by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/16/20
BSC operated from the 35th and 36th floors of the International Building, Rockefeller Center, New York during World War II
British Security Co-ordination (BSC) was a covert organisation set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in May 1940 upon the authorisation of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
Its purpose was to investigate enemy activities, prevent sabotage against British interests in the Americas, and mobilise pro-British opinion in the Americas. As a 'huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda', the BSC influenced news coverage in the Herald Tribune, the New York Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Radio New York Worldwide.[1] The stories disseminated from Rockefeller Center would then be legitimately picked up by other radio stations and newspapers, before being relayed to the American public.[1] Through this, anti-German stories were placed in major American media outlets to turn public opinion.[2]
Its cover was the British Passport Control Office. BSC benefitted from support given by the chief of the US Office of Strategic Services, William J. Donovan (whose organisation was modelled on British activities), and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was staunchly anti-Nazi.[3]
Beginnings
As head of the British Security Coordination, William Stephenson has been credited with changing American public opinion from an isolationist stance to a supportive tendency regarding America's entry into World War II.[4]
The declaration of war upon Germany by the British in September 1939 forced a break in liaison between SIS [Secret Intelligence Service: MI6] and the FBI because of the Neutrality Acts of 1930s. William Stephenson was sent to the US by the head of SIS to see if it could be rekindled to an extent that SIS could operate effectively in the US. While J. Edgar Hoover was sympathetic, he could not go against the State Department without the President's authorisation; he also believed that if it was authorised, it should be a personal liaison between Stephenson and himself without other departments being informed. However, Roosevelt endorsed co-operation.
The liaison was necessary because Britain's enemies were already present in the US and could expect sympathy and support from German and Italian immigrants, but the authorities there had no remit or interest in activities that were not directly against US security.[5]
Stephenson's report on the American situation advocated a secret organisation acting beyond purely SIS activities and covering all covert operations that could be done to ensure aid to Britain and an eventual entry of the US into the war. Stephenson was given this remit and the traditional cover of appointment as a 'Passport Control Officer' which he took up in June 1940. Although the existing setup in New York was lacking, Stephenson could call upon his personal liaison with Hoover, the support of Canada, the British ambassador, and his acquaintances with US interventionists.
Operation
The office, which was established for intelligence and propaganda services, was headed by Canadian industrialist William Stephenson. Its first tasks were to promote British interests in the United States, counter Nazi propaganda, and protect the Atlantic convoys from enemy sabotage.
The BSC was registered by the State Department as a foreign entity. It operated out of Room 3603 at Rockefeller Center and was officially known as the British Passport Control Office from which it had expanded. BSC acted as administrative headquarters more than operational one for SIS and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was a channel for communications and liaison between US and British security and intelligence organisations.[6]
BSC used a number of legitimate outlets for its work. In 1940, a German agent, Gerhard Alois Westrick, who was cultivating support and possible sabotage among American oil companies, was effectively exposed through news articles placed in the New York Herald Tribune. A wave of public outrage was followed by Weldrick's expulsion from the US and the forced resignation of the head of Texaco (Torkild Rieber). Through third parties, BSC developed the independent and non-profit WRUL shortwave radio station foreign-language broadcast capability and then fed it stories it wanted disseminated worldwide. The station had a large number of listeners who corresponded with the station, which made it possible for reactions to the broadcasts to be directly monitored. For a period, the station was unwittingly the agent of BSC; after the US entered the war, the WRUL operation was turned over to US control.
Although the British and Americans were co-operating at the Prime Minister-President level at the time, the arrival of "British spies" in the United States infuriated J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and displeased the US Department of State.
Stephenson and Hoover did not see eye to eye but had cooperated in a number of operations against espionage activities by Nazi Germany in the US. The British hired Americans despite promising otherwise. The Americans who were recruited in the BSC were given British identification numbers beginning with the digits 4 and 8, apparently representing the 48 states.
