against that claim. [1]
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 defected to Canada September 5 and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation operating in the country.
[edit] References
- Inside Camp X by Lynn Philip Hodgson, with a foreword by Secret Agent 'Andy Durovecz (2003) - ISBN 0-9687062-0-7
[edit] Notes
- ^ Chancellor, Henry (2005). James Bond: The Man and His World. John Murray. ISBN 0-7195-6815-3.
