Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957 9781442673045

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Part One: Introduction
Part Two: The Gouzenko Affair
Part Three: Canada in a Cold War World
Part Four: The Cold War in Ottawa
Part Five: The Cold War in Canadian Society
Part Six: The End of the First Cold War Era
Notes
Primary Sources, Abbreviations, and Subjects Interviewed
PICTURE CREDITS
Index

Citation preview

COLD WAR C A N A D A : THE M A K I N G OF A N A T I O N A L I N S E C U R I T Y STATE, 1945-1957

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REG WHITAKER AND GARY MARCUSE

Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com ©University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-5935-X (cloth)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Whitaker, Reginald, 1943Cold War Canada : the making of a national insecurity state, 1945-1957 Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-5935-X 1. Canada - Politics and government - 1935-1957.* 2. Canada - National security. 3. Cold War. I. Marcuse, Gary. II. Title. FC610.W55 1994 Fl 034.2. W55 1994

971.063'3

C94-931211-8

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

To Pam, Sarah, and Robin; Fred, Dvora, and Dorothy Marcuse, and Betsy Carson

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Contents

P R E F A C E IX A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S xiii C H R O N O L O G Y XV

1

Part One: Introduction Never Again! From World War to Cold War 3

2 3 4

Part Two: The Gouzenko Affair Gouzenko Concealed: Spies and Atomic Politics 27 Gouzenko Revealed: Spy Chases and Witch-hunts 56 Gouzenko - the Aftermath: Scientists under Surveillance: 81

5 6

Part Three: Canada in a Cold War World The Russians, the Americans, and Us: Cold War Foreign Policy 113 Stand on Guard: In the Defence of Canada 138

11

Part Four: The Cold War in Ottawa Security Screening Civil Servants 161 The Dog That Never Barked: Anti-Communist Legislation 188 The Antagonists: Cops versus Commies 207 'Freda to the Professor through Grierson': The Persecution of a Film Maker 227 'A Communist Nest': Witch-hunt at the NFB 243

12 13 14

Part Five: The Cold War in Canadian Society The Debate That Never Was: Selling the Cold War 261 The Cold War in the Provinces 287 Labour's Cold War (I): Communists and Unions, 1945-1949 310

7 8 9 10

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Contents

15 16

Labour's Cold War (II): Purging the Trades and Labour Congress, 1949-1955 342 Ban the Bomb! The War on the Peace Movement 364

17 18

The Korean War: Second Thoughts about American Leadership 387 'The Black Madness of the Witch Hunt': The Herbert Norman Affair 402

Part Six: The End of the First Cold War Era

N O T E S 427 P R I M A R Y SOURCES, ABBREVIATIONS, AND SUBJECTS I N T E R V I E W E D 491 P I C T U R E C R E D I T S 494 I N D E X 495

Preface

Two events, twelve years and thousands of miles apart, serve as brackets for the story we tell in this book. The first event was in Ottawa on a warm evening in the late summer of 1945. The night of 5 September found Canada's capital at peace. A few weeks earlier Japan had surrendered, bringing the Second World War to a close. Ottawans, for the first time in years no longer distracted by war news and casualty reports, strolled the streets or lined up for the cinema. But in the Soviet Embassy, a young cipher clerk was feverishly amassing documents in a secret code room. He then stuffed these into his jacket and fled. Igor Gouzenko was defecting to Canada, and implicating Canadians in espionage against their country. Some five months of top-secret high-level international consultation were to pass before police swooped down on suspects in the early hours of the morning and sensational news hit the world's press that a Soviet spy ring had been discovered in Canada. The first major public blow had been struck in the Cold War. The second event bracketing the inception of the Cold War for Canada did not happen in Canada at all, but in faraway Cairo where, on 4 April 1957, a quiet, gentle scholar of Japanese history and career diplomat serving as Canada's ambassador to Egypt walked with deliberation off the roof of a nine-storey apartment building in downtown Cairo and fell to his death. The suicide of Herbert Norman followed the revival of charges of disloyalty and Communist espionage by an American congressional committee. An angry spasm of anti-American reaction followed, affecting a broad range of Canadians from the Ottawa elite down to ordinary citizens. Norman's suicide seemed to epitomize the tragic consequences of the dark side of the Cold War: witch-hunting, McCarthyism, intolerance, and the victimization of innocents. It seemed to close a chapter on a period of excess and hysteria. These events punctuate the inception and implantation of the Cold War within Canadian society. This book is an account of Act One; the play continued for four decades, until by the beginning of the 1990s the long-running show finally closed.

x

Preface

The Cold War not only encompassed a considerable chunk of the history of twentieth-century Canada but also had a significant influence on what Canada by the last decade of this century has become. Research on this book has spanned almost a decade. When it began, Ronald Reagan was leading the western world into a renewed Cold War against what he called the 'Evil Empire.' Canada was renewing its commitment to the American-led anti-Soviet alliance that had its origins in the late 1940s. Yet by the time the book was reaching completion, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had collapsed, and finally in 1991 the Communist party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union itself dissolved. The West may or may not have 'won,' but there could be no doubt that Soviet-style Communism had lost. The Cold War is now definitively a part of history, a page that has irrevocably turned. Against this backdrop of dramatic transformations of world politics, a word is in order about our moral and political commitments as authors. When we began this research, we were watching, with growing apprehension and alarm, the resurgence in the 1980s of the old Cold War bellicosity of the 1940s and 1950s. We turned to the past to discover the foundations upon which succeeding generations of Cold Warriors continued to build. We saw the Cold War as endangering the very future of life on this planet, and we were deeply suspicious of the ideological zeal that justified the holding of the earth to ransom. As Canadians, we were angry at the way in which the Cold War was used to justify the subordination of our country's goals to an agenda set by a giant neighbour to the south. And as Canadians with progressive political and social commitments, on the left, we were concerned at the way in which the Cold War had been used in the past to reinforce the conservatism of wealth and power and to thwart the dreams of a better and more democratic world for the less privileged - and that it would be so used again. The end of the Cold War is to be welcomed unreservedly. That it has come about as a result of the decline and fall of Communism is no cause for regret to us, nor has this necessitated any change in the views of the conflict as we have presented it. In contesting the official Western version we never allowed ourselves to become mirror-image apologists for Soviet Communism. Indeed, we believe that some of the most lasting damage caused by the Cold War stemmed from the false either-or choices it imposed upon the rest of us. It was the very essence of the Cold War mentality to demand absolute and unthinking fidelity to the 'right' side in the apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. This led, on the one hand, to a self-imposed blindness of the majority to the defects and the injustices of the Western way of life. Among a much smaller number of people, it led to a hopeless and stupid apologia for Stalinist tyranny. Given the geopolitical fate of Canada, and its more or less unequivocal adherence to the Western alliance under American leadership, it is inevitable that most of the decisions and actions we deplore in this book are decisions and actions that might be called anti-Communist and pro-American. This is the way, after all, in which this country entered the Cold War. This does not mean

Preface

xi

that we are retroactively 'pro-Communist' or 'pro-Soviet'; that would be to fall into the opposite trap of the Cold War, as unfortunately many Canadians of decent instincts and high motives were forced to do in the 'with-us-or-against-us' atmosphere of the early Cold War years, when any resistance to mobilization for war under American leadership was forced into the camp of Soviet apologetics, or into silence. It is one of the tragedies of the Cold War in Canada that an indigenous, progressive politics was rendered so difficult by the false choices apparently imposed by the rigidities of the Cold War. The Cold War as it was implanted within Canada was anything but politically neutral: it bolstered the position of certain forces in Canadian life and undermined the position of others. Those that it bolstered tended to be the forces of wealth and power; those that it undermined tended to be the elements of potential opposition to wealth and power. Not surprisingly, some of the forces of wealth and power were themselves active proponents and enthusiasts for the spread of Cold War symbols and Cold War practices. We try to detail these linkages between interest and ideology. And we try to assess the winners and the losers in this process. There is a considerable literature on the emergence of the 'National Security State' in the United States during this era. The idea of a state with obsessive concern over national security, and the consequent development of an armoury of weapons, certainly military but also of an extensive security and intelligence apparatus and of ideological struggle as well, is one that seems to explain a great deal of American behaviour. Indeed, on the evidence of Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf in 1990-1, the National Security State would seem to have outlasted the Cold War that engendered it. The concept of the National Security State has been extended to other Western nations as well, with the same questionable implications for states that claim to be liberal and democratic, yet that privilege the 'national security' over individual liberty and invoke secrecy to stifle democratic debate. Canada tried to develop its own (branch plant) National Security State in this era. We have, however, been rather more attracted to a formulation by Wesley Wark in a historical paper in which he speaks of Canada's developing 'national insecurity state'* - a felicitous phrase that we have placed in our subtitle. Driven by the obsessive fears of Canada's senior partners, Canada set out in search of external and internal enemies - and soon found them. Obsessive concern with security always presupposes a large degree of underlying insecurity. What is particularly striking in the Canadian case is the disproportion between the threat to security and the response. Canada was threatened by the global nuclear confrontation of the United *'Security Intelligence in Canada, 1864-1945: The History of a "National Insecurity State,'" in Keith Neilson and B.J.C. McKercher, eds. Go Spy the iMnd: Military Intelligence in History (Westport, CT 1992), 153-78. This phrase is also used in H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York 1993), 31-58.

xii

Preface

States and the USSR (as was all life on the planet), but the idea of a Soviet invasion of Canadian territory (upon which policy was actually based) was almost as farfetched in the 1940s and 1950s as it was by the end of the Cold War in 1989-90. As for the internal threat of Communism to Canadian democracy, one can only look back in amazement at the reckless exaggeration of the power of a tiny, marginalized, and publicly reviled group of ideological sectarians to subvert the foundations of Canadian society. 'Witch-hunting' does seem an apposite term under the circumstances. The Canadian state was mobilized and transformed into a institution to protect us against - witches! This was truly a 'National Insecurity State.' A brief word on the organization of this book. A straight chronological account was not possible, since we touch on so many different aspects of the same dozen years. We begin with an introduction, sketching the broad background to the coming of the Cold War to Canada. In the following three chapters we discuss the crucial Gouzenko affair and its aftermath. We turn next to the impact of the Cold War on Canadian foreign and defence policy, followed by a section on the Cold War in Ottawa: security screening and the surveillance and legislative control of Communism, and chapters on the cultural Cold War in the National Film Board. In the next sections, the focus shifts to the wider impact on Canadian society, beginning with the Cold War in the provinces (especially Quebec). A look at the question of public opinion and the public debate over the Cold War is followed by two case studies: the anti-Communist purges in the trade unions; and the peace movement. The concluding section of the book looks closely at the impact of the Korean War on Canada, another crucial event, and then at the tragic affair of Herbert Norman, the book-end closing the first dozen years of the Cold War in Canada. To assist readers we have included a chronology listing the dates of important events, in Canada and abroad, from 1945 through the 1950s. In writing this book we each bring different skills to bear. One of us (Whitaker) is a political scientist who has studied and written extensively on Canada in the postwar world. The other (Marcuse) is a freelance journalist who has researched and produced film and radio work on, among other things, Canadian politics and culture. We have tried to combine in this book the resources of both historical scholarship (hitherto-secret government records and the private papers of participants in the events we describe) and journalism (personal interviews). We share the experience of growing up under the shadow of the Cold War and the desire to explain how these things happened, and to what effect.

Acknowledgments

The research for this book was very much facilitated by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided a research grant and a leave-time stipend for Whitaker, and by the Canada Council, which provided Marcuse with an Explorations grant. In addition, we would like to thank York University for various forms of assistance, financial and otherwise. Special thanks must be given to the archivists, present and past, at the National Archives in Ottawa, whose help and encouragement over the years has been invaluable: among them are Bob Hayward, Lee McDonald, Danny Moore, Glenn Wright, Gabrielle Blais, Paulette Dozois, Dave Smith, Ian McClymont, Myron Momryk, and Bruce Walton. Similar thanks are due to the various Access to Information officials at the Privy Council Office, CSIS, the RCMP, and other cooperative government departments and agencies (a commendation not earned by all). We also found the officials at the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London to be helpful and accommodating to visiting foreigners. Two former graduate students at York, Andrea Demchuk and Gavin Showier, provided research assistance on public opinion polls. Over the course of the years this work has been in process, there have been many individuals who have given generously of their time and expertise to assist us - too many, in fact, to be enumerated here. We would especially like to thank the interview subjects, listed at the end of the book, and to remember those who have since passed away. James Littleton was a helpful presence to the project from its beginning, and deserves special thanks. Gerry Hallowell of the University of Toronto Press was instrumental in seeing this lengthy project through to completion, despite many difficulties along the way. It is a tribute to the new technologies of communications, especially the fax, that this could all come together with one author on the West Coast, one in Toronto, and an editor on the East Coast. We would also like to thank Margaret Allen for her careful copy-editing of the manuscript and the improvements she has brought to its style.

xiv

Acknowledgments

Last but by no means least, we must thank those closest to us for tolerating the presence in their lives of what must have seemed at some points to be a project without end. They are remembered in the dedication, but only they can know how much they contributed.

Chronology

Items in bold type indicate Canadian events. 4-11 Feb. 12 Apr. 7 May 11 June 25 June 17 July 26 July 6 Aug. 15 Aug. 5-6 Sept. 30 Sept. 6 Oct. 7 Oct. 15 Nov. 3 Dec.

5 Feb. 9 Feb.

1945

Yalta conference Roosevelt dies, Truman president Nazi surrender, war in Europe ends Liberals re-elected U.N. Charter Potsdam Conference opens Labour elected in United Kingdom, Attlee prime minister Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima Japan surrenders, war in Asia ends Igor Gouzenko defects in Ottawa Mackenzie King talks with Truman in Washington Secret order in council authorizes detention of espionage suspects in Gouzenko affair King arrives in London to talk with Attlee U.S.-U.K.-Canada public declaration on atomic energy, secret agreement on handling of Gouzenko affair King's resolve to deal unilaterally with Gouzenko affair headed off by RCMP commissioner

1946

Taschereau-Kellock royal commission to investigate Gouzenko affair Stalin delivers hard-line speech on international relations in Moscow

xvi Chronology 15 Feb. 20 Feb. Mar. 5 Mar. 16 Mar. 13 Apr.

Twelve espionage suspects detained for interrogation Soviet government admits spying on Canada Interim reports of royal commission Churchill delivers 'iron curtain' speech Baruch Plan on control of atomic energy Cabinet approval for Communications Branch, National Research Council to monitor communications in USSR 16 Apr. Security Panel created to advise cabinet on internal security May U.S.-Canada Military Co-operation Committee 1 May Allan Nunn May sentenced to ten years for espionage in British court 13 May John Grierson testifies before royal commission 20 June Fred Rose, only Communist MP, sentenced to six years for espionage 27 June Final report of royal commission 29 July-15 Oct. Paris Peace Conference 4 Sept. Louis St Laurent secretary of state for external affairs, Lester Pearson under-secretary Oct. Security screening of immigrants begins Nov. Special Branch of RCMP organized Nov. Republicans gain control of both houses of U.S. Congress 12 Dec. Brooke Claxton minister of national defence

1947 Feb. 21 Feb. 10 Mar. 12 Mar. 21 Mar. 7 Apr. May 5 June 18 June 29 June July 26 July Aug.-Dec. 30 Sept. Oct.

Full-scale civil war erupts in Greece Britain informs United States it can no longer aid anti-Communists in Greece and Turkey Foreign ministers' meeting, Moscow Truman Doctrine U.S. Loyalty-Security Program for government employees Defence Research Board established Communists leave government in France and Italy Marshall Plan for European recovery proposed U.S. Congress passes Taft-Hartley anti-Communist labour law over Truman's veto USSR rejects Marshall aid George Kennan's 'Mr X' article in Foreign Affairs U.S. National Security Act, mandate for CIA Debate within External Affairs on Canada's role in Cold War Canada on U.N. Security Council U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) begins hearings on Communism in Hollywood

Chronology

xvii

Nov.

UKUSA agreements linking Canada to Western signals intelligence network

Feb.

Quebec 'Padlock Law' reactivated with raids on left-wing organizations Communist coup in Czechoslovakia Secret cabinet directive on security screening of government employees British government announces screening of civil servants Brussels pact Truman introduces peacetime draft U.S. Attorney General's List of subversive organizations published Communists defeated in Italian election Tito's Yugoslavia splits from Soviet bloc Berlin blockade and airlift begins HUAC begins Hiss-Chambers hearings Pearson secretary of state for external affairs Truman re-elected president in upset Law graduate denied entry to B.C. bar as Communist King resigns, St Laurent prime minister Secret cabinet directive on immigration security screening

25 Feb. 5 Mar. 15 Mar. 17 Mar. 20 Mar. 18 Apr. June 22 June Aug. 10 Sept. Nov. Nov. 15 Nov. 20 Nov.

1948

1949 20 Jan. Apr. 4 Api. 8 Apr. 6-8 May 11 May June 27 June Aug. 29 Aug. Sept. 21 Sept. 10 Oct. Nov.

Dean Acheson U.S. secretary of state Canadian Seamen's Union strike NATO treaty signed Communist official Sam Carr, last of Gouzenko affair suspects, sentenced to six years Canadian Peace Congress founded Berlin blockade lifted CSU expelled from Trades and Labour Congress as Communist Canadian Congress of Labour expels ten unions as Communist Liberals win landslide election victory Greek civil war ends with victory for anti-Communists First Soviet nuclear test Red Army victorious in China, People's Republic proclaimed Federal Republic of Germany German Democratic Republic National Film Board purge of 'Communists' public, commissioner dismissed

xviii

Chronology

21 Jan. 31 Jan. 2 Feb. 9 Feb.

1950

Alger Hiss convicted of perjury, sentenced to five years Truman orders development of hydrogen bomb Klaus Fuchs arrested in Britain for atomic espionage Senator Joseph McCarthy begins anti-Communist smear campaign in Wheeling, West Virginia 14 Feb. Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty Apr. U.S. Supreme Court sends 'Hollywood Ten' to prison 25-7 June War in Korea, U.N. Security Council calls on members for armed assistance to South Korea July United States doubles defence budget 10 July RCMP Special Branch reports directly to RCMP commissioner 17 July-11 Aug. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg arrested for atomic espionage 7 Aug. Canada sends forces to Korea Sept. German rearmament debate in NATO 15 Sept. General MacArthur mounts successful U.N. forces landing at Inchon, Korea 21 Sept. U.S. Congress passes Internal Security Act (McCarran Act) over Truman's veto Oct. Bruno Pontecorvo, atomic scientist at Chalk River nuclear plant, defects to USSR 9 Oct. MacArthur leads U.N. forces across thirty-eighth parallel into North Korea Oct.-Nov. First investigation of Herbert Norman Nov. Chinese troops enter Korean War, begin to drive U.N. forces back below thirty-eighth parallel 4 Dec. Attlee flies to Washington to confer on use of atomic weapons in Korean War 7 Dec. Labour Relations Board decertifies CSU for Communism

1951 31 Jan. Mar. 22 Mar. Apr. 2 Apr. 27-8 May 1 Aug. 22 Sept.

Canada sends land and air forces to Europe Emergency Powers Act Security screening of Great Lakes seamen Cabinet rejects Criminal Code amendments on sedition NATO integrated command activated British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defect to USSR U.S.-Canada Pinetree air warning line Australian voters in referendum reject bill to ban Communist party

Chronology

xix

Oct. 22 Oct.

Conservatives return to power in Britain, Churchill prime minister Greece and Turkey enter NATO

Jan.-Feb. 12 Mar. 15 May

Second investigation of Herbert Norman 'Positive vetting' introduced for British civil service Cabinet considers, rejects treason charges against the Reverend James Endicott Canadian troops used to suppress rising on Koje Island prisoner-of-war camp in Korea U.S. Congress passes Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran-Walter Act) over Truman's veto Revised cabinet directive on security Pearson effort for armistice in Korea fails because of U.S. opposition U.K. atomic bomb First U.S. H-bomb test Republicans win U.S. elections, Eisenhower president-elect Twenty-year lease for U.S. air base in Goose Bay, Labrador

1952

June 21 June Sept. Oct.-Dec. 3 Oct. 1 Nov. 4 Nov. 5 Dec.

1953 20 Jan. 5 Mar. 9 Apr. 19 June 27 July Aug. 10 Aug. 12 Aug. 13 Sept. Nov. Dec.-Jan.

Eisenhower president, Dulles secretary of state Death of Stalin Security Sub-Panel created Rosenbergs executed Armistice in Korea CIA-backed overthrow of Iranian government; Shah restored to throne Liberals re-elected First Soviet H-bomb test Khrushchev first secretary, Communist party of USSR Canada to build Mid-Canada air warning line Anti-Communist amendments to Criminal Code

1954 12 Jan. Feb. Apr. Apr.-June June

Dulles enunciates 'massive retaliation' policy Duplessis passes Taft-Hartley-style anti-Communist labour laws in Quebec French army falls to Vietnamese Communists at Dien Bien Phu Army-McCarthy hearings Coup with covert CIA backing topples reformist government in Guatemala

xx

Chronology

1 June 24 Aug. 8 Sept. Nov. Dec.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb,' officially declared a security risk and denied access to classified material Communist Control Act, co-sponsored by 'liberal' Democrat Hubert Humphrey, passed by U.S. Senate with single dissenting vote South East Asia treaty (SEATO) Joint U.S.-Canada development of DEW line U.S. Senate votes 67-22 to censure McCarthy United States signs mutual defence pact with Nationalist Chinese regime on Taiwan

1955 Jan. Feb. 5 May 15 May 9 June July 18 July

United States pledges defence of Nationalist-held offshore islands in Straits of Formosa, considers use of nuclear weapons Pearson indicates to Americans that Canada will offer no assistance in Formosan crisis West Germany enters NATO Austrian state treaty, Soviet troops withdraw Last Communist member of a provincial legislature, Joseph Salsberg, defeated in Toronto-Spadina Internal RCMP report calling for civilianization of security service rejected by commissioner Geneva 'Big Four' conference

1956 17-25 Feb. 5 June July 23 Oct. 29-30 Oct. Nov. 1 Nov. 4 Nov. 6 Nov. Dec.

Secret sessions of Soviet Party Congress hear about crimes of Stalin New York Times publishes transcript of secret sessions Nasser nationalizes Suez canal Hungarian revolt begins Israel, Britain, France invade Egypt U.N. negotiates withdrawal from Egypt, U.N. peacekeeping force, Pearson key figure Special Branch of RCMP becomes Directorate of Security and Intelligence Red Army begins suppression of Hungarian revolt Eisenhower re-elected president First of 37,000 Hungarian refugees arrive in Canada

1957 7 Mar.

Supreme Court declares Quebec 'Padlock Law' unconstitutional

Chronology Apr. 4 Apr. 10 June Aug. 1 Aug. 4 Oct. 14 Oct.

31 Mar. July-Sept. 29 Aug. 31 Oct. 10 Nov.

xxi

National convention of Canadian Communists leads to mass resignations of dissidents Herbert Norman commits suicide in Cairo Liberals defeated, Diefenbaker heads minority Conservative government Soviets test first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) NORAD announced USSR launches Sputnik, first earth satellite Pearson receives Nobel Peace Prize for Suez role

1958 Diefenbaker wins majority government Chinese Communists begin shelling offshore islands in Formosa Straits; United States considers use of atomic weapons Exchange of notes establishing Canada-U.S. defence production sharing agreement Talks begin in Geneva on proposed U.S.-Soviet nuclear test ban, after unilateral suspension of testing by United States Khrushchev initiates new Berlin crisis

1959 1 Jan. 20 Feb.

Leftist rebels led by Fidel Castro drive U.S.-backed regime from power in Cuba Avro Arrow project cancelled

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'Brave New World!': politicians and diplomats plan the postwar world. Members of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, May 1945

Public talk about the Bomb, private talk about Soviet spies. Attlee, Truman, and King at the Atomic Bomb conference in Washington, November 1945

From cipher clerk to a figure in Canadian mythology. Igor Gouzenko, bag over head, on TV displaying his Governor General's Award-winning novel

From MP to convicted spy. Fred Rose, the only elected Communist MR on trial for espionage, Montreal, March 1946

In the belly of the beast. Lester Pearson and his wife, Maryon, inside the Kremlin walls, Moscow, 1955

Manager of the Cold War (Canada) Ltd. Louis St Laurent at the National Liberal Convention Ottawa, 6 August 1948

Mixed metaphors of East-West conflict. Communists demonstrating on Parliament Hill against the iron curtain - in Canada, Ottawa, 1947

Communist fronts - even among the kiddies! A Communist-sponsored candy-bar boycott, Montreal, May 1947

Anti-Communists strike back ... An anti-Communist demonstration outside Massey Hall, Toronto, 8 April 1951

and so does the State. Police removing Communist posters, Montreal, May Day 1952

One of the 'usual suspects.' John Grierson, commissioner, National Film Board of Canada, c. 1940

On the waterfront. Canadian Seamen's Union members demonstrating against the use of the Seafarers' International Union to man Canadian ships, Halifax, 1949

Public Enemy Number One. The Rev. James Endicott, c. 1950

Taking the peace issue to the streets. The Canadian Peace Congress and a peace petition, c. 1950

No refuge but suicide. E. Herbert Norman, External Affairs, nd

We were not unaware of the fact that a time would come when historians would be able to survey from all angles this stretch of time which we lived feverishly from minute to minute, when they would illuminate our past by our future and would decide upon the value of our undertakings by their outcome and upon the sincerity of our intentions by their success. But the irreversibility of our age belonged only to us. We had to save or lose ourselves gropingly in this irreversible time. Those events pounced upon us like thieves and we had to do our job in the face of the incomprehensible and the untenable, to bet, to conjecture without evidence, to undertake in uncertainty and persevere without hope. Our age would be explained but no one could keep it from being inexplicable to us. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Situation of the Writer in 1947'

PART O N E : I N T R O D U C T I O N

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1 Never Again! From World War to Cold War

There can be more than one kind of war. Some wars are fought to the death, like the two world wars in this century. Others are carried on at lower levels of intensity. The Cold War, declared in the late 1940s and called off with the collapse of the Communist bloc at the end of the 1980s, never involved direct military conflict between the chief antagonists, the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet it deeply shaped the world in which we live. The Cold War emerged out of the Second World War. The USSR and the United States were allies for a little under four years, from 1941 to 1945, but the defeat of the Axis powers left the two giants astride the continent of Europe and in near proximity in Asia. Out of this grew a confrontation that quickly became the Cold War. For Canadians the Cold War emerged out of the world war not only in the international sense, but within Canada as well. From September 1939 to the summer of 1945, all Canadians were at war. This was a war that involved not only uniformed Canadians fighting on foreign shores, but also the mobilization of the nation's resources, economic and human, for war production. Such a mobilization meant unprecedented restructuring of the Canadian economy and of Canadian society. The Second World War was a total war, a war in which people's productive capacities and minds became war resources. It was appropriate, if chilling, that it finally ended with the unleashing of the ultimate weapon of total destruction, the atomic bomb. Canadians could not escape unscathed from such an experience. The war left deep marks, certainly on those who fought, but also on those whose only war was on the home front. And then, abruptly, Canadians found themselves swept up in another kind of war. This one was not a shooting war - although by 1950 some Canadians were trading shots with Communist-led soldiers in Korea - but it was a war that called for its own kind of national mobilization. There was once again, it seemed, a totalitarian enemy whose armies were at the gates, if not of Canada itself then at least of its allies. This enemy too was led by a ruthless and absolute dictator with limitless ambitions for world conquest. And this enemy was once again fuelled by

4 Introduction an evil and alien ideology that sought the downfall of freedom and our way of life. This much was familiar from the war just ended. Germany had been replaced by Russia, Hitler by Stalin, and Nazism by Communism. By 1949 Japan had been replaced by China in the East. There were some differences as well, and they were differences that fostered troubling ambiguities in the minds of Canadians. The Cold War enemy had a secret weapon: a fifth column within our gates, apparently far more extensive and effective than the fifth column deployed by the wartime enemy. But war on the enemy within was constrained by the fact that the Cold War was waged in peacetime, and the rules of a free society in peacetime did not allow for an unrestrained attack on a domestic enemy. The Cold War was thus a far more ambiguous kind of conflict than the world war. The atmosphere surrounding the launching of the Cold War in Canada was brittle and edged with hysteria. It was an atmosphere in which real debate about the fundamental issues at stake was widely seen as threatening the national consensus, and dissent from that consensus was often interpreted as disloyalty to the country. People who questioned the emergent orthodoxy sometimes fell under police surveillance, lost their government jobs, were purged from their trade unions, or became subject to deportation proceedings. These things did not happen to all dissenters, but when it happened even to a few, free discussion about Canada's options was constricted. To understand how Canadians could be so easily swept up into the all-or-nothing mentality of the Cold War, we must look to the immediate past, to the indelible memories Canadians brought with them from the wartime experience. As the Cold War emerged out of the world war, a family resemblance was unmistakable. GHOSTS

There were the broad lessons to be drawn from how the war had begun, or more precisely, why it had been allowed to happen. The events of the late 1930s, the darkening stage over which the shadows of impending war had fallen, seemed to many thoughtful Canadians to have represented, in retrospect at least, a great moral lesson for the future. War had been caused by the limitless appetite of an aggressive totalitarian dictatorship for conquest and hegemony. The Western democracies had been lacking in the will to resist this aggression. Instead they had tried appeasement (by now a very dirty word), which reached its infamous depths on 30 September 1938, the day of the Munich agreement, when Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler for the illusory promise of 'peace in our time.' To Western governments, Munich became a symbol of how appeasement feeds the appetite of dictators for aggrandizement. Hitler could have been stopped only by the application of superior force. This meant arrangements for the collective security of allied nations, and the will to meet force with greater force. This did not mean that war was inevitable.

Never Again! 5 Rather, war might have been averted by early firmness, which could have prevented Hitler from reaching the stage where his rearmed Reich posed a real threat. It did mean that the democratic nations would have to be prepared (materially and mentally) for war if necessary. Otherwise the threat of force would lack credibility. Western weakness in the 1930s invited a war for which the democracies were not initially prepared. The rapid and humiliating collapse of France in the spring of 1940 seemed a sign of just how rotten the fibre of the democracies had grown. The lesson drawn from this nightmarish slide into war and near-defeat was 'never again!' never again appeasement in the face of totalitarian dictators; never again pacifism and defeatism in the teeth of aggression; never again a failure to achieve and sustain collective security. The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the prosecution of the Korean War, and (ironically) German rearmament were among the concrete results of this resolve. Canada was not a great power (although its power at the end of the war was relatively greater than before or since), and could on its own do very little to influence the tide of history. But many Canadians drew their own particular lesson from the experience of the 1930s: by pursuing policies of isolationism Canada had shared in the moral guilt of the Western democracies for the onset of the war. Canada had swung courageously to Britain's side in the mother country's hour of greatest need, but Canada also made its own small contribution to the diplomatic fiasco that led to war. The postwar lesson was clear: Canada should now do what it could as a middle power to encourage the formation of the instruments of collective security against the menace of totalitarian aggression and play its fair part in shouldering the burden of the alliance's defence. The ghosts of the Munich pact thus haunted Canadian policy makers long after the melancholy events that gave rise to the discreditable pact had passed into history. Indeed, these ghosts grew larger and more threatening a decade later when a Communist coup backed by the Soviet army extinguished the democratic regime set up in Czechoslovakia after the German defeat. This was to Canadian policy makers perhaps the single most disturbing event of the postwar consolidation of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and led directly to the creation of the NATO alliance in which Canada was an important participant. 'Nineteen thirty-eight must not equal 1948' was a watchword of the day. Thus, in a very real sense, Canadian responses to the developing Cold War were predetermined by the trauma of the war and how it was seen to have happened. Another wartime ghost hovering over Canadian shoulders during the immediate postwar years was that of American isolationism. For more than two years, between September 1939 and American entry into the war at the end of 1941, Britain and the Commonwealth had stood (alone after the fall of France) against the seemingly irresistible Nazi armies. The memory of these two years was a constant spur to the Canadians and the British to bring the Americans 'onside,' to encourage American leadership and the use of American military and economic resources in blocking the

6

Introduction

expansionist designs of the USSR. It is difficult for us now to credit this concern, given the unbounded enthusiasm the Americans began to show as early as 1947^8 (and have shown ever since) to seize and exercise this position of leadership. Yet Canadians, conditioned by the war, feared the return of American isolationism and acted accordingly. The ghosts of the war did not just dance before Western eyes. The Soviets, too, were deeply haunted by these spectres, and herein lies a profound irony of the Cold War. The Soviets were above all in the grip of the trauma of 22 June 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in violation of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and the subsequent agony of what the Soviets called their Great Patriotic War. Indeed, this part of the global conflict was fought with a savagery almost unimaginable from the more limited experience of the Western allies: more than twenty million Soviets perished (almost double the entire population of Canada at that time). The Soviets too cried 'never again!': never again a surprise attack on Soviet soil; never again a false sense of security and military unprcparedness based on a pact with an untrustworthy foreign power; never again such a wanton outpouring of the country's lifeblood. Their response was to consolidate a buffer zone of subservient satellite regimes around the Soviet borders, to liquidate any political opposition within these regimes that might be linked to the USSR's enemies abroad, and to erect a military garrison state capable of defending this 'socialist' bloc. The irony is that each side in the emergent Cold War saw the other in terms of its former Nazi antagonist. The ghost of Adolf Hitler presided over a new set of hostilities even as his body was being burned in his Berlin bunker. Shaped and conditioned as they were by their wartime experiences, neither of the principal antagonists could readily allow that the other might also have legitimate interests to defend. Instead the USSR's cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe was most often seen by the West as the first step towards world conquest, and Western collective security was viewed in the East as proof of aggressive intent to overwhelm the Soviet homeland. The Cold War was a dialogue of the deaf. 1 WARS ON THE HOME FRONT

The Cold War was not merely a matter of international relations, it was a war launched within nations. The world war had a home front, and so did the Cold War. Wars are sustained by support behind the lines. The home front was crucial for the prosecution of the Cold War, since domestic support for the diversion of taxes and resources to rearmament and new worldwide diplomatic and military commitments had to be secured and sustained. 2 It was also shaped by the experience of the wartime home front that preceded it. The Second World War was a 'good war,' a popular war with Canadians. For the troops, this war was much less bloody, on the whole, than the First World War. For the people at home, it meant full employment, a broad consensus that this was a war

Never Again! 7 that must and should be fought, and a sense of collective purpose that had been sadly lacking in the Depression decade of the 1930s. Few could deny that the enemy, in the personification of Hitler's Nazi legions, was indeed an embodiment of evil. Stories of German atrocities against civilian populations that had turned out to be exaggerated propaganda during the First World War this time were ultimately revealed as mere pale intimations of the unspeakable reality of genocide and death camps. Wiping out fascism was surely a cause worth fighting for. Even good wars have their down side. In addition to those who died or were seriously wounded, and the anguish of their families and friends, there were other casualties. One was freedom of speech. Fears and rumours of an enemy within were treated very seriously. Reaction by the state was swift and tough. 'Half the war is in Europe,' the Security Service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) confidentially informed its agents in March 1940: The other half is behind our lines in Canada and must be waged with equal resourcefulness and decision.'3- The war was a dark time for civil liberties and freedom of expression in Canada. Although Canada was far away from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, the Canadian state acted as if the threat of invasion was dire and imminent and worried greatly that disloyal elements within Canada were assisting the enemy. For this reason it was deemed necessary to suspend much of the apparatus of liberal democracy for the duration of the conflict. To battle totalitarianism, Canada itself became a quasi-totalitarian state. Under the Defence of Canada Regulations enacted under the authority of the War Measures Act - draconian emergency legislation that far outdid the emergency powers available in wartime to either the British or the American governments - the federal government assumed awesome powers of control of wide areas of Canadian life usually thought of as within provincial jurisdiction or customarily left outside the scope of governmental regulation altogether. These powers were exercised over the economy, over everyday life, and over political dissent and freedom of expression. One of the enemies within was the entire Japanese-Canadian population of the Pacific coast, some 22,000 men, women and children. Under the wartime powers, these citizens were forcibly relocated to camps in the interior, had their property confiscated, and were seriously threatened with mass deportation to Japan (including the Canadian-born among them) at war's end. All of this was done without proof of a single case of espionage or sabotage by a Japanese Canadian. Under wartime censorship powers, 325 newspapers and periodicals were banned in the first years of the war. Criticism of the government's conduct of the war was subject to the close attention of the censors' scissors, and editors learned how to precensor their publications to avoid direct censorship. More positively, the media were organized for propaganda to sustain support for the war. There were entire agencies of the Canadian state entrusted with this task, among them the National Film Board (NFB) and the Wartime Information Board (WIB), but the challenge was eagerly accepted by the privately owned media of communication as well.

