Intrepid's Man in Canada
A newly declassified oral history of Canada's role in the secret war.
Thomas Geoffrey Drew-Brook is not a well-known figure in the history of Canada’s Second World War. But that can and should change. Drew-Brook was the Canadian link between William Stephenson’s British Security Co-Ordination and the Government of Canada. It is increasingly clear from the archival record, recently released in Canada, and the files open for much longer at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, that Drew-Brook was enormously active during the secret war.
Drew-Brook was the man who arranged the construction of what we now call “Camp X”. (It was referred to as the “Country House,” by Drew-Brook’s interlocutors, or STS 103, with STS standing for “Special Training School”).
This was the location in Oshawa where the Special Operations Executive’s instructors trained the agents and officers who, as Drew-Brook put it, “dropped into Europe or landed by submarine or French fishing smack or something like that,” on their way to set Europe ablaze.
In 1977, Drew-Brook gave an oral history interview to a member of the Department of External Affairs, A. F. Hart. The transcript is notable because it offers Drew-Brook’s views on Canada’s broader relationship with British Security Co-Ordination, as well as some specific wartime efforts: See below for Drew-Brook’s self-deprecating story about a major error of forgery, and then a more successful Canadian effort to use a forgery to create a rift between Italy and Brazil.
The interview, which took place in 1977, was finally declassified on Christmas Eve, 2024, in response to my Access to Information request. Over 46 years since the interview took place and more than 75 years after the events in question, Canadians can now read more about Canada’s wartime role.
I’ve selected some excerpts from the interview and included them below. All of the words indented by the blue line are from the transcript.
The full interview is now online both as a PDF and in plain text, here.
On William Stephenson (i.e. the man called Intrepid):
He came over here as the direct representative of Winston Churchill with the main objective of establishing a secret contact with President Roosevelt as Churchill realized that France would collapse and that the United States would be the only salvation of the whole West. As this contact progressed, it became more and more obvious that in order to do a real good job, particularly after the fall of France, that he must establish some sort of contact with Canada. Canada was in the war, the United States was not. And American public opinion being as it was at that time, it was essential to have a base where there was some freedom of action.
On Stephenson, Drew-Brook, and Vining:
Bill Stephenson had two very old friends. I met him in the first place during the first war in the same squadron and before the [second] war I had introduced Charles Vining to him and he and Vining became great friends, so that the two of us were his only real contacts in Canada.
Both of us saw quite a bit of him and during 1940 he never told us what he was up to. Both of us made the same guess and both of us proved right. So that by the end of 1940 it was pretty obvious that he must have some sort of contact with Canada. And at that time, Charlie Vining was seeing much more of him than I was. He was going to and fro from New York all the time. Bill told him that he was going to need a contact with Canada and of course the Canadian Government. So Bill asked Charlie if he could help him advise him on it.
So Charlie Vining undertook to establish some sort of contact with the Canadian Government.
Charlie knew Mackenzie King very well and was sort of frightened of him and realized that if he went to the Prime Minister chances are he would be turned down flat, and if he wasn't turned down Mackenzie King would want to dominate the scene and have it under his control completely. So he discussed these aspects with [Minister of National Defence James] Ralston. Ralston agreed that it would be a mistake to discuss this with the Prime Minister at all because there would be too much interference and he would want to [know] every detail of everything that was done and that was undesirable in every aspect.
So Charlie said to Ralston what do you suggest? And he said, I don't think we will have any difficulty. I'll advise the heads of the various departments who may be approached from time to time and I ask you.... I suggest that you favourably consider supporting and doing whatever they ask you to do. I don't want to be informed, but I will give my undertaking that if anything blows, or if there is trouble anyway it would be entirely my responsibility.
That was the basis of the contact with the Canadian Government, because from then on it was easy.
On Drew-Brook’s cover in Toronto:
Yes, I was in Toronto. I was a stockbroker. I had an office, people would be coming and going all the time If more people than usual came, it would not attract attention. In fact it was an ideal cover for a secret operation. So I became Bill Stephenson's representative in Canada full time.
