H. Montgomery Hyde - Room 3603: The Story Of The British Intelligence Center In New York During World War II

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

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ROOM 3603:

THE STORY OF THE BRITISH INTELLIGENCE CENTER IN NEW YORK DURING WORLD WAR II

BY

H. MONTGOMERY HYDE

Foreword by Ian Fleming

Contents

TO

LADY STEPHENSON

There was established, by Roosevelts order and despite State Department qualms, effectively close co-operation between J. Edgar Hoover and British Security Services under the direction of a quiet Canadian, William Stephenson. The purpose of this was the detection and frustration of espionage and sabotage activities in the Western Hemisphere....It produced some remarkable results which were incalculably valuable....Hoover was later decorated by the British and Stephenson by the U.S. Government for exploits which could hardly be advertised at the time.Robert Sherwood. Roosevelt and Hopkins.

Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.General William J. Donovan, Director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services

If it had not been for Stephenson and his organization in the U.S.A., there would have been many more gold star mothers in America at the end of the war.Ernest Cuneo

BY IAN FLEMING

In the high ranges of Secret Service work the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, bomb, the dagger and the firing party, interwoven in many a texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true. The Chief and the High Officers of the Secret Service revelled in these subterranean labyrinths, and pursued their task with cold and silent passion.SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL

IN this era of the anti-hero, when anyone on a pedestal is assaulted (how has Nelson survived?), unfashionably and obstinately I have my heroes. Being a second son, I dare say this all started from hero-worshipping my elder brother Peter, who had to become head of the family at the age of ten, when our father was killed in 1917.

But the habit stayed with me, and I now, naively no doubt, have a miscellaneous cohort of heroes, from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh through Sir Winston Churchill and on downwards to many Other Ranks, who would be surprised if they knew how much I admired them for such old-fashioned virtues as courage, fortitude, and service to a cause or a country. I suspectI hopethat 99.9 per cent of the population of these British islands has heroes in their family or outside. I am convinced they are necessary companions through life.

High up on my list is one of the great secret agents of the last war who, at this moment, will be sitting at a loaded desk in a small study in an expensive apartment block bordering the East River in New York.

It is not an inspiring roomranged bookcases, a copy of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen, the Cecil Beaton photograph of Churchill, autographed, a straightforward print of General Donovan, two Krieghoffs, comfortably placed boxes of stale cigarettes, and an automatic telephone recorder that clicks from time to time and shows a light, and into which, exasperated, I used to speak indelicate limericks until asked to desist to spare the secretary, who transcribes the calls, her blushes.

The telephone number is unlisted. The cable address, as during the war, is INTREPID. A panelled bar leads off the study, and then a bathroom. My frequent complaints about the exiguous bar of Lux have proved fruitless. The occupant expects one to come to see him with clean hands.

People often ask me how closely the hero of my thrillers, James Bond, resembles a true, live secret agent. To begin with, James Bond is not in fact a hero, but an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government, and though he is a meld of various qualities I noted among Secret Service men and commandos in the last war, he remains, of course, a highly romanticised version of the true spy. The real thing, who may be sitting next to you as you read this, is another kind of beast altogether.

We know for instance, that Mr. Somerset Maugham and Sir Compton Mackenzie were spies in the First World War, and we now know, from Mr. Montgomery Hydes book, that Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., D.S.O., M.C., a member of Whites and the St. Jamess, formerly of Eton and the Life Guards, was head of the Secret Service in the last warnews which will no doubt cause a delighted shiver to run down the spines of many fellow-members of his clubs and of his local hunt.

But the man sitting alone now in his study in New York is so much closer to the spy of fiction, and yet so far removed from James Bond or Our Man in Havana, that only the removal of the cloak of anonymity he has worn since 1940 allows us to realise to our astonishment that men of super-qualities can exist, and that such men can be super-spies and, by any standard, heroes.

Such a man is the Quiet Canadian, otherwise Sir William Stephenson, M.C., D.F.C., known throughout the war to his subordinates and friends, and to the enemy, as Little Bill. He is the man who became one of the great secret agents of the last war, and it would be a foolish person who would argue his credentials; to which I would add, from my own experience, that he is a man of few words and has a magnetic personality and the quality of making anyone ready to follow him to the ends of the earth. (He also used to make the most powerful martinis in America and serve them in quart glasses.)

I first met him in 1941 when I was on a plainclothes mission to Washington with my chief, Rear-Admiral J. H. Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, the most inspired appointment to this office since Blinker Hall, because, when the days were dark and the going bleak, he worked so passionately, and made his subordinates do the same, to win the war. Our chief business was with the American Office of Naval Intelligence, but we quickly came within the orbit of Little Bill and of his American team-mate, General Wild Bill Donovan (Congressional Medal of Honor), who was subsequently appointed head of the O.S.S., the first true American Secret Service.

This splendid American, being almost twice the size of Stephenson, though no match for him, I would guess, in unarmed combat, became known as Big Bill, and the two of them, in absolute partnership and with Mr. J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. as a formidable fullback, became the scourge of the enemy throughout the Americas.