On the night shift, alone in the code room, she heard the knock on the door. It was late, the building nearly empty, and only one other woman was working in the registry. Neither of them knew what to do. Somebody had left a pistol in the room, and the other girl grabbed it, held it up, and stood at the door ready.
It turned out to be just a telegram boy delivering a message. The women of British Security Coordination learned to live with that kind of fear, and with far more secrecy. They were young Canadians, most of them, recruited in 1940 and 1941 to come to New York City to work for the British government. They signed the Official Secrets Act.
They were told not to ask questions. For more than fifty years, most of them never told anyone—not their husbands, not their children—what they had actually done. By the spring of 1940, the war had gone disastrously for the Allies. Defeats across Europe had left Britain standing alone against Nazi Germany, and the United States remained firmly neutral.
Without American help, Britain looked finished. In May of that year, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, determined to secure American aid and, eventually, to bring the United States into the war. Churchill was living on the edge of the blade. He told British leaders that the United States was like a huge steam engine: once you got it going, you could not stop it, and it would win the war.
The problem was getting it going. Churchill turned to William Stephenson, a Canadian industrialist then living in Britain. He made him head of a top-secret branch of British intelligence in New York City, an organization that would come to be called British Security Coordination. Over the course of the war, BSC grew into a massive operation responsible for intelligence gathering across the entire Western Hemisphere.
It played a key role in bolstering American support for the war and helped establish an American intelligence service that would become the CIA. Stephenson arrived in New York in the summer of 1940. The first people he approached were his friends. Tommy Drew Brook, an old comrade from the First World War and a Toronto stockbroker, helped recruit people.
A. J. Taylor, from the West Coast, did the same. It was friends telling friends, and that was how it grew.
Though the organization was called British, it was run by Stephenson and staffed largely by Canadians. The majority of the Canadians BSC hired were young women. As many as eight hundred of them came down from towns and cities across Canada, all sworn to secrecy upon arrival. Patsy Sullivan was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1913.
She graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a BA in 1934, then went to business and secretarial college. She did not want to be a teacher, and there was not much else for women in those days. As the Depression eased in the East, many prairie people migrated to Toronto. Patsy joined them, finding a job at Oxford University Press.
When war came in 1939, she was like many young Canadians, anxious to do what she could for King and country. Most of them thought they would get into something if they could. All the men simply vanished, and it became a female world. Thousands of Canadian women heeded the call, taking factory work building planes, munitions, and ships, or joining nursing and the Canadian Women’s Army Corps.
In 1940, BSC began placing advertisements in several Canadian newspapers, looking for reliable young women to come to New York City to work for the British government. Patsy Sullivan saw one and thought it was for her. She showed it to her friend Enid, with whom she shared an apartment. They applied and were interviewed, both separately and together, by Tommy Drew Brook.
He got in touch with New York, phoned Patsy at the office, and asked her to come and have tea with his wife and himself. She went on her best behavior, and he told her they would have a position for her in the cold services. Another recruit had a family friend, A. J.
Taylor, who had been involved with Mr. Stevenson for many years in other projects. His daughter was living in New York, and they thought she might eventually go down, but they sent her to Washington first. She lived there for three months, convinced she was under observation before being sent up to New York.
One woman was recruited in Winnipeg following an advertisement in the Winnipeg Free Press. She did not tell her parents she was going, because she did not think they would like the idea of her going down to a hotel to be interviewed. She was interviewed by Captain Herb Roland, a very low-key affair. He said she would be contacted by a Mrs.
Shakespeare of the RCMP. She called, they met, and she was fingerprinted and signed the Official Secrets Act. Another recruit had wanted a job in Toronto. Her interview with Mr.
Roland was held in a broker’s office, and she later learned the brokerage belonged to someone Sir William Stephenson knew and could trust. Roland was given a little cubbyhole at the back, and she began to wonder what she was getting into. One woman was recruited through a friend, Margaret Morden, who was already working at BSC in 1941. Margaret asked if she would like to come to New York to work, and she thought it sounded like a very good idea.
