bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 23–25
“They Lock Up Their Wastepaper Baskets” read the headline of the February 28, 1950, edition of The Standard. The article included a photograph of a tall, lanky man and described his job at the Joint Intelligence Bureau as supplementing “the intelligence on foreign military power which the intelligence directorates of the armed services gather.” It added that foreign intelligence was principally gathered by the Department of External Affairs. This intelligence, the article went on, “is the knowledge on which cabinet decisions affecting our foreign relations are based.”
The Standard article is a remarkable footnote to the early life of Canada’s foreign intelligence establishment given the reluctance at the time (and for decades thereafter) of the government to reveal its intelligence involvement. The lanky gentleman was also, in fact, one of the architects of Canadian foreign intelligence: History Professor George Glazebrook of the University of Toronto.
When George Glazebrook died in 1989, his obituary in The Globe and Mail quoted a friend’s depiction of him as a “spook,” a description with which Glazebrook would have been uncomfortable. He would have presented his work as involving national security, downplaying the sensational and the dramatic. However, despite any possible disclaimers about his intelligence involvement, the fact remains that Glazebrook spent much of his government career at the core of Canadian foreign intelligence efforts, an early architect of what we know today.
Glazebrook was one of a number of respected academics that joined the Department of External Affairs (DEA) during the dramatic expansion which came with World War II. With the war, External Affairs sought to attract the best and the brightest to help manage the significant international role Canada was about to assume. These individuals, (Lester Pearson, Norman Robertson, Glazebrook and Hume Wrong among others), became the partners in Canada’s diplomatic “Golden Age”.
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On Christmas Eve 1941, Undersecretary of State N.A. Robertson wrote the President of the University of Toronto requesting that the university release Glazebrook “for important work…in Ottawa.” He reported for work the following week. Glazebrook was already a well-known academic achiever: he had written the definite Canadian book on the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and the first edition of his seminal book, A History of Canada’s External Relations, was completed and would be published in 1942.
Tall, angular and a pipe-smoker, Glazebrook was a shy, school-masterish man with a dry sense of humour. He had a penchant for the works of Dashiell Hammett, creator of the 1930s private detective, Sam Spade, and could quote at length from the dialogue of Spade in the many detective novels. He was a cultivated man, erudite and well-spoken, but —as the expression goes — did not suffer fools easily. He had high intellectual expectations of people involved in national security work and was disdainful of what he viewed as lesser minds leading Canadian military intelligence. This trait caused repeated grief in his relations with the intelligence chiefs at National Defence who often did not accept his intellectual arguments.
Glazebrook reported to External at the beginning of 1942. Initially he worked for several months under Lester B. Pearson, who headed the Commonwealth and European Division. He recalled Pearson as having good knowledge of foreign intelligence, a subsidiary responsibility of the division. Pearson, Tommy Stone, and Glazebrook formed the early wartime foreign intelligence team, working closely with the Undersecretary. Tommy Stone, a childhood friend of Pearson, had joined the diplomatic service in 1927 only to leave after marrying an American Southern heiress. With the war, he returned to the fold and would end up as Ambassador to The Netherlands.
Over the next several years there would be a small number of others who contributed significantly to intelligence functions. One was Herbert Norman who ran the Special Intelligence Section (a highly secret assessment unit attached to the Examination Unit, Canada’s wartime signals intelligence organization). Norman, as is well-known, became a victim of McCarthyism. American allegations of communist sympathies drove him to suicide in 1956.
By the spring of 1942 Pearson was posted to Washington, with Stone taking over management of intelligence activities. By 1943, in turn, Stone was becoming increasingly engaged in psychological warfare, leaving Glazebrook to carry on the intelligence work.
The foreign intelligence function at DEA was always small, and didn’t exist as a separate identifiable entity until 1950.
The template for wartime foreign intelligence activity was for DEA, perennially short of qualified staff, to set policy and taskings while encouraging others to supply the resources to carry out the tasks. For the most part, the work was done by the Department of National Defence, but other organizations also were involved, including Censorship and Transport.
Only three months after starting at DEA, in March 1942, Glazebrook already showed real acumen for intelligence work. He persuaded senior ranks at DEA that valuable foreign intelligence could be gleaned from a centralized and coordinated approach to censorship activities, as opposed to the existing haphazard activities carried out at POW camps. His hypothesis was that significant information about the enemy could be obtained from the systemic analysis of economic, health and social information referred to innocently in correspondence to German POWs in Canada, and that censorship activities should not be limited to preventing secret messages reaching the POWs. Norman Robertson, then Undersecretary, wrote to the Prime Minister about the idea and within two months an Order-in-Council removed censorship from National Defence and gave the task to the National War Service Department, with guidance and some analysis coming from DEA.
Stone and Glazebrook also provided oversight of the Examination Unit, Canada’s wartime signals intelligence (SIGINT) unit. They conducted liaison with British Security Coordination, the British secret intelligence unit in New York. That included issues pertaining to Camp X (a British intelligence training establishment in southern Ontario), intelligence exchanges, inter-allied intelligence communication, and the identification of Canadian residents for secondment to the Special Operations Executive (the wartime covert operations wing of British intelligence). Foreign intelligence in Canada was already viewed as the domain of External Affairs.
A rather peculiar episode took place involving Glazebrook at the end of World War II. Canada’s wartime signals intelligence contribution, through the Examination Unit, had been small but important considering the resources of the country and its lack of previous experience in the field. By war’s end the Examination Unit supported various Allied SIGINT activities, but had sole responsibility for signals intelligence collection directed against Vichy France, as well as the Free French.
With the war coming to an end, DEA favoured the closure of the Examination Unit. Glazebrook strongly supported this position for reasons which are not entirely clear but which were presented as austerity measures. Both the British and the Americans were radically downsizing their own SIGINT activities but had no plans to end these activities altogether. The British informed Canada that a scaled down version of the Examination Unit would be inadequate for the tasks still at hand. For its part, External Affairs recognized that the status quo was financially untenable. In addition, Hume Wrong, newly returned to Ottawa from Washington, and in charge of the daily running of the department, did not share the perception of the importance of foreign intelligence which prevailed within DEA. He may well have influenced the debate.
National Defence begged to differ: it vehemently opposed the closure of the Examination Unit, making a case for postwar responsibility falling within the realm of DEA. It was only a DND threat to take over the signals intelligence function themselves which led to DEA reversing its stand in support of retention of the Examination Unit. Postwar intelligence planning already had begun in 1943 when the outcome of the war appeared increasingly certain. By the end of the war there were two postwar intelligence models in play for Canada: National Defence supported a format which was extensive and somewhat American in form and orientation. DEA came to support a British proposal for a smaller Canadian foreign intelligence structure interconnected with organizations also to be established in Great Britain and the other Dominions.
In the event, DEA’s vision ultimately won out and Glazebrook was at the centre of the policy development for the new Canadian intelligence architecture. A Canadian Joint Intelligence Committee (CJIC) was ultimately agreed upon, with Glazebrook assuming the chairmanship at its first meeting on June 21, 1946. The CJIC was located at National Defence and included representatives of all Canadian intelligence bodies, but was always directed by an officer from DEA. A Canadian Joint Intelligence Bureau (CJIB), the operational side of intelligence, was formed, somewhat belatedly, at the beginning of 1947 with a mandate for “the collection, collation, study, and dissemination of certain types of intelligence.” It also was housed with National Defence.
In the meantime, at the end of 1946 and with Canada’s postwar intelligence architecture in place, Glazebrook severed his relationship with DEA, and the chairmanship of the CJIC. He returned to the University of Toronto to resume his first love, teaching history. Nonetheless, he was continuously called back to Ottawa to clear up intelligence matters. These repeated visits to Ottawa eventually cost him a lucrative fellowship, although by this time he also appeared to have lost his zest for teaching.
While Glazebrook was in Toronto, External Affairs and National Defence proved unable to place the newly formed CJIB on a firm footing. After a year of squabbling DEA had had enough and approached Glazebrook in the fall of 1948 about assuming the Directorship of the CJIB, which was subservient to the CJIC. Glazebrook refused to join National Defence, the nominal home of the CJIB, and negotiated a return to DEA with a secondment from there to National Defence (with the option of returning to DEA). Whether he had an ulterior motive in being in the DEA fold is unknown. Likely, it reflected his view of the military which had grown in the course of the war.
The offer to Glazebrook was made in the middle of the academic year. To get Glazebrook back to Ottawa, the Minister of National Defence, B. Claxton, (then briefly the Acting Secretary of State for External Affairs), wrote to the president of the university. He requested Glazebrook’s release “on grounds of emergency,” adding his own plea in his capacity as the Minister of National Defence.
Glazebrook assumed the directorship of CJIB in January 1949. He remained there for exactly one year before returning to External Affairs as head of the intelligence segment of the Defence Liaison Division (and concomitant chairmanship of the CJIC). By the summer of 1950 the security and intelligence function had received its own designation with the creation of Defence Liaison 2 (DL2) (and with it, the first formal acknowledgment of a foreign intelligence function in the department). Glazebrook was its first director.
He most likely remained in that position until 1953 when he was posted to the Embassy in Washington. Upon his return to Ottawa in 1956, and in light of his expertise on the history of Canadian foreign relations, he was appointed director of the Historical Research and Reports Division (later the Historical Division), with concurrent directorship for the Commonwealth Division the following year. Glazebrook was the obvious choice as the department’s historian at a time when there was considerable agitation to launch the Documents on Canadian External Relations series.
In 1960 Glazebrook moved from the Commonwealth Division to the Assistant Undersecretary level until his retirement in August 1963. He returned to teach at the University of Toronto until a second retirement in 1967. He died in 1989 at the age of 89.
George Glazebrook was part of a different era. This was a time in Canada’s diplomatic history when a merging of academia, diplomacy, and political leadership was possible and where individuals could move relatively easily between these different realms. Glazebrook may have been exceptional but his case was not unique. He entered DEA, as did others, with strong credentials and a proven track record preceding his career in diplomacy (and in his case, intelligence). His remarkable career in public service reflected what was possible when a fluid and broad-based meritocracy prevailed, a meritocracy that we might well envy today.
Kurt Jensen is a retired Foreign Service officer who concluded his career as Deputy Director for Foreign Intelligence. He is now an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University where he teaches courses on intelligence. His recent book, Cautious Beginnings, tells the early history of Canadian foreign intelligence involvement.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 23–25. Read the rest of this issue →
