True Patriot Love - [Sneak Peek] Camp X： Canada’s Secret Spy School & The Real James Bond ｜ ft. Robbie Cressman

During the Second World War, hidden along the shores of Lake Ontario, a top-secret training facility helped shape some of the most daring intelligence operations of the war. Known as Camp X, it was Canada s answer to the world of espionage, sabotage, and covert communication. Agents were trained there in everything from code-breaking and intelligence gathering to survival behind enemy lines. Decades later, Camp X remains one of Canada s most fascinating and mysterious chapters in history. Today, we re joined by Rob Cressman, historian and expert on Camp X to separate the fact from the fiction, explore the camp s lasting legacy, and uncover the stories of the men and women who trained in secrecy to help win a global war.

00:00:00.000 During the Second World War, hidden along the shores of Lake Ontario, a top-secret training

00:00:05.140 facility helped shape some of the most daring intelligence operations of the war.

00:00:10.380 Known as Camp X, it was Canada's answer to the world of espionage, sabotage, covert communication

00:00:16.020 and special operations. Agents were trained there in everything from code-breaking and

00:00:21.260 intelligence gathering to survival behind enemy lines. Decades later, Camp X remains one of the

00:00:26.700 most fascinating and mysterious chapters in canadian history today we're joined by rob

00:00:31.800 cressman historian and expert on camp x to separate the fact from the fiction explore the

00:00:37.720 camp's lasting legacy and uncover the stories of the men and women who trained in secrecy

00:00:43.560 to help win a global war

00:00:45.720 all right well uh robbie thanks so much for joining us this is so cool for me yeah uh as

00:00:55.160 mentioned i kind of teed you up in the intro there but uh as i take a look at and thank you

00:01:00.520 very much for these uh here's just a sample of the books i think that we're going to get out of

00:01:05.720 the crestman camp uh this first one by the way very cool tracking the little giant killer this

00:01:12.060 is really a story that we're going to be talking about today in many ways we're going to hear this

00:01:16.760 name bill underwood and his legacy of combat uh training your updated version inspired by that

00:01:23.900 discrete fighting i'll recommend that you reach out and i'll put the link in the description for

00:01:28.380 these and what we're going to be talking about today of course is camp x a little bit about you

00:01:36.940 first of all robbie how do you end up uh the guy who knows all about this i mean i know what you do

00:01:43.740 for a living but are you even allowed to share that yes i am it's some of what i do has been

00:01:48.560 published and so i can to some degree but uh but definitely mike wrote what's really come about is

00:01:54.860 it's been an unintended path to discovery of discovery for me i started off in short as a

00:02:01.000 silly civilian which i still still am but i've been a supporter to the special and black ops

00:02:05.940 communities within our allied and countries five seven and nine eyes and beyond but essentially 0.86

00:02:11.920 as a civilian had a love for martial arts but i was always a patriotic guy and even back in the

00:02:18.080 80s and 90s it kind of bothered me with respect like why do i have to go to china japan korea

00:02:23.040 to learn how to fight i knew our canadian military history was exemplary so a question

00:02:27.600 came to me essentially well you know did our canadian boys have ever i want to learn some

00:02:31.600 canadian did our canadian guys ever create a canadian fighting system i want to at least

00:02:35.440 learn something western and so i started to do the research found nothing until i came across

00:02:40.080 the legacy of bill underwood when everything essentially opened up and in short i discovered

00:02:45.760 that Canada not only has a martial art, if you will,

00:02:49.480 although it's birthed in the military special operations perspective,

00:02:52.900 it's not civilian, okay, or wasn't birthed civilian,

00:02:55.920 but essentially we have a grandfather of fighting,

00:02:58.280 and it was so effective, man,

00:02:59.980 that it was actually classified after World War II.

00:03:02.600 That's why a lot of stuff was locked down.

00:03:04.380 Now, he was involved publicly after World War II,

00:03:06.340 but his real accomplishments were actually deemed to be illegal

00:03:09.580 to teach outside declared war because it was that vicious and violent.