The RCMP vetted everybody going to New York. The only black mark against her was that her mother belonged to the Oxford Group, a pacifist organization, but she could prove she was not a member herself. One recruit remembered her father asking why she did not just go to Toronto if she wanted to try her wings. She said, why would she go to Toronto, she was perfectly happy in Winnipeg, but she would go to New York if she got the opportunity.
Her mother said immediately, go for it. The whole business started as a scruffy little office called the British Passport Control Office, off Wall Street. Stephenson used his own money to rent two floors in the prestigious Rockefeller Center and created a working environment that looked very successful. He was the ultimate insider, a successful businessman with contacts all over the world and many American friends.
Before Pearl Harbor, the most important thing to be done was to win the United States over to intervention. BSC, to some degree, was a propaganda organization, using contacts in intelligence to reach people of influence and convince them the war could be won with Britain. BSC’s first task was getting critical resources to a beleaguered Britain, covertly lobbying influential Americans to support deals that brought much-needed war material to the Allied cause. One assessment held that BSC played the decisive role in bringing the United States, particularly the Roosevelt administration, to a determination to do everything to help Britain win the war, and that in turn probably did win World War II.
To new recruits, BSC was a secret of which they would be told little. They were given an address and a numbered room with a guard on the door, who looked at their identities and cards. You could not get past this guard, nor could you see from any other place that this door existed. In the front hall, on the other side of the elevator, was the British Passport Office.
Everybody coming off the elevator turned to the passport office, and nobody saw the other door hidden in the back. The office was at 630 Fifth Avenue, on the mezzanine floor. As you walked in, massive escalators led up to the mezzanine. The women were told to go through an unmarked door, which opened onto what looked like a stationery warehouse, where a plainclothes RCMP officer sat.
They were trained in the skill of opening mail secretly. A separate room was taken somewhere else for the training. One of the first things they learned was how to open a sealed envelope, like a legal document, by shaving off little bits of paper on both sides, lifting the edge, then sealing it back so carefully that it did not look as if it had been opened. If any glue came out, they had to rip it off quickly with a bit of Kleenex.
The training went on for quite some time, and their work was secret even to the other people working there. Some did not realize what it was all about until they arrived and had to sign the Official Secrets Act. One woman went straight into the code and cipher room, a very small room with about six or seven people jammed in it, working with pen, pencil, and paper, or pecking away at manual typewriters. She did coding and ciphering for Mr.
Stevenson’s confidential correspondence. Then Miss Richardson, the head of the code room, told her she was being transferred to Mr. Stevenson’s office, and she trotted off. For the women of BSC, it was a blur of paperwork, confidential correspondence, coded messages, and filing.
They filed papers marked with how they should be filed, and they learned coding too. They were filing and coding clerks. One worked on the communications desk just outside Stevenson’s inner sanctum. Messages came to her through a pneumatic tube.
The top-secret ones went right through to the office; the others remained in her desk, and she sent the decoded ones to the various men who dealt with that particular subject. BSC maintained files on Axis shipping and Nazi companies operating in the Western Hemisphere. Masses of information were gathered through methodical, detailed work from which intelligence was gleaned. The material that came in was very interesting, all sent in as reports on people they were watching.
When the United States entered the war in late 1941, BSC took on a new role. It appeared to have lost much of its importance after Pearl Harbor. The Americans were now an ally, no need for propaganda in the papers. But at the same time, BSC’s whole focus shifted into the area of communications.
Stevenson’s second in command, Benjamin de Forest Bayly, set up a communication system connecting Washington, New York, Ottawa, Camp X near Toronto, and Britain. It was so efficient that all the Allies decided to use it as well. The office was very large. The biggest part was the TK room, with a huge staff working around the clock.
BSC turned the second floor into a massive communication center. One section operated 105 teleprinters three shifts a day, requiring over four hundred people to run them. The system became the quickest and most secure ever devised, carrying some of the war’s top secrets, including decryptions of the German cipher machine Enigma. The intercept stations were like vacuum cleaners of the skies, pulling in thousands, millions of messages every month.
Intercepted enemy messages went to BSC, where they were quickly collated, encrypted, and sent to the Allied country working to break that code. The ability to read enemy traffic had an enormous impact on the war and saved lives. Many key battles were won because the codes had been broken, allowing slimmer resources to be placed in the right spots. The women were taught to send coded messages using one-time pads and teletype machines.