8

Introduction

Not content with censorship of ideas, the government went farther and outlawed more than thirty political, social, religious, and ethnic organizations judged to be disloyal, subversive, or suspect. Anyone who belonged to these organizations or who 'advocates or defends [their] acts, principles or policies' was presumed guilty 'in the absence of proof to the contrary.' Internment camps were set up across Canada and 2,423 Canadians or Canadian residents were incarcerated in them. Hundreds of Canadians of German and Italian origin were rounded up. So were some Ukrainian Canadians, Communists, local fascists, and some Quebec anti-conscriptionists. Habeas corpus was suspended for such persons, as were most of the rights thought to protect Canadians against arbitrary action by the slate. The attorney general of Ontario publicly thundered that 'to my mind the application of the time-honoured principle of British justice, that a man is innocent until proven guilty, makes it impossible to curtail the activities of these slimy, subversive elements which are at work not only in this province, but throughout the entire country.' Canadians were admonished in innumerable official posters and advertisements to beware fellow workers and citizens who might turn out to be enemy agents. 'Loose lips sink ships' was a common refrain. Distrust was an inherent part of a democratic war. A number of municipal councils in Ontario passed a resolution calling upon the state to strip citizenship rights from 'subversives.' The mayor of Hamilton praised the resolution as it passed his council: T would like to add pacifism, disarmament and brotherly love to the things we are against.' 4 Love, brotherly or otherwise, was a somewhat suspect quality in a state geared to total war. Wartime propaganda conditioned Canadians not merely to mistrust but to hate the enemy. In the case of Germany and Italy, this hate was predicated upon ideology but was not untainted with a degree of racism. In the case of Japan, the racism was striking. For instance, films in the National Film Board of Canada's World in Action series - widely seen across Canada (as well as abroad) - depicted the 'Japs' as 'little men ... their faces tawny masks, blank, expressionless,' 'collectively treacherous and greedy.' These aliens could be stopped only by 'striking' them repeatedly to demonstrate 'that we also do not fear to die and the false mask of arrogance will fall forever'. 5 Through films, radio broadcasts, posters, and advertisements, Canadians were being conditioned to view the enemy as subhuman slaves of organized totalitarian fanaticism. As the reports of bombing missions over enemy cities flooded the airwaves and the toll of enemy deaths mounted, there was an inevitable coarsening of public attitudes assisted by the dehumanization of the image of the enemy. Of course, not all Canadians lost the capacity to understand that the 'enemies' were also human beings, but the numbing of moral sensibility can be glimpsed in the initial public attitude towards the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The incineration of entire cities and the hideous deaths of tens of thousands of civilians by blast, burning, and radiation were overshadowed by relief at final victory. Later, attitudes shifted as the enormity of the destructiveness sank into popular consciousness, but at the time there was widespread approval. 6

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9

It is not surprising that in wartime people learn to hate the enemy. Yet to the extent that this was a popular, democratic war, it was a war of peoples against peoples. This 'democratization' of war, and the consequent emphasis of governments on the mobilization and manipulation of public opinion as a weapon, reached heights never previously seen. Never had so many people in so many nations been swept up at one time in such collective mobilizations. Ironically, these mass movements were all for the purpose of more effectively organizing the mass destruction of other similarly organized people under different flags and ideological symbols. Canadians sacrificed and fought bravely for what was undoubtedly a good cause, but could not themselves escape the psychological effects of total war. The dehumanization of the enemy and the hardening of moral sensibilities did not vanish with victory. Within a few years, indeed, the Germans themselves were to become close and trusted allies, and the Japanese friendly competitors in world commerce. But another enemy quickly replaced the old as the Cold War replaced the world war. This enemy was also seen as a dehumanized mass under totalitarian control: savage, ruthless, Slavic (this time), and, after 1949, 'Oriental' as well. The reflexes were already in place; the propaganda machines were warmed up and, with scarcely a shift in gears, the faces of the wartime Russian and Chinese allies were pasted over the faces of the former enemies, now become allies. A glance at the rhetoric and images of the Cold War as propagated in the Canadian media in the late 1940s offers a sense of deja vu. The ground had been laid by the experience of the war. There was another thread of continuity between the war and the Cold War: Communism as the internal enemy. The war had been fought against fascism, by 1941 in alliance with Communist Russia. Many thousands of people had expressed their sympathies for the Russians in huge, government-sponsored rallies in cities across Canada. Two of these rallies filled Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto with singing, clapping supporters who came to hear messages of solidarity with the Russian people. In 1942 the master of ceremonies was Harry 'Red' Foster, and the keynote speaker was the American Republican Wendell Wilkie, who advised the crowd not to fear the Soviets but to help them: T ask you as men and women to give aid to the men and women of Russia. How many among the democracies have feared and distrusted Soviet Russia? They have dreaded the inroads of an economic order that would be destructive of their own. Such fear is weakness. Russia is neither going to eat us or seduce us. No, we do not have to fear Russia; we need to work with her against our common enemy, Hitler.' The Canadian political, business, and military elites urged support for the USSR against Hitler. 'Russia is our ally, our friend, and our neighbour,' prominent barrister Leonard Brockington told the overflow crowd at another rally, 'We are both northern peoples, we are both pioneer peoples of the frontier. The Russian people will not forget those who were their friends in the hour of their need.' At another of these rallies the city of Toronto adopted the city of Stalingrad, and during the war a banner hung over the entrance to Toronto's city

10 Introduction hall; on one end of the banner was a portrait of Churchill, on the other end was Stalin. 7 This sort of thing was stirring and colourful war propaganda, but little more. When the alliance with Stalin was cemented, Churchill had made it clear that to defeat Hitler he would sup with the devil himself. Stalin was an ally for the moment, but he was not a friend. Nor was Communism suddenly given a sheen of respectability by this temporary alliance of convenience. High officials of the Canadian government always believed that Communism represented a greater threat to Canada than fascism. This was publicly reiterated by the minister of justice and senior officials of the RCMP; it was privately stated from time to time by Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Such statements predated the outbreak of the war, took on particular life when the Communists opposed the war following the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and continued long after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 and the consequent conversion of the Communists into fervent supporters of the war effort. Communist opposition to the war, which lasted some seventeen months, offered a convenient excuse for the state to do what it had always been trying to do, that is, repress Communism. From the time of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919 through the 1931 prosecution of eight Communist leaders under the notorious (and later repealed) Section 98 of the Criminal Code, with arrests, beatings, shootings, infiltrations, and disruptions along the way, the state had always sought to crush what respectable opinion in Canada saw as sedition, subversion, and revolution. The war gave the state the excuse and, with the War Measures Act, the means to make its anti-Communist repression more effective. The largest number of Canadian publications banned under the censorship regulations were Communist, rather than fascist. The Communist party along with a number of its 'front' organizations was declared an unlawful association in the spring of 1940; this ban was retained throughout the duration of the war, making Canada the only Western nation to declare its local Communist party illegal while the Soviet Union was an ally against Germany. More than 100 Communists or presumed Communists were interned, and the majority were not released until a year after the USSR had become an ally. A number of leading left-wing trade unionists were interned. The Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temples, representing tens of thousands of Ukrainian-Canadians across Canada, were declared unlawful, and more than 100 local halls were closed and their properties seized by the state.8 There is a commonly held view about Canada in the war years that is at striking variance with this picture. After the entry of the USSR into the war, so this story goes, pro-Soviet feelings waxed strong across the land. Cold Warriors declared retroactively that this was an era of illusions when Canadians were led to believe much naive nonsense about the Stalinist regime. Then these childish illusions were rudely shattered by the reality of Soviet duplicity in the form of the spy scandal that broke over Ottawa with the defection of Igor Gouzenko in 1945-6 and the subsequent opening of the Cold War.

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The truth is rather less dramatic. The continuity of anti-Communism throughout the twentieth century is more striking than any sudden oscillations of illusion and disillusion. Suspicion about the USSR and Communism had always been characteristic of the Canadian governmental and administrative elites. The wartime alliance changed nothing in this regard. Despite the statements for public (and Soviet) consumption about 'our gallant Russian ally,' a reading of the wartime letters, memoranda, and reports produced by the senior civil service, especially those in External Affairs, turns up almost no evidence of any pro-Soviet sentiment, as such. Mandarins like Norman Robertson were generally dubious about Stalin's Russia and remained so throughout the course of the wartime alliance of convenience -just as Churchill did. No Canadian official, for instance, raised any doubts about the decision to exclude the Soviet ally entirely from the Anglo-American-Canadian research that led to the atomic bomb. It is true that there was for a time a leftward trend evident in Canadian public opinion during the latter war years. According to polls, Canadians were more favourable to government ownership of industry and state program for social security than ever before (or in some cases, ever since). This popularity of left-wing public policies contrasted sharply with a rightward trend evident in the United States at the same time - but placed Canada closer to the experience of European countries where the Left was gathering strength in the latter war years. However, this trend should not be misunderstood. The major beneficiary in the end was the Mackenzie King Liberal party, which won the 1945 election on its economic policies of moderate social security and full employment. In the main, people were afraid of a return to the conditions of the Depression that had preceded the government-controlled wartime economy: the Liberal promise of a kind of managed free enterprise was good enough for the majority. To the extent that there was a genuine shift to the left in public opinion, most of it actually went to the moderate social-democratic (and very anti-Communist) Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor to the New Democratic Party (NDP) of today. In the immediate postwar period, the CCF was to play a modest but not unimportant role in offering its support to a 'non-partisan' Cold War foreign and defence policy for Canada (the Marshall Plan, NATO, and participation in the Korean War). The Communist line throughout the Western world after June 1941 was to support 'popular fronts' of 'progressive' forces to win the war against fascism. Cold Warriors have charged that the popular front was no more than a classic Communist tactic to advance their own cause by duping na'ive 'progressives' into cooperating with the Red lion, which would make short work of the lambs once power was in sight. Whatever truth there might have been in this interpretation for other countries where the Communists were a real and effective mass force, the situation in Canada seems to stand this argument on its head. In Canada the pursuit of the popular front actually led the Communists to offer limited backing to the Liberals in the 1945 election: a somewhat quixotic application of the tactic, considering that leading Communists

12 Introduction would be arrested by the same Liberals less than a year later. Under such circumstances there is some ambiguity concerning just who were the lions and who the lambs. Did the Communists actually gain much of a foothold in the Canadian political culture by such tactics? To a very limited extent they did cash in on the momentary prestige of the Soviet Union and on the leftward drift of public opinion. They had already established a relatively strong base in some trade unions during the 1930s, and there was enthusiasm for a popular front of 'progressive' forces (including Communists) in some sections of the union movement during the latter war years. In certain, mainly Jewish, electoral districts in Montreal, Winnipeg, and Toronto, where admiration for the Red Army's titanic struggle against the Nazi Wehrmacht ran high, Communist (or 'Labour Progressive' candidates, as they were known in deference to the official ban on the Communists) scored some limited electoral successes at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels. Yet even at the height of its popularity, the Labour Progressive party (LPP) never represented more than a pimple upon the swelling support for social democracy and reform liberalism. Within a few years of the coming of the Cold War, those who had been elected under the LPP banner were swept away - and the only Communist ever elected under that banner to the House of Commons was removed after being found guilty of espionage for the Soviet Union. Nor is there much evidence that Canadian public opinion was ever swept off its feet by pro-Soviet enthusiasm. The Wartime Information Board was carrying out secret surveys of public opinion that tended to suggest that even at the zenith of the alliance, dislike and mistrust of Soviet Russia were never far beneath the surface. After the vast Soviet-counteroffensive began to drive back the Nazi invaders in 1943, the board found evidence of a 'flareup of old suspicions and fears' of the USSR that continued as long as it appeared to be winning. The board warned that postwar relations with the USSR were a matter of 'real concern,' citing a powerful anti-Soviet coalition of big business and finance, French Canadians and Catholics generally, fundamentalist Protestants, and Canadians of Eastern European extraction. When asked in 1943 whether they favoured close ties with the USSR following the war, there was a plurality in favour, but French Canadians were strongly against. By 1944, with French-Canadian hostility constant, the board kept reporting 'latent fears' in English Canada as well: 'suggestions that we will have to fight Russia ultimately are made with disquieting frequency.' By 1945, 46 per cent expressed confidence that Canada could 'get along' with Russia after the war, while 34 per cent had no such confidence - results that were more pessimistic than those expressed in a similar survey taken in the United States at the same time. And when the first postwar conferences were held at San Francisco and Potsdam, the board noted a further 'stiffening' of distrust in Canadian opinion. 9 The world war paved the way for the Cold War to come. Canadians were mobilized by the state to fight an enemy that had both an external and an internal reach.

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The crude, all-or-nothing, for-us-or-against-us mentality of the world war - the wartime propaganda world of heroes and villains - was readily carried over into the more ambiguous and perplexing postwar era of atomic diplomacy and controlled international rivalry. The home front for the Cold War was already well prepared by the home front for the world war. What made this continuity even more striking is that even as the external enemy of the world war became an ally in the Cold War, and the ally of the world war became the enemy in the Cold War, the internal enemy for many Canadians - and especially for the governing elite - had never changed at all. POSTWAR CONSERVATISM

The Canada that faced the world at the end of the Second World War was a different country from the one that had entered the war six years earlier. Canadian participation in a global war and the social and economic effects of wartime mobilization had wrought changes in the country that in some cases would take a generation to become clearly apparent. As the soldiers returned and wartime production was phased out, the new peacetime Canada disclosed some surprises. For one thing, the long-expected recurrence of economic depression (once the war-induced, full-employment economy of 19405 was eliminated) never materialized. Instead of dislocations and unemployment, there was a relatively easy transition to peacetime prosperity: a boom, unmatched since the early part of the century, gathered force in the first postwar decade. There were hitches here and there - inflation in the early postwar years and problems in Canada's balance of payments abroad - but for ordinary Canadians the postwar world was one of relatively stable employment and a capacity to afford a growing share of consumer goods. Given the spectre of the Great Depression, which had haunted Canadians throughout the war years, this postwar prosperity was of crucial importance in determining the shape of postwar politics. Capitalism was emphatically working again. If the fruits of free enterprise were not evenly distributed, the modest expectations of most ordinary Canadians for a share of the pie were being met - and the wartime fears of so many Canadians about a return to the depression and despair of the 'Dirty Thirties' turned out to be groundless. Relative prosperity offered a powerful inducement to a new conservatism in the postwar years. The attractions to Canadian capitalism of helping to build a strongly conservative Cold War consensus in postwar Canada were manifest. A consensus cutting across classes defending 'our way of life' - crucially including free enterprise - against the philosophy of Communism (and socialism) obviously appealed to businessmen contending with the demands of trade unions and fears of government intervention, nationalization, and regulation. The economics of closer integration with the United States also appealed strongly to many Canadian businessmen, as did the opportunities opened up by Cold War rearmament. Yet it would be wrong to attribute to busi-

14 Introduction ness the leading role in creating this consensus. Certainly business added its influential voice to the chorus and contributed directly through 'public service' advertising campaigns, and indirectly through the media, which it owned and greatly influenced, to the stream of images and ideas that defined the Cold War in Canadian life. But the leading role in launching the Cold War within Canada was played not by business, as such, but by the Canadian state. It was the state that most often played the crucial role in the establishment of the Cold War as a permanent force within Canadian life, while neither seeking nor receiving external inputs from business interests. Moreover, government elites sometimes took a very vocal and visible role in directly influencing public opinion to move towards the new conservative Cold War consensus - and in publicly excoriating as disloyal and unpatriotic those who sought to contest this direction. In the Canada of this era there was still much deference granted to state authority. The counsels of the governmental elites were generally heard with respect and with much less of the populist mistrust towards 'polities' so prevalent today. Adding to its prestige, the federal government took at least part of the credit for the postwar economic recovery. Certainly the recovery was a triumph of capitalism, and registered as such in the minds of many Canadians whose earlier doubts had been fuelled by the Great Depression. But the capitalism that produced the goods after the war was not quite the old unregulated laissez-faire capitalism of the 'Dirty Thirties.' It was a capitalism managed and assisted by the state. In Canada it was not government in general, but the federal government in Ottawa that gained most in prestige from the war and postwar recovery. During the Depression years, the federal government had been impotent, lacking the political will and the constitutional power to deal with the crisis. The 1930s were the era of the great populist provincial demagogues - Mitchell ('Mitch') Hepburn, Maurice Duplessis, and William ('Bible Bill') Aberhart. Centralist economic controls in wartime had finally done what the windy rhetoric of the provincial demagogues had never done: put people back to work. The postwar recovery was managed by a federal government that not only confidently assumed new managerial powers over the private sector, but also assumed, by means of its superior fiscal capacity, extended powers over the provinces as well. The years from 1945 through the mid-1950s were the years of the greatest effective centralization of federalism during the twentieth century. This was the era when the influence of the 'mandarins' of the Ottawa civil service reached its zenith: the golden age of the Ottawa bureaucracy. Under the careful guidance of the Ottawa elite, Canada became permanently aligned internationally in the new power-bloc relations that emerged with the Cold War. At the same time, the domestic launching of the Cold War was managed by a central bureaucratic elite that had never had and was unlikely ever to have again - such scope for influence over events. By and large, it used this influence in ways which reinforced the conservatism that became ascendant in Canadian society in the postwar era. The civil-service mandarins of this

Never Again!

15

era have been characterized as 'liberal' in philosophy (and sometimes Liberal because of their generation-long association with successive Liberal governments). True, their management of Cold War Canada was liberal in comparison to the approach taken in McCarthy-era America. Nevertheless, the Canadian state helped consolidate the mood of postwar conservatism. One leading social manifestation of the new conservatism was the rush to return to the traditional structure of the patriarchal family. During the war, women had briefly emerged from the shadows of family life to take over 'male' jobs in industry while men were on active service abroad. Some women had joined the armed forces and served their country directly. Even during the war, the appearance of liberation was deceptive to a degree, masking continued conservative attitudes about 'women's place.' 10 In the immediate aftermath of war, women moved in droves from the factories and back into the home. The images of womanhood propagated in the mass media and advertising were no longer of Rosie the Riveter but of the dutiful wife and mother applying her talents to kitchen and kids. The famous postwar baby boom followed. Of course not all women welcomed this fate with open arms. Many of those who resisted demobilization from factory and office were simply given their walking papers as the men marched back. Some tenaciously held on, however, and formed the nucleus of a female workforce that would later grow in the 1950s, swelled by ranks of married women seeking a second income for their families or perhaps seeking escape from the home. For the first postwar decade, however, the 'official' image of women was that of stay-at-home wives and mothers. Men, as businessmen, administrators, workers, or soldiers, were responsible for looking after the dangerously insecure world beyond the home, while women tended the home fires. These were deeply conservative images that reinforced conservative trends elsewhere in Canadian society." The baby boom would later have significant repercussions when the postwar babies began to reach maturity by the 1960s. But for the first postwar decade, it was the relative age, rather than youth, of the Canadian population that was most significant. For the two preceding decades the birth rate had been low, and some of the young had been cut down in war. Consequently, there were, by present standards, relatively few teenagers or young adults in the Canada of the late 1940s. As some recent historians of this era put it, 'The dominion looked grey because so many of its people were greying.' 12 This too may have accounted for some of the conservatism of the time. So many Canadians were aging survivors of depression and war seeking peace and security. The return of the veterans to Canadian life had a major impact. By September of 1947 almost a million people had been discharged from the armed services. Following the First World War, the returned soldiers had sometimes been associated in the minds of frightened politicians and businessmen with 'Bolshevism.' This fear was no doubt grossly exaggerated, but rebellions in camps both abroad and at home, and the support that returned soldiers offered the workers in the 1919 Winnipeg General

16 Introduction Strike gave some credibility to the existence of at least a certain amount of radical democratic thinking among those who had fought to 'make the world safe for democracy.' Part of the problem in 1918-19 had simply been the negligence of the government of the day in meeting its responsibilities to those who had sacrificed so much for their country, only to be met with unemployment and indifference upon their return. No such negligence was in evidence after the next war. On the contrary, a massive and generous program of assistance was already in place before the hostilities had come to an end: medical care, disability payments and support, land-purchase assistance, subsidized housing, guaranteed return to prewar employment with seniority, special allowances for those without jobs, preference given to veterans in the public service, and free tuition and living allowances for those who wished to pursue technical or university education. Set beside the relatively quick transition to postwar prosperity, these benefits offered veterans a real stake in the existing order. Not surprisingly, the political radicalism that had touched some of their predecessors a generation earlier was not much in evidence after 1945. Yet unlike the United States which ironically had entered the war more than two years later than Canada - there were few permanent traces of militarism left in Canadian life by the war: no generals sought after as political leaders, little continuing prestige attached to military symbols, and a Canadian Legion that played a more important role in serving alcohol in dry counties than in offering ideological advice to governments. Sobered and matured by the experiences of war, most of the Canadian veterans applied themselves seriously to pursuing a career and raising a family: they represented, if anything, an apolitical conservatism. The working class, or at least the unionized elements of it, showed some initial signs of continuing militancy and even political radicalism in the immediate postwar period. There was a sharp flare-up of strike activity in 1945-6, including some struggles celebrated in the history of the union movement in Canada. The intensity of this labour militancy declined in the late 1940s and continued at a lower level through the 1950s. Support by workers for left-wing political movements did continue in certain areas immediately after the war, and a few Communists held on to provincial and municipal office in a handful of urban working-class constituencies. Yet by the early 1950s this support had declined sharply to the point of virtual extinction. Even the moderate and respectable CCF was experiencing diminishing voting returns from its working-class base. In this process of socialist decline, Cold War propaganda and outright coercion played an undeniable role. The Cold War was waged within the trade-union movement in the late 1940s, and it was sometimes violent and often intolerant. At the same time, the appeal of conservative businessoriented unionism was strong in an era when relatively full employment was apparently guaranteed by a Cold War-sponsored rearmament and by the infusion of American capital into Canada. Finally, there was the non-unionized working class always a majority of workers in Canada - who felt more weakly, if at all, a con-

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sciousness of themselves as a separate class with a political role. Add to these the large number of politically conservative unionized workers who had never wavered in their support of the Liberals or Tories, and it becomes clear that the working class was unable, and in part unwilling, to present a major obstacle to the assertion of a conservative Cold War consensus. Nevertheless, the trade-union movement was a terrain that those seeking to impose a Cold War consensus had to contest. The victory was won, but it did not just happen. The working class was one of the first battlegrounds upon which the Cold War was fought in Canada. Quebec, or French Canada in the wider sense, offered in this era one of the most fertile grounds for a genuinely populist anti-Communist consensus. Deeply under the ideological and cultural influence of the Catholic church (which still controlled education in Quebec), French Canadians showed strong antipathy to Soviet Communism. In this era the church hierarchy was universally committed to the view that Soviet Communism represented the Antichrist, an image that was tirelessly repeated in every parish from Trois-Pistoles to Portage-la-prairie. In Quebec, the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis played to this feeling with anti-Communist legislation, including the 'Padlock Law' and special amendments to the Quebec labour code. While there was a very small number of French Canadians who were themselves Communists, it would seem that the vast majority shared more or less enthusiastically in the official anti-Communism; certainly there were very few who were willing publicly to represent a liberal middle ground. Thus those forces within Canadian society seeking to establish a Cold War consensus could count on French Canada as a consistently zealous anti-Communist lobby. In the late 1940s and early 1950s a new movement gathered force: the rush of middle-class (and some working-class) Canadians to the suburbs. The lure of owning a single-family dwelling (however heavily mortgaged to those omnipresent Canadian institutions the banks) impelled large numbers of Canadians out of the older inner cities onto muddy and treeless suburban tracts far from their places of work. In Toronto alone almost three quarters of a million people appeared in the suburban boroughs between the 1941 and 1961 censuses, with the bulk of the movement taking place from 1952 to 1958. The very rich and the very poor stayed in the cities, while a middle class or would-be middle class, relatively homogeneous in ethnic and religious terms, gave a rather uniform WASP cast to the new suburban world. Despite the conformist face of pioneer suburbia, it was a world with little sense of the collective community that had characterized earlier pioneer settlements. It tended instead to be a world of separate, privatized families with absent commuting fathers, isolated and often bored wives, and children with few organized activities to occupy their time and nowhere to go. The eminent Canadian sociologist S.D. Clark, who studied suburban society, found a notable absence of any collective sense that a new world was being built: It was this lack of a clearly perceived view or 'image' of the good society which was the dis-

18 Introduction tinguishing mark of the suburban population. What was sought in the suburbs, by the vast majority who settled there, was a home, not a new social world. ... The population is intent only upon the business at hand: the acquisition of a home in which to raise a family. But what this means is a very strong reluctance to get caught up in that kind of network of obligations which is a normal part of an old established society. To be left alone, that is as a family, is what is wanted more than anything else.13

With time, these suburban worlds would develop more settled forms of community, but in the immediate postwar years the flight to the suburbs was a flight towards the privatization of life and an apolitical conservatism. Meanwhile, there was another movement going on, this time towards the older inner cities. One and a half million immigrants - displaced persons and refugees from the war and its upheavals, and multitudes seeking a better life with more opportunities - poured into Canada between 1947 and 1958, most of them settling in the major cities. Unlike some earlier prewar waves of immigrants, they did not tend to bring with them traditions of Old World radicalism. On the contrary, the postwar immigration brought new forms of conservatism. Many of the immigrants were, not surprisingly, interested only in pursuing the economic advancement of their families. Others, especially those from Eastern Europe, brought with them a bitter anti-Communism and hatred of the Soviet expansionism that had engulfed their homelands: they often added their voices to those of the extreme Right and supported any policies that maintained the Cold War with the USSR. The absence of radicalism among the postwar immigrants was also in part the result of deliberate government policy. A massive security-screening apparatus was set up precisely to keep out would-be immigrants with left-wing views or associations, or even with any past histories of left-wing activity. Moreover, once immigrants had arrived in Canada, they had to face another security screening when they later applied for citizenship. Under such circumstances, even those who might have harboured radical views found it prudent to keep them well hidden. On the whole, then, the immigrants added to the postwar conservatism already fostered among middle- and working-class Canadians. The Canadian culture in which the new immigrants found themselves was not one with a strong identity. Some might have been forgiven if they mistakenly thought themselves to be in the United States. 'High culture' (the visual arts, music, drama, literature) was often imported or derivative. Popular culture in the late 1940s centred on radio, the movies, and sports. Apart from some indigenous Canadian content promoted by the state-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), radio was largely commercial and American in content. American pop music, American comedy, American thrillers, and American soap opera filled the Canadian airwaves. Along with this came the importation of an American frame of reference that coloured the events of the day, and in particular, the events of the unfolding Cold War, both abroad and at home in North America. Beginning in the early 1950s, Canadians in areas close to the U.S. border drew in television signals with the help

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19

of huge and ungainly rooftop antennae. When they did, they tuned into the new medium through U.S. eyes. By 1952 television began officially in Canada, but much of its content (and usually the most popular portions, except for hockey) was American. The era that spawned the indelible TV image of Senator Joseph McCarthy pointing the finger of accusation at alleged Communist subversives was precisely the era in which TV made its entry into Canadian life. Canadians still flocked in large numbers to the cinema in the 1940s and into the early 1950s before TV began to keep them in their living-rooms. What they saw in the American-owned movie houses were almost entirely American feature-films. There was no Canadian feature film industry. Hollywood idols were Canadian idols, and Hollywood values were the values to which Canadians were exposed. After the 1947 circus-like hearings of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee investigating Communism in the Hollywood industry and the subsequent blacklist of left-wing directors, scriptwriters, and actors, it was a safe, conservative, redwhite-and-blue anti-Communist and pro-American Hollywood that Canadians were left to watch, a Hollywood that produced openly propagandistic Cold War epics such as The Iron Curtain, shot in Ottawa and purporting to depict the defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Embassy in 1945. In this era when motion picture newsreels still reached a mass audience, Canadians' images of current events were strongly defined by pictures and voices produced by American and British companies (sometimes with short Canadian features tacked on). During the war John Grierson's National Film Board enabled Canadians to enjoy the benefits of a strong indigenous producer of documentary films that were technically as good as anything produced elsewhere in the world. The NFB continued to produce documentary films in the postwar era, but the hostility of the private producers, the American theatre chains, and Hollywood itself caught the attentive ear of government and put an end to Grierson's dreams. When Grierson and some employees of the NFB were successfully Red-baited, the innovative and sometimes left-wing voice of Canadian documentary film was effectively isolated and rendered politically toothless. Thus the internal Cold War itself helped stifle a potentially distinctive and independent Canadian outlook on the world. The popular culture of the late 1940s and early 1950s contributed much to the climate of conservatism. Sometimes directly feeding the anti-Communist and antiSoviet hysteria of the time, it more often provided escapism and rest from serious thought about the nature of the society and the wisdom of the decisions that were being made in the name of the people. Above all, the mass media tended to reproduce American images of the world. Canadians had long been loyal to the symbols of Britain and its Empire. During the Cold War era, Canadians were shifting from one imperial attachment to another. The new metropolitan centre had shallower roots in Canadian loyalties than the old, but Cold War conservatism as transmitted through the largely American organs of mass culture played an important part in smoothing the transition.

