page_title: Camp X
section_title: Postwar
hierarchical_section_title: Camp X / Postwar
caption_attribution_description: English: The monument at the site of Camp X. Photographed in the afternoon of Sunday, October 9, 2011.
context_page_description: Camp X was the unofficial name of the secret Special Training School No. 103, a Second World War British paramilitary installation for training covert agents in the methods required for success in clandestine operations. It was located 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, Director of British Security Co-ordination, who established the program to create the training facility.
  The facility was jointly operated by the Canadian military, with help from Foreign Affairs and the RCMP but commanded by the BSC; it also had close ties with MI-6. In addition to the training program, the Camp had a communications tower that could send and transmit radio and telegraph communications, called Hydra.
  Established December 6, 1941, the training facility closed before the end of 1944; the buildings were removed in 1969 and a monument was erected at the site.
context_section_description: One of the trainees, or at least a visitor, may have been Ian Fleming, later famous for his James Bond books, according to the book Inside Camp X by Lynn Philip Hodgson. (While in Toronto, Fleming stayed at a hotel near St. James-Bond United Church, but many believe the name was borrowed from a noted American ornithologist.) There is however evidence against this claim. The character of James Bond was "a highly romanticised version of the true spy", William Stephenson and what Fleming once learned from him.
  Children's book writer Roald Dahl and British screenwriter Paul Dehn also trained at the camp.
  After it had closed, starting 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 had defected to Canada on September 5 and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation in the country. Gouzenko and his family spent two years at the facility.
  Later, until the buildings were destroyed in 1969, the camp became the Oshawa Wireless Station under operation by the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals as a secret listening location. Any records not previously destroyed were stored under the Official Secrets Act. The site, located on Boundary Road in Whitby, Ontario, is now a passive park named "Intrepid Park". In recent years, the park has been the site of annual Remembrance Day ceremonies hosted by 2 Intelligence Company, a military intelligence unit based in Toronto, Ontario.
  A damaged building from Camp X had been found and it was being restored in 2016. Artifacts from the spy camp are still occasionally found in the park. In August 2016, a hobbyist with a metal detector uncovered a rusty World War II smoke mortar round, triggering a visit from Canadian Forces Base Trenton's bomb disposal team.
caption: Monument at the site of Camp X in Whitby, Ontario
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