Camp X: SOE school for spies
David Stafford

Camp X: SOE school for spies

Camp X was the first secret agent training camp ever to be built in North America. Established early in the Second World War by Britain’s Special Operations Executive on the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario, it trained dozens of Americans and Canadians in the arts of secret war including paramilitary skills, close combat, disguise, secret ciphers, propaganda, and undercover operations. 

Many of the Camp’s graduates became secret agents in enemy-occupied Europe and Asia. Others were sent to South or Central America to counter Nazi espionage and subversion against the allied war effort. Still others worked at the Camp’s HYDRA radio station responsible for transmitting some of the most sensitive intelligence material to pass between secret services across the Atlantic. 

Based on eyewitness accounts and secret files in London, Washington, and Ottawa, the cast of this real life spy adventure also includes Sir William Stephenson (‘Intrepid’), OSS chief ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. This edition includes a new preface by the author bringing the story up to date. A documentary based on the book will be shown on the History Channel in 2014. 

“True and fascinating… told in vivid detail… With the excitement of a first-rate thriller Camp X dramatically chronicles a key period in the genesis of the international game.” - Stars and Stripes 

“The course of study at Camp X reads like a James Bond training school.” - Indianapolis Star 

“Required reading for any potential 007” - Sunday Mirror

Book Details:

  • Author: David Stafford
  • On Submission
  • Rights Sold
    • United Kingdom: Thistle
David Stafford

David Stafford

David Stafford is an historian and former diplomat who has written extensively on espionage, intelligence, Churchill, and the Second World War. The former Project Director at the Centre for The Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh, he is now an Honorary Fellow of the University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he and his wife now live. He has frequently acted as a TV and radio consultant, has written radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC, and his latest book, Ten Days to D-Day, formed ...
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Book Reviews

  • "In the ranks of modern historians, David Stafford deserves to be singled out and saluted as a field marshal. Camp X is a perfect representation of the authority that he has long and quietly commanded. At one level, it is the unflaggingly fascinating story of a top-secret camp in Canada, set up by British Intelligence between 1941-44, to train agents, spies and saboteurs. But more than that, it is a probing and deeply informed account of the Anglo-American relationship at a crucial moment in world history. As in each and every one of his works, Stafford combines impeccable and pioneering research with the narrative gifts of a born writer, rendering it a classic of its kind.  "
    Nicholas Shakespeare
  • " Camp X is a perfect representation of the authority that he has long and quietly commanded. At one level, it is the unflaggingly fascinating story of a top-secret camp in Canada, set up by British Intelligence between 1941-44, to train agents, spies and saboteurs. But more than that, it is a probing and deeply informed account of the Anglo-American relationship at a crucial moment in world history. As in each and every one of his works, Stafford combines impeccable and pioneering research with the narrative gifts of a born writer, rendering it a classic of its kind."
    Nicholas Shakespeare, biographer of Ian Fleming