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Stephenson became the senior operative of UK intelligence for the entire western hemisphere during the War. He was known by his codename of Intrepid. Some consider him to be Ian Fleming's real-life inspiration for James Bond.

The BSC's office, headquartered in room 3603 in the Rockefeller Center, Manhattan, became an umbrella organization that by the end of the war represented the British intelligence agencies MI5, MI6 (at the time more generally known as SIS or Secret Intelligence Service), SOE (Special Operations Executive) and PWE (Political Warfare Executive) throughout North America, South America and the Caribbean. The BSC registered with the US State Department as a foreign entity and was officially known as the British Passport Control Office.

However, none of the Americans, including J. Edgar Hoover, knew BSC's real agenda nor what would be the scale of its operations. What eventually developed was a huge secret agency of nationwide news manipulation and black propaganda that numbered upto 3,000 agents. Pro-British and anti-German stories were planted in American newspapers and broadcast on American radio stations, alongside a campaign of harassment against those organisations seen as pro-Nazi or isolationist (such as the anti-British 'America First Committee').

One of Stephenson's most amazing achievements during the war was the setting up of Camp X in Whitby, Ontario, the first training school for clandestine wartime operations in North America. Around 2,000 British, Canadian and American covert operators were trained here between 1941 and 1945, including agents from the ISO, OSS, FBI, RCMP, US Navy and US Military Intelligence, and among them five future directors of the CIA.

Graduates of Camp X included Ian Fleming, later the author of the James Bond books. It's been claimed that Goldfinger's fictional raid on Fort Knox was inspired by a Stephenson plan (never carried out) to steal 2.9 trillion dollars in Vichy French gold reserves from the French Caribbean colony of Martinique.

BSC also purchased a ten-kilowatt transmitter from Philadelphia radio station WCAU and installed the transmitter at Camp X. By mid-1944, Hydra - as it became known - was transmitting and receiving nearly 40,000 message groups daily, much of the secret Allied intelligence traffic across the Atlantic.

France fell to the Nazis in June 1940, after an ugly blitzkreig invasion. Britain's survival WAS threatened As a result.

The assumption in the US, by such luminaries as Joseph Kennedy (JFK's father), then US Ambassador to the Court of St James - was that British capitulation was 'only a matter of time, so why back a loser?'. This position - why join the side of a doomed loser - became the US position according to most senior politicians in the US Congress. Democratic President Roosevelt believed differently, but could do nothing without Congress's support. Much as he wanted to help Britain, at least according to post-war reports, he couldn't alienate Congress with a presidential election looming in November 1940 that he didn't want to lose. Ever the supreme pragmatist, FDR realised that to do so would have been electoral suicide. For this ambitious President - who served from 1933 to 1945 (and is the only President to serve more than two terms) - wanting a third term was paramount, he had to tread very carefully.

When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 - shortly before the fall of France - he realised he had to enlist the US as Britain's ally. Without the US and with Russia neutral at the time, the future looked bleak. Roosevelt, as president, was inclined to help but the popular view in America was overwhelmingly an isolationist one. Polls in the US at the time showed 80% of Americans were against joining the war in Europe.

As Churchill and senior British government figures saw it, somehow the majority of the US population had to be secretly persuaded it was in their interests to join the war in Europe, that not to was in some way un-American. And so BSC [British Security Coordination] was born.

Having the discreet agreement of Roosevelt and the unhappy agreement of J Edgar Hoover of the FBI, the BSC was set up by Canadian entrepreneur, William Stephenson, working on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Services (SIS). As early as 1936, Stephenson - by then a successful businessman living in the UK with contacts around Europe - was voluntarily providing secret information to the British, passing on detailed information to British opposition MP Churchill about Hitler's government. Churchill used Stephenson's information in Parliament to warn against the appeasement polices of of Neville Chamberlain.

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