…
Toronto, yes, in the old Bank of Commerce Building. I don't think that anyone ever suspected that anything funny going on. … You know, it was all out in the open. You don't get curious about things you see.
On Canadian co-operation, and some hesitations:
The cooperation was immediate and fantastic. I couldn't have been more helped in any way. There was only one point on which there was any hesitation and that was the... when it was decided quite early to establish the camp and that, when I told Norman about it, he was pretty hesitant. He felt this was pretty venturesome after all it was a fairly large scale operation - 200 acres of land minimum, a lot of extraordinary people, some being brought into the country for training and so on and he really hesitated and he said you better go over to see the Commissioner of the Mounted Police he may be a bit upset about this. And I did. And to my discomfort, he was really quite upset. … He saw problems, not only the general security problems but he hated the idea of a lot of people being trained in not very polite methods of doing one thing or another and kept wondering how they were going to handle all these people after the war, they'd know too much.
Why was “Camp X” in Oshawa?
Hart: I suppose the choice of Canada was because of our remote-ness, during the wartime period?
Drew-Brook: We were in the war and since we were in the war we could do far more than you could hope to do in any other part of this hemisphere. It had to be Canada.
Hart: Any particular reason for choosing Oshawa locality?
Drew-Brook: Oh dear knows. [The] first thought that Bill Stephenson had was that it should be on the sea, on the sea coast. And I hot footed it out to Halifax and began searching for suitable property which was a tough thing to do and the Airforce helped me, they gave me a plane so that I could look at a lot of ground from the air. And then, Bill changed his mind and decided that it must somewhere much handier than that. Halifax was hard to get to, to and fro and so on. So, I enlisted the help of a man whom I hoped I could use as a nominee if I bought any land and it was he that found the site on which the camp was built, all of which was passed on to Bill and I was given the go ahead. I bought the land through a nominee and then proceeded to build the buildings. I used a Toronto architect, Roper Gouinlock and plans were drawn and sent down to Bill for approval and away we went.
Forgery Error:
I'll never forget my first attempt at creating a forgery. The German Bund sprang up in the United States all over the place and they were very active and a great many people with not a trace of German heritage began joining these Bunds so someone in New York conceived the notion that we should have letterhead, of at least one of these Bunds.
When he was in New Yorks again, Drew-Brook was given a sheet of the original letterhead of one of the Bunds, and brought it back to Canada.
I had it reproduced very successfully, the Mounted Police helped me an awful lot, telling me where to go and who to see. They knew everybody. So I produced this letterhead and I crossed the border - this was before the United States came into the war - it wasn't always easy, because it is not very comfortable to go over the border with 500 sheets of blank German headed letter paper. But the Mounted Police had helped me a lot on that. Many of my trips I crossed the border in one of their cars and they would just greet each other and nobody asked any questions - it was wonderful.
But I took this first forgery down and they all looked at it [presumably at BSC headquarters in Rockefeller Center]. There were about five of them there and thought it was damned good - it was a real duplicate of the thing of the original. And then one of them picked up one sheet and walked over to the window, looked at it in the light and even from where I was sitting I could see Canada Bond.
The “Canada Bond” he saw was the watermark of the made-in-Canada paper, a dead giveaway that would have been both embarrassing and compromising of any effort to use the letters for subterfuge.
But forgeries, it turns out, were an important part of Canadian operations…
Embarrassing Letters
But one of these chaps in Brazil managed to get hold a letterhead of the Italian airline which was still flying to Rio. Which was a real menace because Germans if they wanted to get to South America, all they had to do was to go down to Rome and get a plane to Rio.
In addition to the letterhead, Drew-Brook explains, the agent in Rio obtained a letter by the general manager of the airline, and the letter provided an example of the manager’s typewriter strokes and his signature.
So I had to produce a sheet of paper that was identical, chemically, every other way. I had to produce a letterhead that was absolutely an exact duplication and the signature. So I 'phoned Charlie Vining [who] was President of the newsprint association and he arranged for me to take this paper down to Howard Smith Paper Mills in Cornwall and I left it with them and their cooperation was wonderful. I went at 11:00 o'clock at night and it took them about two weeks to get an absolutely exact chemically and every other way thing. This was straw paper.
