Descripción
red, gilt lettered hardbound 8vo. ~ 8º (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. near fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. some sunfading to spine top. edges have age spots. contents free of all markings. dustwrapper in vg cond. 1" tear spine top, corners rubbed,soiling on rear. not price clipped. nice vintage copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking , underlining, remainder markings etc~ 8th impression. frontis. xii+255p. 12 illus. sources.index. world war II. espionage. counter~espionage. propaganda. politics. covert operations. A Man Called Intrepid. b.s.c. british security co~ordination. american history. canadian history. british history. nazism. OSS. SOE. ABC. world history. cold war. camp x. gouzenko. kim philby.~ THE spectacular achievements of the director of Britain's secret intelligence organization in America during the Second World War have, mainly for security reasons not been authoritatively described hitherto. The American playwright, Robert Sherwood, called Sir William Stephenson 'a quiet Canadian', and this designation probably gave the millionaire industrialist, who took no pay for his 'cloak and dagger' job, more pleasure than all the honours which were afterwards showered upon him from both sides of the Atlantic. Stephenson, a fighter pilot in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, shot down twenty-six enemy planes before himself being shot down and captured by the Germans. After the war, he came to England, won the King's Cup Air Race and invented and patented the first device for transmitting photographs by wireless, a discovery which made him a millionaire before he was thirty. In the 1930s his business activities abroad enabled him to supply Sir Winston Churchill with important information about Hitler's secret rearmament programme and it was Churchill who, after Stephenson had carried out a difficult and dangerous intelligence mission to Sweden and Finland in the early months of the war, asked him in 1940 to take charge of all British secret intelligence, security and allied interests in the Western Hemisphere. With headquarters in New York, the organization which Stephenson built up and directed (officially known as British Security Co-ordination, or B.S.C.) was the keystone of the successful Anglo-American partnership which developed in the field of secret intelligence, counter-espionage and 'special operations'. Two heads of U.S. intelligence agencies with whom he worked particularly closely were Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and General William J. Donovan, Director of the Office of Strategic Services, who, after the war, said 'Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence'. Ostensibly existing to protect British shipping and war supplies in American ports, Stephenson's organization's under~cover activities were manifold, ranging from detecting spies and smuggling rings, to sabotage, penetrating foreign embassies and purloining diplomatic codes and cyphers and training agents for intelligence and subversive operations in enemy and enemy-occupied territories. Finally, but for Stephenson's presence of mind, Igor Gouzenko, the cypher clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, who defected to the West in 1945, would probably not be alive today, nor would the details of the vast Soviet espionage network in Canada and the U.S. and the disclosures of the secrets of the atom bomb have been revealed in the way they were. Sir William Stephenson has now put all his papers and much other relevant material at the disposal of Mr. Montgomery Hyde, who was a member of his war-time organization and knows him intimately. The result is a unique picture of the British Secret Service in action and of the remarkable exploits of its brilliant but personally unobtrusive chief in America. N° de ref. del artículo 108051
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