In 1939, Stephenson arranged for the Hamilton Princess Hotel to become a censorship centre. All mail, radio and telegraphic traffic bound for Europe, the U.S. and the Far East were intercepted and analyzed by 1,200 censors, of British Imperial Censorship, part of British Security Coordination (BSC), before being routed to their destination.[7][8][9] With BSC working closely with the FBI, the censors were responsible for the discovery and arrest of a number of Axis spies operating in the US, including the Joe K ring.[10]
It was through the BSC that the British acquired the powerful "Aspidistra" transmitter that was used for propaganda by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), BBC overseas broadcasts and by the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the war against Germany. BSC also sourced a transmitter for it to communicate with the UK which was operated under the code name "Hydra" at Camp X, BSC's Special Training School No. 103, a Second World War paramilitary installation in Whitby, Ontario for training covert agents in the methods of "secret warfare".[11][12] The Hydra station was established in May 1942 by engineer Benjamin deForest Bayly; he also invented a very fast coding/decoding machine for telegraph transmissions labelled the Rockex.[13][14] Camp X had been established in December 1941 by Stephenson to train Allied agents in methods of clandestine operations; many graduates would be dropped behind enemy lines in Europe by SOE.[15][14]
The British novelist William Boyd, in a 2006 article for The Guardian,[16] stated that although the total number of BSC agents operating in the US in the early 1940s is unknown, he estimated there were at least "many hundreds" and had seen "the figure of up to 3,000 mentioned".
Noël Coward saw Stephenson, colloquially known as "Little Bill", at the end of July 1940 when on a world entertainment and propaganda tour. He wrote that the "suite in the Hampshire House with the outsize chintz flowers crawling over the walls became pleasantly familiar to me..." and that Stephenson "had a considerable influence on the next few years of my life". Stephenson offered him a job but was overruled by London.[17]
Counter-smuggling and "shipping security"
South America was an important neutral source of trade for the Axis forces; its importance would increase after the US entry into the war in 1941. The Italian airline LATI operated a transatlantic service - between Rome and Rio de Janeiro - which was a conduit for high-value goods (platinum, mica, diamonds, etc.), agents and diplomatic bags. London instructed the BSC to do something about that.
The airline had connections with the Brazilian government through the President's son-in-law, and it was supplied, despite the US State Department protests, by Standard Oil in the US, making official channels ineffective. To curtail LATI's activities, the BSC decided that the Brazilians themselves would have to take measures - sabotage would be only a temporary inconvenience. Accordingly, the BSC constructed a forged letter of such accuracy that its authenticity could not be questioned even under forensic examination. The letter purported to come from LATI's head office to an executive of the company stationed in Brazil. The contents included disparaging references to the Brazilian president and to the US, and implied connections with a fascist opposition party in Brazil, the Party of Popular Representation (founded in 1945). Following a "burglary" of the executive's house, a photostat of the letter was placed with an American Associated Press reporter, who immediately took it to the American Embassy, which then showed the letter to the President of Brazil, Getúlio Vargas. LATI's operations in Brazil were confiscated and its personnel interned - the airline ceased transatlantic flights in December 1941. Brazil broke off relations with the Axis and joined the Allies in 1942.[18]
To counter the carrying of high-value contraband goods to and from the Americas, the BSC set up a network of observers on merchant ships. The agents, recruited from the crews (and among pro-British masters) of the vessels, would report their observations, cargo manifests, and passenger lists to agents in port when they arrived. Agents watching docks at both ends also gathered intelligence. Ships or enemy agents could be intercepted and US and British lines could blacklist questionable crew from employment. From autumn 1941, the BSC handed over control of observers on American vessels and ports to the US while retaining control of the remainder and maintaining close liaison with the new US handlers.{cn}}
Notable employees
• Cedric Belfrage
Cedric Henning Belfrage was an English film critic, journalist, writer, and political activist. He is best remembered as a co-founder of the radical US-weekly newspaper the National Guardian. Later Belfrage was referenced as a Soviet agent in the US intelligence Venona project, although it appears that he had been working for British Security Co-ordination as a double-agent.
