Mark Summer Chess Camp Event Made Easy

Mark summer chess camp event

[Music] it was an intelligence organization but it did lots of things that I probably didn't know [Music] I mean they weren't going out in the dead of night from our office of doing their Diaries [Music] we were just very much aware that it was a secret as you can get as far as the organization was concerned and don't ask any questions [Music] [Applause] [Music] I've never regretted going to New York for that Berkman BSC it was been on the fringe of big events [Music] 19:40 the opening months of World War two have been disastrous for the Allied cause defeats in Europe have left England standing alone against Nazi aggression the United States remains neutral without American support it looks as if Britain may fall in May 1940 Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Britain he is determined to secure American aid and to eventually bring the u.s. into the war Churchill really was living on the edge of the blade Churchill had toe British leaders the United States is like a huge steam engine once you get it going you can't stop it and it'll win the war for us but the problem is to get it going Churchill turns to William Stephenson a Canadian industrialist living in Britain he appoints him head of a top-secret arm of British intelligence located in New York City eventually called British security coordination it will play a key role in bolstering American support for the war and will aid in the establishment of an American intelligence service now the CIA over the course of the war BSC will grow into a massive operation responsible for intelligence gathering across the entire Western Hemisphere Stephenson arrived in the summer of 1940 in New York the first people he approached were his friends Tommy drew Brook a friend from the First World War was a Toronto stockbroker he helped recruit people AJ Taylor who was from the West Coast friends telling friends and that's how it grew so British security coordination even though it's called British was run by Stephenson and and staffed by Canadians the majority of the Canadians hired by BSC are young women as many as 800 of them come to New York from towns and cities across Canada all are sworn to secrecy upon arrival now more than 50 years later the secrets of eight of these women are finally being revealed well I was born in Saskatoon Saskatchewan in 1913 babban went to the University of Saskatchewan and graduated with a BA degree in 1934 and then I went to a business and secretarial College I didn't want to be a teacher and there just wasn't much proof women and lost gays with the depression easing in the East many prairie people migrate to Toronto Patsy Sullivan joins them finding a job with Oxford University Press when war comes in 1939 she is like many young Canadians anxious to do what she can for king and country most of us thought they were going to get into something if we could Britain with our empire around God carried the weight of the war alone for a whole long year through the darkest part of the valley she is growing stronger every day all our chaps joined up immediately everybody all the men have simply vanished so it was a female world thousands of Canadian women heed the call factories offer war work building planes munitions ships for others there is nursing or the Canadian Women's Army Corps [Music] hold on what kind of work can we do [Music] confidential work exists elsewhere - in 1940 BSC begins placing ads in several Canadian newspapers looking for reliable young women to come to New York City to work for the British government no I thought that's for me yes I thought that would be just terrific so I sure did my friend Enid with him I shared an apartment so we applied and in due course we were both interviewed both separately and also together by Tommy Drew book he got in touch with New York and phoned me at the office and asked me if I would come have tea with his wife himself and so I went on the desk Edwin Tucker my best behavior and he told me then that they would have a position for me in : Green Road Cypress well my family had a had a friend mr. AJ Taylor who was involved with mr. Stevenson for many years and other projects and his daughter was living in New York and they thought that maybe I might go down eventually but they sent me to Washington first and I lived in Washington for three months I think probably I was under observation before I was sent up to New York [Music] I was recruited in Winnipeg following an enforcement in the Winnipeg Free Press I really didn't tell my parents when I was going down there because I didn't think maybe they would like the idea that I was going down to a hotel to be interviewed and were interviewed by captain herb Rowland it was a very low-key interview he said I would be contacted by a mrs. Shakespeare of the RCMP and she called and I met with her I was fingerprinted and signed the Official Secrets ervice Act it started because I wanted job in Toronto the interview with mr. Rowland was held in a broker's office and I later learned that the brokerage was somebody that mister that Sir William Stephenson knew and could trust and but mr. Rowland was given a room at the back and was just a little wee cubby hole I began to wonder what I was getting into I was recruited through a friend I had a friend called Margaret Moore who was working in BSC at the time this was in 1941 and she said would you like to come to New York to work and I thought that silent like a very good idea so I said yes I'd love to [Music] the RCMP vented everybody that was going to go to New York and the one thing that they worried about was that my mother was a member of the Oxford group which was a pacifist organization and so that was the only black mark on my name but I could prove that I wasn't a member so I remember my father saying why don't you just go to Toronto if you want to try your wings and I said why would I go to Toronto I'm perfectly happy in Winnipeg but I'll go to New York