It was 1961, and Raymond Robert was excited about his first posting to Pakistan as Third Secretary, in the Department of External Affairs (DEA). Raymond was a young lawyer, with a D.Phil from Oxford. Around the same time, Jim Elliott was also posted there as Third Secretary on the Trade side.
Raymond was gay. He developed a relationship with a locally engaged Pakistani man, Anwar, who shared his residence as a cook. When the High Commission doctor reported suspicions of their relationship to High Commissioner Chris Eberts, Eberts called the diplomatic staff to an early morning meeting at his residence. According to Elliott, now retired, Eberts queried them about any signs that Robert may be gay. Soon after, Eberts ordered Foreign Service Officer George Hampson to tell Robert he was being recalled to Ottawa to take up a new assignment.
When Robert got back to Ottawa, he was informed by RCMP and DEA’s security division DL2 (Defence Liaison 2) that he was being fired because he was gay.
Shortly after his firing on March 2, 1963, Robert, devasted, shot himself at the family cottage in Gatineau. He left a note for his family asking them to transfer $5000 to DEA to enable Anwar to travel to Mecca for the Hajj. Newly arrived Third Secretary Dick Seaborn was tasked with this. In a conversation with me earlier this year, Seaborn vividly recalled the effort he put into this task, and the joy of Anwar and his family in making the pilgrimage. Seaborn had no knowledge of the circumstances of Robert’s tragic death until I told him.
Some years later, when Seaborn was in Washington, DC as cultural attaché, he and his wife were at a reception hosted by the Embassy following a concert by the Montreal Symphony. Seaborn’s wife was approached by an elderly Montreal woman who identified herself as Raymond Robert’s mother and she expressed the deep gratitude of his family for the respect and kindness Seaborn showed in honouring Raymond’s final wishes.
Raymond Robert was just one of the countless victims of what is now known as the LGBT Purge. The Purge struck with a particular vengeance in the DEA from 1959 to 1962, and continued far beyond that until at least the late 1970s. The toll it took on the Department was devastating. While we will never know the exact numbers, the head of DL2 during the height of the Purge, John Starnes, confirmed in later interviews that some 70 people were targeted during his tenure. Many more quietly resigned when confronted by RCMP security service officials with evidence of their homosexuality.
Former Assistant Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs (USSEA) John Holmes (and likely as well Douglas LePan), Ambassador David Johnson, and many other dedicated, talented gay Foreign Service Officers were fired, their knowledge and experience lost with them. John Watkins, former Ambassador and Assistant USSEA, was after retirement interrogated over many days by RCMP officers before dying of a heart attack in a Montreal hotel room during “intense probing.” For those at the top, close to USSEA Norman Robertson and to Lester Pearson, other posts were found. But the rest, like Robert, were given the choice of resignation or dismissal … when homosexuality was a criminal offence, and a subject of shame with family and friends. Before they left, they were grilled or blackmailed to name names of other gay colleagues, and sadly many of them did so. (I write here of gay men, as records of any lesbian women victimized by the Purge are non-existent, and official documents of the time, be they RCMP, PCO, or DEA, are largely silent. Of course women faced incredible sexism and misogyny in the Department, not least being fired if they married).
The Purge was orchestrated and conducted by the RCMP Security Service, which was guided and encouraged at the highest levels of government, in the PCO, the PMO, and in DEA, as former GAC Historian Hector Mackenzie has eloquently documented in a recent article. (Hector Mackenzie, “The Straight and Narrow Path: Policy Direction and Oversight of the Gay Purges in Canada,” British Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 34, Number 2, 2022, pp189–216)
A secretive body called the Security Panel directed policy in this area and ultimately sealed the fate of individuals. That body was chaired by the Clerk of the Privy Council and included the Commissioner of the RCMP and the USSEA.
While policies implicitly barring homosexuals from DEA were in place with Cabinet Directives CD24 in 1952 and CD29 in 1955, later revised with CD35 in 1963, the RCMP Purge in DEA began in 1959 following a 1958 incident in Moscow involving a Canadian Foreign Service Officer who had a sexual relationship with a Soviet man. The Soviets entrapped him with compromising photos, but he immediately reported this to his Ambassador, David Johnson, himself gay. Johnson sent him back to Ottawa and under interrogation by the RCMP he named many names in the DEA and outside, including John Holmes, with whom he had an affair some years previously while posted in Moscow. He was then forced to resign.
The event sparked the RCMP, with support from the Security Panel and government of the day, to embark on a massive campaign to identify homosexuals, afflicted with “character weaknesses” or “human frailties,” not just in DEA and the Public Service, but in the Ottawa area, allegedly subject to blackmail by hostile Soviet intelligence forces. They created a new team, A-3, and set up a card index which grew to over 30,000 names of “sexual deviates” by the 1970s. Yet while there were several successful blackmail efforts directed at heterosexual Foreign Service Officers, not a single gay Canadian Foreign Service Officer was ever found to have succumbed to hostile blackmail efforts.
The Security Panel in 1960 enlisted the services of a Carleton University Professor, Frank Wake, in an effort to develop a technology, the infamous “Fruit Machine.” The Fruit Machine was intended to help identify homosexuals, so they could avoid recruiting them and fire those in positions requiring security clearances. While it never came to “fruition,” this outrageous experiment was supported by USSEA Norman Robertson as well as the highest levels of PCO and PM Lester Pearson. At one key meeting, officials including Robertson agreed that they needed to develop a “cover story” to hide the project from public scrutiny.
While the impact of the Purge was greatest during the intense period of 1959–62, it continued for many years thereafter, again with the full support of top officials in government, including DEA. The Royal Commission on Security (Mackenzie Commission) recommended in 1968 that homosexuals be barred from any rotational service in DEA – a dead end for any career.
