Bill Stevenson - obituaryBill Stevenson was an author whose imaginative inside track on the world of espionage helped him write a bestseller in a week
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10673705/Bill-Stevenson-obituary.html6:27PM GMT 03 Mar 2014
Bill Stevenson, who has died aged 89, was a British-born Canadian journalist and author who used his espionage connections to write two bestselling books, A Man Called Intrepid and 90 Minutes at Entebbe.
The first of these, published in 1976, told the story of Sir William Stephenson (the similar names were coincidental), the Canadian-born intelligence operative who, under the codename Intrepid, acted as the head of British intelligence operations in the United States during the war.
Stevenson had first met the spymaster while training as a pilot in Canada, and in the post-war years he worked as a voluntary agent for Intrepid’s front company, the World Commerce Corporation. At the same time as he pursued a career at the Toronto Star, Stevenson assisted in the transfer of highly-sensitive intelligence documents from the British Security Coordination (BSC) headquarters in New York, while Sir William in turn suggested possible destinations of journalistic interest.
Stevenson’s unusual relationship with his near-namesake ensured that A Man Called Intrepid was criticised for the extravagant claims made on behalf of its subject, notably that Stephenson had played a central role in almost every successful intelligence operation of the war.
The espionage author Nigel West wrote that it was “almost entire fictional in content”, alleging that even the codename of Intrepid was given, not to Stephenson himself, but to the BSC’s New York operation; while Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had himself served in the Radio Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service during the war, wrote a particularly excoriating review in the New York Review of Books, suggesting that to hold Stevenson to account for his inaccuracies would be “like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels”.
For the general readership, however, Stevenson had tapped into a prevailing fascination with secrecy and intrigue, fuelled by that year’s Church Committee hearings into CIA activities worldwide. Translated into 13 languages, A Man Called Intrepid spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list and spawned a television miniseries starring David Niven.
Soon afterwards came 90 Minutes at Entebbe, an early example of the “instant book”. At 216 pages long, it recounted the spectacular rescue by Israeli forces of 100 hostages from Uganda’s Entebbe airport on July 4 1976, and was published by Bantam on July 26, receiving serialisations in The New York Times and other papers around the world. Stevenson had dashed off the manuscript in just over a week from a New York hotel room .
The son of a Scottish merchant marine sailor, William Henri Stevenson was born in London on June 1 1924. On the outbreak of war the family moved near to Bletchley Park, where his father was employed; meanwhile, Bill’s French mother trained Oxford students in the appropriate dialects for service in the French Resistance.
He left school at 16 and wrote his first book, Sarka the Seagull, before enlisting in the Royal Navy as a pilot and qualifying from the Service Flying Training School at Kingston, Ontario . Beginning as a Fleet Air Arm carrier pilot, from 1943 he moved into aerial reconnaissance, flying Sea Spitfires, Corsairs and Hellcats equipped with spy cameras over Japanese-occupied territory.
Questioned about the distinction between his dual role as agent and investigative reporter, Stevenson was very clear: “There is none. 'Spyglass’ is the word I’d prefer to use. All through the centuries, reporters of one kind or another have put the spyglass to events.”
The naval intelligence officer – and later James Bond author – Ian Fleming then urged him to “go somewhere exotic”. But Stevenson instead returned to Canada where, by 1950, he had risen to the foreign desk of the Toronto Star.
During the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation of the early 1960s Stevenson worked for the Near & Far East News Agency (NAFEN), a front organisation belonging to the Foreign Office’s Intelligence & Research Department (IRD); and in 1965 he joined other observers of the Indo-Pakistani war. Further assignments took him to Korea, Maoist China, Taiwan, French Indochina and North and South Vietnam.
In addition to the two bestsellers, his other books included Intrepid’s Last Case (1983), a follow-up to his 1976 work, and Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (2006). The Bushbabies (1965), a children’s adventure story inspired by his experiences in Kenya, was adapted for film by MGM. He also wrote and produced several documentaries for CBC Television.
Stevenson’s autobiography, Past to Present: A Reporter’s Story of War, Spies, People, and Politics, was published in 2012. Narrated in the present tense, its style is characteristically anecdotal, a typical sentence beginning: “I rediscover Rena, the Polish news agency girl I first met in Mexico when I cornered Trotsky’s assassin.” Other supporting characters include Vera Lynn, who was the daughter of a neighbouring plumber from Stevenson’s boyhood London street; the 14th Dalai Lama; and King Bhumibol of Thailand, subject of Stevenson’s 2001 biography The Revolutionary King.