if I get the opportunity mother said immediately we'll go for it anybody thought that should be a challenge it started out you know this whole business as British passport control office a scruffy little office in off of Wall Street and Stevenson used his own money rented out two floors in the very prestigious Rockefeller Center paid for most of that out of zone pocket and created a working environment that looked like it was something very successful Stevenson was the ultimate insider he was a successful businessman who had contacts all over the world he had a lot of American friends before Pearl Harbor in a way the most important thing that could be done was to win the United States over to intervention and and BSC to some degree was a propaganda organization using contacts in intelligence to reach people of influence and to get them convinced that the war could be won with Britain BSC's first task is to get critical resources to a beleaguered Britain it covertly lobbies influential Americans to gain their support of deals that bring much needed war material to the Allied cause America steps closer to war BSc probably played I would say the decisive role in bringing the United States and 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 two the new recruits BSC is a secret of which they will be told little we had an address to where we should go and when we got to the numbered room there was a guard on the door he looked at our identity in our cards and so on you couldn't get past this guard nor could you see from any other place that this door existed in the front hall at the other side of the elevator was a British passport office so everybody coming off an elevator would turn to their passport office and nobody would see this other door hidden under back our office was at 6:30 Fifth Avenue Rockefeller Center on the mezzanine floor and for anyone who's been in 6:30 Fifth Avenue as you walk in there are massive escalators to the mezzanine we were told to go to this unmarked door which we did and you opened that door it looked like a stationary warehouse and sitting there was a man who was a plain closed rcmp and we were trained and they the so-called skill of opening mail or other things secretly they had to take a separate room for us somewhere else to do the training and believe it or not one of the first things we learned was how to open a seal the sealed envelope like a legal document the training went on for quite some time and our work was secret even to the other people working there I didn't realize what it was all about until I got down there and then I had to sign the Official Secrets Act and I gradually when I started working there became aware of what it was all about so I went straight into the hokum cipher it was a very small room with about six or seven people jammed in it and they were there working with the pen pencil and paper or they were pecking away at little manual typewriters well mostly I was doing coding and ciphering for mr. Stevenson's confidential correspondence I was told at some point by Miss Richardson who was the head of the code room that I was being transferred to the office of mr. Stevenson and so I'm trotted off for the women of BSC it is a blur of paperwork confidential correspondence coded messages filing they gave us jobs to file papers which were given to us and they were usually marked how they should be filed and we also learned coding too so we were filing on coding clerks I worked on the communications desk just outside the might say inner sanctum of Stevenson's office and the messages came to me through a pneumatic tube and the top-secret ones went right through to mr. Stevenson's office and otherwise they would remain in my desk and and I would send the decoded ones to the various men who dealt with that particular subject BSC maintains files on axis shipping and Nazi companies operating in the Western Hemisphere masses of information are gathered the methodical detailed work from which intelligence is gleaned the material that we saw was very interesting it was all sent in by reports on people that we were watching and interested in when the u.s. enters the war in late 1941 BSC takes on a new role it would appear that BSC had lost a lot of importance after Pearl Harbor the Americans were being trained Americans were an ally no need for propaganda in the papers but at the same time BSC's whole focus changed into the area of communications Stevenson second-in-command Benjamin DeForest Bailey set up a communication system for Stevenson connecting Washington New York Ottawa Camp X which is near Toronto and Britain he connected up such an efficient system that all the Allies decided they should use it as well well it was a very large office the largest part was what we call the TK room and they had a huge staff going around the clock [Music] BSc turns the second floor into a massive communication center one section operates 105 teleprinters three shifts a day requiring over 400 people to operate them [Music] BSC's complex communication system becomes the quickest and most secure ever devised it will carry some of the wars top secrets including the decryptions of the german cipher machine enigma they were kind of like vacuum cleaners of the skies and thousands millions of messages were pulled in every month intercepted enemy messages go to BSC where they are quickly collated encrypted and sent to the Allied country working to break that code you must remember that the ability to read the enemy traffic has an enormous impact on war and saved lives a lot of key battles were won because we had broken their codes we knew where they were going to move their men and their ships and we were able to put slimmer resources in the right places and to win battles [Music] the women are taught to send coded messages using one time coding pads and teletype machines it's just told one morning to get myself down to lower Manhattan and go to a certain telephone company and to learn about killers so my rent and I