00:03:12.600 So I ended up reviving Bill Underwood's legacy.

00:03:15.760 Okay, and his original combato systems, which were taught during the war.

00:03:19.940 Underwood, Bill Underwood, British-born Bill Underwood, emigrated to Canada,

00:03:23.360 created the first fighting system for a Canadian military called combato.

00:03:26.960 And then after the war, he started to get asked by law enforcement and government,

00:03:30.820 like, hey, Bill, you were teaching our soldiers how to use their hands and so forth.

00:03:35.100 Can you teach our police officers combato?

00:03:37.200 And Bill was like, no, I can't do that.

00:03:39.160 Combato is designed to kill everything that moved.

00:03:40.960 Well, Bill, can you modify it?

00:03:42.500 can you modify a fighting system to be a little more defensive and subject control oriented and

00:03:47.300 he developed the defendo system which essentially became the template for policing defensive tactics

00:03:52.500 not only in canada but many places in the states so i ended up basically being the individual that

00:03:57.140 revived bill underwood's legacy and there was not a single reference to him on the world wide web in

00:04:02.020 the 90s everything that's there today is because of the research i was doing okay and that essentially

00:04:06.900 opened doors as i started to research the fact that huh underwood these vets would talk about

00:04:11.300 but the fact that Underwood was a secret instructor at this super top classified training facility called Camp X.

00:04:18.020 Like James Bond was born. I'm like, what? Bond was born out of this camp in Canada.

00:04:21.680 And I ended up connecting with the world expert on Camp X who verified that, yes, we believe Underwood was involved.

00:04:28.240 And I then spent a connected 20 years in the Camp X legacy.

00:04:31.960 And when the classified community, let's just say it's a, you know, sometimes a horrible blanket term,

00:04:36.380 But the sensitive communities, as I was doing research, found out that I had a lot of the original stuff, let's say, from the tradecraft from the Camp X era.

00:04:45.160 I started to get asked, listen, would you show our intelligence agents today what we were doing at Camp X?

00:04:50.240 Will you show our soldiers?

00:04:51.640 Show our soldiers.

00:04:52.920 So they wanted you to go back to this legacy.

00:04:56.400 Yeah, it was so mysterious for them.

00:04:58.460 That's correct.

00:04:58.800 On Bill Underwood.

00:04:59.380 The whole Bill Underwood and Camp X legacy was so mysterious.

00:05:03.160 And so our modern agencies, you know, really didn't have any idea about,

00:05:07.780 they knew what was there but didn't know what was going on,

00:05:09.580 even up to the levels of our Joint Task Force 2 or JTF2, our SEAL Team 6.

00:05:13.980 They knew about CAMPEX but didn't really know what was going on there.

00:05:17.260 And there's reasons.

00:05:18.140 I was hinting at it in an earlier discussion.

00:05:19.980 There's a reason.

00:05:20.580 We know why.

00:05:21.700 Now, I very much believe why, and I've released this in this book,

00:05:25.240 but we know why now they've kept that legacy suppressed.

00:05:28.380 But I was originally asked, starting back in the early 2000s,

00:05:31.280 say listen we'd love to see some of this what was going on and so times change though and as in

00:05:36.720 essence as they asked me to problem solves and giving them ways to fight with their hands okay

00:05:41.520 that we're much really more applicable to special operations and not the ring for mma so in other

00:05:46.000 words sports right this is a scenario where you're up close absolutely there's been a change there's

00:05:51.680 been a change of temperature with your so show us what they're doing then yeah you can't really fit

00:05:57.760 that the old model over today's uh over today's environment so they said listen robbie can you

00:06:03.200 develop something and that was was for me which was birthed in the early 2000s was i went about

00:06:08.480 trying to develop a method that really taking taking the mindset and the the point and purpose

00:06:14.240 of what was going on at camp x and how to develop an application for it in a modern environment and

00:06:18.960 in essence i can wrap it up with one thing the difference between your standard martial arts

00:06:23.200 sports mixed martial arts kind of platform than what our guys and girls need today at a special

