The story of the British Intelligence Center in New York during World War II
With headquarters in New York at 630 Fifth Avenue, Room 3603, the organization known as the British Security Coordination, or B.S.C., was the keystone of the successful
Anglo-American partnership in the field of secret intelligence, counterespionage and “special operations.”
The man chosen by Sir Winston Churchill to set up and direct this crucial effort was Sir William Stephenson. A fighter pilot in the First World War, he had become a millionaire before he was thirty through his invention of the device for transmitting photographs by wireless. The late General Bill Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, said of him; “Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.”
Sir William Stephenson has now put all his papers and much other relevant material at the disposal of H. Montgomery Hyde, a member of his wartime organization who knows him intimately. The result is a unique picture of the British Secret Service in action and of the remarkable exploits of its brilliant but personally unobtrusive chief in the United States.
At the end of the war, J. Edgar Hoover, with whom Stephenson worked closely, wrote to him: “When the full story can be told, I am quite certain that your contribution will be among the foremost in having brought victory finally to the united nations’ cause” Now it can be told; Room 3603 is the full story.
Ian Fleming’s delightful Foreword adds this information: “Bill Stephenson worked himself almost to death during the war, carrying out undercover operations and often dangerous assignments (they culminated with the Gouzenko case that put Fuchs in the bag) that can only be hinted at in the fascinating book that Mr. Montgomery Hyde has, for some reason, been allowed to write—the first book, so far as I know, about the British secret agent whose publication has received official blessing.”
