Camp X was the one of the primary spy training centres for the Allies and it has been widely accepted as the precursor to the OSS and CIA yet it is relatively unknown outside Canada and is heavily downplayed in American and British history books if it is mentioned at all. Why is it so heavily downplayed?
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Even in Canada it’s not super well-known, probably because of the successor organization’s postwar reputation. Significant numbers of American university students came to Canada in the late 60s and early 70s, and lots of them stayed to hold teaching positions in Canadian universities. Most of them had entirely negative views of the US government in general and the CIA in particular, and those views naturally were influential with the students they taught in their turn.
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There is truth to that but in high school the book “A man called intrepid” was required reading in the 1980s for our course curriculum it was a pretty good read even for a teenager back then even if we didn’t understand most of it.
That’s when learned about camp X
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It wasn’t in our curriculum in the mid-70s, but the TV mini series was certainly popular later in the decade. But by the same token, so were the McKenna hatchet-job TV miniseries in the 90s that went out of its way to paint Canadians as war criminals and military incompetents. TV presentations of Canadian history don’t seem to have quite the same lasting power as British or US TV for their respective histories.
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The sad part of Canadian TV is they do not get the big budgets american studios get and it shows unfortunately. We have great acting talent but when it comes to budgets the money just ain’t there.
Add to that the Canadian Film Board and the CBC really focussed on retelling the stories through docu-dramas and biographical information which was ok but really really boring.
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