would be doing nothing for probably three quarters of the way through their lesson when it was an urgent phone call from BSC office mr. shusun said they'd get up here as fast as you can the machine is installed and it's working and we don't know what to do with it so I went back fortunately the lesson was nearly over the messages came through a central section and when they were headed confidential to WSS or for your eyes only or something like that they were sent in to the inner office where where we were and we decoded them there there were quite a few confidential messages there were some from Churchill and other very big names during the war you were asking about the content of the messages well if I can't remember really now I mean if I did I certainly wouldn't tell you the communist code wasn't what you see referred to most of the time is the one-time pad you get your number from of the word or phrase and you would put it below a number on the one-time pad and they had groups of five they were typed and put on the teletype [Music] Dorothee Evanson is trained on a special coding machine known only as the type X we operated 24 hours a day seven days a week it just became routine for us whenever the messages became scrambled we would get a password and then change the drums so that the messages would count we didn't spend much time reading messages we simply got them poured the mode and they went to the next division and then up to Sir William when I first went there I was an assistant to the secretary of captain made me one of major maintenance jobs was to look after the Canadian ham radio operators that had been hired to go to South America to monitor the radio messages sent by Nazi spies in South America say from Saudi ah go to Berlin or from Buenos Aires to Hamburg my biggest job was to help identify the different circuits that they picked up and we never saw the contents everything we saw was in code everything they sent up to us was in code and then we just passed it down to England I was sent in to to Trinidad and then Trinidad there were four other mail was vetted outside one that looked suspicious was sent to us shaft reading is the method of separating two pieces of paper like the eggs of an envelope of your life and you have to see it lift it off and then you have to see that back again so that doesn't look as it's been opened and shaved off little bits of the paper on both sides so you would seal it back very carefully I think glue came out I forgot to flip it off quickly with pretty Kleenex [Music] upon joining BSC all women are required to sign the British Official Secrets Act and how do we conduct ourselves to people asked us what we were doing and they said you don't say anything about this place you don't mention it to anybody at all if you're actually pursued by someone on you needs to know where you're working you say you're on government work there were different departments but we never knew what they did which was the secret of BSC we were in this little box in the jobs we were doing and we weren't really able to know what other people were doing because they never told us that we never asked that was the way we operated and I read about the mezzanine floor and I was not aware that it even existed in there three and a half years I was there you didn't discuss anything with even your co employees because they would be doing different kind of work than you would and nobody knew until I think we started this interview a couple of months ago I didn't know what some of the other girls did and we were told even in our hotel room we should tap the walls first to before we were talking and see if there was any information that there might be about but I mean it was very serious we just did not talk about [Music] I wasn't too difficult to adapt to that I think people like having secrets not even family members know the true nature of their work friends and boyfriends are vetted some are not approved they were very good at watching over us you know we had a lot of perks we had all our we were paid in cash every Friday all our doctors and medical dentists bills were all paid the restrictions on us were that we could only live in a certain area of Manhattan [Music] whenever we were going to do anything we reported what we were going to do I was rooming with another Canadian and we met these two nice American girls and we decided that we would like to rent an apartment so we found one and signed the lease and thought everything was hunky-dory well about two days later I was called into the chief security officers office to ask what this was all about he told me I could not live with Americans I might talk in my sleep and let the enormous secrets out I was dating a young man very briefly who was an American of and should have been in the forces according to them and also owned a car which was unheard of in Manhattan because private cars were very few and gas restrictions were on so I was told to find out exactly what he did then the night that we went to Long Island to a country club to a dinner dance on Monday morning I was told it it would be probably a good idea to stop going out with him which is fine that that happened I just didn't go out with him anymore [Music] after the war Stevenson is dubbed intrepid a fitting name for an elusive and fearless man the first time I saw him I asked who was that and the answer came loud and clear that was God he was the most secret man I've ever met and he doe hide was one of the people who taught us told me one day I asked now what's he look like and I've never seen him and she said you you've been riding an elevator every day or being here with him in there he's a man you don't see and I tried this once and it actually does work you stand perfectly still and don't look at anybody in the eye you will vanish no secret he was like that he was a very unassuming rather shy gentleman small in stature and you would be in an elevator and never know he was there and he was very gentlemanly in that