-- Cedric Belfrage, by Wikipedia
• Roald Dahl[19] – after he was transferred to Washington, D.C. as Assistant Air Attaché.
Roald Dahl was a British novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter pilot. His books have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide...
He served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He became a fighter pilot and, subsequently, an intelligence officer, rising to the rank of acting wing commander. He rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s with works for children and for adults, and he became one of the world's best-selling authors. He has been referred to as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century"...
Dahl's short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters. His books champion the kindhearted and feature an underlying warm sentiment. His works for children include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Twits, and George's Marvellous Medicine. His adult works include Tales of the Unexpected.
-- Roald Dahl, by Wikipedia
• Dick Ellis – deputy-head, post-war accused of being spy for the Germans and the Soviets
Charles Howard Ellis CBE CMG (1895–1975), better known as Dick Ellis, was an Australian-born British intelligence officer, who is alleged to have also been a double agent for Germany and the Soviet Union. According to Nigel West the SIS believed that Ellis had been a spy for the Abwehr.[1] Ellis was accused by Chapman Pincher of being a traitor.
-- Dick Ellis, by Wikipedia
• Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his father was the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 until his death on the Western Front in 1917. Educated at Eton, Sandhurst and, briefly, the universities of Munich and Geneva, Fleming moved through several jobs before he started writing.
While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during the Second World War, Fleming was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. His wartime service and his career as a journalist provided much of the background, detail and depth of the James Bond novels.
-- Ian Fleming, by Wikipedia
• Gilbert Highet – historian, professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia University
• Dorothy Maclean
Dorothy Maclean was a Canadian writer and educator on spiritual subjects who was one of the original three adults at what is now the Findhorn Foundation in northeast Scotland...
From 1941 onwards she worked for the British Security Coordination in New York City. After being posted to Panama, she met and married John Wood, though the couple would divorce in 1951.
On her way to New York City in 1941, Maclean had met Sheena Govan, and it was through her that she would later meet Peter Caddy. Living in England in the 1950s, Maclean became involved in the spiritual practices of Govan and Caddy and eventually Eileen Caddy. When the Caddys were appointed to manage a hotel in Scotland, Maclean joined them as the hotel's secretary.
After the Caddys became unemployed in 1962, they moved into a caravan near the village of Findhorn. In 1963, an annex was built so that Maclean could continue to work with them. A community eventually grew up around the Caddys and Maclean, and this community has since 1972 been known as the Findhorn Foundation.
Maclean was known for her work with devas, said to be intelligences overseeing the natural world. Her book To Hear the Angels Sing gives an overview of this work and also provides autobiographical materials. A full-length biography, Memoirs of an Ordinary Mystic was published in 2010.
Maclean left Findhorn in 1973 and subsequently founded an educational organization in North America with David Spangler [the Lorian Association].
-- Dorothy Maclean, by Wikipedia
• Eric Maschwitz – screenwriter, lyricist and broadcaster, Intelligence Corps officer
He joined the BBC in 1926. His first radio show was In Town Tonight. While at the BBC he wrote a radio operetta Goodnight Vienna, with the popular song of the same title co-written by George Posford. In 1932 it was adapted as a film starring Anna Neagle.
Between 1927 and 1933, Maschwitz was the editor of the weekly broadcast listings magazine Radio Times.
Under contract to MGM in Hollywood from 1937, he co-wrote the adaptation of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, made by MGM-British, for which he shared an Academy Award nomination.
From August 1939, he was a postal censor in Liverpool. From November 1939, he served with the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)/MI-6 D Section (sabotage). In 1940, he briefly worked to establish a resistance organization in Beverley, Yorkshire, and for Army Welfare in London before being assigned to the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In 1940 he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. He was then sent to New York City to work for the British Security Coordination (BSC). In 1942, he returned to London, briefly supervising radio programmes for the troops. He then transferred to the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). He ended the war as chief broadcasting officer with the 21st Army Group, leaving the army as a Lieutenant-Colonel. Maschwitz, along with Major John MacMillan (members of "No 1 Field Broadcasting Unit"), was responsible for taking over the "Reichssender Hamburg" on 3 May 1945. This requisition enabled the British occupation troops to start broadcasting programmes for their soldiers in northern Germany, and was the nucleus for the British Forces Network (BFN), inaugurated with Maschwitz's help in July 1945, eventually to become the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS)....
