[5][6] As mounted units, Guides Companies were tasked to survey their respective regions as well as to collect information of potential military intelligence value.

This was due to the fact that there was no establishment for intelligence units in the British divisional structure on which the Canadian Expeditionary Force was based.

Following the end of World War I, units of the Corps of Guides were restructured as Cyclists and a company assigned to each Military District.

As a result, the Canadian Army had no officers or men trained in "field intelligence" at the beginning of World War II.

The need to train officers and men without wartime experience was recognized quickly after the end of World War II and militia intelligence companies were formed across Canada.

[8] 4th Divisional Cyclist Company of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was organized in Toronto in March 1916 under the command of Captain G. L. Berkley, with a strength of 8 officers and 191 other ranks.

They deployed from Halifax aboard HMT Olympic 1 May 1916, arriving in England 6 May, and were attached to Canadian Reserve Cyclist Company near Swindon at Chisledon Camp.

[10] The Canadian Virtual War Memorial lists six fallen soldiers as members either of "2 Intelligence Company", or "2 Field Security Sec.".

After using a metal file smuggled to him in a loaf of bread to saw his way out of his cell and escape,[17] he returned to Britain, briefing Canadian units on conditions in German-occupied France.

[19] Buchenwald survivors said Pickersgill continued to try to keep his fellow captives' spirits up to the very end, telling bad jokes and encouraging them to march in step like soldiers.

He was posthumously awarded the Cross of the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (France) in a ceremony on 12 December 1950 at the French embassy in Ottawa, Ontario.

John Kenneth Macalister (code name: Valentin, alias: Jean Charles Mauinier[citation needed]) was born July 19, 1914, in Guelph, Ontario.

[24] He turned down a position teaching law at the University of Toronto in order to serve as an Intelligence Officer, responding to the faculty with only, "Sorry.

Macalister steadfastly refused to reveal his security checks to the Germans who had his codes and wished to send misleading messages back to the SOE's London headquarters.

He was killed in action on Operation Totalize during the push to Falaise,[38] and was buried at Bretteville-Sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery, Calvados, France.

[42] Staff Sergeant James Hillary Struthers was one of the few Canadian Intelligence Corps personnel to serve in the Korean War.

Their tasks included Counter Intelligence and Force Protection through screening of civilian labourers, refugee control, and interrogations; activities now known as HUMINT.

2 Intelligence Company personnel served with various formations and units, including at ISAF Joint Command (IJC), Information Dominance Centre (IDC) Kabul, Regional Command South, Task Force Kandahar HQ, Battle Group, Canadian Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams (OMLTs), National Support Element and the All Source Intelligence Centre.

Unit member citations from the war include a Mention in Dispatches October 2, 2007,[44] and a Meritorious Service Medal awarded June 20, 2012.

Prior to her appointment as Honorary Lieutenant-Colonel of the 25 Field Ambulance in 1992, H LCol Doris Guyatt P.h.D., CD, served with 2 Intelligence Company for seventeen years from 1958 to 1975 and then from 1975 for 1992 as a Military Aide de Camp to five Lieutenant Governors of Ontario.

Weeks present to sign, Major Sandra L. Bullock became the first female commanding officer of an intelligence unit in Canada.

[57] Founded by Sir William Stephenson (more popularly known by his codename 'The Man Called Intrepid'),[58] Camp X operated from 1941 to 1946 as a vital co-operative training ground for agents in Canadian, British and American service, who were inserted deep in Nazi-occupied Europe.

[60] Agents were not protected by the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War and many were captured, tortured, and executed by hostile forces.

It is surrounded by four flags: that of Bermuda (where Sir William Stephenson lived for many decades) and those of wartime Allies the United States, Canada and Britain.

Camp X was also the site of Hydra, a sophisticated top-secret communications relay station that facilitated the transmission of Allied sensitive and secret information during the war, and continued to operate until 1969.

[63] Built and run by Canadian electrical engineer Benjamin de Forest Bayly, it was considered one of the world's most advanced communications centres at that time.

In the fall of 1945, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police delivered to Camp X one of its most informative visitors, Igor Gouzenko, a Russian embassy cypher-clerk who defected to Canada.

MacAlister and Pickersgill were members of 2 Intelligence Company who were executed in the Buchenwald concentration camp by the German Gestapo, after being parachuted into France for the SOE prior to D-Day.

1997) a veteran and award-winning poet, had known Macalister as a student, and was chiefly responsible for the creation of the Pickersgill-Macalister Memorial Garden on the west side of Soldiers' Tower.

He presented the gun to Major Wilford C. Wheeler, Commanding Officer of 2 Intelligence Company at the unit's Christmas Ball, December 16, 1966, at which time it was fired.