Camp X

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Located in Canada not far from Toronto, Special Training School 103 (``Camp X'') was established by the British in 1941 primarily to teach American civilian recruits the basic elements of sabotage and counterintelligence. By the time it closed down in 1944, various agencies in Britain, Canada and the United States, including the OSS and the FBI, had used the facilities to train some 500 students as secret agents, spies and guerrilla fighters who performed missions behind enemy lines in Europe and Asia. The author, executive director of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, strains to explore several little-known myths of doubtful interest about the camp: its supposed connection with the assassination of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, the cross-Channel raid on Dieppe and Ian Fleming's creation of ``James Bond.'' Stafford acknowledges that Camp X played a modest role in American-British-Canadian cooperation during the war. His book, jammed with largely undigested material, is modest. Photos. (September)