One woman was told one morning to get down to Lower Manhattan, go to a certain telephone company, and learn about teletypes. She was perhaps three-quarters of the way through the lesson when an urgent call came from the BSC office. Miss Richardson said to get back as fast as she could: the machine was installed, it was working, and they did not know what to do with it. Fortunately, the lesson was nearly over.
Messages came through a central section, and when they were headed confidential to WSS, or for your eyes only, they were sent to the inner office where the women decoded them. There were quite a few confidential messages, some from Churchill and other very big names during the war. The commonest code was the one-time pad. You got your number for a word or phrase, put it below a number on the pad, and they came in groups of five, typed out on the machine.
Dorothy Evanson was trained on a special coding machine known only as the Typex. They operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and it became routine. Whenever the messages became scrambled, they would get a password and change the drums so the messages would come out. They did not spend much time reading messages.
They simply got them, poured them out, and sent them to the next division, and then up to Sir William. One woman was an assistant to the secretary of Captain Meidment. One of Major Meidment’s jobs was to look after the Canadian ham radio operators hired to go to South America to monitor radio messages sent by Nazi spies in South America, say, from Santiago to Berlin or Buenos Aires to Hamburg. Her biggest job was helping identify the different circuits they picked up.
They never saw the contents; everything was in code, and they just passed it on to England. Another woman was sent to Trinidad, where there were four of them. Mail was vetted outside, and the suspicious-looking pieces were sent to them. Shaping was the method of separating two pieces of paper at the edge of an envelope, lifting it off, and sealing it back again so it did not look opened.
Upon joining BSC, all the women signed the British Official Secrets Act. They were told how to conduct themselves if people asked what they were doing. You did not say anything about the place. You did not mention it to anybody at all.
If you were pursued and someone needed to know where you worked, you said you were on government work. There were different departments, but they never knew what the others did, which was the secret of BSC. They lived in a little box, unable to know what other people were doing, because they were never told and never asked. That was the way they operated.
One woman read about the mezzanine floor after the war and realized she had not even known it existed in the three and a half years she worked there. You did not discuss anything with co-employees because they did different work. Nobody knew until they started these interviews, a couple of months before, what some of the other girls had done. They were told that even in their hotel rooms, if they were going to talk, they should tap the walls first to see if there was any indication of a bug.
It was very serious. They just did not talk about it. It was not too difficult to adapt. People like having secrets.
Not even family members knew the true nature of the work. Friends and boyfriends were vetted, and some were not approved. BSC watched over the women carefully. They were paid in cash every Friday, and all their doctor and dentist bills were paid.
The restrictions were that they could only live in a certain area of Manhattan, and whenever they were going to do anything, they reported what they were going to do. One woman was rooming with another Canadian, and they met two nice American girls and decided to rent an apartment together. They found one, signed a lease, and thought everything was fine. About two days later, she was called into the chief security officer’s office and asked what this was all about.
She could not live with Americans, he told her. She might talk in her sleep and leak enormous secrets. Another woman was dating a young American very briefly. According to BSC, he should have been in the forces, and he also owned a car, which was unheard of in Manhattan, where private cars were very few and gas restrictions were on.
She was told to find out exactly what he did. The night they went to Long Island to a country club for a dinner dance, on Monday morning she was told it would probably be a good idea to stop going out with him. That was fine. She just did not go out with him anymore.
After the war, Stephenson was dubbed Intrepid, a fitting name for an elusive and fearless man. The first time one of the women saw him, she asked who that was, and the answer came loud and clear: that was God. He was the most secret man she had ever met. One of the women who taught them told her that she had been riding the elevator every day with him, that he was the man you do not see.
She tried it once and found it actually worked: you stand perfectly still, do not look anybody in the eye, and you vanish. He was like that, a very unassuming, rather shy gentleman, small in stature. You would be in an elevator and never know he was there. In one letter, Grace Gardner called him Bossy, not as a description, just saying Bossy will be back next week, that sort of thing.
Among themselves, they called him WSS, his initials, but never mentioned it to anybody else anywhere. One woman remembered him appearing at the elevator door and saying, good evening, Miss Dunleavy. She was astounded that he would know her name, and it left her speechless. They stood there silently for the ride down from the thirty-sixth floor.