In 1958, near the start of the BBC/ITV ratings wars, he rejoined the BBC as Head of Television Light Entertainment. About the job he said, "I don't think the BBC is a cultural organisation. We've got to please the people. The job of a man putting on a show is to get an audience." By 1962, he was serving as assistant to the BBC's Controller of Programmes, and it was in this capacity that he requested the recently formed BBC Survey Group to examine possible ideas for a science fiction drama series; the results of the study led to the creation of Doctor Who the next year.
-- Eric Maschwitz, by Wikipedia
• H. Montgomery Hyde – counter-espionage Intelligence Corps officer
Although his mother came from a Protestant Home Rule background, all were involved in the 1914 UVF gun running, the seven-year-old Harford being a dummy casualty for first-aid practice....The Larne gun-running was a major gun smuggling operation organised in April 1914 in Ireland by Major Frederick H. Crawford and Captain Wilfrid Spender for the Ulster Unionist Council to equip the Ulster Volunteer Force. The operation involved the smuggling of almost 25,000 rifles and between 3 and 5 million rounds of ammunition from the German Empire, with the shipments landing in Larne, Donaghadee, and Bangor in the early hours between Friday 24 and Saturday 25 April 1914. The Larne gun-running may have been the first time in history that motor-vehicles were used "on a large scale for a military-purpose, and with striking success".
-- Larne gun-running, by Wikipedia
He joined the British Army Intelligence Corps in 1939, serving as an Assistant Censor in Gibraltar in 1940. He was then commissioned in the intelligence corps (MI6) and engaged in counter-espionage work in the United States under Sir William Stephenson, the Director of British Security Coordination in the Western Hemisphere. Hyde was also Military Liaison and Security Officer, Bermuda, from 1940 to 1941 and Assistant Passport Control Officer in New York from 1941 to 1942. He was with British Army Staff, USA from 1942 to 1944, attached to the Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force in 1944, and then seconded to the Allied Control Commission for Austria until 1945 as a legal officer....
Hyde later in 1972 wrote the first history of homosexuality in Great Britain and Ireland, The Other Love, perhaps his most memorable and long-lasting work. With its rich and detailed narratives, "fusing legal knowledge with illustrative anecdotage," it was the most extensive book on the subject. Antony Grey, secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) provided case histories and cuttings from the society's files for its contemporary section.
-- H. Montgomery Hyde, by Wikipedia
• David Ogilvy – applied Gallup audience research techniques
David Mackenzie Ogilvy CBE was a British advertising tycoon, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, and known as the "Father of Advertising". Trained at the Gallup research organisation, he attributed the success of his campaigns to meticulous research into consumer habits....
During World War II, Ogilvy worked for the British Intelligence Service at the British embassy in Washington, DC. There he analyzed and made recommendations on matters of diplomacy and security. According to a biography produced by Ogilvy & Mather, "he extrapolated his knowledge of human behaviour from consumerism to nationalism in a report which suggested 'applying the Gallup technique to fields of secret intelligence.'" Eisenhower’s Psychological Warfare Board picked up the report and successfully put Ogilvy’s suggestions to work in Europe during the last year of the war.
Also during World War II David Ogilvy was a notable alumnus of the secret Camp X, located near the towns of Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. According to an article on the CBC Website: "It was there he mastered the power of propaganda before becoming king of Madison Avenue. Although Ogilvy was trained in sabotage and close combat, he was ultimately tasked with projects that included successfully ruining the reputation of businessmen who were supplying the Nazis with industrial materials."...
He was appointed Chairman of the United Negro College Fund in 1968, and trustee on the Executive Council of the World Wildlife Fund in 1975.