20

Introduction

THE AGE OF INSECURITY

The unsettling backdrop to the new conservatism of the postwar recovery was the extreme international instability that followed the defeat of Germany and Japan. The years from 1945 through 1949 witnessed huge upheavals and redrawn maps of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In this fierce new international cockpit, Canada was compelled to play an unaccustomed role. Few Canadians had anticipated an important postwar role in the world for a country that had been an isolationist and semi-colonial state before the war. In 1945 Canada found itself, at least temporarily, one of the principal powers in the world. With Europe prostrate and Asia devastated, Canada was in possession of one of the world's larger and better-equipped fighting forces. It had been a partner in the secret research that had developed the atomic bomb, and its leaders and diplomats were being consulted by America and Britain in an unprecedented manner. At the fledgling United Nations, Canada was playing a role of prominence and prestige that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. Canada was apparently staying on the world stage, but this stage was an unsettling, even sinister one. Canada's first taste of international celebrity came with the Gouzenko spy affair, which broke upon the world in early 1946. Canada was briefly at the centre of the Cold War. It was an extremely unpleasant affair, involving as it did charges of espionage and disloyalty against Canadians holding trusted positions in the public service. It also left Canada in the uncomfortable and unaccustomed position of having to deal with an issue that hastened the rupture between the wartime allies. The inability of the great powers to settle the peace was especially ominous, for after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the prospect of another war was more terrifying than ever to contemplate. But not to all. U.S. general George S. Patton, Jr, addressing a Sunday-school class of eight-year-olds, told them they were the 'soldiers and nurses of the next war': 'There will be another war,' he assured the children. 'There always has been.' 14 It is doubtful that very many Canadians shared General Patton's enthusiasm. Many more were worried, deeply worried, about another war, which, if fought with nuclear weapons, would indeed be a war to end wars, and possibly the human race as well. Alternatives to nuclear war had to be explored. One alternative was international cooperation through the United Nations. The United Nations was seen by some in the immediate postwar years as a possible supranational agency that could stand above the petty but deadly quarrels of the great powers. Some even sought U.N. control of the demon of nuclear power. Another alternative was collective security through a military alliance employing nuclear arms as a deterrent to aggression by the Communist world. It was this latter alternative that Canada generally followed, and Canadian public opinion in its majority appeared to support this decision. Actually, Canadian policy makers spoke as if Canada were pursuing both alternatives simultaneously, but the

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second was not entirely compatible with the former. Canada continued to support the United Nations as a forum in which disputes might be resolved, but its heart, and its armed forces, went with the emergent Western alliance in its confrontation with the emergent Soviet bloc. Canada liked to think of itself as internationalist in outlook, but it also liked to think of itself as a strong and loyal member of the Western military alliance. Collective security through military alliances and the nuclear deterrent may have seemed to many Canadians the only sensible answer to the perceived threat of Soviet aggression, but an uncontrolled arms race and constant superpower confrontation left a great deal to be desired as a way of buying safety in the nuclear age. Opinion polls and other indicators of public thinking during this era tend to show an underlying anxiety beneath the strong support that Canadians manifested for the pro-Western and anti-Soviet alliance system. This anxiety rarely had to do with Canada's ideological alignment with the West against Soviet Communism; rather, it was linked to the insecurity that lurked just beneath the search for security through armed strength. Every exercise of armed strength against Communism, actual or threatened, only fed this underlying anxiety, for each such exercise involved the threat of war. Foreign and defence policy cannot be separated from the economic imperatives that faced Canadian policy makers. The economic problems that beset the Canadian government in the late 1940s were largely international in origin: the dollar shortage and the decline of traditional markets for Canadian exports. These problems were solved by short-run solutions that either involved much closer economic ties, in some instances what amounted to economic integration, with the United States, or as in the case of the Marshall Plan - by Canada's virtual purchase of a junior partnership in the kind of policies through which America was establishing its diplomatic and economic hegemony over the Western world. This junior partnership paid off handsomely in Canadian prosperity. If hard economic logic underpinned these policies, at the level of rhetoric Canada gave strong symbolic support to the anti-Soviet language of the U.S. leadership. Anti-Communism and economic recovery were thus tied closely together. The connection between the economic depression that never happened and the remobilization and rearmament of the Cold War could hardly escape the attention of Canadians, especially by the time of the Korean War, when a defence-induced boom greatly stimulated economic growth. It seemed that the Cold War was good for business, even if it caused worries about a real war that would be very bad for business. The conservatism of Cold War Canada was thus fed by the fear of two sorts of insecurity: the economic insecurity of those who remembered only too well the Great Depression and how they had been delivered from its grip only by war and wartime mobilization; and the international insecurity that led to the frantic search for armed strength and the uneasy stalemate of the Cold War. 'Security' was the watchword of the postwar era. In earlier eras, 'risk taking' had

22

Introduction

been a proud slogan of pioneers and entrepreneurs (perhaps more honoured in the breach, but central to the rhetoric of Canadian capitalism). In the 1930s, dictators and demagogues abroad - and a few of the latter at home as well - had exhorted the masses to take chances. The war had been won by daring and sacrifice. But by the end of the war it was apparent that people everywhere throughout the West wanted only to retreat from risk and insecurity to some safe refuge. This search for security took many forms. In Canada it had already been evident in the popular demand for social security that had led to the wartime rise of the social-democratic CCF party in the polls and the turn to the left of the Liberal and Tory parties in the 1945 election. It was evident in the development of the new Keynesian economic policies with which the government undertook responsibility for maintaining full employment, a form of state-guaranteed economic security that governments had previously eschewed. It was evident in the return to the family symbolized in the great postwar baby boom, and in the rush to the new suburbs where a single-family home promised a private retreat from the world. It was evident in a North American popular culture that for a decade after the war offered the simple-minded reassurance of traditional homilies and the refuge of escapism. It was evident in the almost obsessive concern of governments with erecting the machinery of collective security on the international stage, and in the race to develop military security through rearmament and the developing technology of defence. And it was evident in the concern of governments with internal security, the erection of controls to screen out 'security risks' among civil servants and immigrants; the elaboration of internal surveillance techniques to keep watch over dissident political activities; the dissemination of propaganda warning citizens of the dangers of Communism and celebrating the benefits of the Free World. An age obsessed with the pursuit of security is necessarily an age haunted by insecurity. The dark underside of the rather colourless, conformist, buttoned-down world that had taken shape by the mid-1950s was gnawing anxiety about the dangers - real and imagined - lurking half-hidden on the margins of the black-andwhite TV-tube image of the suburban middle-class family bungalow with its working dad, domestic mom, kids, dog, and latest-model car. Somewhere out of the corner of the eye there always seemed to be shadowy, elusive threats: inflation, unemployment, crime, juvenile delinquency, Soviet aggression, Communist subversion, and, always, the spectre of nuclear war. The new technologies of war brought insecurity home with a vengeance. The family home - symbol of hard-won economic and personal security - was seemingly threatened directly by forces that at one and the same time had recognizable faces (Stalin, Communism, the mushroom cloud of nuclear devastation) yet were maddeningly diffuse and beyond the capacity of the individual to control. Those politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen who could offer the most plausible insurance policies against these multiple insecurities would be able to command the allegiance of Canadians. It was the Liberal party, the mandarins of the Ottawa civil

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23

service, and the coiporate empires of Bay Street that together drew the benefits of the apparent conservative consensus among Canadians and, in (sometimes uneasy) concert, managed the Canadian political economy in the first postwar decade. Like insurance companies that themselves require reinsurance, this triumvirate of protective forces was given external protection by the Western Alliance and American military power. Such were some of the forces that helped to consolidate the postwar conservative consensus. The coming of the Cold War to Canada was both a cause and an effect of postwar conservatism. It is tempting to assume that this conservatism was inevitable. The very word 'consensus' seems to imply an agreement of opinion on the part of all concerned. Of course such agreement is never complete in any society, and rarely is the process by which a dominant consensus is developed ever free of bias, and even coercion. W I N N E R S AND LOSERS

At the end of the war, Canada was, in one sense, up for grabs. Profound changes had been wrought in the political economy; major elements of the social equilibrium had been disturbed; Canadians found themselves facing, with subtly altered perceptions, a new world in the making. The promises of new social-security legislation and the new centralized Keynesian economics practised by the federal government were one answer to this uncertainty. Another was the postwar wave of strikes as workers jockeyed for a better position. Powerful and influential forces in Canadian society saw it as in their own economic and political self-interest to force an outcome that would be to their advantage and consolidate their position. Of course, they justified their interests as being those of the nation as a whole. No doubt most of them sincerely believed what they said. This is the way that liberal democracies are normally supposed to work: each group tries to identify its own interests with the national interest. Competition is, however, imperfect. Some interests have greater advantages based on the unequal access to wealth and power. Public policy is usually debated in terms that mix expressions of self-interest with assertions about the national or common interest. The coming of the Cold War to Canada was most often discussed in lofty language and high rhetoric: the defence of Western civilization; drawing the line against totalitarian aggression; freedom against slavery; capitalism against Communism; collective security; national security. Each of these had real meaning, of course, although in some cases this had become much devalued by propagandist^ repetition and excess. It is well to recall that other motives most often lurked just beneath this surface of grand intentions. Historians should not take the rhetoric of an earlier age at face value. In the case of the Cold War this is particularly important because the very extreme symbolism so characteristic of an issue couched in terms of war and peace

24

Introduction

and freedom versus slavery masked more effectively than usual the very particular interests that were being served. Moreover, this symbolic extremism signalled that something else was going on that was more than the business-as-usual of liberal democracy. Those groups that effectively used Cold War arguments did more than simply advance their own interests. They participated in a process that coerced their opponents into relative silence. Cold War debates were rarely debates in the sense of free exchanges of ideas. They were struggles for control of the symbols of legitimacy in Canadian society. The winners consolidated their power and influence. The losers were tarred with the brush of illegitimacy: disloyalty, subversion, connections to an external enemy. The stakes were high. Business in general, certain state elites and particular departments and agencies of the stale, and some conservative ethnic, religious, and social groupings did very well out of the Cold War. Labour in general, other agencies of the state, and ethnic, religious, and social groupings with less conservative interests did poorly out of the Cold War. Those who wanted to maintain the status quo of capitalism and its unequal class structure did well; those who wanted radical, egalitarian change in the structure of privilege did poorly. Those who wanted an economy of armament expenditure did well; those who wanted disarmament and the diversion of resources towards social goals did poorly. Those who preferred a strong state to repress dissent did well; those who would have liked greater freedom of expression and openness did poorly. Those who wished to see greater integration of Canada within the American empire did well; those who wished for a greater degree of Canadian autonomy and neutrality did poorly. Who won and who lost had profound implications for the shape of postwar Canada. And the reverberations continue even today, in a Canada that now adjusts to a world without the Cold War.

PART TWO: THE G O U Z E N K O AFFAIR

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2

Gouzenko Concealed: Spies and Atomic Politics

The defection of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa in 1945 revealed the existence of a Soviet espionage system that was using Canadian civil servants to supply secret and confidential information to Soviet intelligence. The shocking news was revealed to the public in February 1946, just as relations between the Soviet Union and its wartime allies were deteriorating. This spectacular story of a ring of spies, said to be pursuing the secret of the atomic bomb, helped terminate the already failing negotiations on a postwar settlement. News of the ring of spies made headlines around the world as the RCMP seized and interrogated twelve Canadians and one British civil servant on suspicion of espionage. A special royal commission was struck, and for the next six months it provided graphic descriptions of the activities of the Soviet intelligence service and Canadian sympathizers who were spying on Canada's sleepy national capital. Along with the reports of the spy ring came the story of the young Russian and his family who suffered through a day and a half of terror before the government agreed to grant them asylum. This story, told to the House of Commons by Prime Minister Mackenzie King, to the royal commission by Gouzenko, and to the public by the commission, emerged as the standard account of the spy affair. Over the years the story was repeated in newspaper stories, radio and television interviews, several books, and a Hollywood film entitled The Iron Curtain. The tale has been retold with such consistency that it has become, over the years, a familiar part of Canadian mythology. In all the retellings there have been significant omissions in the sequence of events. Gouzenko, for example, defected in September of 1945, but the spies were not rounded up until five months later. What was going on in the intervening five months? Years after the defection and the spy trials that followed it, this question has not been fully answered. Some clues were provided by the publication of Mackenzie King's personal diaries in 1970, but the additions to the story, as seen through the eyes of the Prime Minister, only heightened speculation. Where Gouzenko's version

28

The Gouzenko Affair

provided a dramatic personal account, King's diaries provided a chronology of the political reaction to the spy scandal by politicians in Ottawa, Washington, and London. But here again a significant gap in the story appeared: King's diaries covering a crucial period in the fall of 1945 have vanished - the only diaries from all his years in office to go missing. The missing diaries, in turn, have fuelled speculation about a deliberate theft in order to cover up the government's handling of the spy investigation. These charges remained speculative because further attempts to uncover the complete story were frustrated by the official secrecy that enveloped the case. More recently, the Access to Information Act has facilitated the release of a large amount of pertinent documentation. In the light of this new material, a different version emerges in which the affair was shaped, manipulated, and defined by the same international tensions that led to the outbreak of the Cold War early in 1946.1 In reconstructing these events this account begins, as it did for the Canadian public, with the sensational news of the detention of the spy suspects in mid-February 1946. GOUZENKO'S ODYSSEY

In the pre-dawn hours of 15 February 1946, a dozen squads of RCMP narcotics agents dressed in plainclothes and wearing black leather jackets waited outside the homes of a number of civil servants, ten Canadian and one British, in Ottawa and Montreal. The drug squads were on loan to the Intelligence Branch of the RCMP, a small division that had comparatively few resources of its own. Each squad had instructions to force entry into the homes and apartments of the suspects at 6:00 a.m. precisely. Once inside, they would seize the suspects, gather up notes, books, and files and take the lot to a secret location outside Ottawa. The suspects, seized without formal charges, would be handed over to special guards and held incommunicado, out of reach of their wives, friends, and lawyers. The sweep was authorized under the extraordinary powers of the War Measures Act, secretly invoked by Prime Minister King and two members of his cabinet. The sweep had first been planned for 3:00 a.m., but at the last moment the Prime Minister's staff had intervened and forced a delay. Dawn was considered more appropriate, for the sake of appearances. Just before dawn the squads were briefed for the first time by Sergeant Cecil Bayfield, an intelligence officer who had spent the previous five months tailing the Ottawa suspects from home to work and back on shifts that lasted eighteen to twenty hours a day. That drudgery, Bayfield reflected, was finally over; the secrecy that had shrouded the spy investigation for five months was about to end. As he briefed the officers they realized, for the first time, that their targets were Canadian civil servants and the crime was suspected espionage. At six o'clock precisely the squads moved in on their targets. One of the squads bungled its assignment immediately by bursting into the wrong apartment. In the excitement that followed, the tenant tried to call the police, a Moun-

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29

tie seized her phone, and the squad withdrew to assault the apartment next door. That incident made the Ottawa papers. That morning nine men and two women were seized, and two more men were picked up in the next few days. All were transported to a specially prepared barracks at the Rockcliffe RCMP headquarters, where they were placed in isolated rooms in preparation for intensive interrogations. When Mackenzie King awoke later that morning, he realized with a start that the raids had been carried out as he slept and that soon he would have to issue a prepared statement announcing the detentions. That evening he read the terse 250-word statement to assembled reporters, disclosing only that certain unnamed persons had disclosed unspecified information to an unidentified foreign embassy. The reporters quickly discovered more accommodating unofficial sources, and the next morning a flood of sensational stories attributed to highly placed but unnamed government sources carried the news to a stunned public. In Toronto, the Globe and Mail announced that 'the atom secret' had been passed to the Soviet Union. In Washington, columnist Drew Pearson reported that the Canadians had taken in a Soviet agent who then 'broke down under questioning and revealed the names of 1700 agents operating in the U.S. and Canada.' The Canadians had uncovered the biggest spy scandal since the Second World War, the story continued, and soon politicians and public alike would be 'running for the diplomatic storm cellars.' In London, CBC correspondent Matthew Halton reported that 'almost everybody is interested in the big spy story from Canada. There is a wild flood of wild rumours coming over the cables, mostly from Washington, as if someone were trying to start a witch hunt.' 2 Soon after the news of the spy scandal broke, the public first heard the story of the young Soviet cipher clerk who had triggered the events by escaping into the arms of the RCMP in Ottawa with his wife and a handful of Soviet documents revealing the existence of the spy ring. The Gouzenkos' flight from the embassy had been difficult and harrowing, the very stuff of cloak-and-dagger espionage stories. For thirty hours Gouzenko had wandered the streets of Ottawa, wife and infant son in tow, searching for a Canadian who would understand and accept his desperate plea for asylum. While Gouzenko suffered one rebuff after another, the Soviets were furiously searching for the missing clerk and the secret documents he had pilfered from the embassy's files. The Gouzenko family managed to flee to a neighbour's apartment just before the Soviets broke into their own apartment in search of the documents and ransacked it. When the police came and offered the family sanctuary it was the dramatic conclusion to an epic that had been set in motion two years earlier when the Gouzenkos arrived in Ottawa. Igor Gouzenko, a lieutenant in the Soviet army, arrived in Canada in 1943, a year after the Soviet Union opened its embassy in Ottawa. As a twenty-three-year-old cipher clerk he had little direct experience of the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage, but his work was relatively simple: he was put to work encoding a great deal of the embassy's cable traffic that passed between Ottawa and Moscow.

30 The Gouzenko Affair Gouzenko's normal tour of duty was scheduled to end in the fall of 1945, and as the time approached it occurred to him that he would rather remain in Canada. Around the time of the explosion of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Gouzenko began marking incriminating documents in the embassy's files, anticipating the need for something valuable to offer the Canadians in exchange for refuge. On the evening of 5 September 1945, Gouzenko stuffed his shirt with more than 100 documents and made his way to the Ottawa Journal where he planned to get his story into print. Arriving in the late evening, he tried to plead his case with the night city editor, Chester Frowde. Frowde was baffled, Gouzenko increasingly rattled. 'This man was short, with a tubby build,' Frowde later recalled, 'and he was white as a sheet.' The two of them retreated into a side room where Gouzenko burst out in a thick accent: 'It's war! It's Russia!' Frowde didn't understand what Gouzenko was trying to say, and the Russian's poor English and nervous state only made communication more difficult. After ten minutes, Frowde gave up and advised Gouzenko to stop in at the RCMP headquarters nearby. Worried that the Mounties might have been infiltrated by Soviet spies, Gouzenko bypassed the RCMP building and went instead to the Department of Justice where he was turned away by a commissionaire because the building was closed.3 Word of Gouzenko's strange behaviour reached the RCMP Intelligence Branch, and by the time Sergeant Bayfield reported to work the next morning, the office was buzzing with rumours. That morning Gouzenko returned to the Journal with his wife, Svetlana, and proceeded to the Supreme Court to apply for citizenship and then to the Department of Justice. Finally, after suggesting that he was contemplating suicide, he headed home. As he left the Department of Justice with his wife, Gouzenko was sure that he was being followed by another Russian. He ducked into a downtown department store, left immediately through a rear door, and thus managed to shake Sergeant Bayfield. But Ottawa was a small town, and Bayfield circled around, spotted the Gouzenkos on a streetcar, and followed them home. While the couple picked up their son from a neighbour, Bayfield settled onto a park bench to watch. Gouzenko, peering from his window, was sure that Bayfield and another plainclothes officer seated beside him in the park were Soviet agents. 'IT WAS L I K E A BOMB ON TOP OF E V E R Y T H I N G '

Mackenzie King was first informed of Gouzenko's attempts to win asylum in Canada on the morning of 6 September 1945. Norman Robertson and Hume Wrong brought him the news just as he was preparing to open Parliament, and as his diaries show, his first reaction was one of caution, reserve, and suspicion. His critics would later fault him for the response, but the Prime Minister was loath to upset relations with the Soviet Union on behalf of a young man who had by then admitted that he was attempting to avoid returning to the Soviet Union. Louis St Laurent, the minis-

Gouzenko Concealed

31

ter of justice, was similarly cautious and had turned Gouzenko away without seeing him at the Justice Department. Robertson, however, was already interested in the intelligence that Gouzenko had to offer, and he told King that he felt that 'the information might be so important to both the States and to ourselves and to Britain that it would be in their interests for us to seize it no matter how it was obtained.'4 During the day, Gouzenko managed to communicate that his documents offered evidence of a Soviet espionage ring that was using Canadian civil servants as informants. This only magnified King's anxieties, as he later recorded in his diaries. Offering Gouzenko protection would be a deliberate attempt to gather classified information from a Soviet citizen. If the information obtained was not especially embarrassing to the Soviets - so much so that they were silenced - then the result would be a sour exchange of diplomatic notes and accusations. The Canadians, meanwhile, would have committed exactly the same act as the Soviets: receiving secret information from civil servants. But if Gouzenko could prove the existence of a ring of spies, as he was now claiming, then the information would have the potentially explosive power of a major public scandal. Such a scandal could seriously undermine the next round of meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London. In a few days' time, the Soviet Union was to begin a round of crucial postwar negotiations with its wartime allies, including Britain, France, China, Canada, and the United States. A diplomatic incident between the USSR and Canada could upset the very negotiations that held the key to future peace between the countries. The items on the agenda of that meeting included the disposition of the Italian colonies, the formation of new governments in Eastern Europe, the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East, and the issue of the Greek civil war. Looming over the negotiations was the spectre of the recently developed atomic bomb, which had been exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki the month before. Canada and Britain had assisted in the development of the bomb, but the Soviets had been excluded. At the time of Gouzenko's defection the United States was embroiled in debate over whether to share or monopolize the military and industrial secrets of the atom. Even Canada and Britain, who had contributed to the unravelling of these secrets, might be excluded. Through a series of signed agreements, the United States maintained a virtual monopoly on all atomic research. That Canada might somehow damage these negotiations by encouraging a scandal triggered by a twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk who did not want to return home was repellent to the cautious Mackenzie King. 'It was like a bomb on top of everything,' King wrote, 'and one could not say how serious it might be or to what it might lead.'5 King and Robertson approved the RCMP request for surveillance of Gouzenko and agreed to their plan to grab the documents if Gouzenko attempted suicide. Then they called in William Stephenson, an expert on espionage who had been in charge of liaison between British intelligence and the American Office of Strategic Services during the war. Stephenson, who was later knighted and then lionized as 'the Man

32

The Gouzenko Affair

Called Intrepid' after a biography and a film made his code-name popular, was close at hand, just a few miles outside Ottawa at Montebello, and he came up to Ottawa immediately. In his view, Gouzenko offered an intelligence coup. As a young lieutenant in the Russian army, Gouzenko could describe something of the training given to intelligence officers. As an embassy employee, he had some knowledge, if only partial, of the Soviet system of espionage. The alternative to asylum that Stephenson might have preferred - cultivating Gouzenko as a double agent - was ruled out by Gouzenko's theft of documents and his flight from the embassy. Stephenson argued in favour of asylum. The government was disposed to disagree. While King was loath to give the Soviets an excuse to claim that Canada was provoking an incident, his reservations melted away late that night when the Soviets made a tactical blunder and gave the Canadians the slight excuse they needed to bring Gouzenko in. Around midnight four officers from the Soviet Embassy drove to Gouzenko's apartment on Somerset Street. While the driver waited, the four men broke into the apartment and ransacked it. The Ottawa police came immediately and found the four still at work turning out drawers and closets. After some shouting, the Soviets managed to bluster their way out of the apartment by claiming diplomatic immunity, but their action tilted the diplomatic scales in Gouzenko's favour. The Gouzenkos, at that point hiding in a neighbour's apartment, were given asylum. The next morning two Mounties were assigned to take the family to a motel in the Gatineau hills, outside Ottawa. Soon after that they were transferred to an old farmhouse outside Toronto at a location known as 'Camp X,' where secret agents had received training for wartime missions.6 Here the Gouzenkos spent the fall and winter in close company with their RCMP protectors. A tight lid of secrecy was immediately clamped down on the case. Government officials, looking for a suitable code-name for the case, came up with 'Corby,' inspired by the label on a bottle of gin. Newspaper reporters and secretaries who had come in contact with Gouzenko were advised to forget about it, and all further knowledge of the case was confined to a small working group that included the Prime Minister, his key advisers, and representatives of the RCMP, the FBI, and British Intelligence. 'WE HAVE GOT NOW WHAT IS N E E D E D TO B R I N G THE USSR TO T H E I R SENSES'

Canadian-Soviet relations, never especially warm, were at their most cordial during the two years preceding Gouzenko's defection, largely due to the Soviet Union's entry into the war on the side of the Allies and to officially sponsored 'Aid to Russia' events.7 The Canadian Communist party, then called the Labour Progressive party (LPP), even appeared on the verge of becoming a fourth national party. Its first electoral breakthrough came in a by-election in the east end of Montreal when Fred Rose won the first federal seat for the Communists (Rose was re-elected in the general election of 1945).8 Party leader Tim Buck optimistically announced the begin-

Gouzenko Concealed

33

ning of a twenty-year partnership between business and labour, between Communists and liberals, and among Canada, the United States, and the USSR, that would speed the reconstruction of a world damaged by war. Buck's dream was punctured a few months later. The alliance of the Allied powers was rooted in expediency, not in faith. Officials in Ottawa remained deeply suspicious of the Soviets. Diplomatic relations were hardly as warm as the public enthusiasm for the Soviet Union war effort would suggest. The Cold War had not yet begun, but as veteran diplomat Charles Ritchie recalled, 'the signs were there.' Following the defeat of Germany and Japan, the stability of the peace depended upon the Allies' ability to negotiate on their differences, and the scheduled meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers was a crucial step in that direction. In this context, the Gouzenko affair was a potentially explosive scandal that could damage international relations and divide the Allies.9 Gouzenko's story was particularly disruptive because it described the active recruitment of Canadian civil servants into the Soviet espionage ring. One of the goals of that operation was the theft of information about atomic research in Canada. His documents revealed that the Soviets had sources of information in the National Research Council, the Wartime Information Board, and the Department of External Affairs, and he had heard of sources in the U.S. Treasury and State departments. The explosive potential of the scandal was hardly lessened by the fact that Gouzenko himself was only a middle-level cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy who had never actually laid eyes on a spy. All Gouzenko's knowledge had been gleaned from the documents he encoded for the embassy, and even these contained only code-names for the informants. Nor did the fact that the information was leaked by Canadians to the Soviets while the two countries were allies - and while the Soviet troops were taking the brunt of the German attack - lessen the scandal. The mere fact that the Soviets had utilized Canadians to obtain secrets, especially secrets concerned with the atomic bomb, would create a sensation. The diplomats were aware of this, and their careful handling of the spy case and their constant revision of plans for publicizing the affair reflected the fluctuating state of international relations throughout the fall of 1945. Mackenzie King recognized the power of a spy scandal to disrupt negotiations. He also realized that Gouzenko gave him a chance to position himself, and thus Canada, briefly near the centre of the international stage. This cameo role in diplomacy suited the Prime Minister and, as his diaries show, he managed it well. Throughout the fall the Gouzenko affair was Mackenzie King's entree into the postwar negotiations, and wherever he went in the following months, the spy scandal intruded into his conversations, his diaries, and his exchanges with his advisers. The issue took the Prime Minister twice to Washington and once to London, and it provided the subject of conversations with President Truman, Prime Minister Attlee, Winston Churchill, and others. The Gouzenko case was inextricably connected to King's (and Canada's) participation in the failed diplomacy that marked the begin-

34

The Gouzenko Affair

ning of the Cold War. By tracing the emergence of the Gouzenko case, first in secret meetings and then in a public scandal, we can glimpse the outlines and the limits of Canadian diplomacy during this crucial period. Once the Gouzenkos were safely under guard at Camp X, immediate steps were taken to bring in British and American security agencies. British agents Peter Dwyer of MI6 (external intelligence) and Roger Hollis of MIS (the security service) joined British high commissioner Malcolm MacDonald in Ottawa to prepare a report for the Foreign Office. At King's request, the British also informed the American secretary of state, James Byrnes, who was in London for the meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers. The FBI arrived in Ottawa soon after, and a police intelligence operation was begun to verify Gouzenko's information, to identify and keep watch on suspects, and to pump the cipher clerk for any additional knowledge he might have. Afterwards, the security value and the political impact of the defection could be determined. The initial assessment of the documents took less than a day. The Soviets had established a network of contacts within the Canadian government, and they were successfully extracting classified information on non-nuclear weapons, political discussions, and atomic research. The informants were evidently Soviet sympathizers, not professional spies. The list of code-names suggested as many as twenty-six informants, eighteen of them Canadian. Even the cable traffic and possibly the code of the British High Commission and the Department of External Affairs had been compromised. Among the key departments leaking information were the Wartime Information Board and the National Research Council. Furthermore, Gouzenko's story revealed the activities of only one part of the Soviet espionage system, the military. According to Gouzenko there were several other undercover operations centred in the embassy - in the secret police (NKVD), the political section of the Communist party, the commercial section, and possibly a naval intelligence system - but he had no specific knowledge of their activities.10 Among the evidence brought by Gouzenko there were disturbing suggestions - of special interest to the RCMP - that two prominent Canadian Communists were involved in the spying. The names of MP Fred Rose and party organizer Sam Cancame up repeatedly in the documents. But what most dismayed King and his advisers was the evidence that trusted civil servants, Canadian citizens by birth at that, were knowingly disloyal. That these people would violate their secrecy oaths for the benefit of a foreign power, albeit a wartime ally, was shocking, and this shock paved the way for the stringent security-screening procedures that followed in the wake of Gouzenko's defection. These revelations were closely guarded secrets throughout the fall and winter of 1945. Inside the government, the small working group code-named 'Corby' included King, Norman Robertson and Hume Wrong from External Affairs, Minister of Justice Louis St Laurent, and RCMP Superintendent Charles Rivett-Carnac. The Mounties developed their own core group within the Intelligence Branch with

Gouzenko Concealed

35

the addition of Inspectors C.W. (Clifford) Harvison and M.E. Anthony. Sergeant Bayfield and his partner, Constable Campbell, were assigned to track all the suspects in the Ottawa area from home to work and back again. This they did on an assignment that dragged on through the fall and into the cold Ottawa winter. The police investigation was relatively simple. Handwriting samples were collected to compare with those taken from the embassy. Samples of stationery were compared with those supplied to the embassy. The date of a rainstorm mentioned in a Soviet Embassy report was verified through the weather office. These details helped to convince Canadian authorities that the documents were genuine. Although it was conceivable that embassy staff were magnifying information gleaned from cocktail-party conversations in order to fulfil Moscow's expectations, this possibility was apparently rejected early in the investigation. Even though the investigators had confidence in the documents supplied by Gouzenko, however, the Justice Department advised King that additional evidence would be needed to gain convictions in court. The evidence that Gouzenko could offer, no matter how persuasive, was necessarily hearsay evidence. Before it could be used against most of the suspects, some additional evidence had to be found that demonstrated a violation of the Official Secrets Act or linked them to a conspiracy to violate the act. Even Gouzenko, since he had transmitted the information, was a co-conspirator in the spying. This would not affect his ability to give evidence in court, but the Justice Department knew that judges and juries were loath to return conviction on the basis of uncorroborated evidence of co-conspirators, and therefore the department opposed any prosecutions without further evidence. While the British and the Americans launched their own investigations, several steps were taken to mask the extent of the revelations made by Gouzenko. The cipher codes used by the British High Commission and External Affairs that might have been compromised were intentionally left unchanged until the new year. All communications regarding the Gouzenko case were sent over a secure communications system arranged by William Stephenson. Suspects who had access to classified information were left in their jobs, but they were given banal assignments. When the Soviet Embassy made formal enquiries after Gouzenko, the RCMP replied with a massive charade that included the deception of their own field officers. A nationwide alert was sent out for the Gouzenkos, and when negative reports came back to Ottawa, this was dutifully reported to the Prime Minister for him to relay to the Soviets.11 The Soviets, similarly, seemed to have abandoned all contact with their former informants. Inspector Harvison, who later interrogated the suspects, found that 'it was quite evident that the Russians had not told their Canadian dupes of Gouzenko's defection or warned them of the possible consequences.' One suspect, Alan Nunn May, did leave Canada for London, but he was tailed by Sergeant Bayfield and the case was turned over to MI5.12 With the security investigation under control, King began to speculate anew on

36 The Gouzenko Affair the political dimensions of the Gouzenko case. It was clear that the evidence of spying could be a lever to use against the Soviets. But where to apply it? King's view was that the threat of such a revelation might make the Soviets more manageable at the United Nations. He favoured a direct approach to the Soviet leaders with the threat of public exposure if their behaviour failed to improve. 'A MOST D I S A G R E E A B L E P U B L I C S C A N D A L '

There was an immediate precedent for King's plan in another spy scandal that had been uncovered eighteen months earlier. In 1943, the Spanish consul general in Vancouver, Fernando de Kobbe, was very quietly deported for spying on behalf of the Japanese. The RCMP and the FBI had intercepted cash payments and detailed instructions for de Kobbe and had evidence that he was using the Spanish diplomatic pouch to send his replies. The Consul was escorted to a boat in New Orleans and returned to Spain, protesting his innocence. Evidence of the spying was then passed to the British to use against Spain. As Norman Robertson noted in a memo to the Prime Minister, the information they had in the de Kobbe case would allow them 'to put the screws to Franco. In the present phase of the European political situation, the threat of exposure of Spanish collusion with the Axis may be a very useful lever in securing further concessions from Spain, or if this course seems more desirable, [it] could be used to discredit the present dictatorial regime entirely.'13 External Affairs officer Thomas A. Stone added another note one that would reappear in the Gouzenko case: 'the implied threat of a most disagreeable public scandal might result in a general clean-up of the anti-United Nations activities in the Spanish foreign service.'14 Many of the same options were present in the Gouzenko case. In late September 1945, King hoped to pressure the Soviets to make concessions, or risk a scandal. As for what concessions should be sought, King was unsure. At first he considered demanding an end to the spying, or possibly an agreement by the Soviets to cooperate at the United Nations. Later he considered asking them to give up their veto power in the Security Council, a position that was pressed for a time by the Canadians. For the moment, at least, the Gouzenko revelations were not primarily linked with the atom bomb; that connection developed later. Whatever the concession sought, all parties agreed that the impact of the revelations would be considerable. Superintendent Rivett-Carnac saw its potential largely in terms of an anti-Communist initiative. As King noted in his diary, the Superintendent held forth on 'what was to be gained by making the whole business public in the way of stopping the Communist movement on the Continent. That to expose the whole thing might cause our people to cut away from the Russian influence altogether.'15 But in the weeks that followed, the consensus was to confer with the British and the Americans and develop a common plan before acting against the Soviets. Near the end of September, King was jolted into action by the British, who were

Gouzenko Concealed

37

anxious to arrest their one suspect, atomic scientist Alan Nunn May. They were persuaded to put off the arrest while King and Robertson journeyed to Washington and London to hammer out a common strategy among the three countries. Soon Mackenzie King was slumbering in the guest bedroom in the Canadian Embassy in Washington while Robertson and Ambassador Lester Pearson worked late into the night working out the details for a meeting with U.S. undersecretary of state Dean Acheson and President Truman. The facts of the spy affair had already been shared among the three Allies. What Gouzenko knew about possible spying in the United States and what his documents showed about the Soviet system of espionage were already known to the FBI. The real purpose of King's visit was to discuss the political ramifications, not the facts. The meeting also offered Mackenzie King a chance, eagerly seized, to participate in the postwar negotiations. At the heart of these negotiations was the unsettling issue of the international control of the atomic bomb and international access to the research that had produced the bomb. There was a deep division of opinion within the Truman administration over the significance and the usefulness of the atomic bomb in postwar negotiations. In Truman's divided cabinet, the opposition to any sharing of the bomb was led by the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, while the proponents of international control included the undersecretary of state, Dean Acheson, the vice secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and the former vice-president and now secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace. Outside the Executive Branch there was little sympathy for any exchange of information with the Soviets. Opinion polls taken in the United States at the end of September showed that 70 per cent of the public and 90 per cent of Congressmen opposed any sharing of 'the atomic bomb secret' with other nations. Faced with a choice between a policy that sought global peace through international control and one that sought security through military pre-eminence, Truman vacillated.16 The view held by many of the scientists who had helped to develop the atomic bomb was that the principal secret was revealed over Hiroshima: it worked. The raw materials for the construction of a bomb could be refined from widely available thorium deposits as well as the relatively scarce uranium ore. Any nation that now wished to develop atomic weapons could reasonably expect to succeed given an adequate investment of time and industrial resources. It would be only a matter of time, they argued, before the Soviet Union could produce and deliver its own atomic bombs. This was the view held by Lester Pearson as he discussed the issue with King during his stay in Washington. Pearson guessed that the Soviets might develop a bomb within five years (in fact it took four), and he frightened the Prime Minister with his descriptions of a new generation of hydrogen weapons. Scientists then believed that the explosion of one of the new 'super-bombs' might engulf the world in fire by igniting the oxygen in the atmosphere. These were additional reasons, in Pearson's