During a comprehensive 1977 review of government policies on homosexuality in the Public Service, then USSEA Basil Robinson argued strongly along with the RCMP and DND for policies barring all homosexuals from service in DEA. DEA Security heads at the time, Glen Shortliffe and John Hadwen, backed Robinson with outrageous statements, including Hadwen: “Certainly we do not want our ambassadors wearing lipstick and rouge, at least not abroad. And what are we to think of an ambassadress who does not wear lipstick or rouge?” Shortliffe grudgingly conceded that there may be some non-rotational posts in DEA which could be offered to a homosexual who was otherwise “a responsible person and a good candidate,” suggesting that “positions such as interior decorating” could be offered. No wonder then that during the 1960s and 1970s gays continued to lose their jobs in DEA, almost all of them recorded as “permitted to resign.” Some were quietly transferred to other federal departments. Some succumbed to substance abuse and mental health issues. Yet another toll of the Purge were the bright young Canadians who happened to be gay or lesbian who were lost to DEA because they knew that they had no future as diplomats. Recruitment documents were clear: there was no place in DEA for homosexuals.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s and early 1980s that a few brave gay Foreign Service Officers were prepared to be open about their sexuality and their relationships. One of the very first, Doug McCue, shared with me the story of his journey with Ryan, the partner he met in 1980 while posted to Trinidad. Doug arranged for him to join him in Canada on a student visa, and they lived together as a couple. In 1985, then Departmental Security Officer James Bartleman took away his security clearance. But when McCue confronted him personally and demanded that it be restored, or he would go public, Bartleman backed down. McCue’s Copenhagen posting was gone by then, so he went to Los Angeles, Ryan accompanying him as his “valet.”
While firings apparently ceased in the late 70s, homophobic and racist security briefings did not. Several retired Foreign Service Officers have shared with me stories of briefings by DL2 Security official John Von Kats, who at one point informed new recruits that there was no place in DEA for “Queers, Communists, or Separatists.” During briefings on more than one occasion he also made racist references to black African women as “chocolate bars” or “chocolate bunnies.” Up until the 1990s, CSIS, having taken over the security screening process from RCMP in 1984, engaged in deeply offensive and homophobic interrogation during field checks. Two former Foreign Service Officers, gay partners, now retired, recalled to me how a friend of theirs was questioned by CSIS in the early 1990s during security clearance interviews, asking if she would trust them to be alone around her four-year-old son.
The Purge also took a huge toll on the lives of gay and lesbian Foreign Service Officers who wanted to enter into open relationships with a partner. Many of them shared with me the pain of knowing that they could not have a meaningful loving relationship because that would mean the end of their career. For those who were finally able to be open, their relationships were totally invisible and non-existent in the eyes of DEA. In 1992, an anonymous article was published in bout, “The Ghosts Among Us,” sharing in powerful words the reality facing gay and lesbian Foreign Service Officers. None of the FSD benefits, or pension and health benefits, were extended to gay and lesbian partners until finally in 1996 when Foreign Service Officer Stan Moore blazed the trail, along with Dale Akerstrom, in a legal challenge at Federal Court. Moore told the Court of how DEA offered to pay the full expenses of transporting his cat, Lady Jasmine, to his new post in Indonesia, but not a penny for his partner Pierre to join him there.
As a federal MP from 1979 to 2004, and the first openly gay MP in 1988, I fought for equality and justice for LGBT people, including in DEA, including moving to include “sexual orientation” in s15 of the Charter in 1981, and later in 1985 when the all-party Equality Rights Committee unanimously supported my Bill to include “sexual orientation” in the Canadian Human Rights Act (opposed by DEA at the time). While it would take another decade for that to become law, the Mulroney government did accept our key recommendation that s15 of the Charter be interpreted as including “sexual orientation” as an analogous ground, which led to a series of powerful legal victories including the key Haig and Birch decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992.
While Prime Minister Brian Mulroney replied to my question in Parliament in April of 1992 that the recent revelations of the Purge “would appear to be one of the great outrages and violations of fundamental human rights,” no action was taken by his government or succeeding governments for over 25 years, until Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a meaningful, heartfelt apology in the House of Commons to survivors of the Purge. I had the honour of serving on the Advisory Council on the apology, and shared tears in the House gallery that day with many survivors, almost all from the Canadian Armed Forces. Only a handful of former public servants (unknown how many of them were DEA), some 40 out of over 700, received compensation from a class action lawsuit and a personal apology for the impact of the Purge on their lives. Indeed, a number of those in DEA impacted by the Purge informed me that they had no knowledge of the class action lawsuit or the apology. In addition to individual compensation, the class action settlement funds support the building of a monument in Ottawa to honour the struggles and history of 2SLGBTQIA+ people, to open in 2025, as well as Public Service training, permanent and travelling exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, and a commitment to share the historical records of the Purge (which has been a huge struggle to date).
I am engaged by the Purge Fund to write an updated book on the history of the Purge, and welcome any contributions or stories from readers of bout about the impact in DEA. I can be reached at [email protected].
Finally, a humble suggestion. To honour the memory of those in DEA like Raymond Robert, whose dreams were destroyed and lives shattered by the Purge, orchestrated at the highest levels of DEA over many years, Global Affairs Canada might establish a lecture series, or a scholarship for promising young 2SLGBTQI+ researchers sharing knowledge of our experience in Canada with those in other countries. Let us hope that others will learn the lessons of this dark chapter in Canada’s history, and enact policies that ensure full equality, respect, and dignity to all in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