letter from great grace Garner did she mention his cousin bossy I mean not describing him just saying bossy we'll be back next week that sort of thing and I would say wssr his intense you know if you're just talking amongst yourself J ever mentioned anybody else anywhere Stevenson appeared at the door of the elevator and got in and he said good evening miss Dunlevy and I was astounded but he would know me and you don't know my name and I was just left me speechless he just sort of stood there and we nobody else was on the elevator we went down the 36th floor is very silently Bill Stevenson was supposed to been born January 11th 1896 he was actually born in Winnipeg January 23rd 1897 he was actually born in William Samuel closed and stained jur when he was about three years old his father passed on his mother was too poor to take care of all the kids so she ended up giving bill to her friend Kristen Stevenson who lived right beside them he left school and grade six eventually decided to join the Canadian Forces in World War one he was gassed in France he learned to fly he became a successful RAF pilot but eventually he was shot down he was captured by the Germans young captain Stephenson escapes the prisoner of war camp and returns to Winnipeg where he sets up the first of many business ventures a company called franco-british supply the business goes bankrupt in two years he moves to Britain where by 1923 he is hailed as a leader of industry it is unclear how he becomes so wealthy so fast but he does with interests in wireless communications airplanes Shepherd and film studios and press still work with his companies let him travel all over the world so he ended up seeing the build-up of Hitler on the continent and he warned people in England some of these reports found their way to church him when Churchill became prime minister in May of 1940 he was looking for someone to send to United States and Stephenson was chosen I was sent as a personal representative of Winston Churchill an old friend and 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 for Stevenson come at war's end he is knighted in 1944 the United States Awards him the medal of merit the first time this medal is given to a foreigner J Edgar Hoover wrote to Stevenson after the war and he said when the full story can be told I'm sure your role will be among the foremost and having brought victory to the United Nations calls [Music] Ian Fleming is quoted as saying James Bond is a highly romanticized version of the true spy the real thing is Bill Stevenson Stevenson's head secretary Grace garner is often regarded as being the model for Miss Moneypenny Ian Fleming was a frequent visitor to the New York offices they had the miniature cameras they had exploding pants they had suitcase radios this is where he and Fleming saw a lot of those things so many of these women are essentially the first Bond girls Marion disaster Lane used to go down to Washington if she had a contact down there who was an intermediary I think to pick up material which lady was by named Cynthia she had managed to ingratiate herself with somebody in the French Embassy well I was stationed in New York she was in Washington in the flow of diplomatic life where she met the gentleman who supplied this information so I commuted back and forth to Washington met her in odd places sometimes in her hotel told her what we needed cheered her up if she was blue and then collected what she had for me to get back to New York and then got it back again in the hurry so it could be replaced the climate of secrecy at me SC is tinged with mystery and sometimes I was on a night shift I guess I was the only one on in the cold room and there was somebody in the registry I think reading at night so we were the only two people there but there was a knock on her door and didn't know how to do the Bruce is just one we didn't know who owned it or anything about it but anyway this other girls took it upon herself to grab the thing and stand there and it turned out to be just a telegram boy delivery if I had I acted as somewhat of a courier in my job and I had to go one day to a Chinese Laundry delivering some documents and I never really knew what these documents were about as everything but secrets in the office some of the men I had used an alias obviously for contacts outside the office and some of the there was one case I think / - people are using the same alias and I can still see miss Richardson muttering to herself after she'd answered the telephone and well these aliases why don't they get themselves straightened away [Music] it was wonderful it really was me I'd hardly been out of Toronto maybe over the center island a few times I hadn't traveled so it was all very exciting well life was wonderful in New York there was a war on but you really honestly wouldn't know life went on and it was wonderful and we were so thrilled to be there the musicals were fantastic the big band era was on we saw Frank Sinatra as he started out as a very young man and we went to the museum such a fantastic and the cloisters the fish market the stores [Music] [Applause] [Music] reagent goes with theater I never forget Oklahoma I just didn't want to leave that theater ever ever again just seeing New York for the first time and getting around I'm going to Radio City Music Hall museums and art galleries and all the places of interest that was exciting [Music] we would get dressed up and wandered through Tiffany's and car chase and bond would tell her as if we were going to buy never bought a thing another great thing was go down to Klein's it was like a warehouse secondhand clothing that sort of thing and it was bargain bargain time and it was absolutely wicked to go down there because to be women pulling clothes on and off and grabbing clothes from other women you could get a labelled dress for next to nothing but it was a real circus [Music] liebherr owner owned a lot particularly for a person working in the ribs office because they were in the office