38

The Gouzenko Affair

view, why the entire issue should be put before the United Nations. The existence of the bomb had already undermined the power that a United Nations might wield. What country, possessed of a bomb, could be brought to heel by the United Nations with the threat of conventional sanctions? International control was required. Secretary of State James Byrnes, on the other hand, viewed the atomic bomb as a bargaining chip in the postwar negotiations. At the September meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London, Byrnes attempted to bully Soviet foreign minister V.M. Molotov into making concessions. But Molotov defused the threat by making jokes about the American bomb. Molotov even shocked Byrnes by embracing him and then whispering dramatically in his ear, 'You know we have the atomic bomb!' The Americans found that the implied threat of the bomb was giving them no leverage. No attempt was made at this meeting to win cooperation by offering any exchange of information on atomic energy. When the talks stalemated, Byrnes pulled out and the meeting collapsed. As Mackenzie King wound up his visit to Washington, Byrnes was preparing to return from London. 17 King's visit to the White House was not as dramatic as he wished. Truman did not appear surprised at the evidence of Soviet spying. Though the President did not mention the fact, he had been informed of several previous attempts by the Soviets to obtain information on atomic research. Truman allowed King to read him several long passages from the preliminary investigation, and they both agreed that no action should be taken until the U.S. leads provided by Gouzenko were followed up by the FBI and until all parties, including the British, agreed on a joint action. This news was immediately conveyed to the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax. At the White House, King had suggested that perhaps the threat of a spy scandal could be used to remove the Soviet veto at the United Nations. Truman was noncommittal. Now with Lord Halifax, Mackenzie King for the first time sought a connection between Gouzenko and the atomic issue, and he suggested that the threat of a scandal might somehow be used in the atomic negotiations. Later in his diary, he pursued this thought: 'What I feel is that neither the U.K., the U.S., or Canada would ever use the atomic bomb as a surprise weapon. I do not feel the same way about a country that uses the espionage on a national scale as it is being used against Canada today. This therefore shows how important it is that the bomb situation must be controlled in the interests of mankind. I think we have got now what is needed to bring the USSR to their senses in this regard. These are the factors that are bound up in the mission that we are now taking abroad.'18 'I T H I N K WE ARE BEING TOO T E N D E R '

In London, the British were restless. According to Gouzenko's documents, Alan Nunn May would be making contact with a Soviet agent outside the British Museum in early October, on the very night that King and Robertson were scheduled to arrive

Gouzenko Concealed

39

aboard the Queen Mary. British security had the area well covered, and they proposed to arrest the scientist if he showed up for the appointment. Anticipating this, King and three ministers signed a secret order in council, PC 6444, which authorized the Mounties to use the authority of the War Measures Act to seize and interrogate any of the Canadian suspects. The British, however, lacked the blanket powers available to King under the War Measures Act and thus needed Nunn May to incriminate himself by appearing for the rendezvous. Now it was President Truman's turn to appeal for a delay. As the Queen Mary reached Southampton, Roger Hollis stepped on board to show Mackenzie King an urgent telegram from the President. Truman asked that Nunn May be arrested only as a last resort and called for 'a complete understanding between the countries immediately concerned' before any action was taken. This urgent exchange between the great powers likely suited King's sense of drama. Nunn May, for his part, stayed home. That night, while MI5 waited in vain for Nunn May to step into their trap, King reviewed the Gouzenko affair with Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Now King emphasized the link between the spy affair and the nuclear debate: T spoke of linking this matter of espionage with the atomic bomb. I found that in this Attlee was also in entire agreement. He used the expression that he felt the time had come when there must be a "show-down" with the Russians.' 19 The next day an alarmed Norman Robertson discovered that the British were very anxious to take immediate action. A note marked 'top secret'provides an account of the meeting he held with representatives of MIS. According to his notes, the Foreign Office and 'C from London'(the chief of MI6) indicated that they wished to see the suspects arrested by mid-October. MI5 likewise 'made it clear that they were anxious for a decision; prolonged delay would result in the trail becoming cold.'20 Robertson pointed out that the Canadians - and he believed the Americans as well - were worried about the publicity that would surround the arrest of the spy suspects. U.S. undersecretary of state Dean Acheson agreed with Robertson that any publicity on the Gouzenko affair could backfire badly. The result, Robertson suggested, would be 'that public opinion, including the Canadian Parliament and the United States Congress, would be so stirred by the story of this Russian network stealing our secrets that prejudice would inevitably be brought both to the possibility of sharing with the Soviet Government on terms some of our atomic secrets, and to general prospects of financial and economic co-operation with Soviet Russia.' 21 At the same time Robertson argued that a spy scandal would only stir up enough anti-Soviet feeling to block the sharing of the atomic research but no more. Public opinion, he felt, would not be sufficiently united behind the American and Canadian governments to allow them to confront the Soviets in other areas. For the time being, the Soviets retained a reserve of public sympathy because they had 'scored some publicity successes' during the war. Robertson was also concerned that some sections of opinion, especially in the scientific community, would feel that the

40

The Gouzenko Affair

USSR had been unfairly shouldered out of the development of the atomic bomb (which might explain some of the cooperation that scientists had given to the Soviet espionage operation). Consequently, he argued against 'risking a show-down with the Soviet government unless the allied governments concerned were assured of the overwhelming support of their own public opinion, and he was doubtful whether this unanimity could be secured until an offer of collaboration in these questions had been made to the Soviet Government which the latter had either accepted or rejected.'22 The basis of the Canadian position was that diplomatic efforts to reform the behaviour of the Soviet Union at the United Nations were now pointless. Robertson argued that the detailed arrangements for security and sanctions that had been worked out at the first sessions of the United Nations in San Francisco had been rendered meaningless by the development of the atomic bomb. Worse, American scientists were now predicting the development of the hydrogen bomb and promised 'developments in the future many times more frightening than those seen in Japan.' Uncontrolled competition in such an arms race, Robertson suggested, 'was an appalling prospect.' The Canadians proposed a test of Soviet intentions that they hoped would lead to international cooperation in the control of the atomic bomb through the United Nations. The first step in this direction might be the free exchange of scientists and atomic research among the countries. This in turn would pave the way for international policing of all fissionable materials and the eventual destruction of existing stockpiles of atomic weapons. If the offer were rejected and the Soviet Union refused to cooperate, then the public might be rallied against them. Robertson's proposals echoed those given by Acheson to Truman during the same period. In the wake of Byrnes's failed attempt to use the bomb as a big stick in the recent meetings of the Council of Foreign Ministers, a negotiated approach leading to international control was gaining some ground in Washington, much to the satisfaction of the Canadians. But the British, especially the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, and the Foreign Office, seemed adamant in their desire to arrest Nunn May as soon as possible. They argued that little more could be learned from Gouzenko or his documents and that the investigation must be hotly pursued; following Robertson's course would be a visible sign of weakness. MI5 wished to act within ten days. The British representatives reiterated their view that 'the most straight-forward procedure was the best,' that is, 'to prosecute when possible.' It was not thought by London that this would create 'serious difficulties' with the Soviets, 'who would, on the contrary, suspect us of weakness if we adopted any of the other courses hitherto suggested.' Attlee was in a more cautious mood, however, and was receptive to Truman's request for a delay. After Mackenzie King spoke to Attlee, the two leaders agreed on delaying matters, although Bevin commented, T think we are being too tender.' At this point the British, far more than the Americans, were inclined to force a confrontation with the

Gouzenko Concealed

41

Soviets, but faced with the combined U.S. and Canadian reluctance to do anything that might jeopardize negotiations, the British agreed to wait for further high-level discussions, which were eventually scheduled for mid-November in Washington. But for the Americans' desire to delay any confrontation, the Gouzenko affair would have seen the light of day little more than a month after the cipher clerk's defection.23 By this point the Gouzenko affair had become inextricably entangled with the politics of the atomic bomb. The Gouzenko affair was just the kind of scandal that might polarize discussions and lead to a break in relations. For the highest reasons of state, therefore, Gouzenko was kept under wraps. Mackenzie King reflected on the chain of coincidences that had placed him at the heart of these negotiations at such a crucial moment: 'Again how strange it is that I should find myself at the very centre of this problem through Canada possessing uranium, having contributed to the production of the bomb, being recognized as one of the three countries to hold most of the secrets and (now) having more in my possession of the Russian system of espionage than anyone living excepting the men whose duty it is to keep me informed.' 24 In Washington, President Truman was struggling to regain some initiative in the negotiations after the failure of the foreign ministers' talks in September. To deflect criticism by Congress, he announced impending discussions with the Canadians and the British on the whole question of atomic energy. At Acheson's insistence, and to Lester Pearson's relief, Truman made a vague reference to the possibility of international control of atomic energy - 'someday'. Truman's announcement, with its accompanying invitation to Washington, was gratifying to Britain and Canada for several more selfish reasons in addition to their desire to strengthen the United Nations. Twice during the wartime development of the atomic bomb, both countries had signed agreements with the Americans that promised continued cooperation in atomic research after the end of the war. Now they were anxious for reassurance that the United States still considered them as partners in the club of nuclear powers. Attlee was especially concerned, as he envisioned commercial atomic power as an engine in the reconstruction of the devastated British economy. This could not happen unless the United States granted the British access to the theoretical and engineering data required to construct a nuclear reactor. To date this assistance had been withheld. Likewise, the consultation that had been promised in the 1943 Quebec accord and in the Hyde Park aide-memoire signed by Roosevelt and Churchill on atomic cooperation in 1944 was not provided. Furthermore, the recent failed attempts by Byrnes to use the bomb as a lever in the negotiations had been attempted without consultation. The British were anxious, and consequently Attlee had been pressing Truman for a new round of talks. Truman's agreement raised hopes of a new deal on atomic energy. But before these hopes could be translated onto paper, Truman issued a new and tougher statement that dashed them. Speaking to reporters from the porch of a lodge in rural Tennessee, the President declared that only the United States had the neces-

42

The Gouzenko Affair

sary combinations of atomic theory, raw materials, industrial capacity, and technical know-how required to build a bomb. No other country had the right combination, and the United States was not going to assist anyone, in any way. If anyone wished to catch up to the United States, Truman announced, 'they will have to do it on their own hook, just as we did.'25 The announcement was clearly directed at the Soviet Union, but it also served notice to America's allies that the limited cooperation enjoyed during the war might be further curtailed, not increased. Ironically, Truman's earlier announcement of the trilateral talks now prompted the Soviet Union to accuse the three countries of forming a nuclear cabal. Again the British pressed for the detention and interrogation of the spy suspects, hoping to uncover some new information on Soviet espionage that they could bring to the conference this time. Mackenzie King was ready to have eighteen Canadian suspects taken before the minister of justice and questioned, but he was dissuaded. He was advised that secrecy would be too hard to maintain with so many civil servants involved. Robertson's views on this were consistent; a scandal would damage the case for international control of the bomb. Action against the spy suspects was rescheduled for late November. For the rest of October, the Gouzenko affair remained in limbo. In Ottawa the RCMP was proceeding rapidly in its investigation of the authenticity of Gouzenko's documents and in its compilation of files on the suspects. This phase of the investigation was completed in advance of the Washington conference and the Mounties were ready. A plan for the detention and interrogation of the suspects had been worked out by the Department of Justice and the RCMP. Their plan called for the use of the War Measures Act to round up the suspects, followed by a full royal commission enquiry and attendant publicity. Similar actions should be carried out in the United States and Britain. These were the steps that would be proposed at the joint meeting in Washington. Before leaving London, King paid a visit to Winston Churchill, then leader of the opposition, and described the Gouzenko affair. King rationalized this breach of secrecy by telling himself that Churchill was his fellow Privy Council member. Churchill seemed unmoved by the revelation: 'It did not seem to take him by surprise,' King wrote. Churchill agreed that the Russians should be confronted privately at first, but he emphasized the need for great publicity immediately after in order to expose the Communist movement. King was energized by the prospect. Several times during the month of October he mused about the significance of the revelations that would come when the leaders gathered for the discussion on the atomic bomb: 'There will be a real world sensation when it is announced that the President, Attlee and myself, are in Washington and there follows immediately afterward some disclosure of the R.E. (Russian Espionage) matter ... I will go back from England ready to enter on a larger sphere of work than ever - a sphere which will identify me with this new age of atomic energy and world peace.'26

Gouzenko Concealed

43

'THE BOMB WAS REALLY CONCEIVED IN CANADA'

Feodor Gousev, the Soviet ambassador in London, was thinking about Gouzenko when he invited Mackenzie King to lunch on 31 October 1945. Norman Robertson warned King that the issue of Canadian atomic research might come up. Indeed, over lunch the Prime Minister found himself fencing with the Soviet ambassador over the significance of Canada's contribution to the development of the bomb. As King sipped carefully at the sherry, wine, vodka, and champagne that accompanied the luncheon, Gousev claimed that Canada knew the 'secret' of the bomb. King remained circumspect. Yet he knew that beneath the surface of the discussion was the unspoken question of the spy scandal. King assumed that Gousev was giving him a preview of the position that the Soviets would take if the Canadians charged them with spying: 'From what he said I could see that the Russians may come back on any disclosures we make, presenting the view that the bomb was really conceived in Canada and worked out there by scientists of Britain and the U.S. ... This will be the excuse they make for having found it necessary to have espionage.'27 Agreements signed during the war had promised a free exchange of information about the development of new weapons between the Allied powers, including the Soviet Union. In practice this was not done, and the Soviets were locked out of the Manhattan Project. Now Gousev seemed to imply that the Soviets would claim that they were forced to spy on the atomic research in Canada in order to get what they had been promised in agreements. This position, as Mackenzie King interpreted it, was an attempt to occupy the high moral ground in advance of a scandal. How could King reply? Gousev's charge put the Canadians in an odd position. According to the wartime press releases, America, Britain, and Canada were the 'ABC'powers jointly responsible for discovering the secret of the bomb. But the real story, as the scientists and the politicians in all three countries knew, was considerably different. While there had been some Canadian research on nuclear fission, Canada was more important as the site chosen by a British scientific team in 1942 for intensive development of a bomb. The Americans later overtook the British-Canadian efforts with their Manhattan Project, which ultimately assumed control of Allied efforts. The key to the American domination of the field lay in another top-secret project named the Murray Hill Area Project. The purpose of this program was to tie up every known source of uranium in the world in order to give the United States complete control of the world's supply of fissionable materials. Using commercial companies as false fronts, the military secured long-term contracts with suppliers of uranium oxide, including Canada's Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd. These contracts were drawn so carefully and so secretly that the Anglo-Canadian atomic project found itself cut off from the flow of uranium ore. The heavy-water production from a plant at Trail, B.C., was similarly diverted. The security surrounding the American project was so thorough that even C.D. Howe, Canada's powerful

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The Gouzenko Affair

minister of munitions and supply, was unable to find out the provisions of the contracts.28 The scientists in Montreal were stymied and frustrated as their research was bypassed and their contributions ignored. For them to re-enter the mainstream required the blessing of the U.S. military, especially that of General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan and Murray Hill projects. The exclusion of the British and European scientists was relaxed slightly when Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mackenzie King signed the secret Quebec accord in the autumn of 1943. The accord promised mutual consultation on the use of the bomb and 'full and effective collaboration' in order to speed the production of the bomb. The price of admission for the British was high. In return for participation they signed away their control of the uranium ores from the Belgian Congo for the duration of the war and gave up all claim to any of the 'postwar advantages' that might be extrapolated from the military research. A further agreement, called the Hyde Park aide-memoire, was signed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill a year later. This agreement promised 'full collaboration between the U.S. and British Governments in developing [atomic energy] for military and commercial purposes.' These provisions, like those of the Quebec agreement, were subject to review after the end of the war.29 The actual collaboration during the war was far more restricted than the language of the agreements implied. A few of the British scientists were given full security clearance and taken into the heart of the Manhattan Project, but most of the researchers assembled in Montreal were left to continue their work on the periphery. General Groves made it clear that he was taking a narrow interpretation of the meaning of 'full and effective collaboration.' When the British appealed for details on the construction of a reactor, Groves suggested that they not build one. The Montreal scientists were free to pursue research on their own heavy-water reactor, but the Americans continued to divert new supplies of heavy water from Trail to a secret project near Chicago. The immediate military value of the Montreal heavy-water project was further decreased when the Americans were able to produce enough plutonium for the first bombs in a graphite core reactor in Hanford, Washington. The trickle of heavy water to the Montreal laboratories was finally increased, but three weeks later this apparent largesse was explained when the Americans unveiled their own functioning heavywater reactor near Chicago. Perhaps as a consolation prize, a few of the Montreal scientists - including DrAlan Nunn May and Dr Bruno Pontecorvo, both of whom were working secretly for the Soviets - were given tours of the Chicago facilities. After the first bombs were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Canada was identified as one of the co-inventors of the weapon, and C.D. Howe put aside Canada's past frustration in his message to the press: T take pride that for the first time a sizeable group of Canadian scientists under the auspices of a Canadian institution have been actively engaged in the pioneering phases of what may well prove to be one of the major scientific advances in history.'30

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45

But an editorial in the Washington Times-Herald more accurately pinpointed Canada's contribution when it concluded that 'Canada must give its uranium to us and not make it available elsewhere.' Also, Canada must make itself 'our out-and-out exclusive ally,' the editorial declared, or else 'enough patriotic Americans can probably be found to see to it that Canada does the right thing by us.' 'Jealous eyes,' Hume Wrong noted in a memo to King, 'may be turned towards the sources of the essential ingredients and we may feel compelled to take special measures to protect those sources within Canada.' Wrong also anticipated the Gouzenko affair by nearly three weeks when he advised King that 'we may also find that our part in the development will lead for the first time to a serious effort to plant foreign agents in Canada with the object of securing information on secret processes.'31 On the day of Gouzenko's defection, the Anglo-Canadian project finally bore fruit with the activation of the small experimental heavy-water reactor. A full-sized reactor was activated at Chalk River two years after the end of the war; but by then most of the British scientists had returned home to work on their own projects. A sober assessment of the modest role Canada played in the development of the bomb was prepared by C.D. Howe in the wake of Gouzenko's defection. Howe described Canada as having been far from instrumental in the actual manufacture of the weapon. Later, when the spy story broke, Howe called in the press to explain that Canada really had no secrets that could be stolen. The final report of the royal commission that investigated the spy case told the same story: 'As to the question of atomic energy and the work done by nuclear physicists, we are able to say in the first place that on the basis of evidence before us no one in Canada could have revealed how to make an atomic bomb. There was no one in Canada who had that information. In the second place there is no suggestion that anyone who had any information on the subject made any disclosures except May.'32 Was Alan Nunn May in a position to disclose important classified information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union? The question was an urgent concern of the Canadian government and the royal commission. King's diary entries in the weeks immediately following Gouzenko's defection reflected his anxiety over the possibility that important information on the bomb could have been passed by scientists in Canada. King worried about the loyalty of 'British scientists working [in the Montreal laboratories] who have even more knowledge of the atomic bomb developments than almost anyone.' King's estimate of the information possessed by the Montreal team was inflated, as he later learned, but in the rush of the first few weeks of the spy scandal, so soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his anxiety is understandable.33 Nunn May had participated in the work of the Montreal laboratories and had visited the Chicago reactor, but his knowledge and his access to classified information were limited. His superior, Dr John Cockcroft, made an initial assessment of Nunn May's access to information and materials in October of 1945 and concluded that

46 The Gouzenko Affair the scientist could have turned over some valuable samples of uranium. Cockcroft found that Nunn May's knowledge of the Canadian heavy-water project was not of any major importance, and his working knowledge of the American facilities was not considered especially valuable. However his knowledge of the experiments with isotopes of uranium and the isotope samples he had access to could have assisted the Soviets in developing a chemical separation process used in the refining of plutonium.34 Cockcroft's assessment proved astute when May later confessed to giving away small samples of uranium isotopes and a report on atomic research as he knew it. But there were no suggestions that May had any information on the bomb itself. At the time of May's arrest in March 1946 General Groves concluded that it was 'very doubtful if May has anything but a general knowledge of the construction of the atom bomb. He would not have been able to secure any such knowledge through legitimate channels.' The director of the University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies was similarly reassuring on this point: 'Although May was admitted to the metallurgical laboratory during the war and knew about our work initiating the controlled chain reaction, he was never, to the best of my knowledge, given information about the construction of an atomic bomb as worked out at Los Alamos.'35 Nunn May's relative ignorance was not due to lack of trying. During his visits to Chicago he was so inquisitive that he aroused the suspicions of some of the scientists there. Dr Arthur Compton later wrote that 'I myself told him on one occasion that we did not consider it in our nation's interest or necessary for the development of Canada's program to give him the detailed information that he was requesting. When he persisted in his efforts I told him he was no longer welcome in our laboratories. Shortly afterwards the visits with the Canadian scientists stopped.'36 Nunn May was not the only one to give the Soviets samples of uranium during the war. In 1943 and 1944 General Groves sent 1,000 pounds of uranium salts and two pounds of uranium metal to the Soviet Union just to see what they would do with it. Groves's own loyalty was momentarily suspect when a U.S. congressional committee discovered the gift a few years later and called him in to explain it.37 While the evidence was clear that Nunn May had passed on samples of uranium to his Soviet contacts, Gousev's suggestion to Mackenzie King that Canada held the 'secret' of the bomb vastly overstated Canada's role. By that time King was better informed on the nature of Canada's contribution, and he therefore assumed that the Soviets were intentionally overstating Canada's importance to justify their own activities. King apparently did not consider the possibility that the Soviets actually believed what their ambassador said; that Soviet intelligence might be so incompetent as to believe that they were going to uncover the secret of the bomb in Montreal or Ottawa. It is just possible, however, that the Soviet representatives in Ottawa overestimated or inflated the value of the information available to them through their

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47

contacts. In that case Gousev might have been voicing an honestly held belief based on faulty intelligence. It seems more reasonable, however, to agree with Mackenzie King that the ambassador was hinting at the position that the Soviet Union would take in the event of a public scandal. Rather than minimizing the importance of atomic espionage, the Soviets appeared ready to use atomic espionage as the regrettable but necessary reason for running a spy ring in Ottawa. Even though they knew that there were no secrets worth discovering in Canada, the Soviets were apparently prepared to link the Gouzenko affair to the atomic bomb issue, just as King had decided to do a few weeks earlier. By mutual consent between the Canadian and Soviet governments, as it were, the Ottawa civil servants who had given away little more than low-grade information to the Soviets were recast as a ring of atom spies, for greater effect. The volatile issue of the control of the atomic bomb proved to be a vortex that drew in all other issues in the fall of 1945. While King and Robertson were still at sea, en route to the Washington conference, Russian foreign minister Molotov announced that a nuclear monopoly was impossible because the Soviets would eventually have atomic energy 'and many other things too.' He warned the United States against seeking political gains from temporary advantages. The British and Canadian position, going into the conference, proposed that they should share control of the bomb with the United Nations. From the first high-level talks aboard the yacht Sequoia, drifting down the Potomac, it was evident that the Anglo-Canadian position was going nowhere. As Lester Pearson recalled, the discussion was 'discursive talk, unfocused, unrelated to any specific plan of action, or any concrete proposal.'38 The Americans had their own agenda for further negotiations with the Soviet Union, but for the moment they had no interest in sharing the negotiations with their former research partners and no interest in submitting the bomb to the United Nations for immediate international control. Consequently, a vaguely worded accord emerged from the conference that attempted to paper over the differences among the three countries. The final document, drafted by Pearson, the American representative, Vannevar Bush and the British representative, Sir John Anderson made a rousing appeal for the creation of a U.N. atomic-energy commission that would itself produce suggestions on how the bomb might be controlled. All three participants declared themselves ready 'to share on a reciprocal basis with other United Nations detailed information concerning the practical industrial applications of atomic energy just as soon as effective and enforceable safeguards can be devised.'39 The agreement at least salvaged the possibility that the United States might agree to international control of the bomb one day. The appearance of unity was enough to move the Soviets to denounce the conference as evidence of a growing anti-Soviet bloc that was attempting 'to use the atomic bomb in the game of foreign power politics.' But behind the scenes the conference was anything but a unified bloc of atomic

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The Gouzenko Affair

powers. The British attempted to renegotiate the Quebec accord and found themselves stymied by General Groves and Vannevar Bush. Groves offered to release the British from their wartime promise not to make any industrial use of atomic research. In exchange, Britain was invited to give the United States first call on all atomic materials, as before. Given the General's demonstrated appetite for raw materials, the proposal would have left the British with a nuclear plant and no fuel, not even their own. The British demurred and settled for a vague promise of some future cooperation. Another secret agreement signed by Canada called for 'full and effective cooperation in the field of atomic energy' among the three countries, but this agreement proved no more productive than its predecessors.40 This was not the conference anticipated by Attlee, who later decided to begin an atomic-research program without U.S. assistance. Neither was it the conference envisaged by Mackenzie King, who had been expecting a show of real solidarity followed by a sensational expose of Soviet espionage. The final accord never mentioned the Soviet Union, and solidarity on the matter of atomic energy was superficial and tenuous. A secret agreement governing the Gouzenko affair was also reached at the Washington conference. A draft of the agreement, with a few marginal notes in the Prime Minister's hand, is available. Judging by subsequent references to the agreement and the government's eventual handling of the case, the draft closely resembles the actual agreement in all essential aspects. That an agreement was indeed reached is reflected in a long memo from RCMP commissioner S.T. Wood in which he urges the Prime Minister not to deviate from 'the lines decided upon at the Washington Conference.' The draft, included among King's papers, outlines a rationale for taking action against spy suspects, a plan for coordinated action by all three countries involved, and a prepared speech to be delivered by the Prime Minister announcing the detention of suspects and the creation of a royal commission. The wording of the speech is nearly identical to that of the one given by the Prime Minister the following February. The plan of action reiterated the understanding that had been forged during King's visits to Washington and London. The only substantial change between the action contemplated in this agreement and the actual handling of the spy case when it broke three months later was that the United States reneged on its commitment to take simultaneous action against American suspects.41 The agreement outlined a strategy for tough security measures coupled with diplomatic decorum. Action would begin the week of 25 November, a week after the end of the conference. Three 'considerations'would guide the handling of the case: (a) The practices of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa which undoubtedly are followed also in the United States and United Kingdom, are not to be tolerated. (b) While the case should be handled firmly, it should be dealt with, nevertheless, so as to disturb as little as possible the continuance of normal diplomatic relations with the USSR.

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(c) The case provides an opportunity for exposing the uses to which the Soviet Government puts local communist elements, and one objective should be to make it as difficult as possible for them to continue (or, in Canada, to reconstruct) their network based largely on these elements.

The Soviet ambassador, though not implicated, was to be informed that the military attache and his aides were persona non grata, forcing them to return home. Publicity in the United States and Britain would follow the same general course: 'It is agreed that police action in the three countries should be taken in the course of the week beginning November 25 and should immediately be followed by diplomatic action in Canada.'42 M I S S I O N TO M O S C O W

Two days before the scheduled police action against the Gouzenko suspects, U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes announced a new proposal for bilateral talks with the Soviets. Byrnes was determined to break the deadlock that had stymied the last round of talks in London. The central feature of the new talks, which would take place in Moscow, would be cooperation with the Soviets on the international control of the bomb. If the bomb was useless as a veiled threat, perhaps it might now serve as an inducement for progress in other areas. The proposal was a victory for Byrnes and the moderates in the Truman administration and the State Department who still favoured international control of the bomb. The new proposal envisaged gradual progress towards such controls through exchanges of scientists and research data, the exchange of information on natural resources, the exchange of industrial and engineering information, and the development of effective safeguards against the construction or use of atomic weapons. The Soviets would be invited to join with Canada, the United States, and Britain in sponsoring the creation of a U.N. commission on atomic energy to oversee the peaceful development of atomic energy. Canada, as one of the partners in the development of the bomb, would be given a special place on the committee alongside members of the Security Council.43 In an exchange of top-secret memos, Hume Wrong in Ottawa and Lester Pearson in Washington discussed the new initiative by Byrnes and noted that the Secretary 'very much wants to bring in Russia if this can be managed.' By scrapping the position that a system of verifiable safeguards must precede any other steps towards disarmament, the State Department was advancing the policy favoured by the Canadians. The creation of a special permanent position on the proposed U.N. Atomic Energy Commission in recognition of Canada's contribution to the development of the bomb was also gratifying. If set up according to the early proposals, the UNAEC would have been authorized to report directly to the General Assembly, thus bypassing the Security Council and the possible veto of any unpopular recom-

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The Gouzenko Affair

mendations that the committee might make. Such a committee, given policing authority over the production and distribution of fissionable materials, would have considerable importance; a reserved position for Canada on it represented a diplomatic coup.44 The week of 25 November passed without any action on the Gouzenko case. Given Byrnes's new conciliatory approach towards the Soviet Union and the importance attached by all parties to the successful creation of the UNAEC, their decision to defer a public scandal over the Ottawa spies is hardly surprising. King, however, had a new plan. Even today the continuing secrecy covering intergovernmental communication on the case and the loss of the Prime Minister's diary covering this period make it difficult to develop a complete picture of the handling of the case in the final weeks of 1945. But a number of key documents obtained from the Department of External Affairs, the RCMP, and the Department of State reveal the outlines of a striking and unusual initiative by the Prime Minister to take action against the spy suspects without the assistance of the United States or Britain. ' M R . H O O V E R H A S TOLD T H E C O M M I S S I O N E R '

By the first day of December, King was anxious to put the Gouzenko case to rest. Byrnes's mission to Moscow would take at least until Christmas and, as if to underline the reluctance of the United States to join in an expose, King was told that American officials now doubted that they had enough evidence to justify police action against American suspects. The basis for joint action that all parties had agreed on in Washington seemed to evaporate. The final straw, for King, was the imminent departure of the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa, Georgi Zaroubin. In a few day's time King's last opportunity to make a forceful representation to the Soviets would vanish. King concluded that the best course was to send a message to Stalin via Ambassador Zaroubin demanding an end to all espionage activities in Canada. The military attache and his assistants would be expelled. Civil servants who were suspected of spying would be questioned in departmental enquiries with the assistance of the RCMP. The War Measures Act, which was due to expire in a week, would not be invoked. A royal commission would not be created. Accordingly, the Soviet ambassador was given an appointment with King on the afternoon of 3 December. RCMP commissioner Wood immediately condemned the idea in a four-page letter to Louis St Laurent that called the plan 'fraught with possibilities of the gravest danger to Canadian interests.' Wood fired off a shotgun blast of arguments in his desire to see the plan withdrawn. The suspects would be warned as soon as the ambassador left the meeting, Wood suggested. Or the interrogation of the suspects might reveal to the Soviets that Gouzenko was in custody and give them an excuse for a protest. The story might leak out, and be publicized. And time was short. The

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Mounties and the department heads were not prepared to act, Wood said. But these arguments paled beside Wood's fundamental objection: without a royal commission and the use of the War Measures Act, there was less likelihood of 'obtaining any admission or additional evidence.' Worse, in Wood's view, an internal enquiry would allow Canadian Communists to get off unscathed. The Mounties were especially interested in two of the code-names that appeared repeatedly in Gouzenko's documents and that the Mounties linked to Communist MP Fred Rose and to a prominent party organizer in Toronto: 'A departmental enquiry will not allow us to put an end to the activities of such key men in the network ... who should be primary targets of any action. It should also be realized that any agent investigated by departmental enquiry who categorically refuses to admit his guilt must then be left at liberty to continue his activities.' The problem faced by the Mounties and the government prosecutors was a general lack of evidence that could be used in court. Without additional evidence or confessions, they estimated that they might successfully prosecute four suspects, not including the atomic scientist or either of the Communist party officials. In the four promising cases, Gouzenko had obtained actual copies of the handwriting of suspects or similarly incriminating materials from the embassy. In the remaining cases, the suggestions that the civil servants were spies required corroborating evidence, and none was forthcoming. The first step favoured by the Mounties and supported by the minister of justice was a rigorous interrogation of the suspects beyond the reach of their families or lawyers. The War Measures Act could provide for this. The Justice Department, as Hume Wrong had noted two months earlier, was 'rather wedded' to the idea of a royal commission as the best means of 'exposing the facts and getting on the record evidence which would not be admissible in court proceedings.'45 Commissioner Wood was dismayed to find that this strategy was being abandoned and he pleaded for the government to proceed along the lines decided upon at the Washington Conference and to hold a Royal Commission ... However, if by reason of high political and diplomatic considerations it is thought that such actions are not in the best interests, or possible, it is strongly emphasized that for the time being, at all events, no action should be taken and the subject be treated as an intelligence matter for present purposes pending further developments. It may then be possible at a later date to take action in conjunction with the American authorities - who are continuing their own enquiry in a most vigorous manner ...