Oh, I had to produce a typewriter that would absolutely exactly reproduce the typewriter with which this particular original letter was written. Apparently all typewriters have little kinks and gadgets that can show up under examination. And here again I went to the Mounted Police - where can I get a couple of old war veterans that really do this job for me? Oh, they said, that's easy - we use so-and-so, and so-and-so in our work all the time, examining typewriters - they're past-masters. I took it to them, they could tell what typewriter, what make of typewriter had originated the thing, if it was an Italian one. They found one and they squiggled around with the adjustments on each letter and produced every kink that the original typewriter had had.
And then the signature was a bit of a puzzle to me. and finally one of the girls in New York, and English girl who had done a lot of work in opening envelopes and things like this, probably had done a little forgery too, she produced the exact copy of the signature. And there we had it.
It was a very insulting letter about the President of Brazil. It was very sensitive though and it referred to his very fat stomach; then the problem was to get it into the hands of the Brazilians, and that was done through a fake burglary, I think and the police got this, picked up this letter among the other things and saw that it was addressed to the President of Brazil and he was furious, so furious that he refused landing rights to the El Italian airline [sic], kicked them out of the country and fined them a million dollars, or something. And that source of entry was cut off. It was a long story, but demonstrated the sort of thing that Canada was capable of doing so quite openly. You couldn't do that sort of thing anywhere else. Canada's help was beyond description.
Gouzenko
The oral history ends with a ripping yarn in which Drew-Brook describes going to investigate Igor Gouzenko’s apartment, and how he was first apprehended by an Ottawa policeman, and then later bumped into the head of the NKVD in Canada. It is a longer story, and worth a read if you are interested.
High Marks for Canada
At the end of the interview, Hart for ask for any final comments from Drew-Brook on Canadian relations with British Security Co-Ordination during the war:
Only to say that it was the most splendid cooperation that you could possibly imagine.
The Ur-source?
As Hart encouraged Drew-Brook to provide some of the examples above, he said: “We have nothing on the record, you see….”
Even though the Drew-Brook transcript was still closed, I was in the curious position of having heard (or, I should say, read) his stories before.
Not long after Drew-Brook’s interview in 1977, a historian at the Department of External Affairs wrote a draft chapter detailing Canadian intelligence contributions to the Second World War. As I wrote in “Maintaining Innocence: The Curious Case of Wartime Intelligence History,” Canada’s British and American allies pressured the Government of Canada to keep that chapter secret. But much of the story was published in an article by Peter St. John in Conflict Quarterly in 1984. (I explain the relationship of the chapter to my draft history in my chapter).
It is clear reading the External Affairs draft chapter, and St. John’s chapter, that they both rely heavily on Drew-Brook’s interview.
As readers know, we have had some other records on Canada’s wartime cooperation with BSC released recently, and we will keep looking. But the records on this subject are finite, and a single interview like this one with Drew-Brook holds within it a large percentage of the stories of Canada’s connections to BSC.
More on Canada, BSC, and SOE:
For a previous post related to Canada and British Security Co-Ordination, see:
Special Operations Executive: “The Recruitment of Yugoslav Irregulars in Canada, 1942-43.”
I walked by 200 Bay Street this morning on my way to work. This is the site of the “Royal Bank Plaza,” and the current structure was built in 1976.
And also:
What is up with that weird CSIS video?
In August 2022, I took a group of UofT students to Oxford University for a Study Abroad course. We spent four weeks studying intelligence history in the United Kingdom. We visited a number of intelligence-and-military history-related sites: The Cabinet War Rooms, the Imperial War Museums in both London and Duxford,
For many more documents, check out the Canada Declassified site for Sam Eberlee’s excellent briefing books on Canada’s connections to both BSC and the Special Operations Executive:
Excellent acquisitiion, Tim - hugely compelling stuff, and immensely interesting to read. Thank you for your tenacity.
Dean