| Last updated at 1:23 AM on 14/11/09 |
Secrets yet untold 
Years after his service as a secret agent with the British Security Coordination, Clifton Stewart of Charlottetown still stays mum on some Second World War subjects
BY MARY MACKAY
The Guardian
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Stewart. Clifton Stewart.
That’s what this former secret agent is called today.
Back during the Second World War, long before the onset of James Bond and reams of other secret agent/spy movies, this soft-spoken Charlottetown electrician was known simply as W5 on the British Service Coordination (BSC) roster.
“When they referred to me, it was (as) W5, no names were mentioned. If you got correspondence or messages it was for W5, W6, W7 and so on,” says Stewart, 89, who was honoured by the Rotary Club of Charlottetown this week at the club’s annual remembrance and commemoration luncheon for his distinguished service during the Second World War.
Some of his many contributions were helping to improve the security, efficiency and reliability of radio communications to all Allied operations and occupied European countries.
He also participated in a number of top-secret missions behind enemy lines to train people on the ground in those countries to further the Allied war effort.
For special agent W5, the whos, whats, wheres, whens and whys of this chapter in his long life started just after the onset of the Second World War when he was a 20-something amateur ham radio operator with a keen interest in new technology.
“It’s not like it is now. Equipment was home-built, and there were a lot of unexplored territories equipment-wise, (as well as) methods of transmission,” Stewart says.
At the time, he was one of a rare few to have a licence for carrier shift keying, also known as frequency shift keying, which was an up-and-coming mode of transmission in higher radio frequencies.
“(We) had a licence to experiment with that. It was new and they picked us up right quick,” Stewart says.
The “they” in this instance is the BSC, which recruited him and a small number of others from Canada, the United States and Britain in 1940. The BSC was headed by Winnipeg-born Sir William Stephenson, who was in tight with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The BSC’s main mission was liaison and planning with the Americans on anti-Axis security and operations. Its headquarters in New York was a base from which secret warfare operations were conducted.
Stewart really had no clue what was to come when the RCMP showed up at the family farm in Hampshire to talk to him early in 1940.
“All the RCMP was concerned about was doing a security check on me and the family background. He said right out they were doing a security check and he said if there was horse thieves or sheep stealers (in the family history) it didn’t make any difference. It was as long as I had no connections with ‘undesirable foreigners’ I’d be clearing (the check),” laughs Stewart.
Given the all-clear, Stewart went to the BSC headquarters in Rockerfeller Center in New York. His main task was to help with the development of radio communications equipment that would do mechanical or electrical ciphering using frequency or carrier shift keying. This meant that in the case of Morse code, automatic machines could transmit and receive information at a phenomenal pace, when compared to the previous by-hand, tap-tap-tap Morse code entry and by-ear retrieval mode.
It was also a much more secure way of transmitting highly secret information.
Then in 1941 the BSC opened a secret paramilitary and commando training centre near Oshawa, Ont. It was unofficially called Camp X.
Camp X training included a broad spread of special techniques, including silent killing, sabotage, partisan support and recruitment methods for resistance movements, the use of various weapons, demolition and more.
“Blowing things up was fun, you know. It really was,” laughs Stewart.
More than 500 Allied units were trained at Camp X.
“They came from all the Allied countries. I think there were more Polish people trained there. Out of all the undergrounds in Europe or the occupied countries, the Poles took it the hardest. They trained anybody and anybody that could do some damage inside (the country),” Stewart says.
After Camp X, Stewart was well versed in the skills he needed for the several top-secret missions, which included three drops into occupied Europe.
“(We were) training resistance people and delivering them plastic explosives and showing them how to use them,” he says.
Getting in and out of occupied Europe was no easy task, but one thing that the BSC agents had in their favour was a nifty British aircraft that was perfect for clandestine missions.
“There’s our spy taxi,” Stewart says of a photo of a Westland Lysander, which earned its taxi title because it was built for rugged short take-offs and landings and low-level reconnaissance and therefore invaluable for picking up and dropping off secret agents behind enemy lines.
“That little thing had 900 horsepower, it would almost go straight up. See these heavy wing struts there?” he adds, pointing to his photo.
“They had running boards on it and they would just touch down and get down to 20 miles an hour. And if there were two (people on the ground, the pilot would) pick up one on each side and they would run their arm through (the wing struts) and lock it and stand on (the running board). And as soon as you got up 400 or 500 feet and there was nobody shooting at you anymore you got inside (the plane).”
Getting out of the plane was a much different scenario.
“I’ll tell you this right now, people actually skydive for fun, (but) I will never jump out of a working airplane for fun,” Stewart laughs.
“If you have to do it, that’s different.”
During his time with the BSC, Stewart helped with the development of the Rockex, which for its time was a sophisticated encoding and decoding machine. Improved versions of it were still in use by British consulates and embassies until 1973, and a few even till the mid-1980s.
“It was a roomful of equipment that did what can be done on a laptop today,” Stewart smiles.
In 1945 when the war ended, the Americans who were in the organization became the CIA. Five Canadians were invited to stay, including Stewart.
“If I hadn’t been married at that time I would have stayed.”
Stewart and his now late wife, Hilda, moved to Camp X, where their first son was born. Stewart stayed with the organization until 1949 when he and his family, which eventually included three more children, returned to P.E.I.
He worked as an electrician and later taught electronics at Holland College in Charlottetown for a number of years.
The unusual thing about Stewart’s war years is that Camp X did not even exist officially until 1995 when the statute of limitations ran out.
“All records of Camp X were destroyed in 1946. Everything. It didn’t exist,” Stewart says.
Most people just thought he was in the army. And he didn’t volunteer any information other than that he was on loan to other forces during the Second World War.
“Until ’95, you just didn’t talk about it,” he says.
Even to this day there are some things he cannot and will not ever talk about.
“We have a separate oath that will go on forever, you see. Till death do us part,” smiles Stewart.
“Anything of any significance will never be discussed.”
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