-- David Ogilvy (businessman), by Wikipeida
• Walter Thomas Wren
• John Arthur Reid Pepper
• Ivan T. Sanderson
Ivan Terence Sanderson was a biologist and writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland, who became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Along with Belgian-French biologist Bernard Heuvelmans, Sanderson was a founding figure of cryptozoology, a pseudoscience and subculture. Sanderson authored material on paranormal subjects and wrote fiction under the pen name Terence Roberts....
He became famous claiming to have seen an Olitiau after being attacked by a creature he described as "the Granddaddy of all bats".The olitiau is a giant bat reported from the Assumbo Mountains of Cameroon in West-Central Africa, known from native folklore and a single sighting made by Ivan T. Sanderson. It has sometimes been equated with the kongamato.
-- Olitiau, by Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology
Sanderson conducted a number of expeditions as a teenager and young man into tropical areas in the 1920s and 1930s, gaining fame for his animal collecting as well as his popular writings on nature and travel.
During World War II, Sanderson worked for British Naval Intelligence, in charge of counter-espionage against the Germans in the Caribbean, then for British Security Coordination, finally finishing out the war as a press agent in New York City. Afterwards, Sanderson made New York his home and became a naturalized U.S. citizen...
Sanderson was an early follower of Charles Fort. Later he became known for writings on topics such as cryptozoology, a word Sanderson coined in the early 1940s, with special attention to the search for lake monsters, sea serpents, Mokèlé-mbèmbé, giant penguins, Yeti, and Sasquatch.
Sanderson's book Abominable Snowmen argued that there are four living types of abominable snowmen scattered over five continents. The book was criticized in the Science journal as unscientific. The reviewer noted that "unfortunately, the author's concept of what constitutes scientific evidence will scarcely be accepted by most scientists. His standards are unbelievably low." Sanderson relied upon anecdotal reports and dubious footprints.
Sanderson has been described as credulous for suggesting that aircraft and boats went missing at Devil's Sea because of a wrinkle in spacetime, gravitational or magnetic aberrations, extra-terrestrials or mysterious underwater people. Larry Kusche who traced the Devil's sea stories to their original sources found that the phenomena of Devil's Sea had been fabricated and was nothing more than an exaggeration based on the loss of several fishing boats over a period of five years.
Sanderson's credibility was damaged with his endorsement of the giant penguin hoax. In 1948 (and the next decade), giant three-toed footprints were found at Clearwater Beach in Florida. Sanderson proclaimed that the footprints were impossible to fake and were made by a fifteen-foot tall penguin. In 1988, Tony Signorini a prankster admitted that with a friend he had made the footprints by a pair of cast iron feet attached to high-top sneakers.
Sanderson founded the Ivan T. Sanderson Foundation in August 1965 on his New Jersey property, which became the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU) in 1967. SITU was a non-profit organization that investigated claims of strange phenomena ignored by mainstream science.
-- Ivan T. Sanderson, by Wikipedia
• Amy Elizabeth Thorpe
Amy Elizabeth "Betty" Thorpe was, according to William Stephenson of British Security Coordination, an American spy, codenamed "Cynthia", who worked for his agency during World War II....
Her father was George C. Thorpe, a distinguished U.S. Marine Corps officer. Her mother, Cora Wells, was the daughter of a Minnesota state senator.
Thorpe was introduced at a young age by her parents to the Washington social scene and quickly became immersed in the world of diplomatic intrigue. By the time she was in her late teens, she had been romantically linked to foreign diplomats many years her senior. In 1936, Arthur Pack, second secretary at the British embassy in Washington, became Thorpe's choice for a husband; but in the 1930s, in the wake of two quick pregnancies and Pack's work-connected travels, the relationship became distant.
According to William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid, Thorpe traveled frequently to Europe, nominally to support Pack's work. In reality, according to Stevenson, she had embarked upon secret intrigues, working for both sides in the Spanish Civil War....