Commissioner Wood's entreaty offered a restatement of the RCMP's view of the Gouzenko affair, but it did not introduce any new arguments that the Prime Minister had not already heard. Time was running out for the Commissioner; but, just hours before King was scheduled to meet with Zaroubin, Wood offered a new and decisive argument not mentioned in the letter to St Laurent the previous day. At a top-secret

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meeting limited to St Laurent, Wood, the Prime Minister, Robertson, and Hume Wrong, the Commissioner made a dramatic announcement: 'Further information has been received from Washington indicating that they have learned of Soviet penetration involving senior officers of the Treasury, the United States Intelligence Services and the White House. The information is so grave that Mr. Hoover has told the Commissioner that he has instructed the FBI to concentrate all their activities on this case. If the accusations are true, there are most impelling reasons, from the point of view of security for as prompt United States counter-action as possible.'47 Wood was sure that J. Edgar Hoover 'would prefer postponement.' This announcement had a chastening effect on Mackenzie King, who allowed that 'it put a different complexion' on matters. He agreed to await the conclusion of the U.S. investigation. Years later, conservative critics would accuse Mackenzie King and the Liberals of having tried to bury the Gouzenko affair by continually postponing its revelation. In this instance, the delay was precipitated by the security intelligence agencies, who neatly finessed King's plan to dispose of the Gouzenko affair without invoking the War Measures Act. The subsequent decision to invoke the act two months later can thus be traced back to the desire of the FBI, the Mounties, and the Department of Justice to maintain control of the investigation and to inflict the greatest damage possible to the Communist party in Canada. What is particularly striking about this intervention is the strategic use of privileged American security information by the RCMP commissioner to compel the highest political official in the land to change his planned course of action. It is unclear to what extent Wood actually reflected American concern, and to what extent he was simply invoking an interpretation of J. Edgar Hoover's interest to compel a change in the Prime Minister's intentions. There is no doubt, however, that even the possibility of Washington's displeasure was decisive in displacing King from following a made-in-Canada policy option. King apparently accepted Wood's intervention without further question. The relationship of the new information to the Gouzenko affair was not examined, and the Prime Minister abandoned his plan to confront the Soviet ambassador based on an oral report from his security adviser, a report that was committed to paper only because Hume Wrong wrote a memo on the discussion. The Prime Minister was at a disadvantage in these discussions; he had little experience in security matters and he had no means other than the RCMP of assessing the validity or the importance of the request from Hoover. The FBI investigation, if there was one, apparently produced no more evidence than the previous investigation, as the United States took no action. It appears distinctly possible that Hoover provided some general suggestions of spies in high places and passed them to Wood who used them to good effect. The FBI, after all, collected enough suggestions of highly placed Soviet agents to fuel a decade of congressional enquiries in the United States. As Wood discovered in December 1945, citing a threat from what Churchill was to call 'the communist centre'was a powerful tool that could be used to manipulate domestic policies.

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A corroborating account alluding to King's desire to settle the Gouzenko affair comes from the U.S. military attache in Ottawa. In a private conversation, Commissioner Wood told the attache that 'we very nearly missed the boat in the early days of the spy case. The Prime Minister kept it in his desk for four months and when I needled him about it he wanted to turn it over to the courts. That would have rendered inadmissible most of the essential evidence. The Royal Commission caused us to get a lot of criticism, but it was the only effective way to proceed in a case like that.'48 The Commissioner should have taken some personal credit for persuading King to delay action. Another two months elapsed between the meeting in December and the formation of a royal commission the following February. During that time Mackenzie King was under the impression that the United States was actively investigating its own leads and did not wish the Canadians to proceed. Commissioner Wood had helped create this impression. The Commissioner's suggestion that King was in charge of the spy case and 'kept it in his desk' was misleading. The Gouzenko case was seized upon, manipulated, and controlled by turns by diplomats and intelligence agencies in Ottawa, Washington, and London. Gouzenko's defection had come at the beginning of a tense period of faltering postwar diplomacy that stretched from the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima through the first antagonistic sessions of the United Nations in London in early 1946. During this period, the Gouzenko affair, like the Cold War itself, appeared to be dormant. But quietly, behind the scenes, hopes for a negotiated settlement with the Soviet Union were ebbing and a confrontation was brewing. With Byrnes's departure for Moscow carrying one last offer of cooperation with the Soviet Union, events seemed to be fulfilling the scenario offered by Norman Robertson in London in early October. He had observed that the Gouzenko affair should not be used against the Russians until they were offered cooperation by the West. Now it appeared likely that the Gouzenko affair would be brought out if either the United States or the USSR broke off the negotiations. If these last diplomatic efforts failed there would be no further 'high considerations'to block police action against the spy suspects. All that would remain to be discussed would be the manner of conducting the enquiry. Here, too, Wood and the minister of justice had a plan. After King's aborted plan to resolve the spy cases through departmental enquiries, the Justice Department called in an outside consultant to bolster its case for a royal commission. E.K. Williams, then president of the Canadian Bar Association, produced an unequivocal recommendation for a commission in a report that concluded that prosecution in the courts was 'the least important phase of this matter.' Williams suggested a commission headed by two Supreme Court justices. The commission 'should sit in camera, should make its enquiries in the widest possible way, should not allow counsel to appear for those summoned before it.' The findings of such a commission would carry weight with the public even if those findings could not be admitted in court. Williams worried, for example, that any confession won

54

The Gouzenko Affair

under the interrogations made possible by the War Measures Act would be excluded by the courts. A royal commission, however, could accept such statements under the broad powers of the Inquiries Act and the looser rules of evidence that might be employed. Williams allowed that the government was worried about the impact of an investigation on the 'present international situation' and the smooth functioning of the United Nations, but he still suggested the government should act. The Russians, he said, are 'realists' who would expect the Canadians to do so.49 'THE ICY W I N D S OF THE COLD WAR'

The Soviet ambassador left Ottawa as scheduled. Along with the ambassador, Moscow recalled Zabotin, the military attache, and two of his aides. These three were at the top of the list of agents exposed by Gouzenko who would have been expelled when the case was made public. The ambassador, Zaroubin, went on to become the Soviet representative in London. Zabotin, however, was less fortunate. He died at sea or a few days after arriving home and left behind only rumours that he had been punished for his role in the spy affair. In mid-December, the Mounties sent Inspectors Harvison and Anthony home to Winnipeg and Vancouver. The police investigation was concluded and there was as yet no need for them as interrogators. External Affairs was kept busy preparing for the first meetings of the U.N. organization in London in January. The Canadians had an extra incentive to be well prepared: Lester Pearson was a leading candidate for the position of first secretary general of the United Nations, with the backing of the United States. A week before Christmas, Parliament considered and approved the public portion of the Washington Conference agreement, and was prorogued until March. Knowledge of the Gouzenko affair was still confined to a small group in Ottawa, but around the world the circle of politicians and intelligence officials who knew of the defection now included a substantial number of American, Canadian, British, and Soviet government officials and intelligence officers. No drastic security measures had been taken thus far as a consequence of the Gouzenko defection. Surveillance was increased, but the suspects were not arrested, and even the code that was potentially compromised by a clerk in External Affairs was not changed until the end of the year. In Moscow, Byrnes presented his plan for an accord on atomic energy to the Soviets and was somewhat taken aback to find Stalin agreeable. But pressure from Washington, led by Republican senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, forced Byrnes to undermine his own bargaining position in short order. The American position was abruptly modified to require effective safeguards against bomb production in advance of any sharing of data. Truman undercut what potential remained in Byrnes's mission by repudiating a portion of the communique regarding Eastern Europe, an act that precipitated the Secretary of State's later resignation. Canadian officials found a ray of hope in the wreckage of the Moscow meetings:

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a new agreement by the United States, Britain, and the USSR called for the creation of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. France, Canada, and China were invited to join in sponsoring the commission, thus ensuring Canada a place among the great powers in the continuing debate on the bomb.50 In early January, Louis St Laurent led a prestigious delegation to London for the first meetings of the U.N. organizations. With him were Pearson, Robertson, Wrong, Dana Wilgress, ambassador to the USSR, Vincent Massey, high commissioner in London, CCF leader M.J. Coldwell, and Conservative leader Gordon Graydon. Mackenzie King stayed behind in Ottawa. Judging by his diaries, he gave little thought to Gouzenko during January. The absence from Ottawa of the Minister of Justice, along with King's closest advisers and the leaders of the opposition parties ruled out any new initiatives in the Gouzenko case until their return. Robertson, St Laurent and the party leaders all had key roles to perform in the event of an investigation, with or without a royal commission. This was not the time for a spy scandal. In London the prospects for peaceful relations dimmed. The first meeting of the Security Council degenerated into a hostile debate between British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and Andrei Vishinsky, the Soviet representative. Bevin's criticism went beyond Vishinsky to include Communists in every country whom he accused of fomenting hatred against the British, 'as if there had been no friendship between us. That is the danger to the peace of the world.' Bevin's criticism of Communists outside the Soviet Union marked a steady increase in such attacks as relations with the Soviets soured. The Canadian diplomats in London found themselves well placed on the newly formed Security Council and on committees on atomic energy and conventional weapons. They were in a position to contribute to the pursuit of peace through the United Nations just as the prospect of peace slipped away and the first great promise of the new world organization vanished. 'The icy winds of the Cold War soon replaced the warm breezes of San Francisco,' Lester Pearson wrote, 'and blew away hopes of co-operation.'51

3

Gouzenko Revealed: Spy Chases and Witch-hunts

While Igor Gouzenko was being thoroughly debriefed in secret by British and American intelligence, and the RCMP was carefully preparing its cases against the Canadians involved in espionage, summer had long since passed into the depths of the Canadian winter. With St Laurent in London in January 1946, the Prime Minister put the spy case out of his mind. The first time he thought to mention it again in his diaries was on the first day of February when he was visited by U.S. admiral William Leahy, President Truman's military adviser. Over lunch the conversation turned to atomic energy and from there to the Gouzenko affair. Leahy's interest in the espionage case was not surprising; Leahy, like General Groves, advocated increased anti-espionage measures to ensure the American monopoly on the atomic bomb. It was Leahy's opinion, King noted, that 'we ought to go on with our enquiry if it involved our own civil servants.' This was news to King, and worth noting in his diary as evidence that influential members of the Truman administration were ready to see the Gouzenko story revealed to the public.1 Two days later there was a more public signal: Washington newsman Drew Pearson blew the lid on the tight secrecy that had enveloped the affair for five months with a garbled radio story of a ring of Russian spies operating out of Ottawa. ' R E V E L A T I O N S SO A M A Z I N G AND SO SERIOUS'

Acting on a leak from a source inside the government, Drew Pearson told his Sunday-night audience that a Russian spy had 'confessed [to the existence of] a gigantic Russian espionage network inside the United States and Canada.' Pearson's wellplaced source also informed him that the Canadian prime minister had found the revelations 'so amazing and so serious' that he made a special trip to Washington to confer with President Truman. What was revealed by this spy scandal, Pearson suggested, was Soviet military expansionism: 'All this points to the belief on the part of high American officials that a small group of military minded men near the top in

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Russia apparently are determined to take over not merely Iran, Turkey and the Balkans but perhaps dominate other areas of the world.' 2 King was angered by a leak that he knew was meant to force Canada to go public. King believed that the leak must have originated in the State Department, which he supposed wanted to start the spy scandal without having to take any blame for it. Once Canada was forced to launch a spy investigation the Americans could start their own, without the onus of going first. This was the kind of logic that King understood perfectly. It was, he wrote, 'the way in which a certain kind of politics is played by a certain type of man.' 3 Forced into action, the Canadian government dusted off the plans for the investigation it had prepared months before. The next morning Norman Robertson called a meeting with the RCMP, British high commissioner Malcolm MacDonald, and lawyer E.K. Williams, the president of the Canadian Bar Association, who was to become the chief counsel for a royal commission assigned to investigate the case. Plans for establishing the commission were reviewed; it was agreed that the number of Supreme Court justices in charge of the commission should be increased to two, instead of one as originally planned at the time of the Washington conference in October. Even King's speech announcing the formation of the commission had been written months before, but its delivery would be delayed for eleven days to allow the commission to start its work in secret. On 5 February King called the cabinet into session to approve PC 411, which established a royal commission under the direction of Supreme Court justices Roy Lindsay Kellock and Robert Taschereau.4 At the cabinet meeting King denied that the timing of the investigation had been triggered by the news leak in Washington. The real reason for the delay, he told his colleagues, was 'to give the U.S. an opportunity to follow up the revelations that they had received.' This was as close as King came to revealing Commissioner Wood's December intervention in the name of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In any case, King told the cabinet, the United States 'had now told us it was better we should proceed ...' Moreover, King added, St Laurent had returned from London with word that British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes were in favour of an enquiry: the time was ripe. King also tried to reassure the cabinet that the political fallout from the investigation might not be serious. He told them that the Americans were of the opinion that 'the USSR might not take the matter too seriously.' Privately he was not so sure. 'My own feeling,' he wrote, 'is that this whole business goes much further than any of us begin to realize.' King was particularly worried about the effect of the spy scandal on international relations, and he regretted that he had not been able to settle the affair as he had proposed in December. Now it was too late for diplomacy; he knew that the revelations would produce 'one of the major sensations of the day.' 'They might help to set aflame a controversy of extensive and bitter proportions, throughout this country and the U.S., and also to further suspicion and unrest in other countries. That Canada would be a marked country, so far as Russia was concerned in the future ... I had

58 The Gouzenko Affair hoped ... that we might find a way of communicating the facts to the Russian government itself without disclosing them in court, giving the government a chance to clean up the situation itself.' 5 It was not to be. Instead there would be a royal commission, long favoured by the Department of Justice and the RCMP, armed with many of the tremendous powers of the War Measures Act, the Inquiries Act, and the Official Secrets Act of 1939 (OSA). The first of these allowed the government to seize the suspects, incarcerate them, interrogate them, and detain them incommunicado and without charging them with a crime for an indefinite period. The second act allowed the commissioners to force the testimony of the suspects, and to punish them with charges of contempt if they refused. The third was interpreted by the commission as allowing them to presume all the suspects guilty until proven innocent. On top of these formidable powers, the commission was given the authority to make its own interpretations of these laws and to make up its own rules for the secret hearings. The use of the War Measures Act to seize and detain the suspects was extraordinary. The act, passed during the First World War, was reactivated in 1939, giving the Privy Council the authority to manage the wartime economy and to intern enemy aliens, fascists, Communists, Japanese Canadians, and opponents of conscription. After the war ended, the government was expected to return this authority to Parliament, which it did in December 1945 by allowing the emergency legislation to lapse. During a parliamentary debate on the matter, Tory MP John Diefenbaker made a point of asking Justice Minister Louis St Laurent if there were any outstanding secret orders in council that might extend any part of the emergency powers into peacetime. There was one, of course, the secret PC 6444 passed the previous October that authorized the government to use the War Measures Act to deal with the spies. St Laurent denied the existence of the order in council, and his denial prevented Parliament from learning about it until it was activated in February by the passage of PC 411. Diefenbaker then realized that he had been deceived; he also realized he could provoke a crisis for the Liberal government if he accused St Laurent of lying to Parliament. As it was, when the House reconvened in midMarch, St Laurent claimed that he had 'forgotten' PC 6444. His memory lapse strained credulity, especially as he was a leading advocate of using the War Measures Act to round up and interrogate the suspects. But Diefenbaker, faced with challenging the government's handling of the spy case, accepted St Laurent's explanation and focused instead on the length of the detentions and the denial of basic civil liberties. Once the royal commission was created, Inspectors Harvison and Anthony were recalled to Ottawa, and the nearby barracks at Rockcliffe was readied for the civil servants who would be seized and interrogated. Sergeant Bayfield, who was still keeping an eye on the suspects, was put to work organizing the round-up. Commissioners Taschereau and Kellock convened the hearings and heard testimony from Gouzenko and the RCMP. The commission then made a formal request to the minis-

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ter of justice to detain thirteen civil servants. In spite of this sudden burst of activity, secrecy was maintained until the morning of 15 February when Sergeant Bayfield and his squad of plainclothes police rounded up the suspects. Eleven of the thirteen civil servants sought by Bayfield were captured at their homes in Ottawa and Montreal, another was lured back from London with a promise of a promotion, and the last was arrested as he stepped off a plane in Ottawa after returning from western Canada. All of them were taken to the Rockcliffe barracks, where Harvison and Anthony immediately began to interrogate them. While their names and their location remained secret, the broad outlines of the case were released to the press. After months of secrecy the spy scandal was out in the open, and Gouzenko's existence was about to be revealed. ' W E ' L L TAKE A N Y T H I N G ABOUT SPIES OR ATOMS'

Mackenzie King's first public statement on the spy affair revealed that Canadian civil servants had been detained on suspicion of spying, but he avoided any direct mention of the Soviet Union, saying only that a foreign country had received unauthorized information from Canadian civil servants. This diplomatic nicety was short-lived, as other official sources were more forthcoming. Within hours American journalist Frank McNaughton reported that his sources in Washington said that the spies were working for the Soviet Union and were seeking information on the atomic bomb. Successive stories and rumours were blended together in a flood of wire-service stories, emerging in newspapers in North America and Europe with banner headlines about a ring of atomic spies uncovered in Ottawa. When the Department of External Affairs held a press conference a few days later, reporters had already arrived from New York, Detroit, Chicago, and London to cover the story. In Washington, McNaughton added the alarming claim that a second ring of spies was operating in the United States. The continued survival of this U.S. espionage network, according to McNaughton's source, was due to interference by the State Department, which had allegedly tied the hands of the FBI in order to maintain good relations with Russia. McNaughton's inspired revelations made it clear that the Gouzenko affair was going to be a source of controversy and political infighting in Washington as well as Ottawa, and it was hardly surprising that McNaughton's unnamed source, as he later revealed, was General Groves. Groves, who soon announced on his own that atomic secrets were leaking out at an alarming rate, hoped to inspire investigations that would discredit the liberals in the State Department who - like many Canadians - still favoured cooperation with the Soviet Union in the international control of atomic weapons.6 Drew Pearson refused to identify the Washington source that had given him the original scoop on the spy scandal, and the identity of this person remained a matter of intense speculation by Canadian officials. One likely suspect was uncovered by Canadian ambassador Tommy Stone in Washington; in a secret memo to Ottawa,

60 The Gouzenko Affair Stone reported that according to a friendly journalist, 'it is almost certain that [FBI director J. Edgar] Hoover was Drew Pearson's source of information. Hoover wanted to force the issue.' Stone said that the possibility 'had occurred to Mike [Pearson] & me but Bill S. said that he considered it very unlikely indeed.' 'Bill S.' refers to Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian who headed British Security Coordination (BSC) in New York during the war and served as liaison between American and British intelligence agencies. Stephenson, whose expertise was valued by the Canadian government, had been involved with the Gouzenko affair from the first day. It is interesting that Stephenson denied the FBI director's role in the leak in 1946. Forty years later, long after Hoover's death, he reversed his story and claimed the opposite: that he and Hoover jointly leaked the story to Pearson. According to this revised account, Stephenson and Hoover planned the leak together after they concluded that Mackenzie King 'refused to take the necessary action for fear of offending Stalin.' According to Stephenson: 'The Soviet penetration in the USA was so widespread and their agents were preparing to escape [sic]. After consultation with Hoover and President Roosevelt's so-called brain trust co-ordinator, Ernest Cuneo, we agreed that the story should be released by way of Drew Pearson, Sunday night broadcast, Nationwide.'1 Stephenson's extraordinary claim, made forty years after the fact, remains uncorroborated and undocumented. It is inherently unlikely, in that Hoover could not tolerate Stephenson and had insisted on freezing out the BSC after America entered the war.8 Nevertheless, Stephenson retroactively tried to take credit for masterminding the leak, and many other facets of the spy affair as well. A remarkable series of claims about Stephenson's role is made by his biographer, William Stevenson, in the book Intrepid's Last Case. According to this account, Stephenson's mastery of the spy affair began when he broke the communications code use by the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. He then learned of the existence of the spy ring, knew of Gouzenko's defection before Gouzenko left the Soviet Embassy, knew of the names that Gouzenko carried before he had turned over the stolen documents to the RCMP, and browbeat the government into accepting Gouzenko as a defector. Stevenson's claims know almost no bounds. He goes on to suggest that Stephenson then arranged for King's conversation with Admiral Leahy, drugged a Soviet agent in Ottawa, leaked the spy story to Drew Pearson, and timed the arrest of the suspects conveniently a day before a second story by Pearson. These claims are completely unsubstantiated. If proven, this account would reveal a case of massive deception, duplicity, and manipulation of elected officials by the security agencies. Curiously, if this account were correct, it would substantiate the charge the Communists made at the time that the spy scandal was the result of a conspiracy by Western intelligence agencies. But, as the claim came from the Soviet press, it lacked credibility. Stevenson's account also suggests a calculated and protracted campaign to discredit the Soviets, but his claims are likewise dubious. 9 Mackenzie King's suspicions about Drew Pearson's source centred on the State

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Department or the Oval Office. King understood the political advantages that Washington could gain from the leak, and he knew of the close relationship between administration officials and Drew Pearson. To illustrate Pearson's access to these inner circles of government, King related in his diary the story of the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, who prefaced a remark to Truman's cabinet with the question: 'Am I speaking to the Cabinet or to the President, Byrnes and Drew Pearson?'10 Pearson himself added fuel to the fire with two additional stories that suggested that the Ottawa spies were part of a gigantic network. The day after the suspects were rounded up, Pearson called the scandal 'the biggest story of espionage and intrigue since the war.' According to new information supplied by his contacts, Pearson claimed that the Russian agent in Canada had collapsed under questioning and somehow revealed the names of no less than 1,700 Russian agents operating in the United States and Canada. The next story reinforced the impression that the goal of these spy rings was to steal the secret of the atomic bomb. Pearson outlined the case of a Russian agent who, according to his information, was caught near Seattle with plans for the atomic bomb and samples 'of the metal from which the bomb is made.' This was apparently a garbled reference to a Soviet naval officer who was arrested in Portland, Oregon, a few weeks after the Gouzenko suspects were detained, but was later acquitted of charges of buying secrets." The U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was the first of the congressional committees to leap into the spy scandal with further allegations of atomic espionage linked to the Gouzenko affair. The committee announced that it was sending committee members to Canada to conduct its own investigation. Committee chairman John Rankin also claimed that a spy ring had been uncovered at the atom bomb plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and he assured reporters that the committee was 'on the trail of the Communist spies.' The story of foreign spies stealing America's atomic secrets was reinforced by Major General Patrick J. Hurley, who told reporters that 'it was known abroad before the end of the war that there had been leakage of atomic secrets to the Soviets.' General Groves then added his own claim that more atomic secrets had been lost in the previous four weeks than in any other period. Yet another story about atomic espionage in Canada came in a garbled account of Canadian wartime uranium production. According to this fictional account, the Russians had attempted to purchase a huge quantity of uranium on an imaginary Canadian black market. 12 Some of these reports were speculative, others were exaggerated for effect, and some were simply bizarre. But where spies and atomic secrets were involved, reporters seemed to suspend their critical faculties in favour of the big story. In one story, the official participation of Soviet officers in operation 'MUSKOX,' a Canadian wartime exercise in Alberta, led to rumours that the Soviets were seeking maps of the lakes and rivers around Calgary in preparation for an invasion. As the rumours flew, newspapers were increasingly eager for fresh news from Ottawa.

62 The Gouzenko Affair When a Canadian information officer in Havana asked what information the Cubans would like about Canada, a newspaper editor replied that he would take 'anything about spies or atoms.'13 The effect of these stories was to reinforce the impression that a Soviet espionage effort on a vast scale had penetrated the Western countries and had all but stolen the secret of the bomb. If so, then who was to blame? Because if, as many claimed, the bomb was the key to the military security of the West, then the espionage threatened that security. HUAC, among others, was quick to lay the blame at the doorstep of the liberals in the State Department who were insufficiently anti-Soviet. The Philadelphia Enquirer echoed the charges in an editorial that assailed the department for failing to pursue Soviet spies, a charge that anticipated the attacks by Senator Joseph McCarthy a few years later. A few commentators, including Joseph Davies, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, took note of the facts and found them less than extraordinary; espionage is commonplace between mutually suspicious nation states, Davies suggested, and the exclusion of Russia from the wartime atomic research could well be regarded by the Soviets as a 'hostile' act that justified espionage. The alternative to further hostilities, Davies proposed, was an international understanding: 'either we obtain full confidence and co-operation among the large nations or we shall find ourselves playing the old game of power politics.' The kind of mistrust that was evident at the time of the Gouzenko affair could only lead to 'a gigantic race in armament factories and laboratories resulting in totally destructive war.'14 Davies' moderate approach, not altogether dissimilar to policies advanced by Canadian diplomats at the United Nations, was not popular in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of the spring of 1946. In this new climate anti-Communist voices, which had been silenced by the wartime alliance with the USSR, found a new audience for their warnings of an international Communist conspiracy. Captain William Osborne-Dempster, a former police officer in an Ontario anti-Red squad, made front-page news in Canadian papers when he renewed an old charge that the Communist party in Toronto received funding directly from Moscow.15 Government officials in Washington and Ottawa were somewhat nervous about the mounting charges that the espionage had been permitted out of incompetence, left-wing sympathies, and lax security on their part. In an effort to smother the worst of the rumours, officials in both countries denied that the spies had been able to obtain anything of importance, much less information about the bomb. Secretary of State Byrnes insisted that the 'know-how' of the bomb was still an American secret that even the Canadians and British did not share. He also denied reports that the State Department had interfered with the FBI, and he claimed that there were no ramifications of the Gouzenko affair in the United States. In Ottawa, C.D. Howe, the minister in charge of the wartime atomic research, took a similar position when he told reporters that Canada did not have any atomic secrets that could be stolen. Other Canadian officials claimed that the information that was passed

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on by the spies was 'more or less common knowledge' and 'except for one or two items the data would have been given freely to the Russian government had they asked for it.'16 These attempts to minimize the losses suffered by the governments were largely ignored by the press, however, as military and government sources fed them details that supported the more sensational story of atomic espionage by the Soviets. The atom spy label, once applied to the Gouzenko affair, stuck like flypaper. Mackenzie King and his advisers had anticipated all along that the Ottawa espionage would be linked to the atom bomb, but they had made an important mistake: they thought that the Soviets would make the linkage in order to justify their espionage. This was the argument that Ottawa was expecting in February when the Gouzenko affair was revealed. Canadian spokesmen therefore took deliberate steps to counter this expected Soviet ploy. Official statements played down any suggestion that the ring was after atomic secrets, and an unidentified official source told the journalists to expect an undue emphasis on Canada's atomic research emanating from unfriendly sources. 'Communist sympathizers now are most anxious to place the main emphasis on spying with regard to atomic secrets,' the source said 'in order to ... detract attention from the main points of the Canadian government inquiry.' But to the government's chagrin, the emphasis on atomic espionage came from the anti-Communists. It was the American military, particularly General Groves, who promoted the atomic espionage connection, while the Soviets minimized it.17 The initial response from the Soviet Union was, as King had feared, hostile and focused on Canada. The Soviets claimed that King was leading 'an unbridled anti-Soviet campaign' on behalf of the British, in an effort to stir up anti-Soviet feeling to support the British in their aggressive attacks on the Soviet Union at the United Nations. External Affairs memos noted with some irony that 'in no report of the Russian press was there any trace of comment unfavourable to United States policy.'18 A few days further into the investigation, the Soviets stunned Mackenzie King and amazed the diplomatic community by admitting that they had been spying in Ottawa, while minimizing the value of the information received. The information, which the Soviets said was collected by the military staff in Ottawa, was described as 'insignificant secret data.' The actions of the military attache were termed 'inadmissible,' while any involvement of the ambassador was denied. This description of the Gouzenko affair emanating from Moscow must have been somewhat unnerving for the Canadian government; the Soviet account of the espionage efforts and the Canadian account were virtually identical. All the official statements by the Canadian government had maintained that the ambassador was not involved and that the information stolen 'was more or less common knowledge.' The Canadian and Soviet statements on the spy affair, equally understated and diplomatic, matched. The interrogation and trials of the suspects largely confirmed these statements.19

64 The Gouzenko Affair ' T H I S T I M E , B Y GOD, W E ' V E G O T Y O U ! '

Once the suspects were detained by the Mounties in the Rockcliffe barracks, they fell under the absolute control of the minister of justice and the commission. Using the powers of the War Measures Act, the Inquiries Act, and the Official Secrets Act, the government erected an impenetrable wall of secrecy around the investigation and cut off contact between the suspects and their families, their lawyers, and the public. Inside the barracks and in the secret chambers of the commission in downtown Ottawa, the examination of the suspects proceeded in three stages. The first step was the interrogation of the suspects by Inspectors Harvison and Anthony. As one of the detainees, Gordon Lunan, later described the experience, the suspects were kept isolated, one to a room, watched over by guards day and night. The windows were nailed shut and a row of overhead lights was kept burning all night, a practice the RCMP justified as a measure to prevent suicide, and that defence lawyer Joseph Sedgwick described as 'a form of mental torture.' Lunan's guard told him repeatedly that other detainees had attempted suicide, which was not true. He was taken to see Harvison, who greeted him, Lunan recalled, with the words, 'We've tangled with you Reds before, and you have always screamed if we laid our hands on you, but this time, by God, we've got you!' Over a period of two weeks Lunan was interrogated six times by Harvison and then questioned five times by the commission before he was finally charged and allowed access to a lawyer. Other suspects spent up to six weeks at the barracks before they were charged.20 The RCMP interrogators were looking for confessions, information, and the names of additional suspects. Inspector Harvison was also pursuing an answer to a riddle he posed for himself: why would a civil servant spy? One of the first things that he and Anthony discovered was that the suspects were not part of a ring of cool and professional spies. What they found instead was a group of people who were confused, anxious, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes belligerent and defiant. None of them, it appeared, had been involved in espionage for the money. Curiously, none of the suspects seemed to be aware of Gouzenko's defection or the danger they had been in. 'It was quite apparent,' Harvison concluded, 'that the Russians had not told their Canadian dupes of Gouzenko's defection or warned them of the possible consequences.'21 Harvison was wrong. One of the suspects, Emma Woikin, had been told by her Russian contact in early September 1945 that there had been trouble at the Soviet Embassy and that there would be no further contact with her. In spite of this partial warning, Woikin readily confessed under interrogation that she had passed information to the Soviets.22 During these interrogations, the RCMP built up dossiers on each of the suspects and passed them along to the royal commission for the second stage of the questioning. One by one, still not charged with any crime, the civil servants were taken to a secret hearing room in the Justice building in downtown Ottawa. There, seated at a

Gouzenko Revealed 65 small table facing the stenographer, counsel, and two Supreme Court justices, the witnesses were sworn to secrecy and examined. Those who remained reluctant to speak in the absence of a lawyer were told that they had no right to counsel precisely because they were not charged with any crime. At the same time, their testimony was required under the Inquiries Act. 'You must answer,' reluctant witnesses were told again and again. In an exchange with Israel Halperin, a Queen's University mathematician who had been detained for five weeks, Justice Taschereau warned Halperin that 'we have the power to compel you to speak.' 'Are you empowered to use physical intimidation?' asked Israel Halperin. 'Not physical intimidation, but we have the power to punish you if you do not answer,' Taschereau replied.23 The suspects were trapped, anxious about self-incrimination, but told in no uncertain terms that they must testify or be punished for their refusal. Unlike Americans, who enjoy a constitutional protection against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment, Canadians appearing at such tribunals lacked the right to refuse to testify on the grounds that what they say might be used against them in court.24 And while there were no outstanding charges, many of the suspects correctly assumed that their testimony could be self-incriminating and would indeed be used against them. What none of them appeared to know was that Parliament had balanced the power of the Inquiries Act to force testimony with the protection of the Canada Evidence Act, which, when invoked, protects witnesses from self-incrimination. If the witnesses had invoked the act before each part of their testimony, the prosecution would have been prevented from using the testimony against them. None of the witnesses seemed to be aware of this legislation when they were brought before the commission, however, and the commissioners did nothing to bring it to their attention, while doing everything in their power to prevent them from consulting legal counsel, who would have advised them of it. The commission thus pressed the witnesses for testimony and threatened them with punishment if they resisted. One by one, with a stenographer transcribing the testimony for the record, the suspects were skilfully processed by the Mounties and the commission. Once sufficient evidence had been gathered, through self-incrimination or the evidence offered by others, the civil servants were released from custody and then arrested as they left the Rockcliffe compound, charged with violations of the OSA and the Criminal Code, and jailed. Lawyers acting for the families of the suspects attempted to interrupt these secret interrogations by appealing to the courts for a writ of habeas corpus. If the writ had been granted, it would have required the government to produce the detainees before a justice who would then enquire into the legitimacy of the detention. If the justice found no proper charges against the prisoners, he would have them released. As no charges had been laid, the application of habeas corpus, a venerable right under British common law, would have put an end to the forced testimony and the secret investigation. The commission fought the writ by relying on the Official Secrets

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Act. Its lawyers argued that section 10 of the act provides that anyone reasonably suspected of having committed or being about to commit a breach of the act may be detained by order of the minister of justice. However, they proposed, being so suspected was not in itself an offence, and no charges could be laid. And if no charges were laid then the judge would not find any charges against the detainees, and he would have to release the suspects under a writ of habeas corpus. But releasing them would defeat the purpose of the preventive detentions provided for by Parliament in the OSA. Thus the commission took the position that habeas corpus simply did not apply. At the same time, in order not to defeat the purpose of the enquiry the minister of justice would continue to hold the suspects incommunicado as long as he deemed it necessary. In this way the attempt by the lawyers to get the accused brought into court was evaded. The American ambassador, observing this, reported to the State Department that the Canadian government had not exactly suspended the right of habeas corpus but rather had managed to elude it.25 ' E V E R Y B O D Y IS GOING CRAZY THESE DAYS'

The methods of the enquiry were blunt but effective. The RCMP and Minister of Justice Louis St Laurent, who had fought for an enquiry, had reason to be pleased. Before the commission was created, the Justice Department had estimated that perhaps four of the suspects could be convicted in court. But with the help of the selfincriminating testimony taken by the commission the Crown was eventually able to file charges against all thirteen detainees and against several others, including Communist MP Fred Rose and party organizer Sam Carr.26 The means used to elicit that testimony stirred up a powerful controversy that left the Prime Minister worried that the government had given the investigators far too much power. Both King and St Laurent had known ahead of time that the investigation would invade traditional civil liberties, but it had been King's understanding that the whole affair would be wrapped up in a short time. A week after the suspects were detained, however, King realized that the commission had decided on an extended session, and he began to fret about the growing criticism concerning the secrecy and the suspension of civil liberties. At first the press featured speculative stories about the identities and activities of the spies. But after more than a week without news from the commission and without any concrete details to publish, the spotlight shifted to the secrecy, the treatment of the detainees, and the exclusion of lawyers and families. After the suspects had been held incommunicado for two weeks the criticism intensified. The wives of several detainees wrote to the Prime Minister pleading for access to their husbands. Copies of the letters reached the newspapers. One woman received a message from her husband and told reporters that he did not know whether he was being held as a witness or a suspect. At first, she said, he was denied counsel for three days, and then he was allowed to retain counsel but for-

