William Stephenson was one of Winnipeg’s most illustrious exports: knighted by the King, he became the first non-American to receive the presidential Medal of Merit and was later admitted to the Order of Canada. Fellow Winnipeger Bill Macdonald, a teacher and journalist, sets out to correct the version of Stephenson’s Canadian roots offered up in Stephenson’s best-selling A Man Called Intrepid. Macdonald’s account is longish, at times repetitive, but passionately researched: he offers up 35 pages of endnotes and bibliography and 41 photographs.

Stephenson is the hub of the first half of the book, with subsequent chapters serving as spokes. There are profiles and recollections of some of his staff, including many Canadians, in the New York-based British Security Coordination (BSC). The book, like Stephenson’s career, helps situate Canada between Britain and the United States. Stephenson’s life and contribution to the war effort as the master spy figure – later linked to his friend Ian Fleming’s James Bond – were shrouded in secrecy.

Adopted by Icelandic parents, Stephenson kept hidden even innocuous personal facts such as his father’s occupation and his own level of schooling. Almost everything on his British marriage certificate was false or inaccurate. He had a photographic memory and was a decorated First World War pilot and prisoner. We now know, thanks to Macdonald, that he had but elementary schooling and left Canada as a failed can-opener salesman fleeing creditors. He landed in London where he was soon hailed a brilliant scientist (for his process that transmitted photographs by wireless) and he went on to become an enterprising millionaire.

He often met with Churchill and Roosevelt and told one of his employees that Roosevelt astoundingly ignored warnings of the impending assault on Pearl Harbor. Alas, the BSC’s files were liquidated. Was Stephenson a charlatan as historian J.L. Granatstein has suggested? After an enigmatic career in espionage, he appears to have become something of an attention-seeker in retirement. Spy buffs will enjoy this book.