Bill Stevenson was supposed to have been born January 11, 1896. He was actually born in Winnipeg on January 23, 1897, as William Samuel Clouston Stanger. When he was about three years old, his father passed away. His mother was too poor to take care of all the children, so she gave Bill to her friend Kristen Stevenson, who lived right beside them.
He left school in grade six. Eventually, he joined the Canadian forces in World War I. He was gassed in France. He learned to fly and became a successful RAF pilot, but eventually he was shot down and captured by the Germans.
Young Captain Stevenson escaped the prisoner of war camp and returned to Winnipeg, where he set up the first of many business ventures, a company called Franco-British Supply. It went bankrupt in two years. He moved to Britain, where by 1923 he was hailed as a leader of industry. It is unclear how he became so wealthy so fast, but he did, with interests in wireless communications, airplanes, Shepperton Film Studios, and Pressed Steel.
Work with his companies let him travel all over the world, and he saw the buildup of Hitler on the continent and warned people in England. Some of these reports found their way to Churchill. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, he was looking for someone to send to the United States, and Stevenson was chosen. I was sent as a personal representative of Winston Churchill, an old friend, to cover the whole of the Western Hemisphere, and to do any job that he thought might be useful in the war effort in that whole area.
Accolades came at war’s end. Stevenson was knighted in 1944, and the United States awarded him the Medal of Merit, the first time that medal was given to a foreigner. J. Edgar Hoover wrote to him after the war, saying that when the full story could be told, his role would be among the foremost in bringing victory to the United Nations cause.
Ian Fleming was quoted as saying that James Bond was a highly romanticized version of the true spy, and that the real thing was Bill Stephenson. Stevenson’s head secretary, Grace Garner, is often regarded as the model for Miss Moneypenny. Ian Fleming was a frequent visitor to the New York offices, which had miniature cameras, exploding pens, and suitcase radios. This was where Fleming saw a lot of those things.
So many of these women were, in essence, the first Bond girls. Marion de Chastelaine used to go down to Washington. She had a contact down there, an intermediary, a lady spy named Cynthia, who had managed to ingratiate herself with somebody in the French Embassy. Marion was stationed in New York, Cynthia in Washington, in the flow of diplomatic life, where she met the gentleman who supplied the information.
Marion commuted back and forth to Washington, met Cynthia in odd places, sometimes in her hotel, told her what they needed, cheered her up if she was blue, then collected what she had to take back to New York, and got it back again in a hurry so it could be replaced. The climate of secrecy at BSC was tinged with mystery and sometimes fear. One woman on the night shift, alone in the code room with one other girl in the registry, heard a knock at the door. There was a pistol in the room; they did not know who owned it or anything about it, but the other girl grabbed it and stood at the door.
It turned out to be just a telegram boy delivering a message. One woman acted as a courier in her job and had to go one day to a Chinese laundry to deliver documents. She never really knew what those documents were about. Some of the men used aliases, obviously for contacts outside the office, and in one case, two people were using the same alias.
She could still see Sir Richardson muttering to herself after answering the telephone, saying, oh well, these aliases, why don’t they get themselves straightened away. It was wonderful, they said. One woman had hardly been out of Toronto, maybe over to Centre Island a few times. She had not traveled, so it was all very exciting.
Life was wonderful in New York. There was a war on, but you honestly would not know. The musicals were fantastic, the big band era was on. They saw Frank Sinatra as he started out as a very young man.
They went to museums, the Cloisters, the fish market, the stores. They went to the theater and never forgot Oklahoma. They got dressed up and wandered through Tiffany’s, Cartier’s, and Bonwit Teller as if they were going to buy, and never bought a thing. They went down to Klein’s, where second-hand clothing was piled like a warehouse, and women pulled clothes on and off and grabbed them from each other.
You could get a labeled dress for next to nothing, but it was a real circus. They were on their own a lot. One woman worked the night shift alone, and the solitary work could be unnerving. She would go down into the underground part of Rockefeller Center after midnight, and it was an eerie feeling to walk along hearing her own footsteps echoing and wondering if there were other footsteps.