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bidden to communicate with him. The counsel confinned that his letters to his client asking for instructions to seek a writ of habeas corpus had been impounded by the royal commission and would not be delivered. Mackenzie King watched with alarm as the criticism of these methods spread from the wives and lawyers to the editorial pages of the liberal press. 'No one has any sympathy for spies,' the Winnipeg Free Press wrote, 'but, likewise, no one has any sympathy for the method of holding people in jail incommunicado.' The Canadian Bar Association, whose past president, E.K. Williams, was the commission's counsel, also condemned the proceedings.27 King became anxious; twice he called in Williams and tried to impress him with the need to speed up the hearings. He also told Williams that he needed an official statement blaming the Soviets for the spying, to take the pressure off the government. The statement should demonstrate that the Soviet government had been organizing the espionage ring for two years before the end of the war. What was needed, King emphasized, was evidence 'that would disclose that our own people had been drawn into a net by the Russians, which explained their actions, [otherwise] the Commission would be only lending emphasis to what Russia was seeking to have made the public impression, namely, that Canadians were the guilty persons and not the Russians who have organized their complete system of espionage throughout all Canada.'28 King's entreaty did not stir the commissioners into action immediately. Sheltered from the political consequences of their methods, Taschereau and Kellock had their own timetable; at one point King learned that the commission planned to take a recess for a day because Kellock had a previous engagement to speak at a YMCA meeting. Then on 25 February the commission sent a note suggesting that more witnesses were needed and two to three weeks might pass before a report was released. King was outraged. 'It seems to me that everybody is going crazy these days,' he wrote, 'one cannot understand how they could take or propose some of the actions that they do.' The situation was so serious that King worried about it even in his sleep, as he reported in his diary: T had a vision of a rather strong dark man coming to the side of the bed taking me by the left arm and saying: I am the Mayor of so and so - naming some place. Come along ... The vision related to the arbitrary procedures and the necessity of treating those in confinement with utmost care and giving as much freedom as possible.'29 He called in Norman Robertson. 'People will not stand for individual liberty being curtailed or men being detained and denied counsel and fair trial before being kept in prison,' King told him. 'The whole proceedings are far too much like Russia itself.' Robertson was sent to speak to the commission and the Justice Department. Apparently the commission had been planning to keep all the civil servants in detention until the hearings were completed, but this time King's message got through. At the beginning of March the commission released four suspects along with its first interim report.30 The report made headlines with its revelation that two civil servants, both women,

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had confessed to spying for the Soviets and two more would be tried in court on charges of espionage and conspiracy. The confessions came from Emma Woikin, an employee in the Department of External Affairs, and Kathleen Willsher, a secretary at the British High Commission. Both confessed to passing information gleaned from diplomatic cables. Woikin admitted that she provided her Soviet contacts with summaries of telegrams reporting on elections in Spain and Eastern Europe, conditions in Austria, and a conversation between the British and Soviet foreign ministers. Nothing in their confessions, however, suggested that either woman had given the Soviets any information related to atomic research or, for that matter, any information of strategic value. While the contents of the cables were secret, they hardly exceeded the kind of analysis that would be found in a decent newspaper. But Woikin, who was quite unsophisticated, evidently hoped that her Soviet contacts would find them interesting. Willsher, who told the commissioners that she believed she could be shot for her crime, confessed to passing the contents of a cable that, it later emerged, she had never seen. At the time, however, the details of their crimes were less important than the fact that the government had confessions from two members of a Soviet espionage ring. Both women were immediately tried and convicted in county court on charges of violating the Official Secrets Act and both received quite severe sentences: Woikin, two and a half years in prison, and Willsher, three years. The release of the first interim report by the commission was a great relief to Mackenzie King, who felt it would satisfy the public that the extraordinary steps taken by the commission were justified. The report was cabled to Washington where Ambassador Lester Pearson passed it on to Dean Acheson at the Department of State. Pearson considered the report an unimpressive mixture of the 'sensational and the inconsequential' that would fuel more sensational headlines. Pearson then dropped in on Winston Churchill, who was passing through Washington on his way to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a tough anti-Soviet speech. Pearson was asked to read over the speech, on behalf of Mackenzie King. Pearson found the great man 'still in bed, propped up with pillows, looking pink and white as always, with a big cigar in his mouth ...' Pearson read the speech, including its statement that Europe was now divided by 'an iron curtain' and the warning that 'Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilizations.' 'Very strong stuff indeed,' Pearson concluded; 'one of the most impressive things that Mr. Churchill has done.' Afterwards Mackenzie King spoke to Churchill by phone, and told him that the royal commission would be releasing a strong report on Soviet espionage. Churchill's response, was 'Do not hold anything back ...' Churchill's own speech at Fulton, delivered on 5 March 1946, created a sensation and served as the inaugural address of the Cold War.31 But Mackenzie King was wrong if he thought the report on the spy investigation would silence his critics. The commission was not having an easy time developing

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its case against the remaining suspects; only by the time Parliament convened in mid-March were they ready to release a second interim report identifying four more of the detainees as spies. The second group of four detainees was released on 14 March, just before the opening of Parliament. The remaining five were still in custody, still incommunicado, and still uncharged. King was vulnerable to new charges of totalitarian methods, this time from the opposition benches in the House. The suspects who were the least forthcoming were held the longest, and Israel Halperin, who was later cleared by the courts, was not taken before the commission until 22 March, five weeks after his detention. Halperin was allowed to send a message to opposition leader John Bracken, and he appealed for help, complaining of bright lights, 'loud shouting,' and 'physical intimidation.' Bracken was in a quandary over the matter; he was tempted to attack the Liberals for their denial of civil liberties, but the presence of two Supreme Court justices on the commission gave him pause. Bracken's secretary wrote back to Halperin to tell him that the matter was being discussed by the House.32 Neither King nor St Laurent had expected matters to drag on this long, and both were attacked in Parliament for their support of such illiberal measures. As Bracken hung back, John Diefenbaker took up the case, charging that under the Liberals 'every basis of individual freedom going back to 1215 ... every vestige of those things we regard as essential to the preservation of the liberty of the subject was swept aside.' 'When in the history of the British Empire was any man ever denied counsel,' Diefenbaker thundered, 'except under orders-in-council passed by this government?' The suspects, he shrewdly suggested, 'were held until they incriminated themselves.' From the Liberal backbenches, C.G. 'Chubby' Power also attacked the government's handling of the investigation. Power, a Liberal from Quebec South and a former cabinet minister, broke with the government over the issue and labelled its handling of the Gouzenko affair a great mistake. 'If this is to be the funeral of Liberalism,' Power told the house, T do not desire to be even an honorary pallbearer ,..'33 'It is unfair,' King wrote in his diary that day, 'that counsel and the commissioners should let the Liberal party get into the position where it may take a long time for the party itself to be freed of the charge of having acted in a very arbitrary manner with respect to civil liberties.' The government apparently drew a lesson from this experience: never again during the anti-Communist purges of the 1940s and 1950s did it allow another independent investigation of civil servants like the one conducted by the Taschereau-Kellock commission. All subsequent loyalty and security investigations were carried out discreetly, in secrecy, and under the direct supervision of the Privy Council Office.34 Under pressure from the government, the commission relented slightly on its ban on visits with the remaining detainees. After the first four were released the wives of the nine remaining suspects were allowed to visit, but they were required to take an oath of secrecy and were forbidden to discuss the visits with anyone, including their

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lawyers. When only five suspects remained in custody the lawyers were gradually allowed access to their clients, but they too were sworn to secrecy about the commission's proceedings. As the hearings reached their fifth week and all but five of the suspects had been released by the commission and arrested by the RCMP, the commission hearings became increasingly bitter. The five remaining suspects, Eric Adams, James Scott Benning, Israel Halperin, Fred Poland, and Durnford P. Smith, had been the least forthcoming in the interrogations and the hearings. John Diefenbaker's remark in the House, that those who incriminated themselves would be released, was accurate. The commission was still trying to accumulate evidence against the last five. But by then the suspects had learned something of the fate of the previous witnesses, and when Durnford Smith was taken before the commission he resisted the legal fiction that he was only supplying information to an enquiry and was not on trial. He knew that all the others had been arrested after they left the hearings, and he was reluctant to testify: Kellock: Will you take the book please in your right hand? Smith: My Lord, I feel that I cannot take this oath until I have seen my counsel, Mr. Aldous Aylen. Taschereau: You will have to take the oath. You listen to the oath. You will have to take that and then we will discuss the matter of counsel later. You are called here as a witness and you are under obligation to attend and to be sworn. Smith: My Lord, I have not seen my counsel for thirty-two days. Kellock: That is all right. I said that you will first take the oath. There are two oaths. One is that you will speak the truth ... the other is that these proceedings are in camera and that you will keep secret anything that you tell us or anything you learn here unless you get permission from us. Smith: My Lord, I feel it is not fair to make me testify until I have seen Mr. Aylen. Kellock: Mr. Smith, there is not any question of fairness involved. Your are here as a witness. We are sitting as a Royal Commission and you are here as a witness. Now then you must give evidence under oath ... If you do not that is an offence ... Smith: But is it not true that all previous witnesses have been subsequently placed under accusation. Taschereau: There is no accusation against you. Smith: But all previous witnesses before the Commission as far as I know, have been subsequently accused. I cannot rid myself of the feeling Taschereau: There is no witness that has been accused when he came here as a witness. When the investigation is finished and we have finished our work we will make a report to the government and the government will deal with you as they deem advisable, but for the moment you are just a witness for the purpose of this investigation. That is all. You have to be sworn. Smith: I have the feeling I am not really a witness.

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Taschereau: Oh yes, you are a witness. Kellock: It does not matter what your feeling is ...35

Smith's counsel was eventually admitted and Smith went on to testify. In this fashion the commission carried on its examination of the detainees until 29 March, forty-two days after the detentions began. Then the last five detainees were released, along with a third interim report, which declared these five guilty of the same offences as the other eight. They too were arrested as they left the Rockcliffe compound, charged, and jailed. When Smith's case came to trial the charge of communicating secrets was not proceeded on, but he was convicted instead on a charge of conspiring to violate the OSA and sentenced to five years. The other four were acquitted. The trials of the thirteen detainees, and of nine others who were named by the royal commission, began while the secret hearings were still in session and concluded, following a series of appeals, several years after the commission was disbanded. The verdicts reached by judges and juries in these trials were quite different from the judgments passed by the commissioners. Where the commission concluded that the thirteen detainees and nine others were guilty of spying, the courts found otherwise. Only eleven out of twenty trials ended in convictions (including Nunn May's conviction in a British court). Of the original thirteen detainees, just seven were convicted, leading to additional criticism of the commission for making charges that could not be proved in court. There was also a wide discrepancy between the accusations published by the commissioners and the actual charges brought against the accused in court. The commission declared the original thirteen guilty of violating the Official Secrets Act, but in court the Crown won few convictions on this espionage charge. Only Nunn May, Willsher, and Woikin, all of whom confessed to passing secrets, were convicted of violating the OSA. In the absence of a confession the prosecution failed in each of four additional attempts to prove violations of the act. The prosecution was in a stronger position on charges of a criminal conspiracy to violate the OSA, a separate offence under the criminal code. Six of the accused, including MP Fred Rose, were found guilty of conspiracy. Two others, including Sam Carr, were sentenced for offences related to procuring a false passport. In the final count, nine people judged guilty by the commission were acquitted in court, and two others were never tried.36 The commissioners also made the extraordinary statement that three witnesses who were called to testify before the commission 'did not so far as the evidence discloses take any active part in the subversive activities but would have done so if required.' This uncompromising statement labelled the three as treasonous, in the absence of any evidence, while denying them any recourse to clear their names. The commissioners were breaking new ground in character assassination in the name of national security.37 This final tally included fewer convictions, on fewer charges than the government

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might have hoped for, but the conviction rate still surpassed the Justice Department's original prediction that without testimony obtained by a royal commission they could expect to win only three or four convictions. But the effect of the commission went far beyond doubling the number of convictions. Its findings were published around the world, and its findings and accusations received far greater attention in the press than the verdicts of the courts. But above all, the self-incriminating secret testimony obtained by the commission paved the way for the conviction of Canada's only Communist member of Parliament and the jailing of one of the Labour Progressive party's top organizers. As the RCMP had earlier predicted, the use of a commission allowed them to attack the Communist movement in Canada. The conviction of Rose, based on testimony given by scientist Raymond Boyer, shook the LPP, disarmed many of the critics of the commission, and came to symbolize the Gouzenko affair. Mackenzie King's worst fears that the arbitrary and illiberal methods of the commission would rebound against the Liberal party were never realized. A poll during the height of the controversy over the detentions showed that 93 per cent of Canadians had heard of the spy affair and of these 61 per cent believed the government had 'acted wisely.' Whether the same opinions held after the courts found nearly half of the accused innocent was never recorded.38 ' R U S S I A WANTED TO K N O W WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT'

Of all of the self-incriminating testimony recorded by the commission, Boyer's statement that he had discussed secret information with Rose was the greatest windfall for the prosecution. Boyer's testimony to the commission was later admitted as evidence at his trial on charges that he conspired with Rose - and Rose was implicated by the same testimony. Boyer received a two year sentence and Rose received six years, lost his seat in Parliament, and later lost his Canadian citizenship. Boyer's incriminating testimony to the RCMP and the commission emerged from his attempts to make them understand his point of view as a scientist who wanted to help the Soviets defeat the Nazis. Inspector Harvison and the commission counsel encouraged Boyer's explanations, but what they were seeking was not enlightenment but a series of admissions that Boyer had access to secret information, that he spoke to Rose about it, and that he knew Rose would pass it along to the Soviet Union. Boyer's crucial admission was his description of a meeting with Rose early in 1943 when he told Rose about some developments in the manufacturing of RDX, a chemical explosive. T told him we had discovered a new process - what the products were that went into this reaction,' Boyer testified. He also admitted that there was no doubt in his mind that the information would get back to the Soviets: that was precisely his intent. 'Russia wanted very much to know what it was all about,' Boyer said. He also testified that a colleague, Dr Ross, had told him that the minister of munitions and supply, C.D. Howe, 'had been approached by the Russians and that

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he was ready to give the process to the Russians without reserve, but that he had been prevented from doing so by the Americans.' The reason that the Americans were opposed to sharing this information, according to testimony by J.R. Donald, Canada's director general of munitions and supply, was that in 1942 they were afraid that the information would fall into the hands of the Nazi armies, which were then advancing on the eastern front. The Americans were providing the Soviets with $1 billion in aid, but they were more cautious with technical information. The basic formula for RDX had been published in 1904, but during the war scientists in the allied countries were trying to improve its usefulness by mixing it with beeswax, aluminum powder, and TNT. This research was not the most closely guarded secret of the war; by May 1943, information much like what Boyer had described had been published in a book called The Chemical Front, and later, in 1944, a Soviet mission was given a tour of the Canadian RDX plant at Lac a la Tortue where, as Donald testified at Boyer's trial, they were given 'all the processes of the manufacture of RDX.' 39 Documents in the Public Record Office, London, indicate that RDX had been placed on a list for transfer of military technology to the Soviets approved by both the British and American governments as early as 1 May 1944 and had been officially disclosed in full on 16 November 1944. By this time, of course, the German army was in retreat and Soviet armament factories were not threatened.40 Boyer recalled discussing the subject with Rose four times in the period 1943-5, but it was the earliest discussion that hung the conspiracy charge on them both; at that time the information was still secret. But if Boyer's assertion that C.D. Howe favoured sharing the information was true, then Boyer was being tried in a Canadian court for violating American security guidelines that were designed to keep the information from the Nazis, not the Soviets. Boyer appeared to believe that the commissioners would be understanding, once the situation was explained. They were not. Boyer's testimony made the Crown prosecutor's job easy. Once he admitted that information he discussed with Rose was intended for a foreign government - any foreign government - he was guilty under the OSA. In Boyer's case, and in those that followed, the information that was discussed or passed was of little value, and none of it was related to atomic research. As Crown prosecutor (and later Supreme Court chief justice) J.A. Cartwright later recalled, the value of the information was minimal: 'It was rather ironic. The first man that was tried - the evidence of his offence was that sitting in a cafe in Hull he had given some information to a Russian chap and by chance that same information was given publicly to the Russians at the end of an air show in England. That will give you an idea of the value of it.' 41 But as Cartwright also noted, the value of the information had no bearing on the guilt of the defendants; civil servants were sworn to secrecy, period. When it came to sentencing, however, the prosecutor as well as the defence counsel expected that the judge would take into account the actual value of the information, and the stiff sentences

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passed down by Mr Justice McRuer surprised even Cartwright, who later said he found them quite heavy under the circumstances. The defendant in this case, Edward Mazerall, was sentenced to four years in prison.42 The heavy sentences suggested that Boyer, Mazerall, and Rose were being punished not for the damage caused by their crime, but rather for the perceived threat they posed and as an example to other left-leaning civil servants. The conviction of a prominent left-wing scientist and a Communist politician dramatically told the story that the commission was trying to get across about the need for increased security, the threat posed by scientists and civil servants with divided loyalties who questioned the security policies of the state, and the aggressive nature of the Soviets as demonstrated by their espionage. 'YOU ARE DEFINITELY K N O W N IN CERTAIN Q U A R T E R S AS A COMMUNIST'

The three interim reports of the commission emerged at biweekly intervals, the first at the urging of the Prime Minister, the third just before the opening of Parliament in mid-March 1946. Each of these reports named several of the detainees as guilty of espionage and quoted selectively from the more than 6,000 pages of testimony and hundreds of documents seen by the commission. The final 733-page report, a compendium of the interim reports and more, was issued four months later and contained a detailed defence of the methods used and the judgments reached by the commissioners. Although by this time several of the accused had had their day in court and had been exonerated, the commissioners, far from modifying or retracting their original accusations, inserted a blanket assertion that their judgments were valid in any case because the courts were not in a position to see and weigh all the information that had been produced in the secret hearings of the commission. The public had only their word for it, because the commissioners did not reveal any of this conclusive evidence, which, for reasons they did not attempt to explain, the Crown had not introduced at the trials. This blanket condemnation left some of the accused in the peculiar situation of being declared innocent by the courts and guilty by two Supreme Court justices, without further recourse to clear their names. The justification for this unusual and illiberal pronouncement and for the apparently arbitrary behaviour of the commission throughout its tenure was contained in a series of chapters that described a Communist conspiracy in Canada that threatened the safety and interests of the state itself. Under such conditions, it was implied, the civil liberties of individuals must give way. In their arguments for the elevation of national security over individual rights and liberties, their attack on left-wing organizations, and their call for security screening of civil servants, the commission anticipated the suspicious attitudes and sometimes illiberal practices of the modern national security organizations during the coming Cold War era.43 Over the course of the hearings, the commissioners came to believe that the threat

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to the state lay not in the value of the information passed, which was trivial, but in the potential for future spying by Canadians sympathetic to the Soviets. Speaking of the suspects, the commissioners reported that 'some gave all they had or all they could get; others apparently only gave some of what was in their possession; some had not much to give but were in positions where they would, in the future, have been able to give more and they would undoubtedly have done so. The most important thing is the agreement of certain Canadian Communists to work under foreign orders in a conspiracy directed against their own country.'44 From this, the commissioners concluded that they had uncovered a broad pattern of espionage that linked the spies inside the government to the Soviet Embassy via Canadian Communists and those sympathetic to Communism. In the opinion of the commissioners, these were the circumstances surrounding the disclosure of the secret and confidential information that they were required to report on. The commissioners' response, which they advanced as the correct position for the state under the circumstances, was to invoke the spirit of the Official Secrets Act, which cast suspicion over individuals whose character, behaviour, background, activities, reading materials, or associations raised reasonable, if unprovable, doubt about their loyalty in the minds of the state. The commission's treatment of witnesses and the conclusions that it reached in several cases demonstrated just how far it was willing to go in the invasion of civil liberties in the name of state security. The commission believed in the implicit rightness of the presumption of guilt contained in the OSA. Throughout the hearings, the onus was on the detainees to dispel the cloud of doubt that settled over them by their association with other alleged spies, or by the mention of their name in the documents of the Soviet Embassy. The grounds for assuming the guilt of a suspect under the OSA, as interpreted by the commission, were very broad; anyone who had been in contact with an agent of a foreign power, or who possessed the name or address of such an agent, was considered guilty of violating the law or conspiring to do so. According to the OSA, the act of communicating with a foreign agent can be presumed from minimal evidence. The act says that a person shall 'unless he proves to the contrary [emphasis added], be deemed to have been in communication with an agent of a foreign power' if he has visited the agent's address, consorted or associated with the agent, or is in possession of the agent's name, or address, or 'any other information regarding such an agent,' such as a telephone number. With this in mind, the RCMP seized the telephone and address books of the detainees. This gave the commission generous grounds for suspicion, because many of the suspects were friends or professional acquaintances and they possessed each other's addresses and phone numbers. Once 'reasonable suspicion' was established against any one of the accused, then it was incumbent on all of those who possessed his or her phone number to demonstrate that they had it for reasons other than those presumed by the OSA. The general justification for including such presumptions in the OSA is that espi-

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onage is notoriously hard to detect and the state must be able to proceed on the least indication of it in order to protect national security. In practice such presumptions cast a very wide net. For example, once the commission formed an opinion about the guilt of Fred Rose, all those who had communicated with him, or possessed his phone number, were presumed guilty as well. In the case of James Scott Benning, this was the only piece of evidence that linked him to the espionage ring. For the commissioners, it alone was sufficient evidence to justify a presumption of guilt, which they said Benning was unable to dispel. Therefore, the commissioners reported that Benning was guilty of communicating secrets and recommended that he be prosecuted. When Benning was subsequently tried before a jury, the principal evidence offered by the prosecution was again his possession of Fred Rose's phone number. The Crown, like the royal commission before it, argued that under the OSA the possession of the phone number was evidence that Benning had communicated with Rose, a foreign agent, and that communicating with an agent was evidence that the accused had violated the OSA unless he could prove otherwise. Benning tried to demonstrate that he had Rose's phone number for innocuous reasons, but the jury did not believe him and he was convicted of violating the OSA. On appeal, however, the court ruled that the prosecution had built 'inference upon inference' in arguing from the possession of a phone number to a violation of the law. Finding 'no evidence' that Benning did anything wrong, Chief Justice Robertson wrote that 'it is clear that Parliament did not intend to shift the whole burden of proving his innocence upon the accused simply upon the fact being established that he had been in communication with an agent of a foreign power.' Defence counsel also pointed out that if the simple possession of Rose's phone number justified a presumption of guilt, then everyone with an Ottawa phone book would be guilty. The conviction was quashed and Benning was freed. A similar presumption of guilt was made by the commissioners in their presumption that Squadron Leader Matt Nightingale was guilty of communicating secret information. Nightingale, described by his lawyer as a big, open-faced farm boy, was drawn into the spy affair because his name appeared in the files of the Soviet Embassy. The principal witness against him before the commission and at the subsequent trial was Gouzenko. Nightingale admitted to the commission that he had met Major Rogov, assistant military attache (and espionage aide to Colonel Zabotin), but no more. The commission used this admission, along with Gouzenko's testimony and their assessment of Nightingale's conduct, to establish a presumption of guilt, which they said he failed to dispel. As the commissioners wrote: 'having regard to Nightingale's association with Rogov and the burden of proof thereby thrown on him by the Official Secrets Act, 1939, together with his lack of frankness before us which was manifestly an endeavour to hide his real conduct, we are of the opinion that he not only agreed to furnish unauthorized information to the Russians but actually did so.'45 When the case came to trial, however, the court was more circumspect. Mr Justice McRuer advised the jury that the uncorroborated evidence of

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Gouzenko, a co-conspirator, was shaky ground for a conviction, and Nightingale was acquitted. The reference to Nightingale's lack of 'frankness' as evidence against him was based on a section of the OSA that the commissioners believed allowed them to take into account a subjective reading of the character of a witness. When the suspects appeared at the secret sessions of the royal commission they faced an impossible task of dispelling a deeply layered presumption of guilt, without the benefit of counsel. All the witnesses, it appeared, knew little or nothing of the OSA, and were unaware even of the presumption of guilt or their immediate need to persuade the commissioners of their innocence. Thus the process of testifying was strewn with pitfalls. Witnesses who refused to testify, or who resisted testifying without a lawyer, or who insisted that they were under suspicion left the commissioners unconvinced of their innocence. Those who did testify and were evasive or argumentative were also unconvincing. Those who testified fully often found themselves facing prosecution based on their own sworn testimony. Nor was it sufficient for the witnesses to persuade Taschereau and Kellock that no crime had been committed. They also had to convince the commissioners that they were not the kind of person who might commit a crime. Reputation alone could be sufficient to establish guilt. As Williams told one witness: 'There is evidence before the Commission, I should tell you, that you are definitely known in certain quarters as a Communist.'46 According to the OSA, the demeanour or the reputation of the suspects may also serve as grounds for a conviction. According to the OSA, paragraph 3, section 2: 'On a prosecution under this section it shall not be necessary to show that the accused person is guilty of any particular act tending to show a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state, and notwithstanding that no such act is proved against him, he may be convicted if, from the circumstances of his case, or his conduct, or his known character as proved, it appears that his purpose was a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state.' With this section in mind, the commissioners frequently commented on the 'conduct and character [of the witness] as revealed by him before us in the witness box.' This was more than idle comment; it helped to justify their conclusions that every one of the suspects was guilty of violating the act.47 'INGENIOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL

DEVELOPMENT COURSES'

While the OSA did not specify exactly which character traits justified a presumption of guilt, the commissioners developed their own ideas. Assisted, perhaps, by Inspector Harvison's theories, the commissioners generalized that the suspects were motivated to spy by their sympathies towards Communism. Therefore, throughout the hearings the commissioners and their counsel tried to determine whether or not each witness possessed sympathies towards Communism that would make him or her the kind of person who would spy. The test for such sympathies and potential disloyalty

78 The Gouzenko Affair was a series of questions about the witnesses' friends, acquaintances, associations, beliefs, and cultural activities. Witnesses were asked what books they read, magazines they received, petitions they signed, political candidates they supported, and government policies they criticized. From the answers given to these questions and from the demeanour of the witnesses the commission decided whether the witness was sympathetic to Communism. If so, then the presumption of guilt was reinforced, and the task of dispelling that presumption was increased. Under the circumstances, the commissioners found no difficulty in concluding in each case that the suspects were guilty. As the commission moved in this direction it passed from the identification and prosecution of the members of a spy ring to a campaign against ideological subversion. In this kind of thinking, the commissioners were at the farthest remove from the process of justice; where the courts presumed innocence, the commissioners presumed guilt. In key cases, the courts could not be persuaded of the guilt of the accused while the commissioners could not be persuaded of their innocence. The differences in their views and in their interpretation of the OSA stemmed from their different roles. The courts, with their stricter rules of evidence, reflected a balance between the rights of individuals and those of society. The commission, charged with investigating espionage by civil servants, acted to defend the security of the state by casting a wide net of suspicion over the civil service, regardless of its effect on individuals. The weakness of this approach was in its reliance on subjective opinions, on hearsay, and on testimony produced without the benefit of cross-examination. All these weaknesses were evident in the commission's treatment of W.M. Pappin, an employee in the government's passport office. The commissioners pronounced Pappin guilty of helping the Soviet Embassy to obtain a false passport. Pappin was promptly suspended from his job and prosecuted. But as Lester Pearson later wrote in a memo to Mackenzie King: 'certain evidence before the Royal Commission, on which the report on Pappin was based, was shown in the Court proceedings to be mistaken, and the witness in question, [another clerk] of the Passport Office, to be an extremely unreliable person. If the facts had been stated accurately before the Commission by [this clerk] it is very doubtful that the Commission would have reported against Pappin at all.' 48 Pappin was acquitted at his trial, and the testimony of the Crown's main witness was so discredited that the government felt obliged to rehire him. The commissioners had rationalized their judgments by reference to the Official Secrets Act, but as the trial results demonstrated, their interpretation was rejected outside the rarefied atmosphere of a security investigation, where no crossexamination of sources was permitted. In spite of these evident weaknesses in their methods, the commissioners continued to generalize from the perceived disloyalty of a group of civil servants with presumed Communist leanings to the assumption that anyone with related beliefs, a similar character, or shared associations posed a potential threat to national security.

Gouzenko Revealed

79

Here the commission passed completely out of the realm of demonstrable facts into the speculative realm of counter-espionage, a hall of mirrors where nothing that can be seen can be trusted, no caution is too great, and no effort is ever sufficient to guarantee security. Here the commission found its answer to Inspector Harvison's question: why did they spy? The short answer proposed by the commission was simple: Communism made them spy. Communist indoctrination supplied the motivation, and Communist agents supplied the techniques. The purpose of left-wing clubs, cultural organizations, reading groups, scientific groups, and other groups 'controlled' by the Communists was - the commissioners believed - the ultimate transformation of sympathizers into spies. The commission credited the Communists with breaking down the 'normal moral principles such as frankness, honesty, integrity, and a respect for the sanctity of oaths' of Canadians who joined the secret 'cells.' By these means a number of young Canadians, public servants and others, who begin with a desire to advance causes which they consider worthy, have been induced into joining study groups of the Communist Party. They are persuaded to keep this adherence secret. They have then been led step by step along the ingenious psychological development courses we have outlined, until under the influence of sophisticated and unscrupulous leaders they have been persuaded to engage in illegal activities directed against the safety and interests of their own 40

society.

With respect to the ideological motivation for treason, the commissioners' thinking resembled that of the RCMP and the FBI, the domestic security agencies that were emerging as the champions of Cold War anti-Communism. In the United States, the FBI and other anti-Communist voices spoke publicly through the House Un-American Activities Committee, through the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and later through Senator Joseph McCarthy and other anti-Communist investigators. But in Canada, hard-line anti-Communism had fewer outlets for public dissemination. The royal commission on espionage was a rare opportunity to mount an official campaign against left-wing subversion. Communism, according to commission counsel E.K. Williams, was like a disease that had taken hold in the body of the government and that infected civil servants and made them into spies. Sorting out these 'corrupted officials and employees' was necessary, he advised, if the government meant to avoid having 'the infection spread widely throughout the [civil] Service.' This cleansing was the most important task, Williams felt, above and beyond the punishment of the guilty.50 Throughout the hearings, the commissioners probed the witnesses for any evidence of ideas, convictions, statements, books read, or magazines subscribed to that would imply Communist sympathies or beliefs. For instance, they reported that Eric Adams's 'library was literally full of Communist books.' In a leap of logic, they then followed up with the observation that none of his associates at work 'knew he

80 The Gouzenko Affair had any such views.' Presumably the commission worked on the premise that you are what you read. This could be taken further yet. 'It is not surprising,' the report suggested, 'to find that Adams, as a well-trained Communist, had in his home a file headed Civil Liberties.' He was, they explained, 'interested in civil liberties, but solely from the Communist point of view.' The British high commissioner, writing back to the Dominion Office in London, quoted these sentences on Adams as evidence that the commission 'states as facts what can, on the evidence, only be regarded as inferences drawn from them.' 51 To the commissioners, however, such niceties were beside the point, which was to find any evidence that could associate the witnesses with Communism. Once such Communist associations were established, the next link in the argument was that Communist sympathies, however defined, motivated the spying. In one exchange, for example, Kellock put this presumption to Durnford Smith, one of the original detainees: 'Can you think [of] or can you suggest to me any reason why any person in your position should have given any information, secret information to the Russians or any other foreign power, apart from the fact that you were sympathetic to the Communist philosophy?' 52 Smith had no suggestions to offer and the commission remained persuaded that 'Communistic leanings' explained the willingness of the spies to give away secret government information in spite of the oaths of secrecy administered by the civil service. 'In every instance but one,' the commission found, the 'Canadian espionage agents were shown to be members of or sympathizers with the Communist Party ... Because of the emergence of this fact it was necessary for us to ascertain where each of the persons whose conduct was being investigated stood with regard to Communist ideology and Communist belief.'53 Having decided that Communist ideology was at the root of the spying, the commission developed an additional goal: to expose and undermine the clubs, study groups, and left-wing groups thought to be recruiting centres for the Soviets. Perhaps because it was disbanded so soon, the commission stopped short of producing a list of the groups that it considered to be Communist fronts. It did single out and attack one group, the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers. The CAScW was destroyed as a result of the anti-Communist inquisition, and scientists and civil servants with left-wing sympathies were placed on notice that their loyalties were suspect. It is to this witch-hunt, which stemmed directly from the Gouzenko affair, that we turn in the next chapter.

4

Gouzenko - the Aftermath: Scientists under Surveillance

The report of the Taschereau-Kellock Commission found an international audience far beyond anything previously attained by an official publication of the government of Canada. What interested people abroad were the international ramifications of what had been uncovered in Ottawa. If the Soviets had been spying on Canada, it could be assumed that they were doing the same to other wartime allies. The implications for the postwar international order were obviously significant. But the domestic implications equally riveted Canadian attention, and while other countries may have had limited interest in Canada's internal affairs, the spy scandal pointed to a characteristic feature of the emergent postwar order: the Cold War would be fought within Western nations as well as between the West and the USSR. One of the shrewdest commentaries on the implications of the spy affair was penned privately by Sir Alexander Clutterbuck, the British high commissioner to Canada, in a communique to the Dominion secretary, Viscount Addison.1 The royal commission report, he wrote, 'throws a highly illuminating searchlight on Russian methods' and showed that what had happened in Canada was part of an 'elaborate system extending to many other countries': it was 'clear that security measures of all kinds will now have to receive increasing attention ... But it is the domestic aspect that is uppermost and has caused the greatest public attention.' Here the 'most obvious effect of the enquiry has been to cause a sharp reaction against Communism.' He pointed out, correctly, that Canada had never offered very fertile ground for Communism, even without a spy scandal - in visceral anti-Communism, Canadians were more like the Americans than the British. But the spy affair had revived 'former prejudices,' and fear of Communism was now general throughout Canada. This fear had begun to cover by extension other organizations that were thought to be markedly left-wing. 'Already right-wing members in Parliament have denounced the Film Board [and] the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ... on the grounds that they include individuals of Communist leanings and it seems possible that the wind will not blow any good even to the C.C.F.'