By the time World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, Thorpe was out of Poland and had returned to Washington, D.C., where, according to the late American TV journalist David Brinkley, she resumed her tour through the American capital's diplomatic social scene, often as mistress to married foreign diplomats.According to Stevenson, Thorpe used the access gained by her romantic relationships to obtain strategic secrets about Nazi Germany, Vichy France and Fascist Italy, and to extract practical knowledge needed to place spies in Fortress Europe. In 1942, according to Stevenson, she obtained codes from the Vichy French embassy in Washington which assisted the Allied invasion of North Africa.
According to Stevenson, a love affair that Thorpe conducted with the Italian naval attaché Admiral Alberto Lais was especially productive and gained western Allied leaders early strategic insight into Axis war plans in the Mediterranean. In 1967, however, the Admiral's heirs sued British author, H. Montgomery Hyde in an Italian court for defamation, insisting that Lais (who had died in 1951) had not betrayed military secrets, and won. In 1988, Lais' two sons protested publication of the seduction account in David Brinkley's best-selling Washington Goes to War and persuaded the Italian defense ministry to publish denial ads in three leading East Coast newspapers.
The Italian Naval Enigma message leading to Italian defeat at the Battle of Cape Matapan was broken at the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park, using Dilly's rodding method without a codebook. This debunks Hyde's theory that a codebook obtained from Admiral Lais was responsible.
Thorpe is reported to have later said about her sexually-active war years:Ashamed? Not in the least, my superiors told me that the results of my work saved thousands of British and American lives.... It involved me in situations from which 'respectable' women draw back – but mine was total commitment. Wars are not won by respectable methods.
After her nearly-estranged husband, Arthur Pack, killed himself in 1945, Thorpe married one of her best informants, Charles Brousse, former press attaché at the Vichy French embassy in Washington. The couple lived together quietly in France in the Château de Castelnou, a medieval castle in the commune of Castelnou (Catalan: Castellnou dels Aspres) in the French département of Pyrénées-Orientales, until her death, from throat cancer, on December 1, 1963.
-- Amy Elizabeth Thorpe, by Wikipedia
• Frank Foley
The story of his escape from Germany and his language skills had been noted by someone at the War Office. He was encouraged to apply for the Intelligence Corps. On 25 July 1918 Foley was promoted Lieutenant. In July 1918 he became part of a small unit which was responsible for recruiting and running networks of secret agents in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. After the Armistice he served for a short time in the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control in Cologne. On 19 April 1920 he relinquished the temporary rank of captain, and in December 1921 retired from the Army with the rank of Captain.
After the running down of the Commission, he was subsequently offered the post of passport control officer in Berlin which was a cover for his main duties as head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) station. During the 1920s and 30s, Foley was successful in recruiting agents and acquiring key details of German military research and development.
Foley is primarily remembered as a "British Schindler". In his role as passport control officer, he helped thousands of Jews escape from Nazi Germany. At the 1961 trial of former ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann, he was described as a "Scarlet Pimpernel" for the way he risked his own life to save Jews threatened with death by the Nazis. Despite having no diplomatic immunity and being liable to arrest at any time, Foley would bend the rules when stamping passports and issuing visas, to allow Jews to escape "legally" to Britain or Palestine, which was then controlled by the British. Sometimes he went further, going into internment camps to get Jews out, hiding them in his home, and helping them get forged passports. One Jewish aid worker estimated that he saved "tens of thousands" of people from the Holocaust....
He returned to Berlin very soon after the war under the cover of Assistant Inspector General of the Public Safety Branch of the Control Commission in Germany, where he was involved in hunting for ex-SS war criminals.
-- Frank Foley, by Wikipedia
• Herbert Sichel[20]
• Alexander Halpern — Menshevik and ex-Freemason
Aleksandr Yakovelich Galpern. also known as Alexander Halpern, was a Russian Menshevik politician and attorney, who played a significant part in the Russian Revolution. He was a member of the Grand Orient of the Peoples of Russia and sat in Alexander Kerensky's Russian Provisional Government. Following the October Revolution, he fled abroad to the United Kingdom. During the Second World War, Halpern worked in British service as an MI6 agent in the United States, as part of British Security Co-ordination....
