British Security Coordination

The British Security Coordination (BSC) was an organization disguised as a British news agency, which was set up by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from May 1940 in New York . The aim of the organization was the acquisition of intelligence, the support of British interests, the protection of the convoys across the Atlantic from enemy sabotage and the dissemination of reports that should move America to the war.

Its establishment was initiated by Winston Churchill shortly after his appointment as Prime Minister in 1940, the office was led by the Canadian industrialist William Samuel Stephenson . The Rockefeller Center office was registered in America as a foreign organization and was officially run as the UK passport control. Despite the official intergovernmental cooperation, the then director of was FBI , Edgar Hoover , and the State Department about the British spy organization concerned. Although Stephenson and Hoover never met in person, they cooperated in various actions against espionage and propaganda by Germans in the USA.

BSC worked particularly with William Joseph Donovan and his newly formed COI .

Contrary to the original agreement, the British also recruited Americans for their organization. These BSC employees were given British identity papers that began with numbers 4 and 8.

The British writer William Boyd wrote in an article for The Guardian newspaper that the total number of BSC agents in the USA is officially unknown, but he estimates it to be several hundred and the number 3000 was also mentioned.

Churchill realized that Britain could only win the war with America as an ally. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Americans showed little desire to join the fight: 80 percent of the population was strongly against it; a part formed in the America First Committee . The British agents of the BSC were supposed to change that and were working very effectively. One of her greatest successes was to bring a forged German map into circulation, on which plans for a conquered South America were shown. President Franklin D. Roosevelt even mentioned the forged card in his October 1941 address to the nation.

Well-known employees of the BSC were

• Cedric Belfrage
• Noël Coward
• Roald Dahl
• Ian Fleming
• Gilbert Highet
• Dorothy Maclean
• Eric Maschwitz
• Kim Philby
• Ivan T. Sanderson

literature

• William Stephenson (Ed.): British Security Coordination. The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-1945. Introduction by Nigel West . 1st Fromm International edition. Fromm International, New York NY 1999, ISBN 0-88064-236-X .
• Thomas E. Mahl: Desperate Deception. British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44. Brassey's Inc., Dulles VA 1999, ISBN 1-57488-223-6 .
• Lynn-Philip Hodgson: Inside-Camp X. Camp X, the top secret World War II 'Secret Agent Training School' strategically placed in Canada on the Shores of Lake Ontario. Blake Books, Port Perry 2000, ISBN 0-9687062-0-7 .
• Bill Macdonald: The True Intrepid. Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents. Raincoast Books, Vancouver 2001, ISBN 1-55192-418-8 (This book contains interviews with various Canadian staff at the BSC in New York).
• William Boyd : Restless. A novel. 1st US edition. Bloomsbury, New York NY 2006, ISBN 1-59691-236-7 (The novel covers the BSC story).

swell

1. ↑ Boyd, William, "The Secret Persuaders," Aug. 19, 2006
2. ↑ (First edition in Great Britain in 1998) Book review British Security Coordination (English) ( Memento of the original from June 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .