bout de papier, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1994) — Summer 1994 // Été 1994, pp. 45–47
BEST-KEPT SECRET (CANADIAN
INTELLIGENCE IN THE SECOND WORLD
WAR) by John Bryden, M.P. Lester
Publishing, 390 pages, $28.95.
Reviewed by John Starnes
This seems just another book about Canada’s secret wartime activities and exploits. It is much more than that. It is a skillfully researched, well-constructed, clearly-presented account of Canada’s successful entry in wartime into the highly secret, arcane business of communications intelligence. It is a valuable complement to the numerous books written about British and American efforts in this field and to the few which have sought to deal with similar Canadian activities. It is the first such book I have read which comes even close to disclosing in a comprehensive way some of the facts about the complicated, interesting story of Canada’s Second World War contributions to the use of information derived from the interception and deciphering of the military, espionage and diplomatic
ELMINC communications of our enemies and our friends.
The author skillfully illustrates, through quotations from documentation released under the Access to Information Act, and the unpublished version of the Mackenzie King diaries, the extent to which the Department of National Defence, and subsequently the Department of External Affairs, became heavily involved and very proficient in this unusual activity. This book also demonstrates the vital complementary role played by Canadian postal and telegraph censorship in this work.
I suspect the lengthy and deep involvement in this highly secret work of Pearson, Robertson, Pope, Wrong, Heeney, Norman, Stone, Menzies, Glazebrook, Riddell, Crean and Keenleyside, to mention only a few, may come as a surprise to some who made their careers in the foreign service, and perhaps even to the many officers who had occasion to use the end-products of Canada’s communications intelligence activities. There were foreign service officers who found the whole business distasteful and a few who, perhaps because of this, sometimes even tended to disbelieve the evidence in the decrypted messages they were shown!
It is unfortunate that a number of biographies and books about Pearson, Robertson and some of their contemporaries, not to mention numerous learned books about Canadian wartime and post-war foreign policies, were unable to take more account of the important, sometimes crucial role, which communications intelligence activities played in shaping the careers of these men and the policies they formulated. In part this appears to have been because much of the top secret documentation was still tightly held in Canada and elsewhere, and partly because such documentation as was already public may not have been transparently relevant.
Despite continued restrictions on the release of documentation, much has been made public. For example, in October, 1990 I received under the Access to Information Act a slightly expurgated version of the top secret history of the Communications Branch of the National Research Council, written by Kevin O’Neill, a former director (about 900 pages), together with an excellent history of the Examination Unit prepared by G. de B. Robinson in July, 1945, who acted as its director (about 200 pages). Anyone reading these documents could not fail to gain a good idea of the relevance of communications intelligence to the conduct of Canada’s foreign relations.
It required a determined, skilled researcher such as Bryden to pull it all together and to make the important connections between the officials and politicians concerned in National Defence and External Affairs and elsewhere. Indeed, it is extraordinary that Bryden, who knew none of the actors, has comment concerns
Pearson’s career and his achievements in the light of his intimate knowledge of secret intelligence and the uses to which it may have been put. Successfully understood the texture and the importance of the subtle, often complicated, relationships between them. In doing this he also has demonstrated a remarkable ability to re-create accurately events which took place so many years ago.
Where the classified records released to Bryden in Ottawa, Washington, London and Paris created tantalizing gaps in the story, he sought to fill these by using the very techniques which are the mark of a good cryptographer. He resisted, with a few regrettable exceptions, the temptation to indulge in speculation with the result that he has produced a well-balanced, moderate historical account of a fascinating period in Canada’s secret intelligence gathering activities. I am in a good position to judge the accuracy and the value of the book since in 1946 I became Pearson’s personal assistant for a year and, in the late 1950’s for several years, I was the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, head of Defence Liaison (2) Division in External Affairs and, Director of Communications Security. On page 311, Bryden writes, “ … despite the misleading term “security” in the title, [the job] actually involved overall supervision of signals intelligence.” Ten years later I became the first civilian director-general of the RCMP security service (1970 to 1973).
Particularly interesting is the light Bryden sheds on the degree to which senior politicians were knowledgeable about Canada’s communications intelligence activities, and beneficiaries of the political and other information derived from them. period about which Bryden writes, the most involved prime minister was Pearson, but King, St. Laurent and Diefenbaker also were privy to the secrets involved, as were numerous other cabinet ministers over many years. Some ministers objected to the necessarily strict security precautions, attempting unsuccessfully to argue that as ministers of the crown they should be exempt from the comprehensive oaths of secrecy involved. Alas, the book was published immediately before the new Liberal government abolished the Cabinet Committee on Security and Intelligence which was chaired by the prime minister, thereby rendering out-of-date many of Bryden’s observations about government intelligence structures, e.g. the last chapter entitled “Still in the Game.”
One of Bryden’s more interesting comments concerns Pearson’s career and his achievements in the light of his intimate knowledge of secret intelligence and the uses to which it may have been put. He writes, “. … [Pearson] gained great respect for Canada — and the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize — by urging the intervention of Canadian-led United Nations troops during the Suez Crisis. How different his diplomacy seems, however, when it is assessed against the fact that Defence Liaison Two (sic) was then feeding him decrypts from Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states. The risks are somewhat lessened when, as Colonel Murray [one of the founders of Canada’s military communications intelligence effort] had observed more than a decade earlier, ’you have a short, straight road into the opponent’s mind’!”
The book deals with Canada’s relations with Vichy France and the Free French and the role Canada’s efforts to read Free French communications traffic may have played in decisions taken at the time by the Canadian, British and United States governments.
Bryden makes a perceptive comment on page 330 dealing with the continuing requirements in Canada for overt and covert intelligence-gathering and counter-espionage. He writes, “… Sophisticated intelligence-gathering is the province of larger, wealthy nations, not small ones. An independent Quebec would be the inevitable victim of the vast resources of its English-speaking neighbors rather than, as now, their beneficiary. It is something to think about.” I wonder whether the present leaders of the PQ or the BQ are sufficiently aware of these resources or, even if they are, to have considered them important enough to worry about in political and other terms?
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1994) — Summer 1994 // Été 1994, pp. 45–47. Read the rest of this issue →