He joined an irregular freemasonic lodge; the Grand Orient of the Russian Peoples; upon the recommendation of Alexander Kerensky and Bruno Germanovič Lopatin-Bart. He sat as a member of the Supreme Council of the Grand Orient from 1912 to 1917 and was the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of the Grand Orient from 1916 to 1917. In February 1917 he replaced Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov as manager of the affairs of the Russian Provisional Government and held this post until the overthrow of the Provisional Government in October 1917 during the October Revolution. He was associated with the failed Committee for Salvation of Motherland and Revolution. Until the end of 1918, he lived covertly in Moscow and Petrograd, before fleeing first to Paris and then to London.
In 1928 he gave an interview about Freemasonry to Boris Nikolayevsky, later published in the book "Russian Masons and Revolution." ...
During the Second World War, Halpern lived in New York City in the United States, working for British Intelligence (British Security Co-ordination)....While there he maintained contact with old Mensheviks such as Boris Nicolaevsky, Irakli Tsereteli, Raphael Abramovitch and others, who collaborated in The Socialist Herald.
-- Alexander Halpern, by Wikipedia
See also
• Amy Elizabeth Thorpe ("Cynthia")
• Camp X
Notes
1. William Boyd (19 August 2006), "The Secret Persuaders", The Guardian, retrieved 30 November 2013
2. Macintyre, Ben (8 October 2006). "The Spy Who Raised Me". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 November 2013.
3. David Ignatius (1 October 1989). "'45 papers detail British spying in U.S.'". Toledo Blade. The Washington Post. Retrieved 30 November 2013.
4. Folkart, Burt A. (3 February 1989). "William Stephenson, 93; British Spymaster Dubbed 'Intrepid' Worked in U.S." The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 30 November 2013.
5. The Secret History of British Intelligence p.xxvi
6. Davies |MI6 and the Machinery of Spying |ISBN 0714683639 |December 4, 2004 |pp 128, 131
7. [1]
8. Fairmont Hotels & Resorts Hotel History of the Fairmont Hamilton Princess.
9. [ [2]
10. BERNEWS: |Bermuda’s WWII Espionage Role. |11 November, 2011
11. "Ontario War Memorials". Ontario War Memorials. 14 August 2012. Retrieved 23 March 2013.
12. Davies, p137
13. [3]
14. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 3 August 2015.
15. [4]
16. Boyd, William, |William Boyd |"The Secret Persuaders", 19 August 2006
17. Future Indefinite|Noel Coward |page 159, 194 |(William Heinemann, London, 1954)
18. BSC p288-290
19. "The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington", 2008, Jennet Conan
20. Dorril, Stephen (2002). Mi6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service. Simon & Schuster.
References
• Boyd, William, "The Secret Persuaders," The Guardian, 19 August 2006.
• Conant, Jennet The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (Simon and Schuster, 2008)
• Hodgson, Lynn Philip, (foreword by Secret Agent Andy Durovecz), Inside Camp X (2003) – ISBN 0-9687062-0-7
• Macdonald, Bill, The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents, (Raincoast, 2001) – ISBN 1-55192-418-8 This book contains interviews with several Canadian employees of BSC in New York.
• Mahl, Thomas E., Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939–44, (Brassey's Inc., 1999) ISBN 1-57488-223-6
• Stephenson, William Samuel, Roald Dahl, Tom Hill and Gilbert Highet (introduced by Nigel West), British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940–1945, Fromm International (June 1999) – ISBN 0-88064-236-X (first published in the UK in 1998) Reviewed by Charles C. Kolb (National Endowment for the Humanities), December 1999.
• Stevenson, William (no relation to Stephenson), A Man Called Intrepid, The Secret War, (Harcourt Brace Javonovich, 1976) – ISBN 0-15-156795-6.