William Stevenson - Intrepids Last Case

Copyright 1983 by William Stevenson, Ltd.

First Skyhorse Publishing Edition Copyright 2017

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

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Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2915-5

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2918-6

Printed in the United States of America.

TOMAGGIE AND ABDUL MARZOUCA

Deception is an arrangement of light and dark... chiaroscuro.... The people must be made to see white where there is black when this is necessary to the progress of the Revolution....

From the guidelines for disinformation and deceit as an arm of secret warfare, offered to Lenin by his German Communist escort, Willi Mnzenberg, on that famous sealed train carrying Lenin like an incubus into Mother Russia in 1917. The German General Staff provided train and escort from Lenins Swiss exile to Petrograd, counting on him to spread disaffection among the Russian soldiery at a critical phase in World War I.

Little Bill Stephenson, in serious discussions with me concerning wartime operations, always conveyed a sense of unassuming but absolute authority which was based on moral integrity and an immense experience of the world and its affairs, of mans ambitions and follies, of international politics.... He had been through it all as a soldier, an airman, an escaper, setting up his own private intelligence service as the threat of war with Nazi Germany developed.... He was covering the whole world with his intelligence, and he knew what to look for.... One aspect of his operating technique was absolutely fascinating to me: He seemed rarely to leave his New York office, except for some operational purpose where he felt his presence was essentialor else to see some head of state or something that major. But everybody seemed to come and see him, drawn to his office as it were by some unseen thread.

It was like ancient Greeks going to their oracle at Delphi to pose their multitudinous questions and to get a definitive answer.... We always seemed to get from Bill a definitive answer.

General Sir Colin Gubbins, chief of Special Operations Executive; from a tape-recorded interview with the author.

FOREWORD

by MAJOR-GENERAL RICHARD HEATH ROHMER

The place: the library of Sir William Stephensons Bermuda home. The time: just after eleven in the morning, 24 April 1983, four decades after the wartime heroics of the man called Intrepid. Intrepids hooded eyes were bright, filled with intelligence. Would I listen to some tape-recorded notes hed made that morning for a speech he was going to deliver in September to a gathering of members of the American Office of Strategic Services and others of the intelligence community. Where was the speech to be given? In New York aboard the dry-docked aircraft carrier the USS Intrepid. Remember, theyre just notes, he cautioned.

Notes or not, the voice that flowed from the tape recorder was strong and filled with urgency. Intrepids message was typical of the man: concise and to the point. This was the heart of his warning:

The enemy is not only at our door but inside our house and in practically every room. The West is fortunate to have in the United States the most effective and knowledgeable leaders, standing firmly shoulder to shoulder with their British and Canadian allies. They are aware of the present danger, that Yuri Andropov is now sole dictator of all the Soviet Union.

This is the moment that secret intelligence becomes not only the first line of defense but perhaps the only defense.

The issue is quite clear. Death or slavery versus life and freedom. Remember important eventsHitler, Pearl Harbor, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Afghanistan and others. And remember, Russian infiltration and disinformation tactics after Stalin were all the work of Andropov!

Intrepids exhortation to make the issue of death or slavery versus life and freedom clear to all the people was a plea to citizens free to speak and hear all manner of opinions in societies where liberty and justice are taken for granted; to citizens unaware of the powerful, pervasive forces of Soviet disinformation and the penetration of the Russian intelligence services into every level of the ruling bureaucracies, even into the very heart of the intelligence and counterintelligence organizations of the Western nations.

The months and years ahead would be marked by harsh new military and nuclear challenges from the Soviets, and by increased KGB efforts to infiltrate Western security systems, to create more moles and to steal or buy more and more secret technological information. The KGB agents who populate every Soviet embassy would encourage more marches and protests against the deployment of the weapons upon which the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its leading member, the United States of America, must rely for their defense against Kremlin-originated aggression.

Intrepids Last Case demonstrates the Kremlins single-minded purpose, even from the early days of World War II, when the Soviet Union was an ally to the West. Even then Soviet belligerence prompted the defection in early September 1945 of a highly placed member of the secret cipher branch operating out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. The appalling ineptitude of the Canadian government and of its eccentric prime minister, Mackenzie King, in handling this defector brought an alarmed William Stephenson to Ottawato take on the double task of protecting the defector from both the vengeance of his Soviet masters and the incompetence of the Canadians. The man whom Intrepid sought to shield, while at the same time obtaining as much intelligence information from him as possible, was Igor Gouzenko.

Igor Gouzenko was Intrepids last case. Author Bill Stevenson sees the Gouzenko affair, known as the Corby Case, and the crucial part Intrepid played in it, as the pivot for a cluster of events from September 1945 to Gouzenkos death in 1982, and beyond. Applying his own deep knowledge and consummate skills as a researcher to the facts provided by Intrepid, he has written an extraordinary chronical of the widespread strategies employed by the Soviets to undermine every aspect of Western government bureaucracies, from their security services to the reputations of powerful and trusted agents.

Such efforts to neutralize enemies of the Soviet Union by sowing seeds of mistrust and discord among members of the intelligence or counterintelligence services were exemplified by the KGB character assassination of Intrepids wartime right-hand man, Dick Ellis. Shortly before his death in 1975, Ellis had done what I am doing now: he had written the foreword for a book by Bill Stevenson. Colonal Charles Howard (Dick) Ellis, CMG, CBE, OBE, U.S. Legion of Merit, had been flattered to be invited to write an opening historical note for a book on the life and accomplishments of a man he and countless others admired, the man called Intrepid. Ellis finished his foreword to A