522 • STERN GANG
In April 1940 Stephenson was introduced to the director of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, by a mu-
tual friend, lawyer Ernest Cuneo, and by the middle of the next
month he was back in London to be appointed theSecret Intelli-
gence Service(SIS) representative New York, underpassport con-
trol officercover. He took up his new post at the end of June 1940,
accompanied byDick EllisandWalter Belland quickly negotiated
a lend-lease agreement for the immediate delivery of 50 elderly
American destroyers to act as convoy escorts. By the following year
Stephenson had abandoned the Passport Control Office in Wall Street
and establishedBritish Security Coordination(BSC) in the Rocke-
feller Center, with the registered cable address of ‘‘Intrepid, New
York,’’ andSpecial Training School103 at Oshawa, near Toronto in
Canada. He developed a close relationship with General Donovan of
the U.S.Office of Strategic Services, and a slightly more tense liai-
son with the FBI’s Hoover.
Over the next four years, BSC expanded to act as an umbrella for
MI5, SIS, the Radio Security Service, and the Political Warfare Ex-
ecutive, posting representatives across the Western Hemisphere. Ste-
phenson was director of BSC until 1945, when the organization was
wound down and he was awarded a knighthood. Before his death in
January 1989, he sponsored three biographies, two of which—The
Quiet Canadianand the rather less accurateA Man Called Intrepid—
were published. The original historyBritish Security Coordination,
written by Gilbert Highet with help from Roald Dahl and others in
1946, was released in 1998.STERN GANG.Named after Abraham Stern, the Stern Gang was the
British term for the ‘‘Freedom Fighters of Israel,’’ considered the
most ruthless of the terrorist groups campaigning for a Jewish home-
land inPalestineduring the British Mandate. Stern himself was shot
by a British police officer while being arrested in February 1942, but
his organization, led by Avram Yellin and Stern’s sister Hannah, con-
tinued to commit atrocities for a further six years, among them the
assassination of Lord Moyne, the British high commissioner in
Cairo, in November 1944. Security Intelligence Middle East re-
cruited a source within the Stern Gang, Israel Prizker, but he was
murdered when he came under suspicion as an informant.