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In Clutterbuck's opinion, the challenge to traditional standards of civil liberties posed by the methods of the commission were troubling, but what was equally troubling was the way in which the report strove to dramatize the facts for effect. 'It appears remarkable' that the document 'should have been issued over the signature of two judges of the Supreme Court': 'The report is indeed a brilliant study ... Altogether it is a most readable document and misses no point in the drama of the story. On the other hand, one cannot avoid the impression that the attempt to give dramatic effect has led at times to unjustifiably extravagant language; the search for brilliance has not always led to an impartial judicial conclusion.' From his vantage point as an outside observer, the High Commissioner had placed his finger on a key element of the royal commission's strategy. The mediocre record of conviction in the courts of those named in the report (twenty charges laid, ten convictions) no doubt displeased the commissioners, but criminal convictions were not necessarily the main point of the exercise. Spotlighting the dangers of Communism was. The commission had a mandate to report on the circumstances surrounding the espionage, and here their investigation ventured far beyond the actions of individual civil servants in an attempt to answer the fundamental question that Inspector Harvison had asked himself when he first interrogated the suspects in the Rockcliffe barracks: what made them spy? The conclusion reached by the commissioners was sensational; their report was a virtual spy novel, crammed with facts, leads, and theories about an enormous clandestine conspiracy, masterminded by the Soviet Union, involving hundreds, perhaps thousands of Canadians who were said to have been secretly indoctrinated, subverted, converted to Communism, and then turned into traitors against their own country. The sections of the report dealing with this conspiracy contain the most dramatic prose in the report. The authors left no doubt that they had uncovered a serious threat to national security; not something that would allow them to lay charges, but something more subtle, a state of mind or a predisposition to subversion dormant in the body of the citizenry. Communism, they reported, and the wide network of organizations that served it, threatened the security of the state, not from without, but from within. The report was a call to arms in the new Cold War. Aroused Canadians were expected to respond, and the report was designed to draw the line between honest dissent and dangerous subversion so that loyal Canadians could properly take sides. ' G O U Z E N K O SAYS THIS IS NOT HIS JOB'

The task of shaping the dramatic prose of the report was largely left to Arnold Smith, the External Affairs representative on the enquiry. Smith was the leading hard-liner on Soviet Communism among Canadian diplomats. It is apparent from the documents that Smith was well aware of the anti-Communist uses to which Gouzenko's revelations could be put. On the same day that the suspects were picked

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 83 up, Smith engaged Igor Gouzenko in an extended conversation about how best to attack and undermine Canadian Communists and left-wing 'front' groups. When Smith queried Gouzenko about the methods used by the Soviets in Canada, Gouzenko was able to give a general description; he told Smith that Canadians were being recruited as spies - some of them 'unconscious spies' - from among the ranks of the Communist party and its front groups. These front groups were especially important, Gouzenko said, because they attracted 'the more educated classes,' such as scientists. This was not something that Gouzenko could prove, he said, but rather something that he knew, which was knowledge common to 'all politically educated Soviet officials who work abroad.' But he cautioned Smith that he could not offer any specific testimony about any group that the RCMP considered a front for the Communists. Gouzenko was quite clear about the strengths and weaknesses of his own testimony, and he resisted suggestions that he testify in generalities about unspecified conspiracies because he was afraid that such sweeping assertions would not be believed and might undercut his credibility. Smith, however, pressed Gouzenko to testify, arguing, as he later reported, 'that democratic publics, including most Communist Party members and hangers-on should be brought to see the C.P. in this light instead of the usual phoney light as a left wing political party. Gouzenko agreed but said that it is not his job - it is the job of Canadian editors and political commentators and professors. He does not want to spend much time in evidence before the Royal Commission, on these broad subjects - though he will of course state his views briefly on these subjects if desired. This might be useful on the record, as a peg for editorial comments.' 2 Gouzenko's testimony to the commission was, as promised, damning and vague at the same time. It allowed the commissioners to reinforce their belief in the conspiratorial nature of Communist activities without entertaining specific evidence of actual subversive activities. The commission counsel led Gouzenko through his accusations, while the absence of cross-examination left his general assertions unchallenged. This could be a recipe for reckless smears. FRONTS

The system of subversion as described by the report emanated from the Soviet Embassy, spreading outward like ripples on a pond created by a stone falling into the glassy calm of Canadian society. The inner circles were occupied by Soviet agents, the middle circles included the Canadian Communists and all the organizations they created or supported, while the outer rings spread subversion into the farthest reaches of Canadian society, where the Communist conspiracy acted on innocent members of Canadian 'front' groups. Such groups had the misleading appearance of innocent cultural, professional, or political organizations. A front group was defined as any group sympathetic to Communism or to the Soviet Union - or to any cause that Communists might happen to espouse. Furthermore, any group that included

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Communists among its leaders - these might include trade unions, civil-liberties groups, ethnic clubs, and youth groups - was likely a front. Inside these otherwise legal organizations, the commission warned, lurked a seditious conspiracy. The investigation had apparently produced substantial evidence to support the dire antiCommunist warnings that had been the preserve of the RCMP and of right-wing politicians and publicists since the 1920s. As an exemplary case of a dangerous front group, Taschereau and Kellock pointed to the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers (CAScW), an eighteenmonth-old group of left-leaning scientists and technicians. The CAScW was resoundingly denounced as a fa$ade for skilled Communist indoctrinators who used 'psychological development techniques' to induce Canadian civil servants to spy. The name of the scientists' organization recurs again and again in the commission's report, as the prime example of a seemingly legitimate organization secretly dominated by the Soviet Union: 'Control by the Communist Party over a broad organization such as the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers could be used in a variety of ways not only for propaganda purposes, but eventually as a base for recruiting adherents to that Party from among scientists, and in due course no doubt for recruiting additional espionage agents in key positions in the national life.' 3 The CAScW was allowed to stand as the single example that proved the general proposition that left-wing organizations were no more than facades for Soviet espionage. What dramatic evidence had the commission uncovered that justified an attack on a private association, democratically organized? If there was evidence of spying by individual scientists, was it causally related to their participation in the CAScW? And was the evidence so conclusive that it justified the blacklisting, not only of the scientists' group, but also of other left-wing groups that fit the description of fronts offered by the commission? These questions escaped serious study at the time of the Gouzenko affair, when revelations of espionage and rumours of the theft of atomic secrets diverted attention from the finer points of the commission's reasoning. And of course it was difficult for outsiders to assess evidence taken in secret by the commission and only selectively released in the public report. The evidence considered by the two judges would seem to have come from three main sources: the police investigation that followed Gouzenko's defection, the files of the RCMP Intelligence Branch, and its own enquiry. The report quoted selectively from the secret testimony of witnesses called by the enquiry, but did not mention the amount and kind of information provided by the RCMP either from its concurrent investigation or from its files. The commissioners said nothing about either the RCMP's active investigation of presumed subversive group, or the reports of police investigators, informants, and undercover agents that might have influenced the commission in its interpretation of the testimony of witnesses heard during the enquiry into the Gouzenko affair. Today, after the secret testimony has been released, along with most of the exhibits and a few of the RCMP files, a critical review of the investigation of the CAScW is possible. As the CAScW was the sole

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 85 example put forward by the commission to corroborate its general theory of subversion, reviewing the commission's handling of the case presents an opportunity to examine the quality of the evidence and the general validity of its conclusions.4 'THE PROLETARIAN TINGE'

The CAScW was labelled subversive partly because Dr Raymond Boyer was president of the association, and three other suspects, Allan Nunn May, David Shugar, and Edward Mazerall, were active in it. In addition, the names of two others - lab technician Norman Veall and chemist Frank Chubb - turned up in the documents taken by Gouzenko from the embassy. The commissioners make much of their presence and give the general impression that the enquiry turned its attention to the CAScW because of the activities of these scientists. What they did not reveal at the time was that the RCMP had already decided to put the CAScW under surveillance and was actively spying on the organization well before Gouzenko defected - as early as October 1944, before the first public meetings of the CAScW in Montreal and Winnipeg in February 1945. The Intelligence Section of the RCMP Criminal Investigation Branch placed informants at these meetings and obtained a set of the minutes for its files. By early 1945 the RCMP had labelled the CAScW 'subversive' because of its agitation for unions for technicians. 'It is known that some union organizational work is contemplated and under way in respect to such class of workers and that there are definite signs of Communist interest, direction and therefore control apparent.' Inspector Harvison himself was involved and filed a lengthy report with the RCMP Intelligence Section in July 1945, two months prior to Gouzenko's defection.5 The drive to unionize scientific workers was anything but secret. One of the CAScW's goals, publicized in its earliest newsletter, was to unionize the technical workers who were denied membership in the existing network of conservative professional societies, which represented, for example, chemists and engineers. In the trade-union parlance of the period, the CAScW proposed an 'industry wide' union of professionals and non-professionals, a radical idea that had been stirring up dissension among scientists since before the war. These goals alone would have brought the CAScW to the attention of the Mounties, who regarded any union work in sensitive defence industries as suspect. But in the wake of the war, when scientists around the world were lobbying for international control of the atomic bomb and an end to government secrecy, the RCMP, like the FBI, was persuaded that the scientists' movement was Soviet-inspired, designed to further Moscow's plan to steal the scientific discoveries of the West, including the 'secret' of the atomic bomb. The Winnipeg Special Branch therefore cultivated informants in the CAScW, gathered copious notes on its meetings, filed the names of its leaders, and passed this information along to Ottawa. In one insightful report, Winnipeg Superintendent J.D. Bird analysed the origins and program of the association: 'It appears that in Great Britain

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an organization under the nomenclature of the Association of Scientific Workers has been in existence for some years. The objects of this association are to maintain the standards and ethics of men of science at the highest possible level. During the war years some of the scientists coming to this country from Great Britain were not favourably impressed with the standards of so-called scientific workers in this country and it was with a view to improving such standards that the idea of forming a similar association here was mooted.'6 Superintendent Bird's analysis matches the recollections of former members of the CAScW. The model for the Canadian association, as past members readily recall, was the British Association of Scientific Workers (BAScW), which was formed in England in 1919 and became a trade union in 1941. Its membership, at that time, numbered approximately 16,000 scientists, including six members of Parliament. When the Anglo-Canadian atomic research team took up residence in Montreal during the war, the team included several members of the BAScW. Among them were Dr Alan Nunn May, Norman Veall, and the eminently respectable director of the project, Dr John Cockcroft (who was later asked by the royal commission for an assessment of the information passed by Nunn May). According to Veall's testimony to the commission, a majority of the scientists on the research team belonged to the BAScW. After settling in Montreal, the British scientists had considered starting a chapter of the BAScW in Canada. But, as Superintendent Bird noted, having found their Canadian colleagues also interested, they formed a Canadian association instead. Superintendent Bird's analysis was rejected by his superior in Ottawa, who held a more sinister view of the scientific workers. H.A. Gagnon informed Bird that 'for your information the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers was undoubtedly formed, not for the purposes of maintaining the standards and ethics of men of science of the highest possible level, but as a means of furnishing the revolutionary movement a source of information heretofore denied it.' The proletarian tinge to this whole organization is clearly ascertained,' Gagnon wrote, 'in the first paragraph of the [CAScW's] booklet ...' Gagnon quoted from the scientists' manifesto: 'The Canadian Association of Scientific Workers was formed to unite workers from every field of science in the tasks of ensuring that [sic] the full utilization of their knowledge for the benefit of society, and of securing economic conditions that will encourage the expansion of scientific effort and knowledge.' 7 Years of fighting Bolshevism had evidently given Gagnon a sensitive nose for the hidden turn of phrase that revealed the subversive design and unmasked the hidden Communist, if such statements were prima facie evidence of subversive intent. An RCMP report on the CAScW, written in January 1946, a month before the Gouzenko affair became public, described the CAScW as 'led, inspired or influenced' by Communists. The report also made special note that there were plans to organize the scientists at the Chalk River nuclear project, which had recently started up its first experimental reactor, and that 'some dozen of its members in Montreal

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 87 worked on some phases of the atomic bomb project.' The Mounties concluded that 'an overall picture of their aims, purposes and their design for the future is exact in pattern to that found in other organizations which are controlled or strongly influenced by the Communists.' 8 The royal commissioners shared this view. 'PEACE THROUGH EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND CULTURE'

If the immediate inspiration for the creation of the CAScW came with the arrival of the British research team during the Second World War, the desire for such an association had deeper roots in the political ferment of the Depression era and the wartime alliance against fascism. The social activism spawned by the Depression had inspired some young scientists. Then the mobilization of the country to win the war was a convincing demonstration that the activism preached by the radicals was a concrete possibility, not just a dream. And as the Depression made activists out of many young scientists, so the war had made many activists into scientists and technicians to help produce aircraft, armaments, and communications equipment. After the war, many young scientists and engineers were anxious to apply their skills to the social as well as the technical needs of society. They were also anxious for their leaders, in the professional societies, to do more than safeguard traditional standards and fees. Where the existing network of conservative associations left this desire unfulfilled, new institutions like the CAScW sprang up. The social climate after the war was also conducive to the creation of an association of progressive scientists. Canadian industry emerged as a thriving force, and the union movement nearly doubled in size during the war. Some of the new unions were made up of a new kind of amalgamation of professional and technical employees, such as aircraft technicians, designers, draughtsman, and secretarial staff. This was an exciting development for the socially conscious scientists, and for the Canadian labour movement that had previously concentrated on organizing blue-collar workers. One of the energetic organizers in this new movement was Dr David Shugar, in Toronto. During the war, Shugar became the national secretary of a new union, the National Association of Technical Employees (NATE), which had appealed to the government for the right to organize all professionals. This move was vigorously opposed, however, by the traditional professional societies, including, among others, the Canadian Institute of Chemistry, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and the Engineering Institute. These societies preferred to retain a special non-union status for their members, in the unorganized middle ground between labour and management.9 The organizing efforts by Shugar and others generated heated debate among professionals, but made little headway. In the process, Shugar earned a reputation as an agitator, particularly in the eyes of his Toronto employer, a Mr Davison. Davison, who later testified against Shugar before the royal commission, obviously disliked Shugar's union activities; he particularly mentioned the time Shugar had organized a

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The Gouzenko Affair

work stoppage to protest the wages paid to secretaries. Davison tried to get rid of Shugar by firing him, but Shugar took his case to the Labour Board, which ordered Davison to reinstate him. Shugar eventually left Toronto for a position at the National Research Council in Ottawa, and the membership in the fledgling union of technical employees dwindled. 10 Shugar's union activities branded him as a left-wing agitator with professional societies and former employers (and likely the RCMP) even before he helped to found the CAScW with Raymond Boyer in 1944. After several failed efforts to organize a trade union for scientific workers, Shugar, Boyer, and others were determined to start a professional society that might one day become a trade union, as the BAScW had. In the meantime, it could serve as a sounding board for many of the social and political aspirations of Canadian scientists. As soon as the idea was mooted, it attracted wide support. At McGill, Dr Boyer and Dr F.S. Howes, chairman of the department of electrical engineering, were interested, and they met with Dr Cockcroft and David Shugar to discuss it. In the summer of 1944, the CAScW was formed with chapters in Montreal and Ottawa. Howes was elected vice-chairman and Boyer was its national president. The first meetings featured prominent British scientists who were members of the BAScW. The Ottawa branch meetings were held in the auditorium of the National Research Council, where Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the ex-president of the BAScW and a leading researcher in the field of radar, addressed the scientists. A few months later the featured speaker was Dr Cockcroft. Membership grew quickly, and new chapters were announced in Fredericton, Kingston, Toronto, Guelph, London, and Winnipeg. Membership in the association was originally limited to practising scientists and engineers in non-managerial positions, but the students on the McGill and Sir George Williams campuses lobbied successfully for associate membership. The students also reported, however, that their participation was generating controversy: at MacDonald College, for example, their activities were vigorously condemned by professors who belonged to the Canadian Institute of Chemistry. The students joined anyway." The national leadership of the new association included several members of the BAScW. In Montreal, British technician Norman Veall took charge of publications and international correspondence, and Dr Nunn May, a former member of the British executive, was elected to the executive committee of the local branch. Inspired by the British example, the Canadians drew up an ambitious platform for their own association that featured the free exchange of basic scientific research and discussion of the economic, social, and political dimensions of scientific discoveries and called for more science in education. This idealistic platform, prominently displayed in their literature, promised to 'combat all tendencies to limit scientific investigation or to suppress scientific discoveries.' This would be accomplished by 'fostering the interchange of scientific workers and information between scientific institutions throughout the world.' The scientists proposed the creation of a parliamentary com-

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 89 mittee, patterned after the British example, that would advise the government on long-range research goals in the areas of pure science and public health, for the benefit of Canada and the world. It was no accident that these liberal and internationalist ideals echoed the goals proclaimed in the constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), formed in November 1945. British and Canadian scientists had participated in the lobbying that led to a statement by UNESCO that it would further 'peace and security by promoting collaboration among nations through education, science, and culture ...' Through the CAScW, hundreds of Canadian scientists hope to promote the same goals.12 Following the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, members of the CAScW were among the passionate advocates of international control of the bomb. Soon after the explosion, they joined British and American scientific workers in sending telegrams to government leaders urging international control. A month later, the CAScW announced its support for international control of the bomb through the U.N. Security Council, government control of atomic energy, and an end to secrecy on scientific and technological research. The resolution, published in a national newsletter, had the support of 'many of the workers on the Canadian-British atomic energy project.' This same message, wired to Mackenzie King and President Truman, urged the leaders to call an international summit meeting to prevent an arms race.13 The activism and the idealism of the new association struck a sympathetic chord in the scientific community. More than 600 scientists and technicians had signed up with the association by the end of 1945, and the mimeographed newsletters of the Montreal branch had expanded into a professionally printed magazine, the Canadian Scientist. The association mounted an ambitious series of public lectures on scientific issues that covered topics ranging from dermatology and venereal disease to racial discrimination and atomic research. A successful film program was also launched in Montreal with a series of short features, including 'The Heart of the Inca Empire,' 'The Development of a Chick,' and an explanation of the workings of the electron microscope. Articles in the Canadian Scientist included appeals for better education in nutritional science, international control of atomic energy, and collective bargaining for scientific workers. The right to organize unions of professionals was again pursued in briefs to the federal labour relations board. In February of 1946, just as the Gouzenko affair was about to become public knowledge, the CAScW was participating in an international meeting of scientific workers in London that included delegates from the United States, China, France, Holland, Poland, India, and South Africa. While the speakers inside the congress agreed on the need for international control of atomic energy and deplored government secrecy, London's Daily Express announced the beginning of the spy scandal and new problems for the left-wing scientific associations with the headlines: 'ATOM SPIES: AMERICANS DEMAND FULL PROBE: LONDON SAYS CHECK UP ON ALL SCIEN-

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TISTS.' In Ottawa, the investigation was already under way, with the CAScW as one of its main targets. I N S T R U C T I O N S FROM MOSCOW

As Arnold Smith had foreseen, Igor Gouzenko proved to be a helpful witness in unmasking Communist fronts like the CAScW. Q: While there are a large number of members of [the CAScW] most of the offices are held by members of the Communist Party, or by Communist sympathizers. Would it be the Central Committee that would give directions that people were to get into different organizations so as to control them from within for the Communist Party? A: That is right, those would be the general instructions. Q: General instructions? A: From Moscow, for the local Communist Party to work that way. They are told to occupy important positions in labour unions and they are even told to take up positions against Communism if it is necessary. Q: Is it the policy to get into such organizations such as the Youth Movement organizations that are being set up across Canada? A: Yes, and labour unions. Q: And organizations that might be started to promote good relations between Russia and Canada? A: That is right. Q: To get into them and exercise control and influence over them? A: Yes. Of course I did not read those instructions myself that would be sent to Tim Buck from Moscow, but when there is a Communist leader or some Communist who is head of some labour union or head of some organization, such as the Scientific Workers, I think they try to develop them as agents. They would be very important from the propaganda point of view. l4

The commission's own inquiry into the CAScW, which covered 200 pages of testimony, was of a general nature. It consisted largely of asking witnesses about their political views, and about the political sympathies of other CAScW members. For example, in questioning Boyer, Mazerall, and Shugar, the commissioners pressed for the names of the local and national officers of the CAScW. The testimony revealed nothing new to the commission, but served to test the witnesses and force a degree of cooperation. The names of the officers had already been published in CAScW newsletters, and all of it had been in the RCMP files for months. Once the names were given in testimony, however, they were on the record without reference to the RCMP files and the witnesses could then be induced to discuss the political beliefs of each officer. Some, like Boyer, were fairly candid. Others resisted. Either response increased the suspicions of the commissioners.

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 91 The testimony and the documents taken from the Soviet Embassy incriminated several scientists but revealed little new information about the CAScW itself. One fact that did emerge from the documents was that Soviet intelligence (like the RCMP) was very interested in the association, and hoped to use some of its members to gather information. Soviet officials had even targeted specific scientists and assigned them cover names. It was not so clear, however, that everyone targeted by the Soviets had cooperated. Two scientists who belonged to the CAScW chapter in Montreal, Norman Veall and Frank Chubb, had been given cover names, but there was no evidence that they had done anything, or that they had even considered doing so. Acting on the presumption of guilt embodied in the Official Secrets Act, the commission called both scientists to Ottawa, where they were sworn to secrecy and asked to explain why their names were in the Soviet documents. Paradoxically, in the case of Norman Veall, the Soviets had apparently avoided him because he was known to his colleagues as a 'Red,' and because he had little to offer. Veall was only a lab technician, a glass blower who helped the atomic research team produce radiation-measuring devices. His candid testimony before the commission made obvious why his fellow scientists knew about his politics, and why the Soviet handlers would have avoided him. Veall testified willingly that he was a Marxist and a former member of the Young Communist League in Britain before the war, where Nunn May had been his physics tutor. He might have passed information (if he had had any, and if they had asked) to the Soviets while they were an ally during the war, but he denied that he would do so after the war.15 When Chubb was called, he denied everything. A fruitless fishing trip by the investigators ensued. The commissioners did not like Chubb's demeanour or his refusal to explain away assistant military attache Rogov's possession of his name, and they published their conclusion that while he and Veall had not spied, they would have if asked. Neither was ever charged with any crime, but both were declared potential criminals and traitors on the basis of their testimony and their inability to explain away the Soviet Embassy's interest in them.16 THE ATOMIC C O N N E C T I O N

Nothing in the activities of the Canadian scientists and technicians apprehended in the Gouzenko affair justified the inflated 'atom spy ring' label that was (and has continued to be) attached to accounts of the affair. The atomic connection, such as it was, existed entirely through Alan Nunn May, who, as indicated earlier, had no knowledge of atomic bomb construction and little useful knowledge of atomic research in general. While Nunn May did pass atomic information to the Soviets, it was not of the order of secrecy conjured up in the public imagination by stories of a legion of spies hunting for the atomic 'secret.' To say that the Canadian civil servants formed an atomic research spy ring was incorrect and embarrassed the Canadian government, which tried repeatedly but without success to squelch the stories.

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The Gouzenko Affair

Even the royal commission tried to counter the stories of atomic espionage with its statement that there were no atomic secrets leaked from Canada. The commissioners further concluded that the samples of uranium isotopes U233 and U235 that Nunn May admitted having passed to the Soviets were of limited value, and likely came from the United States. In reaching this conclusion, the commission relied heavily on the testimony of Dr John Cockcroft, the head of the Montreal research team, on the question of the origin and value of the uranium samples. Cockcroft was considered so trustworthy that he was consulted in October 1945, just a few weeks after Gouzenko's defection when the spy affair was top secret. A few months later, Cockcroft testified to the commission that the samples might have been of interest to a Soviet scientist who was working on the chemical separation process used to purify and enrich uranium, one step in the long process that President Truman called the 'know-how' required to build an atomic bomb. Given the commission's view that the CAScW was organized and manipulated by Communists, it is interesting that their most trusted witness on the subject of atomic energy should have been a member of the BAScW and an early supporter of the CAScW. The commission, through its enquiry, must have known of Cockcroft's connections, but the commission counsel steered a wide berth around the issue when Cockcroft appeared before them, as though questions of political beliefs and associations were not central to the commission's enquiries with other witnesses. 17 Ultimately, even the Manhattan Project director, General Groves, agreed with Cockcroft that it was unlikely that the Russians learned anything from Nunn May because, as Groves later testified, it was 'very doubtful' that May had 'anything but a general knowledge of the construction of the atomic bomb.' But Groves did not admit this possibility until after the spy scandal had cooled. While the scandal was fresh, Groves used it to help win the fight for greater secrecy and military control over atomic research. This exploitation of the spy scandal took place in a context of heated controversy, in Congress and in the scientific community, over internationalization versus national control of nuclear science.18 Prominent American scientists, including Dr Harold Urey, head of the American Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS), campaigned for less national secrecy. In Canada, the CAScW publicized its support for the free flow of scientific information and international control of the bomb. Many more conservative scientists agreed, particularly on the point of military control and secrecy. Dr D.W. McKinley, the head of the Radio Branch of the National Research Council, summarized this point of view in a letter to the RCMP and the royal commission dealing with the Gouzenko affair. McKinley had been asked to assess the value of classified information on radar experiments that had been passed to the Soviets, and to say whether he thought the various sketches and notes introduced as evidence in the trials might be too revealing to be released to the press. McKinley told the commission it was impossible to give any precise security value to the documents. Then he added:

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 93 Incidentally, and though this is probably not the proper place to go on record, it is my own feeling, in common with the majority of scientists, that all security restrictions on all scientific matters should now be dropped. The scientific reason for security ... only applies in case of war or in anticipation of war. Therefore, to maintain any security restrictions in any country would be reason to suspect that that country was expecting to go to war. If the United Nations set-up is to operate effectively it would seem that freedom of exchange of scientists and information should be a contributing factor.19

McKinley's views were widely shared, and so the news of the detention, trials, and convictions of scientists in the Gouzenko affair caused a surge of anxiety in scientific circles around the world. The arrest of Alan Nunn May, in particular, raised the complex ethical issue of the loyalty of an individual scientist to the state. Nunn May, in confessing his guilt, said he helped the Soviets, then wartime allies, 'for the safety of mankind.' He was anxious, he said, to see that 'the development of atomic energy was not confined to USA.' Some scientists, with the image of a devastated Hiroshima fresh in their minds, were hesitant to condemn Nunn May for an act of conscience. Many deplored his conviction as a first sign that the international exchange of scientific information was going to be regulated by security interests. One wrote that 'it seems to me that the idea that knowledge is the property of the State where it originates, and that a scientist or anyone else who communicates it to anyone not authorised by the State to receive it is committing a crime is inimical to liberty.' Letters to the editor from scientists in Britain referred to Alan Nunn May as the 'first martyr of the atomic age.' Others, however, were less sympathetic. One contributor to the News Chronicle suggested that a scientist like May 'should be shot as a traitor or shut up as a dangerous lunatic.' 20 The timing of the spy scandal could not have been better for supporters of greater secrecy and increased military control. In the United States, congressional support for internationalization collapsed. When Nunn May was arrested, General Groves took the opportunity to write to Republican senator Bourke Hickenlooper. His letter, which was read aloud on the floor of the Senate, claimed that the British scientist had had access to U.S. atomic secrets and 'know-how.' The message was clear: American interests required increased security. Groves even claimed that tight security would give America a fifteen-year monopoly on the bomb (it lasted for four). Groves's view prevailed; in the charged atmosphere of the spy scandals, secrecy was transformed from scientific vice to security virtue. 21 The new secrecy also ended the secret British-American negotiations on atomic research that had begun during the Washington conference. With Anglo-American cooperation ruled out, the British were forced to resume their own research projects without further assistance. Scientists who continued to press for international control of the bomb and the free exchange of scientific information found themselves in conflict with U.S. national-security policies, and were regarded with deepening suspicion by the security agencies.

94 The Gouzenko Affair SCIENTISTS UNDER SURVEILLANCE

A decade of intense surveillance, loyalty investigations, enquiries, and purges testified to the new status of scientists in the Cold War, as security agencies stepped up their investigation of scientists, especially those involved with left-wing groups. The Federation of Atomic Scientists opposed the campaign of loyalty investigations directed against its members, but 'such was the growing fear of any sort of association that [FAS] membership had by 1950 fallen to half of its postwar peak of 3,000.'22 Eventually even the 'father of the atomic bomb' and the director of the Manhattan Project, Dr Robert Oppenheimer, had his security clearance removed when doubts were raised about his reliability. When Alan Nunn May was sentenced to prison for ten years, the severity of the sentence was protested by letters and petitions from British scientists. A letter in the Manchester Guardian from the members of the BAScW called for a reduction in the 'extremely harsh' sentence, and argued that a reduction was justified because Dr May's actions were 'determined only by the principle that fundamental scientific data should have been shared with a country that was not only friendly but a fighting ally.' The scientists suggested that May's knowledge, and thus his transgression, was limited, and that he could not have revealed anything about 'the know-how of atomic bomb manufacture.' Another group of scientists, most of whom had been attached to the atomic-energy project in Montreal, sent a letter to the home secretary, Chuter Ede, requesting a review and a reduction of the sentence. One of the signatories on this letter was Dr Cockcroft, who believed that May's sentence was too severe 'by a factor of perhaps 2.' These protests were carefully monitored and reported by Canadian and U.S. diplomats, and copies of their reports were circulated to the FBI, the RCMP, and the royal commission investigating the Gouzenko affair.23 Security services in the United States, Canada, and Australia collected and shared information, factual and hearsay, about left-wing scientists. The American Embassy in London, for example, described the BAScW workers as 'a trade union of leftist tendency which is active in connection with atomic matters [and] generally supports Soviet views.' When the BAScW joined a delegation to lobby the home secretary for a reduction in Nunn May's sentence, the embassy sent Washington a list of the names and positions of the scientists in the delegation, and Washington forwarded the report to its embassy in Ottawa. The delegation was headed by Labour party chairman Harold Laski and included several prominent scientists, among them Professor Robert Watson-Watt, who earlier had addressed the CAScW in Ottawa, and Dr N. Kemmer, a former member of the Anglo-Canadian research team in Montreal.24 The Canadian High Commission in Australia filed similar reports on the Australian Association of Scientific Workers when the Australian scientists had the temerity to criticize the Canadian handling of the spy affair. A resolution passed by the

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 95 Australians condemned the Gouzenko investigation as the 'persecution' of scientists who advocated international control of atomic energy. The accusation irritated Canada's high commissioner, who told External Affairs that it was evidence that 'the Communist Party in Australia exercises considerable influence in scientific circles in the country.' The commissioner also reported that a meeting of 300 scientific workers at the University of Sydney was 'stiff with Communists,' and that associations of scientists around the world were 'host for the activities of a treasonable Communistic nucleus.' The report concluded that the Australian association 'has the Communists with it just as much as they are with its sister traitor organization in Canada.' External Affairs circulated these remarks to its officers in London and Washington and shared them with the National Research Council and the RCMP.25 'GRADUAL DISINTEGRATION

OF NORMAL MORAL

PRINCIPLES'

The judgment rendered by the royal commission on the CAScW was harsh and unequivocal; the massive final report declared that an active Communist conspiracy existed, as illustrated by the subversive nature of the CAScW. The commissioners left no doubt about their conviction that the Communists had created an extensive network of secret cells, study groups, political organizations, cultural groups, and other front organizations, which together formed a dangerous and subversive fifth column - a secret army - within Canada. These cells were said to be disguised as social gatherings, music-appreciation sessions, and groups that met to discuss international politics and economics. The real function of these meetings, the commission believed, was the study of Communist philosophy and techniques, including the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Soviet espionage experts were credited with creating these groups in order to recruit spies.26 The commission painted a picture of a subtle system of political indoctrination that laid the groundwork for the espionage. The commission offered a general description of the system of study groups and Communist cells: Canadians with some sympathy for the Soviet Union were brought into Communist-inspired organizations. Such recruits included Canadians with a strong commitment to anti-fascism, those interested in social reform, those interested in internationalism, and some who simply had a 'sense of adventure.' The organizations included a broad range of cultural groups, sports teams, political clubs, ethnic groups, trade unions, and the like. Those who wanted to discuss Marxism were invited to join more secretive study groups. A few of these were then introduced into an inner circle or secret cell of the Communist party. This secrecy surrounding Communist-party meetings was well known, and the description provided by the commission required little new research; the RCMP had maintained informants and infiltrators in the party since the 1920s. But what was the significance of this secrecy? The commission's analysis suggested it was sinister. The commission was uninterested in the possibility that this clandestine behaviour

96 The Gouzenko Affair was in part a symptom of the repression of the party by the state. In Quebec, where the clandestine nature of the party was legendary, its suppression by the Red squads had been relentless for more than a decade; the mere possession of Marxist literature was forbidden under the 'Padlock Law.' Many members of the Labour Progressive party did not hold membership cards and met discreetly, in small meetings in private homes, because public acknowledgment was liable to cause problems with their employers and the police. The commission, however, attributed this secretive behaviour entirely to machiavellian plans by the Soviets for subversion: 'An inevitable result of this emphasis on a conspiratorial atmosphere and behaviour even in political discussions, correspondence, and meetings which are in themselves perfectly legal and indeed are the cherished right of everyone in a democratic society, would seem to be the gradual disintegration of normal moral principles such as frankness, honesty, integrity, and a respect for the sanctity of oaths ... this technique seems calculated to affect gradually and unconsciously the secret adherent's attitude toward Canada.'27 From among the members of these inner cells the Soviets were said to reap a harvest of spies. These groups have provided a large base of Canadians in various stages of carefully induced evolution - emotional, mental, and moral - from which base the leaders can recruit those who are considered adequately "developed" into expanding illegal networks for espionage or other purposes.'28 According to the commission's definition, these front organizations existed to recruit spies. By extension, all persons involved with front groups were in some stage of development (consciously or unconsciously) as agents of the USSR. Therefore all persons connected with front groups ought to be considered suspect. These presumptions mirrored the presumptions of guilt contained in the Official Secrets Act, which held that a person's acquaintances or character could cast doubt on his or her loyalty. While the courts ruled that citizens could not be convicted and punished based on this presumption, this did not deter Taschereau and Kellock from naming individuals and groups as spies, or as the kind of people who had 'the necessary frame of mind' to become spies if required.29 Those named, for their part, had little recourse: they could not confront their accusers nor ask them to submit to cross-examination under oath. They could not even discover the full charges and evidence against them, because the commissioners took the testimony in secret and revealed only the parts that supported their conclusions. The charges by the commission resulted, in many cases, in a kind of trial of the accused by publicity and innuendo. A few years later this kind of attack was labelled McCarthyism. The essence of McCarthyism was the levelling of broad, general, and unsubstantiated charges of disloyalty or potential disloyalty. The commission's judgments were of this kind, and they helped to create a climate of suspicion and doubt about the loyalties of many Canadians. The vague description of 'Canadians in various stages of carefully induced evolution' could fit almost anyone on the left, from wellknown Communists who ran for office on the party ticket to others who simply had