Beyond New York beckoned an even wider world. BSC had operations in many parts of the hemisphere, and some women opted for work in offices in the Caribbean and Latin America. There was a rumor that they were going to open an office in Guatemala City, and one woman volunteered because she wanted to see another part of the world. Guatemala sounded interesting, even though she had to go and look it up on the map.
Others left BSC altogether, choosing the theater of war in Europe. One woman saw an ad in the New York Times for British subjects living in the States: the British government would pay their way to England to join up. She joined the Red Cross and went overseas, driving an ambulance in London, then was sent down to Italy as a welfare officer with her own truck and supplies. At one point, she was the only female personnel with three thousand men.
That was delightful. One woman did something she said she was never going to do in wartime: she got married. It was an interesting time, because they moved all over the States to various airfields while her husband learned to fly the B-29. Then they went off from Kansas to the Pacific, and their role was to bomb Japan.
On the second mission he went on, he disappeared. She came home to Toronto, back to her parents, and on she went. Another went home on her annual holiday, knowing her mother was ill. Her brother had taken her to Winnipeg to consult certain doctors, and while they were there, they diagnosed cancer, incurable.
They got her back to Saskatoon and had to cope. She died towards the end of February, and the woman went back to New York on D-Day, in June 1944. Germany’s surrender was greeted in Britain and Canada with unrestrained joy. At BSC, celebrations were tempered by the ongoing war in the Pacific.
The time for celebration came four months later, when Japan surrendered at last. The war was over. Parades went up and down Fifth Avenue, tremendous, going on all day and all night. When the troops started coming home from Europe, some of the Canadian girls would go down to the boats, always early in the morning.
They had to get up at about five to get there and greet the Canadian soldiers when they got off. It was really quite a joyful occasion to see the boys come back. One woman felt she was too far away from the world. Trinidad was a lovely place, with a perfect climate, swimming and dancing all night.
It was too good to be true almost, but she began to miss being in North America, so she asked Stephenson if she could come home, as she called it. He said yes. In the last couple of months, BSC was still in telegraphic communication with the Far East, with a lot of telegrams coming through. Then a call came suddenly.
Stephenson said, I want you to go to Ottawa tonight. She booked into the Chateau Hotel, and at night somebody came and knocked on her door and said, we are ready. It was very secretive, the whole thing. There was a big room with ten wrapped parcels, great big ones.
When she had all her equipment ready, she unwrapped these parcels one by one, and heavy they were, needing two people at least. Each parcel was wound round and round with black and brown sticky paper. There was a guy outside waiting to read these documents, and he was becoming very impatient with the delay, sending her messages asking why she could not speed it up. She could see who they were for: Dr.
Norman May. She did not know what was in them, just all sorts of scribbles. Later she heard Norman May had gone to prison. Some of the girls stayed in New York.
One of them worked for a big advertising agency and had a wonderful career. But Patsy Sullivan wanted to get back to Canada. She left intelligence work behind her in the fall of 1945, moved to Victoria, British Columbia, and found work at a small but growing college that would one day be the University of Victoria. She had a telephone call asking her to go up and be interviewed.
She did, and she was hired, for two years only. She stayed for twenty-seven. I still don’t talk about it unless somebody asks me about it, she said. I just said I worked for the British government.
These women stayed quiet for fifty years. They did not even tell their husbands quite often what type of work they were doing. In the intelligence trade, there is no higher tribute than to say they kept their secrets. Going down to New York and working with BSC changed her life, one of them said.
She grew up, became more aware of what was going on in the world. She really admired Sir William Stephenson and all the people she met who were involved. Joining a group of that type was quite an experience, gradually learning how the operation worked and who the people were. So many of them she never had any idea what they did.
These were executive women of great ability in their own right. They did not claim the fame, but they did some very valuable work. In the more than half century that followed World War II, the story of BSC was obscured by inaccurate histories and the Official Secrets Act. Fiercely loyal to Sir William, the women of BSC remained silent.
It was only after his death in 1989 that some women finally spoke publicly, shedding new light on the organization. Their contribution remains unrecognized in most histories of the war. It is as if they never existed. But they did exist, and dozens still do.
These Canadian women of British Security Coordination.
