The document said "I hereby notify you that your Amateur experimental station licence is suspended forthwith, and direct you to completely dismantle and render inoperative all equipment installed in your station."  click above for full letter Such were the communication capabilities of private radio transmitting and receiving equipment of even the most modest sort that they could readily be used for clandestine purposes. Radio communication in wartime could lead to defeat or victory, triumph or disaster. This fact brought about the recruiting and training at Camp X, or a number of Canadian Amateur radio operators to assist in the interception of the incredible volume of enemy secret radio activity that was to spring up in all parts of the world, and which would play a major role in shaping the war. 
I was one of the radio monitors recruited by the British intelligence agency headed by Sir William Stephenson. Its cover name was the "British Security Coordinator" office. In my case, I spent most of my war years in South America. Simply stated, an Amateur radio operator is an ideal candidate for handling clandestine radio activity of any description, be it interception or the actual transmitting of traffic. The radio Amateur likes and understands his hobby, he's good at solving technical problems and keeping equipment running without seeking outside assistance. He is already capable of sending and receiving Morse code efficiently and needs only to be trained in the specialties of handling clandestine radio messages. In early 1942 I trained for two or three months at a camp on Lake Ontario, the famous "Camp X", where I was a member of the first wireless class. Later the same year I was on my way to Caracas, Venezuela, where I was located at the British controlled oilfields, at a place called El Mene, a tiny community in the jungle near Maracaibo. While in Venezuela I was one of a team of two BSC monitors. My colleague was another Toronto radio Amateur who later went to Trinidad while I went much farther south to Santiago, Chile, where I remained until the end of the war. Other Canadian radio Amateurs from Camp X who took part in this South American venture were stationed at Bogota, Colombia; Quito, Ecuador; Lima, Peru; Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay. The importance of clandestine radio communication to the enemy war effort can be simply explained. There is probably no more perishable commodity than information gathered by spies. As the war progressed, it was commonly taking a month or more for various secret couriers and methods to relay information from enemy or neutral territory to Germany. With radio, the actual transmission took only seconds or minutes. The significance of South America was due in part to the fact that a difference in attitude toward the war, fewer heavily-populated areas and other factors made it easier to maintain illicit radio stations with less chance of detection or interference from authorities. There was also the fact that radio signals tend to travel better north-to-south than east-to-west across the Atlantic. Thus smaller, low-output (more easily hidden and harder to locate) illicit transmitters in the U.S. were used to send information on ship movements and other vital information to South America for relaying by means of more powerful transmitters to Germany. In the clandestine radio 'business,' you have an 'out station' which is secretly located in enemy or neutral territory, and you have the main station back home which is called the 'control', or sometimes 'home station'. Hamburg, or more properly Wohldorf just outside the city limits, was the control point for a vast volume of German clandestine traffic. Working from underground bunkers, this went on unabated, even during the time that Hamburg was being turned into rubble by Allied air attacks. I used to listen with amazement, night after night, to clandestine radio circuits working back to Hamburg, as a time when the city was little more than a blazing ruin. In fact, one of my main priorities was monitoring a circuit which in BSC parlance was identified as 13/43 and it meant a change of frequency to 10,400 kHz. I'd been supplied with a whole list of these frequency change signals (although there was a tendency to use only a couple of them) and I knew exactly what was meant by these cryptic two-letter signals, usually used when reception was poor at one end or the other. Today, nearly 40 years later, I still think of 5:30 p.m. as the time 13/43 came on the air, sometimes seven days a week. It was one of the most professional operations I monitored. With the out-station in Argentina, contact with Hamburg would sometimes be made within a second or two and the traffic started instantly. You had to be on your toes. Oddly enough, if reception was first-class for me I wasn't very happy, because this nearly always meant that the Hamburg operator would have trouble from weak signals, and since 13/43 didn't do much fooling around the transmission would be abruptly halted. They might first try a change of frequency but often they got trickier still by throwing in a time lapse as well. Thus, they might go off the air for two hours and come up on a different frequency. Clandestine radio traffic was always in five-letter cipher groups. Only in rare instances was anything else used, although in one of the most dramatic moments of my entire wartime activity, and at something like 3 a.m., a station I was monitoring came up with the incredible message in plain English, "I have lost my code book"! The use of plain English (en clair, as non-coded messages are called) deserves explanation. Operators of German clandestine stations were taught an assortment of English phrases and words for occasional or special use. Presumably the idea was to give a casual interceptor the idea that he was listening to an American or British service and thus move on. It was a futile, almost silly device, because the sending style and other operating techniques of a clandestine station were such that you had recognized what they were long before they transmitted a couple of words in English. I