Bill Stevenson is survived by his second wife, Monika, and by four children. A son predeceased him.
Bill Stevenson, born June 1 1924, died November 26 2013
William Stephenson, British Spy Known as Intrepid, Is Dead at 93By ALBIN KREBS
Published: February 3, 1989
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/03/obituaries/william-stephenson-british-spy-known-as-intrepid-is-dead-at-93.htmlSir William Stephenson, the Canadian-born millionaire industrialist whose adventures as Britain's World War II chief of intelligence in the Western Hemisphere were chronicled in the 1979 bestseller ''A Man Called Intrepid'' died Tuesday in Paget, Bermuda. He was 93 years old. Sir William, who had been living in retirement in Bermuda and Jamaica for many years, was given the code name Intrepid by Winston Churchill because long before his cloak-and-dagger days began he had been one of Britain's top fighter pilots in World War I, an inventor and a financier.
Operating out of a suite in Rockefeller Center in New York, Sir William sometimes served as a go-between for Churchill and Roosevelt and was sent potential American intelligence agents for training at secret bases in Canada.
He also helped in the organization of the United States' wartime intelligence operation, the Office of Strategic Services, whose head, Maj. Gen. William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan, later said: 'Bill Stephenson taught us all we ever knew about foreign intelligence.''
William Samuel Stephenson was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Jan. 11, 1896.
In 1914 he dropped out of college to join the Royal Canadian Engineers and suffered gas poisoning in France. He later said he faked his medical history to join the Royal Flying Corps and flew into action after only five hours of flight instruction. He was credited with shooting down 26 enemy planes and won Britain's Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Croix de Guerre.
Eventually the young pilot was himself shot down and imprisoned. Before he escaped from prison camp, William Stephenson came across an ingenious can-opener that had been patented only in Germany. After the war he adapted it, obtained patents worldwide and made it the cornerstone of a future fortune. Millionaire and a Boxer
Before he was 30 years old he had become a millionaire, with a finger in the manufacture of radios, phonographs, automobiles and airplanes. He was also in the construction, real estate, and steel businesses, and had invented the first device for sending photographs by radio. He also won the European lightweight boxing championship.
When Hitler was preparing for World War II, William Stephenson, under cover of his own business operations in Germany, gathered intelligence on Nazi steel, arms, and munitions production and passed the information on to an unofficial intelligence network that reported to Churchill, then out of office but soon to become First Sea Lord and then Prime Minister.
''That was my only training in espionage,'' Sir William later recalled, but in 1940 Churchill sent Intrepid to New York with the title of British Passports Control Officer. After the United States got into the war he became British Security Coordinator for the Western Hemisphere.
Reminiscing about his wartime service, Sir William said that in addition to serving as a link between Churchill and Roosevelt and supervising the training of Americans for intelligence work, he operated a spy network that uncovered the activities of Axis agents in South America and provided valuable information to Washington and London on the movements of Vichy French operatives. Knighted in 1946
Afterward he liked to pass off his job as ''80 percent paperwork,'' but in 1946 the British honored him with a knighthood and the Americans presented him the Medal for Merit, then the United States' highest civilian award. The medal's citation, signed by Truman, said Sir William ''gave timely and invaluable aid to the American war effort.''
After the appearance of ''A Man Called Intrepid,'' written by the similarly named William Stevenson, some of Sir William's recollections were contested by Churchill's private secretary, John Colville.
Mr. Colville, in his 1981 book ''Winston Churchill and His Inner Circle,'' said that foremost among Sir William's false assertions were that he was a constant liaison between Churchill and Roosevelt and that he was in constant contact with Churchill on intelligence and military matters.
Sir William replied: ''Those charges are completely untrue, absolute nonsense.''
After the war Sir William joined with several wartime associates, including General Donovan and former Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, to form the World Commerce Corporation, which provided tools, machinery and technical information to developing countries to set up industries.
Sir William, who was buried yesterday in Bermuda, is survived by a daughter, Elizabeth, and a grandson, Rhys. A spokesman for the family declined to give their surname.
Photo of Sir William Stephenson (1954)