00:06:28.380 ops level or a black ops level is this the world war ii context was essentially they had to take

00:06:34.080 a civilian it was a civilian okay okay let's say for example to train them as a spy maybe they

00:06:39.160 needed a forensic accountant to be dropped into an automotive factory in france sneak him in there

00:06:44.000 and he'll report back on what the nazis were we're doing with this factory now okay how do you take

00:06:48.940 an accountant who a horrible overstatement or rather blanket statement but you know who's got

00:06:53.940 a tape between his glasses and a calculator in his pocket all his life he's never fought

00:06:58.180 how do you take an accountant Mike teach him how to be able to defend himself and win a bar fight

00:07:02.460 and by the way you've got hours to do it welcome to Camp X and so I took that mindset of short

00:07:07.660 duration high retention training developed a whole new method based on much more modern physiology

00:07:12.260 and for 20 years I've been out running around our allied special ops communities within tier one

00:07:17.980 special forces within government intelligence agencies and policing special operations units

00:07:22.480 uh and and teaching training method yeah wow okay let's go back to the original method and and uh

00:07:28.840 uh bill underwood's uh first sorry under underwood did i say that right underwood yeah bill underwood

00:07:33.680 yeah let's go back to his uh original uh training and teachings which fascinated you so much in the

00:07:39.760 first place combato combato that's correct combato yeah so tell me about this what what made this

00:07:45.840 unique at a time in world war ii where spies needed to be trained was it the fast the ability

00:07:51.760 to train them fast was it the like what how was this born to be his thing well in essence i mean

00:07:58.700 underwood's story is absolutely a fascinating one i mean a childhood friend of harry houdini

00:08:03.240 buffalo bill coley charlie chaplin i mean again that's why i wrote a book on it it's insane

00:08:08.480 the history is absolutely incredible um but in essence underwood was a part of a day and he was

00:08:13.560 a leading uh you know let's say on the leading edge of it in many ways he was really the first

00:08:18.320 grandfather in north america he really gave the americans much of their start at the beginning of

00:08:23.200 in unarmed fighting the beginning of the war but it was an era when the east was truly meeting the

00:08:27.900 west for the first time so you had these judoka judoka's jiu-jitsu you know masters that were

00:08:32.980 coming for the first time to British shores or European shores and they were kind of clashing

00:08:37.540 and really in a very I guess really it's a very practical story in a way they really needed to

00:08:44.600 yes come up with an ability to give guys and it was really more the boys back then and then the

00:08:50.160 ladies in a lot of ways but give them a short duration high retention skill set you can't train

00:08:55.460 sports and even MMA type skills you can't learn that in a short time you can't learn how to 1.00

00:09:00.180 punch and kick in a short period of time you would assume yeah yeah you can't and I can tell

00:09:04.320 that that's what i do for a living and for a long time and internationally at that but that being

00:09:08.800 said essentially what underwood and some of the guys of his time were developing was a much more

00:09:13.520 linear direct and aggressive approach to jujitsu and judo so it was more biomechanical in nature

00:09:19.440 still uh by way of biomechanics but it was more direct it was linear and to the point

00:09:24.880 okay and so it could be learned and that's why sometimes it was called dirty judo okay

00:09:29.440 it came down to that but all right underwood really made it western and whereas in the east

00:09:33.680 they would turn it into much more of a philosophy and a way of life, what we call warrior culture.

00:09:38.960 Boys back in Underwood's day would just call it a trick. Hey, let me show you a trick. If somebody

00:09:42.720 grabs you here, let me show you how to contend with that. And that's a trick to deal with that.

00:09:46.640 So it kept it simple and linear. But what Underwood did was he even went further and was still trying

00:09:51.840 to figure out how he did it and what he did. But he developed a system of unarmed fighting. And this

00:09:58.240 is not, you know, I know what I'm talking about.

00:10:01.620 I've been tested under very high levels.

True Patriot Love - June 25, 2026

[Sneak Peek] Camp X： Canada’s Secret Spy School & The Real James Bond ｜ ft. Robbie Cressman

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