Richard Melville Brooker | |
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Nickname(s) |
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Born | 23 September 1909 Paris |
Died | 1994 (aged 84) |
Buried | Sicklinghall Cemetery, Harrogate Borough, North Yorkshire, England |
Allegiance | |
Service | |
Rank | Lieutenant Colonel |
Commands | |
Battles / wars |
Richard Melville "Bill" Brooker was a British soldier, spy, instructor, and commando during World War II, and integral to the Allied effort in defeating the Axis. He was a member of Churchill's Special Operations Executive (SOE), and Commandant of Camp X, where he trained the men and women who would become the leaders of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), which became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He is considered one of the fathers of modern American central intelligence, and gained the admiration of William J. Donovan and Allen Dulles, and even is mentioned as being a great instructor of spies in the memoirs of Kim Philby. [1] [2]
Brooker was born on 23 December 1909 in Paris, France. [1] In the years before World War II, he was a traveling salesman for Nestlé. [1] Those who knew him gave him the title of a "born salesman." [1]
Prior to the war, Brooker joined the Force Service Protectorate.
On March 18, 1941, Brooker joined the SOE's training section, and trained scores of SOE operatives at Beaulieu on espionage and tradecraft prior to their departure to fight the Axis. [3] [4]
In December 1941, Brooker was sent to Canada aboard the SS Pasteur with Lieutenant Colonel Roper Caldbeck to become the second in command of STS 103, or what is more commonly known today as Camp X. [3] [5]
In August 1942, Brooker succeeded Roper Caldbeck as Commandant of Camp X. [3] He is said to have been the school's most popular commanding officer to this point. [6] [7]
Bickham Sweet-Escott wrote:
"I have no doubt that OSS (Office of Strategic Services) got much more out of our training school in Canada, (Camp X) than from all the efforts of our party in Washington... What was unique about Oshawa was the personality of the commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Brooker. Bill Brooker was a born salesman. He was a brilliant and convincing lecturer, and he had an immense wealth of stories from the real life of a secret agent to illustrate his points."
Brooker was noted as an unconventional instructor - he would occasionally interrupt his classes with exercises, including gunfire and other scenarios, and would ask his students to recall details like the number of shots fired and the caliber of the weapon. [7] He also gave them much sage advice: “If there’s anything loose in the intelligence business, you’re dead!” [8]
Brooker also trained OSS executives on the weekends on the fundamentals of training, creating "trained trainers" out of them. [9]
In the Winter of 1942, Brooker helped Garland H. Williams to completely redesign the training curriculum of the COI/OSS. [10]
Brooker also assisted, along with British Navy Commander N.G.A. Woolley, Millard Preston Goodfellow and William J. Donovan at the COI in creating an amphibious warfare training unit, that would become the OSS Maritime Unit training center. [11]
In March 1943, Brooker was reassigned to the OSS in Washington, D.C. [6] [11]
Later in the year, William Donovan had Brooker deployed to Algeria to participate in joint SOE/OSS operations there. [10]
In 1944, Brooker would spend more time in Washington and New York, dividing his time in half between the two OSS operations, helping both to instruct students and build secret interception systems of German intelligences. [12]
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence officer and a spy for the Soviet Union. In 1963, he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring that had divulged British secrets to the Soviets during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been the most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was an intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat. He is best known for serving as the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), during World War II. He is regarded as the founding father of the CIA, and a statue of him stands in the lobby of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.
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Sir William Samuel Stephenson was a Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman and spymaster who served as the senior representative of the British Security Coordination (BSC) for the western allies during World War II. He is best known by his wartime intelligence code name, Intrepid. Many people consider him to be one of the real-life inspirations for James Bond. Ian Fleming himself once wrote, "James Bond is a highly romanticised version of a true spy. The real thing is... William Stephenson."
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There is a long history of close cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom intelligence services; see Clandestine HUMINT and Covert Action for World War II and subsequent relationships. There are permanent liaison officers of each country in major intelligence agencies of the other, such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Secret Intelligence Service ("MI6"), FBI and the Security Service (MI5), and National Security Agency (NSA) and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). From 1943 to 2017, the Open Source Enterprise, a division of the CIA, was run out of Caversham Park in Reading, Berkshire. American officials worked closely with their British counterparts to monitor foreign TV and radio broadcasts, as well as online information.
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The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligence on foreign nationals in support of its Five Eyes partners. SIS is one of the British intelligence agencies and the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service ("C") is directly accountable to the Foreign Secretary.
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Millard Preston Goodfellow, who often went by the name "Preston Goodfellow," was an American soldier, spy, diplomat, journalist, war correspondent, and newspaper publisher. A veteran of World War I, Goodfellow became a leading figure at the Office of the Coordinator of Information and the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
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