Jeff Shear's History of "Cynthia," the World War II Spy
Part Five: A Rogues' Gallery
Several characters remain to be introduced before the events of the Second Washington Conference take place.
Perhaps the most important among them was a small, gray and mysterious man by the name of William S. Stephenson. The diminutive director of England's intelligence operations in the Americas arrived to work full-time in the U.S. at age 43, in June 1940. He was known to his colleagues as "Little Bill." President Roosevelt's speech writer, Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Sherwood, characterized Stephenson as "a quiet Canadian." The tag stuck, which is surprising. Sherwood wrote what was perhaps the first vivid White House tell-all, and the 900-plus page tome was thorough to an eye-glazing fault. Yet despite the writer's extraordinary perch from which to detail Roosevelt's heavily trafficked third administration, the "quiet Canadian" is mentioned just once. By comparison, Stephenson often let it be known that he had virtually open access to FDR. Given all that Sherwood reveals about FDR's chief intimate, Hopkins, it's hard to believe he would have kept a personage influential enough to have FDR's instant attention a secret.
British and Canadian writers have sensationalized Stephenson by his cable address, "Intrepid," which they touted as his code name. It was not. The most prolific popularizer of Britain's secret service in the Americas, H. Montgomery Hyde published Stephenson's story in England under the title, The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson. Interestingly, the only other reference the American writier, Robert Sherwood, made to Stephenson in Roosevelt and Hopkins an Intimate History was buried in a long, alphabetical acknowledgment in the book's introduction, a paragraph-length list of 85 other Washington power-brokers.
Stephenson's story appears to be one of many pieces of misinformation or disinformation -- alterations of identity -- referred to in the intelligence community as a "legend." For while he is consistently described as quiet, he was not quite Canadian. Taken together, the real Bill Stephenson may be less than the sum of his parts, and many of those parts appear to be missing.
Part Six: Missing Parts
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