Camp X - Postwar

Postwar

Trainees included Ian Fleming, later famous for his James Bond books, though there is evidence against this claim. The character of James Bond was supposedly based on Sir William Stephenson and what Fleming learned from him. Children's writer Roald Dahl and British screenwriter Paul Dehn also trained at the camp.

In the fall of 1945 Camp X was used by the RCMP as a secure location for interviewing Soviet embassy cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko who defected to Canada on September 5 and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation in the country.

Post-war, the camp was renamed the Oshawa Wireless Station and was turned over to the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals as a wireless intercept station, in essence a spy listening station. The Oshawa Wireless Station ceased operations in 1969. All remaining buildings were demolished or relocated elsewhere and the property abandoned. Records pertaining to Camp X were either locked away under the Official Secrets Act or destroyed after World War II.

Nothing significant remains of Camp X today, as all the remaining buildings were bulldozed into Lake Ontario in 1969 when the camp was decommissioned, although several craters from explosives training are still visible. The site, located on Boundary Road in Whitby, Ontario, is now a passive park named "Intrepid Park". A monument was erected in 1984 to honour the men and women of Camp X, which many in the intelligence world consider to be the finest espionage training camp of the Second World War. The monument is surrounded by four flags: the Bermuda flag (where Stevenson died), the flag of the United States, the British Union Jack, and the current flag of Canada. Today it is the site of annual Remembrance Day ceremonies hosted by 2 Intelligence Company, a Military Intelligence unit based in Toronto, Ontario.

Lynn Philip Hodgson, author of Dispatches from Camp-X, provides annual walking tours of the camps original site.

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