had no idea of the significance of this circuit, beyond the fact that I'd been told that it was of the highest importance. It was operating on a low frequency and signal strength was good, suggesting that it was a communication from a relatively nearby point and intended to be received at close range. An example would be an agent in Chile or Argentina signalling to a submarine off shore. Although monitoring activities spanned, theoretically, a 24-hour day and there was no other BSC operator in Santiago, I still had free time to acquaint myself with a totally foreign world. During the war, travel to South America from North America was limited largely to people related to the war effort. Flight down was on DC3s; slow-flying aircraft that left at daybreak and flew until dusk, stopping only to refuel A flight from the top of South America to Santiago involved three days' travel. There was no after-dark flying and there were times when planes were grounded by the weather for days. Once, during my stay in Santiago, flights over the Andes to Argentina were held up for a couple of weeks. On my flight down, incidentally, I had the unique experience of having a German agent as my seat partner, a fact I didn't know until later. While I got off at Santiago, he continued to Buenos Aires where he was arrested. All this reached me later through my BSC station boss. I had a few anxious moments, of course, trying to recall if I'd said anything indiscreet, although my recollection was that this man had shown no more than the most casual interest in me and had asked no questions of significance. Then there was the time I awoke in the bedroom of my Santiago boarding house in the middle of the night to realize that the door was creeping slowly open and with someone obviously on the other side. For a person in my line of ,work it was an alarming moment and taking into account my doubtful skills at unarmed combat during my brief training at Camp X I decided it would be best to get out of bed and at least die standing up. I leapt out on the far side and, switched on the light. There, in the half-open door, profusely apologizing, stood a young man in the gray uniform of a private in the Chilean army. He'd been upstairs 'visiting' the maid, and in attempting to find his way back to the street in the darkened household he'd become confused and was opening the wrong door. A much more serious incident took place during my brief stay in Venezuela. My colleague and 1, on our way from the British Legation to where we lived in the suburbs, became aware that a man seemed very interested in us. At the bus station, he stood watching a few yards away. Buses came and went and he got on none of them. Finally, our suburban bus pulled in and to test our suspicions we ignored it until it was pulling away. Then we raced to the open back door and leapt aboard. Our follower did the same thing at the open front door. We lived virtually at the end of the bus line, and near this point we and our 'suspicious companion were the only remaining passengers. It 'was a bit like something from a Hitchcock movie. So we tried our ploy in reverse. The bus reached our stop and paused. No one moved. Then as it picked up speed we jumped off at the back, raced across the road and down our dark street. We heard running footsteps behind us but they hadn't yet reached the entrance to our street and in the remaining seconds we hid behind some large bushes. The footsteps raced by and faded away. We crossed the street where we lived and got safely inside. Next morning our BSC station chief listened with interest and eventually showed us a series of police mug shots. We identified our travelling companion. He was well-known and dangerous. The conclusion was that it was probably a case of mistaken identity on the part of our pursuer. There'd been recent activity in which jewelry, intended to be smuggled to Spain to help finance the Axis war effort, had been intercepted and confiscated because of a BSC tip-off to local authorities. It was felt that our follower may have believed that we'd been involved and was out to even things up. Not all my activities took on such a James Bond touch. In Santiago, for example, as the only electronics person on the premises, I was viewed as a repairman for the hearing aid used by the wife of the British ambassador. She was a charming and delightful woman, but obligated to carry around a hearing aid, which in those days was a cumbersome box several times bigger than today's portable radios, and which from time to time had things go wrong with it. The people of Chile were intensely democratic and law abiding, a fact which makes today's situation all the sadder. Day or night, I went without fear to almost any place in the city. I was never involved in, or even witnessed, any sort of real violence. Once, on a Chilean street-car, I was amazed to hear (in startling contrast to the Toronto of the 40s from which I'd come) its poorly dressed conductor telling off a drunken passenger. He told him he should be ashamed, that his conduct was dishonourable. The attitude of Chileans toward the war varied. Some were distinctly pro-German, others pro-allied and many were somewhat neutral. On balance, in Chile, the population favoured the Allies. In movie theatres which specialized in running continuous showings of news reels (rotativos, they were called), as opposed to theatres which showed a feature picture only, and at specified times), the audiences commonly applauded when Roosevelt or Churchill appeared on the screen. During my vacations I traveled to, Argentina and Uruguay and coming home I went up the east coast for a quick look at Rio de Janeiro and a couple of lesser locations. I very much liked South America. I am saddened at the vicious inflation and the military dictatorships that are so prevalent there today. I don't think I'd want to go back now. It would be too depressing. Editors Note: Several KWARC members also spent the war working for Stephenson intercepting German messages. Unlike the author of this article, the KWARC members involved have refused to break their lifelong oath of secrecy. |