bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1987) — Fall 1987 // Automne 1987, pp. 26–29
Last spring we ran the first half of an interview conducted with George and Alison Ignatieff. In this concluding half the Ignatieffs talk of life in Washington during the McCarthy era, at NATO, as Ambassador in: Belgrade, working with George Drew in London during the Diefenbaker years, as Ambassador to NATO in Paris, and at the UN both in New York and Geneva, as well as between postings in Ottawa.
bout de papier: Tell me about defence relations in the early fifties?
Mr. Ignatieff: Prime Minister St. Laurent and Pearson both asked me for a written statement that would be published and made available to the House of Commons on what our relations in the United States and nuclear matters should be. They wanted the statement to look at the strategic implications for Canadian foreign and defence policy of the advent of nuclear weapons and missiles for Canada. The point of the whole question is one which is still unresolved: in previous wars, military have fought military, but with the advent of nuclear weapons it is the bulk of the population which is threatened as victims. Therefore, it cannot be just delegated to military people to make decision on the real issue of survival. The Prime Minister put this thought in writing to Ralph Campney who was the Defence Minister and to General Foulkes who was Chief of Staff, asking that they cooperate in working out a paper. General Foulkes refused point blank. He said that this kind of enquiry would prejudice the flow of privileged information on nuclear matters through military channels, which he was getting from Admiral Radford and General Bradley. “Rad” and “Brad” as he used to call them.
The refusal ultimately led to the signing by executive agreement of NORAD under conditions of misinformation – this was during the transition from St. Laurent to Diefenbaker — the Prime Minister was told that this Document “had gone to Cabinet”, but the St. Laurent government had not approved NORAD in fact as an integrated command structure. Moreover, Diefenbaker was not told what the implications were: that this continental command, like any command of the alliance, would not come under the North Atlantic Council but would be under the control of the American President and Secretary of Defence. The Prime Minister of Canada would only be consulted. There would be no effective consultation with Canadian decision-makers about alerts, especially in an emergency.
When it came to the Cuban Missile crisis, Diefenbaker’s memoirs show how this strange state of affairs when a nuclear alert was declared for NORAD in continental North America, with Prime Minister Diefenbaker refusing to accept it. Therefore, our military both in Canada and in Europe would not know whether they were on alert or not. I remember sitting in NATO during the Cuban Missile Crisis when we were on the very threshold of war not knowing where we stood. I will never forget that.
I had said and would say to the present Defence Minister – something has to be done to put NORAD under responsible civil control through the North Atlantic Council. You cannot have the state of affairs where one military command makes no report to the North Atlantic Council at the ministerial level or any other level. This creates a detachment, which in a crisis separates North America from Europe, and it involves the whole question of the American guarantee. This has been exacerbated by statements such as that of Henry Kissinger, to the effect that there are certain situations in which the United States would not be willing to use the nuclear deterrent if there was any kind of attack in Europe. The whole solidarity of the alliance is involved in this thing. My relations with General Fowlkes were not very happy and I was sent off to Yugoslavia with the issue unresolved in 1957. In a way the most challenging and exciting test of the Department came under Diefenbaker and Howard Green.
bout de papier: Because of the change in government!
Mr. Ignatieff: The Conservatives had not been in power except for a very short time under Arthur Meighen for generations. Mr. Diefenbaker did have profound suspicion of the Department claiming it consisted of ’Pearsonites’ or ’Pearsonalities’ as he called them. He was a western populist who had very little use for the kind of high academic qualifications that people like Norman Robertson had. He himself had been the product of the little school house and a tough upbringing in the Prairies. He had suspicion of the wealthy and the privileged. The strange thing was his appointment of Sidney Smith as Secretary of State for External Affairs. He was a very loyal conservative from the academic world. He thought that Sidney Smith would be able to handle the Department with all its “eggheads”. Sidney Smith took a particular liking to me. It had something to do with the fact that he knew my brother as Warden of Hart House and we were both from the University of Toronto
He took me out of Yugoslavia. I thought I was going to be banished into the outer darkness being a friend of Mr. Pearson’s, but I was sent to London to be deputy to George Drew. This experience was the greatest possible education in “conservative” thinking. I found myself in a strange relationship because, in fact, the Prime Minister did not like Mr. Drew. He had been his competitor for leadership of the Federal Conservative Party (1948). George Drew felt that he had to give it up because of ill health and that he would have been the winner of the subsequent federal election. He did not particularly relish being banished to London. However, this posting as Deputy High Commissioner in London, gave me a tremendous opportunity because George Drew was away a good deal of the time and Alison and I had to fill in and do all kinds of things; especially in social representation activities. These included meeting DeGaulle at Buckingham Palace and speaking at various functions. Being Deputy to George Drew was quite an education in higher echelon diplomacy. I had been Ambassador to Belgrade but it was a rather obscure capital in comparison to London from a representational standpoint.
I enjoyed Belgrade. I was as happy in Belgrade as anywhere in the foreign service. It was a tough time but the whole family was together. I had wonderful support from my staff; Bert Hart as my counsellor and Don Stevenson as third secretary. It was the first time that I had somebody posted to me that I was old enough to be his father.
This is one of the things that the Department really has left me with. Not a nostalgia, but this feeling that the friendships made which have lasted a lifetime. I still feel very close to Bert Hart and to Don and Anna Stevenson.
Anyway, I found myself in this very different ambience in London with George Drew and Diefenbaker. Since Diefenbaker did not like Drew and I was his Deputy, this made me the sort of “confidante” when he would come to London. He drew me in into his entourage and summoned me back to Ottawa. By that time Sidney Smith had suddenly died and Howard Green had taken over. The Prime Minister told me that he was in this mess about NORAD and nuclear weapons and was there anything that I could do to try and straighten things out. I was to report to him directly. I had to go to Howard and Norman Robertson and say, “Look – what am I to do?” They said to play along with the Chief and see what I could do. But there was not anything I could do because he had signed the executive agreement committing Canada to NORAD. I explained to him that this really meant that we were involved in the United States nuclear infrastructure. We had to accept nuclear warheads or get out of NORAD. We could not be in between two positions.
bout de papier: What did you recommend?
Mr. Ignatieff: I said that we frankly should get out of NORAD.
bout de papier: Was it a departmental view?
Mr. Ignatieff: It was the view of Howard Green as Minister and Norman that Canada should not get involved in a nuclear-weapons role. What was of greater importance to Canadian security was to try and promote arms control and peacekeeping roles — the multilateral internationalist approach.
bout de papier: Tell me about Howard Green.
Mr. Ignatieff: He influenced policy giving priority to arms control and negotiation of disarmament. Howard Green, of course, was very much affected by the fact that at that time there was atmospheric testing which had very serious fallout effects on Western Canada. He was representing the constituency which Mr. Turner now represents in Vancouver Quadra so he got very worked up about the radioactive fallout. He took this issue up in company with the Irish Foreign Minister Frank Aitken and pursued both the idea of monitoring the radio-activity and trying to put an end to testing in order to curb the nuclear arms race.
It was under Green that General Burns was appointed not just as negotiator but as chief advisor on arms control with people like Allan Gotlieb as his research assistant. He had research assistants in Geneva and in Ottawa. Disarmament and arms control were given priority by Mr. Green. I cannot pretend that I had very much influence in that. I supported Howard Green’s policy and worked very closely with him. I felt that this was the policy which was basically in the interest of Canada. I had been influenced by an awareness that the option we faced in Canada was that we were going to be drawn deeper and deeper into the nuclear strategy of the United States, one in which the decision-making would be essentially American and consultation would be minimal. This constituted the continentalist approach to Defence policy. The alternative option was the internationalist approach, based on NATO. This involved the kind of agreements which we had concluded in the early fifties in the Korean period, when Canada reserved its sovereign right to decide about American deployments into or over Canadian territory. This sovereignty had been sold out under the integrated command structure of NORAD. Therefore, my instinct was certainly to support Howard Green and Norman Robertson in the policy that they had set. We could not get out of NORAD so soon after Mr. Diefenbaker had signed it, but the Prime Minister and Mr. Green hesitated about accepting the nuclear warheads for the weapons acquired by the Canadian armed forces, which constituted one of the consequences of NORAD.
We then got into trouble in the NATO context about nuclear warheads for our NATO contingents and I was sent to NATO. We had this remarkable state of affairs where our air division was equipped with CF-104’s that were supposed to be nuclear capable and were supposed to have nuclear warheads and would take their turn to be on “alert” with no ammunition at all. We had the ’Honest Johns’ weapons without any warheads. The whole scene was a terrible mess.
We lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis in that state of affairs. What persuaded me about the inadequacy of the NORAD situation was the declaration of a nuclear alert by the U.S.A. with Diefenbaker not accepting it, and our armed forces not knowing if they were on alert or not. The Minister of Defence, Douglas Harkness, declared an alert because he felt that the troops would be in mutiny if they did not know what they were supposed to do. It took about three or four days before the Cabinet finally agreed to accept a state of alert for the Canadian armed forces. In these days of nuclear threat when the time for response is counted in minutes, rather than in hours or days, this is an intolerable state of affairs. We ordinary Canadians would be the victims of any nuclear exchange and our elected representatives have no effective voice in the declaration of a nuclear alert for our country and all the catastrophic consequences that could flow from a nuclear exchange. All the agreements about what happens under nuclear alert are secret. The Prime Minister and Minister of Defence know about them but information is on a “need to know” basis. The consequences of nuclear war would fall on the mass of the people. They would be the victim. This remains a totally unresolved problem.
At the conclusion of the Cuban-missile crisis in 1962, I was invited, along with the rest of the members of the NATO Council, by Mr. Kennedy to see all the nuclear establishments of the United States. Taking advantage of being in Washington I went to see Mr. McNamara, who I knew from my involvement in NATO and asked “What do we do about these 104’s sitting on the ground? They are targeted by the Soviet military and yet we have no means of doing anything until we get the warheads.” He took down one of his “black books” and said, “They are very good for high altitude interception but I would not think they would make a very good nuclear weapons carrier. Anyway, we are going to depend more and more on missiles. Why not try photography with your 104’s?” So much for the 104’s! We bought American hardware without defining the function or responsibility of the Canadian armed forces. This is a continuing problem that, based on my NATO experience, I believe is unfair to our excellent defence establishment. I disagreed with Fowlkes, but this does not mean that I had not the highest possible regard for our defence personnel, especially in NATO.
After the election which brought the Liberals back into office, I was sent to the U.N. as Ambassador. Paul Martin came to see me and said that we were going on the Security Council and he wanted me to be the representative. That was very exciting and perhaps the most rewarding experience of my career because my relations with Paul Martin and Mike Pearson were very close.
If anybody has to represent Canada on the Security Council it is absolutely essential that he or she have direct access to political authority. Paul Martin used to phone me at the earliest hours of the morning and go over all the things which were going to come up that day in the Security Council so that I knew and the Minister knew what were the decisions that had to be taken. If I had a problem on about a vote, which often happens in the Security Council, I could phone or have somebody phone the Minister and say that we were voting. The Minister, for his part, would be aware of the choice to be made. I got immediate instructions. We got through the Six-Day War crisis in this way which was televised world wide. When the Soviets were asked whether they wanted to tape this program they said,, “What are we going to be listening to?” and we said, “The representative of Canada is speaking” and they said, “What, that peerless count!” Mr. Pearson used to watch the television. One day, I got a message from the Prime Minister saying, “George keep your head up because you look asleep.” Alison tells a story that she saw on television that I was nervously playing with my button and it came off. When I came home she said I had better give her that coat to be mended. So much for the impact of television on diplomacy! Mrs. Ignatieff: I was watching him on TV. It was so fascinating to watch your husband and know what he was going to do and I was sort of shouting into the television to stop it.
Mr. Ignatieff: After the Six-Day War in the Middle East, came the Czech crisis. My relations with the United States Ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, had been extremely close. He was a person that I trusted and he trusted me and we worked extremely closely. Together with Lord Caradon from Britain, we worked, as a trio, closely together. It was very important to know what Canada’s role should be. If possible it should be to work with a United States representative if the United States representative is of the quality and experience of Arthur Goldberg. He gave up the Supreme Court and Ministry of Labour to work for the world organization. When Goldberg left, I was asked to be the coordinator for the Western Group during the 1968 Czech crisis because there were a series of American representatives that filled in temporarily. During the Czech crisis, I was the coordinator for the Western Group and I had to choose tactics.
After Canada’s term as a non-permanent member of the Security council came to an end in 1969, I was posted to Geneva as Ambassador for Disarmament and later to the European office of the UN and to GATT. Under the Trudeau régime the Prime Minister quite clearly downgraded the whole role of diplomacy and I was coping, at the time in Geneva, with disarmament, trade in GATT, and with all the specialized agencies. I felt that what he said publicly about the foreign service was confirmed by the fact that when I asked for reinforcements to try and cope at the same time with preparations for the Tokyo Round, the American reaction to the OPEC oil cartel and the Nixon “surcharge” on exports to the U.S.A., the only reinforcement I got was from a former assistant manager from the Chateau Laurier. This confirmed my impression that we were expected to act as hoteliers and greeters for the élite of the mandarins from Ottawa that surrounded the Prime Minister. When I was asked to take over my old college at the University of Toronto, I decided to accept. I still believe that, particularly in the nuclear age, there is no alternative but to find a modus operandi through diplomacy between competitive systems such as the Soviet and the industrial countries of the West, as well as between the developed countries of the North and the developing nations of the South.
bout de papier: Several of your pals have alluded to a letter you had written about this when you left?
Mr. Ignatieff: I made it very clear to Mitchell Sharp, who was then Secretary of State, what I thought about what was happening to the Canadian foreign service. It has never been published and since it is confidential I do not propose to reveal anything. Basically what I said was that never has diplomacy been more necessary than at present, considering the increasingly interdependent world and that Geneva was the meeting-place for the transactions of this global business. In a nuclear age where prosperity was rooted in the whole question of economic interdependence, it is more essential than ever to have professional diplomats trained to find a modus operandi through negotiation between different systems and national interests to resolve differences and settle disputes. Any downgrading into ’instant diplomacy, where chaps are suddenly sent off to negotiate and make statements of some sort or another is uncompatible with true professionalism in diplomacy. I found people arriving in Geneva, for instance, and making statements and going off without even consulting me about what they said. Then I was asked what the Canadian position was meant to be – I did not know, especially as I was receiving different instructions from different departments in Ottawa. I thought that was a fine way of running a railroad…
bout de papier: You came back briefly on an appointment by Turner?
Mr. Ignatieff: That was just a political gambit not to be taken very seriously. It was an interesting footnote to my diplomatic career. The ’Rainmaker’ in his book says that in Winnipeg, Mr. Turner phoned Shultz about SDI as to whether he should support it or not. What in fact happened was that Axworthy and lona Campagnolo, who were trying to give Turner a boost in the West he badly needed, said that he should come out for a nuclear freeze. That was the issue, not SDI. Whether Turner phoned Shultz on the nuclear freeze or not, I do know that he did not feel that Canada should unilaterally come out for a nuclear freeze. He felt it had to be reciprocal and should have some support in the Alliance. Mr. Turner phone me in France to ask whether I would come back and I said that I would not come back as a member of the bureaucracy. I was already seventy and Chancellor of the University of Toronto and had my hands full as the academic year was opening. I asked to be given twenty-four hours to think it over. The next day my reply was: “Look, I am interested in having the post restored that Howard Green made for General Burns, namely there should be a senior advisor to the Government on the vital issue of nuclear arms control and disarmament which I think should be on top of the agenda as far as our foreign affairs was concerned. If you are prepared to restore that position I would be willing to do that and have an alternate as the actual negotiator.” I was thinking of Allan Beesley who is in Geneva. We are close friends and I have the highest regard for him. That was agreed and indeed I dictated what my understanding was to Mr. Turner’s staff, so that an order-in-council could be drawn up. Then of course when the election results came out, somebody came to see me in France and said I was supposed to go and chair the “Barton” Group. I said that I did not know anything about any Barton Group. I said I was advisor to the Government but not available for day-to-day negotiations. This was reported to Mr. Clark and Mr. Clark called me in and said, “We understand you are not going to be able to take this on full time and we think that this should be a full-time job.” I said that I was not prepared to give my full time and that was that. Mr. Clark said that they were thinking of Doug Roche for the job and I said I was happy to work with Doug Roche who was a friend of mine. I had confidence in him. He also told me that he was appointing Stephen Lewis to the U.N. I said those were two excellent appointments and I was willing to work with either or both of them and if there was anything I could do I would be glad to do it in an advisory capacity. I have remained on the Consultative Committee of the Ambassador for Disarmament; so I have not severed all connections with the Department.
bout de papier: Mr. and Mrs. Ignatieff, thank you very much.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1987) — Fall 1987 // Automne 1987, pp. 26–29. Read the rest of this issue →
