British Security Coordination was a cover organization set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in May 1940 upon the authorization of Winston Churchill.
The office, which was established for intelligence and propaganda services, was headed by Canadian industrialist William Stephenson. The BSC was registered by the State Department as a foreign entity. It operated from the 35th and 36th floors of the International Building, Rockefeller Center and was officially known as the British Passport Control Office.
Stephenson and J Edgar Hoover cooperated in a number of operations against espionage activities by Nazi Germany in the U.S. The BSC even hired Americans, they were recruited in the BSC were given British identification numbers beginning with the digits 4 and 8, apparently representing the 48 states.
The British novelist William Boyd, in a 2006 article for The Guardian, stated that although the total number of BSC agents operating in the USA is unknown, he estimated the number to be at least "many hundreds" and had seen "the figure of up to 3,000 mentioned".
Noel Coward saw Stephenson, colloquially known as Little Bill, at the end of July 1940 when on an world entertainment and propaganda tour. He wrote that Stephenson had a considerable influence on the next few years of my life. Stephenson offered him a job, but this was vetoed by London.
Camp X was the unofficial name of a Second World War paramilitary and commando training installation, on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario between Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. The area is known today as Intrepid Park, after the code name for Sir William Stephenson of the British Security Coordination. Camp X was established December 8, 1941 by the chief of British Security Coordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, a close confidante of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The camp was originally designed to link Britain and the United States at a time when the US was forbidden by the Neutrality Act to be directly involved in World War II.
One BSC agent was Cedric Henning Belfrage, in 2009 historian Ronald Radosh said that "we now know, from VENONA and the Vassiliev documents, [that Belfrage was also] a KGB agent."
Other employees include: Noel Coward, a famous playwright, composer, director, actor and singer; Roald Dahl, a novelist, short story writer, fighter pilot and screenwriter. Ian Fleming, a journalist, Naval Intelligence Officer and author of James Bond and David Ogilvy, "The Father of Advertising."