it's the only one person who did the same job that I did and we had to alternate each other you are on a shift you didn't have anybody else around such solitary work could at times be unnerving I would go down into the underground part of Rockefeller Center well after midnight it's a very eerie feeling to be walking along and hearing your own footsteps echoing and wondering if there are other footsteps [Music] beyond New York beckons an even wider world BSC has operations in many parts of the hemisphere some women opt for work in offices in the Caribbean and Latin America well there was a rumor going around that they were going to open up an office in Guatemala City so I thought I'll volunteer because I wanted to see another part of the world and Guatemala sounded interesting even though I had to go and look it up in a map others leave BSC altogether choosing the theatre of war in Europe I saw an ad in The New York Times for any British subjects who are living in the States the British government would pay their way to England to join join up in England so then I joined the Red Cross and went overseas driving an ambulance in London and then was sent down to Italy as a welfare officer and we had her own truck and supplies I was the only female personnel with 3,000 men at one point I was delightful I did something which I said I was never going to do in wartime and that was to get married so it was an interesting time because we moved all over the states to various airfields and while he learned to fly a b-29 and then they went off from Kansas to the Pacific and their role was to bomb Japan on the second mission that he went disappeared [Music] when I came home to Toronto back to my parents and and on I went I ran home on my annual holiday but I knew that my mother Brazil and I knew that my father had taken her to been a peg to consult a certain doctors there and why we were there they don't know it's counselor you're asking durable and we got her back to Saskatoon we had to cope and she died for it's the end of February and I went back to New York on d-day which was in June 1944 today is Victory in Europe day long live the cause of freedom god save the king Germany's surrender is greeted in Britain in Canada with unrestrained joy at BSc celebrations are tempered by the ongoing war in the Pacific the time for celebration comes four months later when Japan surrenders at last the war is over [Music] parades going up and down Fifth Avenue were tremendous that went on all day and I think all night as well when the troops started coming home from Europe some of the Canadian girls would go down to the boats and was always early in the morning we had to get up about 5 o'clock to get down there and we greeted the Canadian soldiers when they got off the boats it was really quite a joyful occasion to see the boys come back I felt I was too far away from the world it was a lovely place Trinidad what a perfect climate swimming and dancing all night and so on which was too good to be true almost but I began to miss the fact it was not in North America so I asked Stevenson if I could come home as I call it and he said yes in the last couple of months fever I suppose was just mopping up because theater is still a telegraphic communication with the Far East a lot of Telegraph's came through that way it came suddenly I called Stevenson said I want you to go to Ottawa tonight book into the shadow hotel and at night somebody came knocked on my door and said we already was very secretive the whole thing and there was a big room with ten wrapped parcels being great big ones and when I had all that equipment ready then I was unwrapping these parcels one by one and heavy they were needed to people at least and they were they were each parcel was wound round and round and round was black brown sticky paper because there's a guy outside waiting to read these documents and he was becoming very impatient with a delay and kept sending me these messages why can't you know speed it up get going I could see who they were for doctor and then May I didn't know what was in them there's all sorts of scribbles and so on and later I heard and then may had gone to prison [Music] some of the girls stayed in New York one of them worked for a big advertising agency had a wonderful career but I wanted to get back to Canada patsy sullivan leaves intelligence work behind her in the fall of 1945 she moves to victoria british columbia and finds work at a small but growing college that will one day be the University of Victoria I had telephoned all that I please go out and be interviewed so I did and I was hired but for two years only but I sleep for twenty-seven [Music] I still don't talk about it in - somebody asks me about I just said a rector British government these women stay quiet for 50 years they didn't even tell their husbands quite often what type of work they were done in the intelligence trade there is no higher tribute than to say they keep their secrets going down to New York and working with the BSC did change my life and grew up but became more aware of what was going on in the world and more interested in everything that was going on in the world it's been very interesting I really admired to him Stevenson and all the people that I met that were involved joining a group of that type is that quite an experience and gradually learning you know how the operation worked and who the people were so many of them I never had any idea what they did these were executive women of great ability on their own right they didn't claim the fame but they did some very valuable work [Music] in the more than half century that has followed since World War two the story of BSC has been obscured by inaccurate histories and the Official Secrets Act fiercely loyal to Sir William the women of BSC remained silent it is only after his death in 1989 that some women finally speak publicly shedding new light on the organization but 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 [Music] [Music]