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 97 associations with other leftists. Many groups could fall into this category: left-wing trade unions, a multitude of ethnic organizations, the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Council, the CAScW, and hundreds of others. But were all these to be considered subversive? Were hundreds or thousands of Canadians being indoctrinated in a network of subversive fronts? After such a provocative revelation, the commission might have been expected to list specific examples of subversive organizations, to expose them, and to warn the public. Such a list undoubtedly existed in the files of the RCMP Intelligence Branch. But the commission was strangely reticent; only the example of the CAScW, a little-known organization, was offered. Much of the validity of the commission's general argument, therefore, depends on the strength of its evidence that the CAScW was itself subversive. There are a number of serious flaws in the charges levelled against the CAScW. To begin with, the commission described the association as a kind of laboratory where the Soviets indoctrinated unsuspecting or sympathetic Canadians and made them into spies, but there was no proof that anything like this actually happened. The commission could point to the conviction of CAScW members like Boyer and Mazerall on charges of conspiracy, and Nunn May on a charge of violating the OS A. They could also point to the documents that showed the Soviets were interested in the CAScW. But something more was required to demonstrate that membership in the CAScW was in some way instrumental in the actions of the individual scientists and that the CAScW was not a democratic organization of scientists with publicly stated principles and goals but a seditious conspiracy. If the commission could demonstrate that Canadians had been induced to spy through their exposure to the CAScW, then the state might be justified in repressing the CAScW in the name of national security. But the commission did little to demonstrate that the participation of the accused in the CAScW was anything more than coincidental. A modest attempt was made, in the most nebulous terms, to outline a conspiracy by using a special definition of 'communication' given in the Official Secrets Act. Veall and Chubb were said to have communicated with each other at CAScW meetings (where both were members of the executive). Boyer likewise was described as communicating with other scientists at these meetings. This transformation of CAScW meetings into conspiracies was accomplished by defining Rose, Boyer, and Veall as foreign agents and applying the presumption of guilt provided under the act when foreign agents are present. For obvious reasons, however, such tenuous reasoning did not give the government grounds for prosecuting anyone, and it could not justify the legal suppression of the CAScW. The commission tried to demonstrate the subversive nature of the CAScW in another way when it suggested that the creation of the group was something that scientist David Shugar desired, as though the desire itself was a subversive act capable of corrupting scientists who joined the CAScW. When Shugar was acquitted by the courts, even before the report was completed, the commissioners called an addi-

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tional witness, Shugar's former employer, to throw further doubt on Shugar's activities. There was no cross-examination, and the testimony remained secret, but the commissioners could cite even this biased information in support of their statement that the courts had not seen all the evidence that they had considered. Shugar, in spite of his acquittal, offered the commissioners tangible evidence of a subversive conspiracy in the leadership of the CAScW: 'The propaganda value of control of such an organization is illustrated by correspondence between Shugar and Boyer discussing whether Shugar or Veall should write an article in The Canadian Scientist, the Association's magazine, regarding plans for the control of atomic energy.'30 This charge reveals more about the commission's attitude towards international control of atomic energy than about a conspiracy. The CAScW's policy, while undoubtedly pushed by Communists, was widely supported; it was publicized openly in the association's newsletters, and by resolution of members at the 1946 annual meeting. Even Canadian foreign policy called for the control of the bomb through the United Nations. But the commission was not bound by such views, and by labelling scientists who held such ideas as pro-Communist the commission helped stifle debate on nuclear arms in Canadian society by raising the spectre of disloyalty. The commission was also evasive and inconsistent in its failure to address the question of the role of the B AScW. According to its thesis that the CAScW was born of a conspiracy, the commission should have addressed the instrumental role played by the British scientists in organizing, supporting, and running the Canadian association. Not only were British scientists influential supporters of the CAScW, they too were interested in union status for scientists and international control of the bomb two earmarks of a subversive organization, according to the RCMP. Several key members of the CAScW, including at least one Marxist (Veall) and a convicted spy (Nunn May), were part of the British research team and had been members of the BAScW. Dr Cockcroft, the research director, and other members of the British team were also involved in the founding of the CAScW, and they helped to give it respectability. Furthermore, several of the British scientists in Montreal had protested the conviction and sentencing of Nunn May. It is also clear from RCMP and U.S. State Department reports that security agencies were already suspicious of the British and Australian scientific workers at the time of the investigation. Much of the circumstantial evidence amassed against the CAScW applied equally to the BAScW. Yet the commission was utterly silent about the British association. It seems fair to assume that a degree of censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, was at play. Attacking the BAScW would have embarrassed the British government, which showed no inclination to join a witch-hunt against the scientific workers.31 More to the point, the commission would have needed much more substantial evidence to launch a credible attack against the BAScW, which had a membership of 16,000 scientists, including a number of British MPs; to attack it using the information they had against the CAScW would have left the commission open to criticism, and pos-

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 99 sibly ridicule, from eminent British scientists and politicians. Furthermore, raising questions about the loyalty of BAScW members would have opened up unsettling doubts about Dr Cockcroft, the entire Montreal research project, the staff of the National Research Council, members of the government, and even the commission's own reliance on Cockcroft for the definitive statement on how much knowledge Nunn May possessed. The commission prudently remained silent about the influential BAScW and concentrated its fire on the vulnerable CAScW. The indoctrination theory itself was riddled with inconsistencies. According to the arguments advanced by the commissioners, political indoctrination accounted for the espionage and, by extension, justified the suppression of the CAScW as the agency of indoctrination. Strictly according to the theory, Raymond Boyer, who was not a Communist, would have been induced to spy through his exposure to Communists in the CAScW. But Boyer was tried and convicted for passing classified information about RDX to Fred Rose early in 1943, a year and a half before the CAScW was founded in the fall of 1944. The CAScW could hardly be credited with indoctrinating Boyer. What evidence was offered, for that matter, that Boyer was indoctrinated at all? The argument for indoctrination constituted little more than a tautology: Boyer spied because he was indoctrinated; he must have been indoctrinated because he spied. But evidence gathered by the RCMP's own investigators contradicted the entire premise. Inspector Harvison, who interrogated many of the scientists at the RCMP barracks before they went before the commission, found to his surprise that they were anything but indoctrinated. As he later wrote in his autobiography: 'So far as I was able to learn during lengthy interviews with the detainees, not one of them had fully accepted the Communist ideology. Surprisingly, three of them were extremely critical of Communism, of the lies, shifting opportunistic policies, and blatant propaganda used in the attempts to spread the Communist cause. The teachers in the secret cells they had belonged to had not done a very thorough job of indoctrination.' Harvison had before him a captive sample of alleged spies, who were presumably graduates of 'secret cell' indoctrination techniques by Communists. According to the royal commission, 'secret' members of the Communist party were inculcated with 'a habit of complete obedience to the dictates of senior members and officials of the Party hierarchy.' Yet according to Harvison, the accused spies were sceptical about Communist party policies and Marxist ideology. The very spies who were supposed to demonstrate the truth of the theory that indoctrination preceded espionage were not indoctrinated. Where was the evidence that indoctrination was taking place at all? Harvison performed some mental gymnastics to account for the lack of indoctrination and proposed a theory that might be called 'negative indoctrination.' Communist teachers, he said, had been successful in undermining their faith in the democratic system. In so doing they had

100 The Gouzenko Affair whittled away moral fibre and loyalties. The spies had not carried out their treachery on behalf of a great ideal or sincere conviction that their work would benefit mankind. They were not working for something they believed to be good. Less understandably, they were working against something - their own country, which the Communists had convinced them was bad. The detainees all advanced reasons or excuses for their association with Communists ... Two of the scientists advanced the belief that there should be free international exchange of information in the scientific field and their efforts had been directed toward breaking down all •j-y barriers of secrecy ... But these explanations were too simple, too pat.

The indoctrination theory was poorly constructed, and Harvison's contribution did little to shore it up. Harvison, to his credit, remained puzzled by the evidence that the spies really were not indoctrinated at all. Later he abandoned the indoctrination theory 'in line with heads of counter-intelligence services in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Europe,' and adopted the view that the scientists represented a new class of 'ideological spy,' people who were driven not by the complete acceptance of Communist ideology but by 'intellectual arrogance.'33 The lack of support for the indoctrination theory raises a fundamental question: if the indoctrination of the accused was imaginary, where was the justification for targeting the so-called front groups where the brainwashing was allegedly carried out? The royal commission tried to portray Boyer and the others as mindless, indoctrinated agents of a foreign power. But if they were not (as Harvison himself concluded), then the responsibility for spying lay with the individual, not with the organization, and there was no justification for publicly attacking the group. BLACKLISTED SCIENTISTS

The spy scandal, the conviction of Raymond Boyer, and the condemnation by two Supreme Court justices were enough to destroy the CAScW. The commission's report constituted an unmistakable warning to scientists. A royal commission had in effect proscribed the CAScW as a subversive Communist front. Scientists who hoped to have a career in government-supported research prudently remained silent about the rights of those scientists named, and would have nothing to do with the organization. Scientists at the National Research Council quickly lost interest in the CAScW. In the midst of the spy scandal, the Winnipeg chapter of the CAScW invited 200 members of the medical, academic, and scientific community to a meeting. The RCMP was able to report that only ten people turned up. Nationwide membership fell from 600 to less than 100, its national newsletter, the Canadian Scientist, folded, and the public-education programs that the association had been sponsoring were abandoned. Only the RCMP files on the organization remained active.34 The collapse of the CAScW also served to scare off civil servants belonging to other left-wing organizations. The commission made the chilling revelation that its

Gouzenko - the Aftermath

101

investigators (the RCMP) knew about 'a number of persons, in Government service and otherwise, who were members of secret Communist cells.' The commission did not consider it necessary 'to mention the names in this Report' because there was no evidence that the civil servants were implicated in espionage. But given their other statements about the subversive nature of all front organizations, the lack of evidence did not imply a lack of suspicion. Self-preservation and fear dictated that civil servants avoid groups that might be considered Communist-influenced. 35 Scientists had good reason to be anxious about being blacklisted for their association with left-wing friends and causes. When systematic security screening was introduced in the wake of the Gouzenko affair, scientists who had been active in the CAScW or continued to support it were denied security clearance. Evidence of this emerges from personal interviews and the study of documents in the National Archives of Canada. At least eight scientists connected with the CAScW were denied security clearance for political reasons in the period 1948-51. Some of these judgments may have been made for reasons other than participation in the CAScW, but in at least two cases, that of an engineer and his wife, participation in the CAScW emerged as the principal, perhaps only reason for the government to deny clearance. The secrecy surrounding the government blacklist makes it difficult to secure data, but as much as is available leaves little doubt that the CAScW was part of the RCMP's list of subversive organizations and that scientists who supported it were blacklisted. The case of 'Mr and Mrs Jones' suggests that the blacklisting was arbitrary and capricious.36 Mr Jones, a twenty-five-year-old electronics engineer was employed by a radio firm in Toronto. He and his wife were acquainted with several of the scientists who helped to found the CAScW in 1944. Jones was bright and idealistic, and he shared the view that scientists should concern themselves with human suffering as well as technical excellence, so he supported the efforts by David Shugar and others to organize a union for professionals. Jones and his wife both joined the association and helped to organize public forums to promote the association and educate the public on scientific issues. Mrs Jones, a part-time musician who had worked as a copy-editor for a magazine during the war, shared the same values and helped to produce the local newsletter. When the association published the Canadian Scientist, she contributed to that as well. Mr Jones's name came up in the commission's investigation as an officer of the local branch of the association, but only in passing. His politics, according to the testimony of another scientist, were 'leftist.' There were no other references to him, and he was never called by the commission as a witness. Mrs Jones's name was never mentioned. Her politics might have been described as social democratic; while some of her friends had worked for the Labour Progressive party in federal elections, Mrs Jones was never attracted to the LPP. Her association with the CAScW was her only political activity. Two years later, after her first child was born, Mrs Jones went looking for work

102 The Gouzenko Affair and was hired as a secretary by the Army Signals Corps. A few months later she was told that she was not needed any longer. The reason for her dismissal puzzled her: her work had been satisfactory; there had not been any complaints. She half suspected that she might have been blacklisted, but it was not until thirty years later, after she obtained archival documents, that she discovered that she was denied security clearance by the RCMP for political reasons, presumably because of her association with the CAScW. After the exodus of most of the scientists from the CAScW, Mr Jones had been deeply disappointed. He had retained the hope, however, that after the furore died away the organization might be revived. He and a few others published intermittent newsletters, but the response was poor. The association survived, in name only, until it was abandoned in 1955. In the meantime, Jones continued to work for the same electronics firm that he had joined during the war, and his work was satisfactory. But in 1950 the general manager called him in for a private discussion. Jones had been denied security clearance by the RCMP, and he would not be allowed to work on any of the defence contracts that the company was handling. Jones was surprised and said that the reason for the blacklisting must have been his association with the CAScW. The general manager, who had been an officer in the Navy and had connections in the government, said that he would make some enquiries. After his next trip to Ottawa he called Jones in again and told him that his surmise about the CAScW was correct, but there would not be any change in his classification. Jones was worried, but he was kept on as a senior engineer, working on projects that did not require security clearance. Jones then discovered that his association with the CAScW had been noted by the American government, which had access to the complete transcripts of the royal commission testimony and received information from the RCMP. Not long after discovering that he had failed the RCMP's security test, Jones received a call from a Navy engineer in the United States who was a friend from university. The first question asked was, 'Are you a Communist?' The Navy engineer had been dismissed from his job because he was said to be a security risk. When he appealed the ruling, as the American laws allowed, he was told that one piece of evidence against him was his association with Jones, who was described as a Canadian Communist and a friend of Professor Boyer. Jones replied that he was certainly not a Communist, but he didn't want to discuss his own experience over the phone. The Navy engineer went back to his appeals board and told them that they were wrong, Jones was not a Communist. Eventually the engineer was reinstated, and subsequently quit. Around 1958, Jones changed jobs and immediately told his new employer about his security status. This man too had connections in the RCMP, seemed to know about the case, and only waved his hands at Jones and said, 'Don't worry about it.' As long as Jones and his wife stayed clear of defence-related work they were able to avoid the direct effects of the blacklisting. Jones later concluded that the Canadian screening system, despite its layers of secrecy and its denial of the right to appeal,

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 103 was superior to the American system that was inextricably linked to the public witch-hunts conducted by Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But Jones was fortunate that his specialty and his interest lay in unclassified engineering projects carried on by private firms run by quite liberal managers. His difficulties, if he had been employed by the National Research Council, the military, or by a more anti-Communist manager, might have been far greater. Mr and Mrs Jones were only two of an unknown number of members of the CAScW who found themselves blacklisted and their careers impeded because of their membership in this association. Canadians tended to think of guilt by association as an American vice, but it is clear that Canada was by no means free of it. GUILT BY A D D R E S S BOOK: THE S T R A N G E CASE OF ISRAEL HALPERIN

Some later writers examining the Gouzenko affair have brushed aside the fact that so many of those named by the royal commission as Soviet agents were never convicted in court.37 Casual references to the limitations imposed by court rules on evidence have been taken as reason to trust the evidence drawn from the commission's less inhibited methods. This was certainly the rule adopted by the government of Canada, which continued to treat as guilty almost all those named by the commission but acquitted by the courts. The government's own security rules suggested that if there were any doubt about the reliability of a civil servant, the doubts should be resolved in favour of the state, but the question of whether those named by the commission should be branded forever has ramifications that extend far beyond the confines of government employment. One of those whose experience best exemplifies the pitfalls of accepting the commission's findings at face value is Israel Halperin. Halperin, a mathematician at Queen's University working for the government during the war, was drawn into the Gouzenko affair by the presence of his name in the Soviet documents taken by Gouzenko, and by the testimony of a fellow detainee, Gordon Lunan, that he was indeed a member of the spy cell for which he, Lunan, was responsible to the Soviets. Halperin was swept up in the predawn arrests. After five weeks of incommunicado interrogation by the Mounties at the Rockliffe barracks, Halperin was hauled before the royal commissioners. He proved to be an uncooperative witness. When asked to take an oath, Halperin gave a response that highlighted the Kafkaesque quality of the proceedings: 'Before you swear me, would you mind telling me who you are?' 'Well,' answered Mr Justice Taschereau helpfully, 'we are the Royal Commission appointed by the government to investigate particular matters.' Things went downhill from there on, with Halperin asking if they could use physical punishment on him if he refused to answer questions, and at one point vainly trying to walk out of the room. Although he was successful in obtaining counsel, he refused to accept his counsel's advice to answer questions. Six days after it began,

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the fruitless interrogation ended definitively with Halperin declaring, 'I will not open my mouth here again.' 'Then that will be all,' Taschereau conceded.38 The commissioners, however, were not prepared to let Halperin off the hook. They concluded in their report that he had communicated material of a confidential nature to a foreign power and that this was inimical to the interests of Canada.39 He was subsequently charged with conspiracy and with breaching the Official Secrets Act. The Crown had only three sources of evidence against Halperin: the testimony of Lunan before the commission; the mention of Halperin's name in Soviet documents based on reports made by Lunan to his Soviet handlers; and finally a piece of pure guilt by association - an address book seized by the police that contained the names and telephone numbers of a number of other suspects in the Gouzenko affair. There was nothing else, unless Halperin's refusal to answer questions put to him by the commissioners was taken as a presumption of guilt. The case against Halperin collapsed when the only witness, Lunan, refused to be sworn or testify on two successive occasions. As a result, Halperin was acquitted and Lunan was sentenced to one year for contempt of court. Halperin's counsel explained Lunan's behaviour quite simply: Halperin had not in fact cooperated with Lunan's espionage plans and the latter feared that under cross-examination his testimony before the commission would fall apart and he would be charged with perjury.40 Indeed, even the evidence of Lunan's reports permits a rather different interpretation from that offered initially by Lunan himself. Although Halperin may have spoken about some matters of public knowledge to Lunan - who was at the time a fellow civil servant with responsibilities for marshalling information to present to the public - he was clearly uncooperative when it came to providing documents or anything in writing. Eventually Halperin drew the line at further information; it may well have been that this coincided with his dawning realization that Lunan was involved in espionage. The last thoughts on Halperin in Lunan's reports were to the effect that he had 'become very difficult to work with.' T think,' Lunan admitted, 'that at present he has a fuller understanding of the essence of my requests and he has a particular dislike for them.' 41 Most consistent with the evidence of the documents is the picture of a man who had been drawn into discussions of certain matters of public record, but who recoiled when these discussions shaded over into clandestine and illegal methods of collection of privileged information. If one adds to this the possibility that Lunan was exaggerating the cooperativeness of his 'ring' in his eagerness to impress his Soviet handlers with his competence (a common enough pattern in the espionage trade), then his subsequent behaviour before the courts begins to make sense. Quite simply, Halperin was an innocent man. While Halperin's fate lay before the courts, considerable support had been launched on his behalf. Most notable was a petition headed by no less than Albert Einstein, the most famous scientist in the world. The petition itself was a model of well-mannered protest. Einstein, along with the pioneer of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, and twenty-three others, appealed to 'the traditional Canadian spirit of fair

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 105 play and true justice to ensure that Professor Halperin be given an unprejudiced and impartial trial.' Their greatest concern was that Halperin was being prosecuted for having given 'certain general and unspecified information about a weapon already in wide battlefield use to a fellow officer in the Canadian army. We have no way of knowing whether or not this charge is true, but we feel that even if it were true, it would represent only a purely technical violation of security regulations. Such "violations" were common occurrences among civilian scientists and Army officers alike in the normal process of cutting red tape. If such formal matters are considered crimes, then almost every Army officer and scientist engaged in war research is guilty of crime.' Norman Robertson was impressed. 'Apart from Einstein who signs all petitions on principle,' he wrote, 'the list contains half a dozen of the leading U.S. mathematicians.' The petition, if nothing else, reminded Robertson of the impact of the spy case in the United States. Others in the Prime Minister's Office were less impressed. The petition was filed away with the comment that the scientists appeared to have taken part in 'an organized campaign' (presumably influenced by Communists). The RCMP took the same view and entered the names of the Americans into their files.42 King also received a letter from faculty members of Queen's University protesting the unjustified 'violation of the rights of the individual that no free society can endure from its rulers, especially when these violations are aggravated by secret interrogation ...' Whether the RCMP recorded the names of these academics is not clear, but one of the signatories, Glen Shortliffe, was later barred from entry into the United States.43 Halperin's vindication in court was not, of course, the end of the matter. In 1950, at the height of the American Communist witch-hunts, the FBI asked the RCMP for a photostat of the petition from the American academics for use in an examination of two of the signatories by the American Loyalty Review Board. The RCMP sent the request to the government for approval. That Halperin had by then received a fair trial, as requested by the petitioners, and had been acquitted, was apparently lost on the RCMP and the government. The only recorded murmur of protest came from Norman Robertson, who disliked the references to 'an organized campaign on Halperin's behalf.' 'I couldn't accept an inference from signing the appeal to the political reliability of the signers,' he wrote, but he did not object further. The original petition was duly extracted from Mackenzie King's papers and copies were sent to the FBI, which was admonished to use the information discreetly.44 Halperin's innocence, vindicated by the courts, was seriously impugned by the published judgment of the royal commission. There were no retractions or apologies ever offered for what had been written about individuals in the report. Whatever the courts decided, those named as traitors to Canada in a document published by the Crown would have to bear the stigma to the end of their days. In Halperin's case, this had immediate consequences that threatened his livelihood and career. Expecting to return to his teaching position at Queen's from which he was on leave, Hal-

106 The Gouzenko Affair perin discovered that there were members of the university board of trustees who did not want a 'Communist fellow-traveller' at Queen's. One of these had contacted the commissioner of the RCMP, who had assured him that 'the dismissal of the two charges against [Halperin] does not invalidate the conclusion reached by the Royal Commission.' The president received a legal opinion from the university solicitor that Halperin could be legally dismissed for impropriety.45 Halperin reacted somewhat aggressively to questions posed about his alleged espionage activities, perhaps reflecting a not-unreasonable anger that he should not be presumed innocent after having been acquitted by the courts. The trustees reacted badly to this attitude, however, and opinion turned strongly against him. At a key meeting of the trustees, dismissal became a real possibility - until a timely and eloquent intervention by the chancellor, Charles Dunning, rallied the forces of liberalism and saved Halperin's position. As the historian of Queen's concludes, the trustees thus 'gave notice that at Queen's there would be no witch-hunting for communists or fellow-travellers.' 46 Halperin was to teach at Queen's for another seventeen years. He then moved to the University of Toronto, where he concluded a long and distinguished career as one of Canada's leading mathematicians. In the 1980s he was active in organizing support for political prisoners around the world, including in the Soviet Union. He was finally given an official seal of approval, of sorts, when he was inducted into the Order of Canada. Yet if Halperin escaped the worst personal consequences of this early brush with the Cold War, this did not mean that the security establishment has ever forgiven him for being suspect. With the aborted court cases and the end of his academic harassment, Halperin vanished from the public eye. But like the Cheshire Cat's smile, his address book remained. The RCMP and the FBI showed over the years an almost prurient interest in the names in this fateful book. The man might be innocent but the address book was guilty. Anyone unlucky enough to have been listed by Halperin was thus guilty by association. One of the 'charges' against the Red-baited diplomat Herbert Norman was that his name was in Halperin's dreaded book (Norman and Halperin had been students together and saw each other from time to time in Ottawa). As late as 1986 this 'fact' was brandished in a book published by one of Halperin's fellow professors at the University of Toronto as allegedly damning evidence of Norman's guilt as a spy.47 There was seemingly no end to the ugly reverberations for anyone caught up in the Gouzenko affair, even as accidentally as Halperin. Halperin himself has steadfastly refused for more than four decades to discuss the events of 1945-6 with anyone. Perhaps that is a sensible defence for a man caught in a no-win situation. McGILL U N I V E R S I T Y : A 'HOT-BED OF C O M M U N I S M '

Raymond Boyer did not fare as well as Israel Halperin. Boyer had, of course, readily

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 107 admitted his role in passing scientific information to the Soviets, was eventually convicted of a breach of the Official Secrets Act, and served two years in prison. His connection to McGill University, where he was an assistant professor of chemistry, proved embarrassing to that institution. Another convicted scientist, Durnford Smith, was a McGill graduate who was at the time of the Gouzenko affair a non-resident candidate for the PhD. Some of the others implicated were McGill graduates, with no contemporary connection to the university. The press and the Social Credit leader in the House of Commons were quick to identify McGill as a 'hot-bed of Communism.' Upon their detention, the university suspended Boyer and Smith pending the disposition of their court cases. Following his conviction, Beyer's position was forfeited. Smith might have completed his PhD after he had fulfilled his sentence, but he never did.48 The unearned image of the university as a breeding ground for Communist traitors died down fairly quickly, perhaps assisted by McGill principal Dr Cyril James's assumption of a public role as an impassioned advocate of Cold War preparedness.49 Although Beyer's career as a university scientist was terminated, there was no further witch-hunt on the campus for left-wing faculty. With this the McGill campus became politically quiet as the Cold War settled in.50 The other leading university in Canada at this time was the University of Toronto, which was unscathed by the Gouzenko revelations. Yet even here, the alleged connection among science, Communism, and espionage took its toll. When the distinguished theoretical physicist Leopold Infeld decided to take a sabbatical year from the University of Toronto in his native Poland in the late 1940s, a McCarthyite storm broke over his head. Although he had nothing to do with atomic physics, the press and opposition politicians somehow got the idea that he would spill atomic secrets to the Communists. Battered by the attacks, and disgusted with the know-nothing attitudes of his adopted country, Infeld stayed in Poland for the rest of his career.51 K A F K A I N C A N A D A : T H E P E R S E C U T I O N O F ' H E N R Y F.'

One of those whose careers suffered long-term damage from the fallout of the Gouzenko affair was the late Henry Ferns. Ferns spent the last four decades of his life as an academic in Britain, after being driven out of his native Canada. The story of Henry Ferns is a Kafkaesque example of how an innocent person's career could be wrecked by a mere slip of a translator's pen. Ferns was not a scientist, but he was mistaken for one. Thereby hangs a tale. Ferns was not an 'innocent' in the sense that he was innocent of knowledge of or sympathy for Marxism. He had been at Cambridge in the 1930s and had grown quite close to the Cambridge generation of Communists. When he returned to Canada, he retained some of his sympathies, but no party ties, while he worked in the Prime Minister's Office and the Department of External Affairs in wartime Ottawa. Ideological sympathies were one thing, activities in aid of Soviet espionage were quite

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another. Ferns was entirely innocent of the latter, yet he was caught up in a bizarre case of mistaken identity deriving from an apparent mention in the documents Gouzenko took with him from the Soviet Embassy. Exhibit 30 of the royal commission was a page torn from the notebook of Lieutenant Colonel Motinov, in his own handwriting. The subject: obtaining a uranium sample. Mentioned on this page are 'Alec' (code-name for Allan Nunn May), Fred Rose, Raymond Boyer, and, according to the translation from the Russian prepared for the Commission (Exhibit 31), 'friend Henry Ferns' and, again, 'Henry F.,' working in a National Research Council laboratory in Montreal.52 When Gouzenko was questioned by E.K. Williams for the commission, he was apparently knowledgeable about these cryptic references: Q: ... there is a reference to Henry Ferns. Does that mean anything to you? A: Yes, I know him. Q: You know him? A: I know what the subject is that is being spoken of. Moscow sent a telegram to the effect that we know that in the research laboratory in Montreal there is a friend of Allan Nunn May, one Henry Ferns, and that contact should be made through Allan Nunn May.53

This reference in the commission's published report was reticent, citing only 'friend Henry —,'54 There was reason for this: the only known Henry 'Ferns' was not a scientist, was never associated with any NRC lab in Montreal, and had no acquaintance with Nunn May. The real Henry Ferns had resigned his position in the Department of External Affairs in November 1944. The mythical Henry Ferns seems to have existed only in Gouzenko's interpretation of the Motinov note. The name Ferns did however appear in the transcript of one of the trials arising from the Gouzenko affair. Word spread and Ferns himself was 'flabbergasted' to learn from a colleague that his name had been linked with Soviet espionage. Through the assistance of lawyer Frank Park (ironically, himself named in the Gouzenko evidence), Ferns learned of the cryptic and nonsensical reference in the evidence. He could, however, do nothing about it.55 In the course of the research for this book, we have been able to reconstruct the grotesque circumstances that led to Ferns's victimization. When the original documents taken from the Soviet Embassy by Gouzenko were obtained under the Access to Information Act in 1984, it became apparent that the reference to 'Ferns' in the translation made for the Canadian government was almost certainly an error. The Motinov note was handwritten in the Cyrillic script, into which all the Canadian names had been transliterated. The close similarity in handwriting of the Russian equivalent of the roman T and V meant that the name 'Ferns' could just as easily have been rendered 'Peris' or 'Ferris' when transliterated back from the Cyrillic. 'Ferns' was a guess by the translator, and quite probably a wrong one.56 The next piece of evidence in this detective story is a Canadian Press dispatch

Gouzenko - the Aftermath 109 datelined Ottawa, 21 May 1946, reporting the trial of Gouzenko defendant Ned Mazerall.57 Testimony was reported from one Harold Ferris of Winnipeg, a former NRC engineer. Mr Ferris testified that the Mazerall report on an airborne distance indicator allegedly given by Mazerall to Gordon Lunan of the Wartime Information Board to be passed on to the Soviets was 'not classified at all.' 'Mr Ferris said that if a Wartime Information Board official had asked him for the report on behalf of the Soviet Embassy he would have provided it.' It is quite likely that the 'Ferns' referred to by Motinov and Gouzenko was actually this man, Harold Ferris, who did work for the NRC and who might, by his own admission, have passed on information (although not presumably as espionage, simply as a courtesy to a wartime ally). The Henry Ferns connection may have been mythical, yet the real Henry Ferns did have a 'suspicious' past and associated with his friend and fellow civil servant Herbert Norman, later to be Canada's best-known victim of McCarthyism. The apparent linkage with the spy scandal was enough to brand him as an untouchable in the eyes of a thoroughly spooked Canadian government. In 1949, after a few years of temporary employment in the private sector, Ferns's application was accepted for a permanent teaching position at Royal Roads military college on the west coast and was then rejected when the Department of National Defence, which was responsible for the college, declared that his services were 'not acceptable.' Ferns and his wife decided then and there to leave Canada. He did contest the decision, seeking an answer to just why he was acceptable at one moment and then 'not acceptable' in the next. The obvious reason was that he failed the kind of security clearance the military required of all its employees. Of course, nothing was said about security, in keeping with the Canadian way in such matters. With a small pressure group acting on Ferns's behalf, the matter was forced to go all the way to the federal cabinet. If Ferns could not be given another appointment outside DND, the ministers decided, some compensation should be granted him for the broken promise of employment. The amount was left to Brooke Claxton, minister of defence.58 Claxton and his officials settled on $2,000, an amount Ferns deemed too small to raise taxpayer grumbles about paying off 'Reds,' but large enough to keep him quiet.59 Ferns and his wife set sail for Britain, never to return to their native country except as occasional visitors. Ironically, in view of his reputation in Ottawa as a Red, Ferns in later life became a conservative and stern critic of the Left.60 SCIENCE AS SORCERY

Science was a prized asset in the Cold War. The scientists assembled in the wartime Manhattan Project had given America what it believed, at least until 1949, to be its 'winning weapon.' After the Soviets entered the nuclear age, Western science was enlisted to build bigger and better bombs, and better ways of delivering them. But to the politicians and the press, science was a kind of sorcery. As sorcerers, scientists

110 The Gouzenko Affair were deeply suspect: they held the secrets that kept us safe, and they could thus give them away to our enemies. Canada was a marginal player in the scientific big leagues, but this did not prevent its scientists from becoming objects of mistrust. The Gouzenko affair began a sorcerer-hunt that could impede the careers of individual scientists, or even, in the ludicrous case of Henry Ferns, someone unlucky enough to be mistaken for a scientist. Scientists were on the front line when the shock waves from the Gouzenko affair spread outward from Ottawa. But in the emergent Cold War, many others would become similarly suspect. The royal commission on the Gouzenko affair set the tone for the years ahead with its highly ideological attack on left-wing organizations and its ready acceptance of the logic of guilt by association.

PART THREE: CANADA IN A COLD WAR WORLD

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5

The Russians, the Americans, and Us: Cold War Foreign Policy

PEACEMAKERS AND PARTISANS

In the late 1940s, Canada emerged as a player on the world stage to a much greater degree than ever before. The first postwar decade has often been seen as the 'golden age' of the External Affairs mandarinate, when a small number of key players in the Ottawa foreign-policy bureaucracy became relatively prominent figures in the great events of world politics. The founding of the United Nations and the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) both bore the stamp of Canadian participation. Canada's prestige in the world reached a peak when Lester Pearson, formerly the under-secretary of state for external affairs, and subsequently the minister of external affairs, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in bringing about a resolution of the Suez crisis of 1956. When Pearson accepted his award, Canada stood at the zenith of its prestige in the international community. This prestige was based to a considerable extent on the idea of Canada as an internationalist middle power, a mediator, and a peacemaker. Yet this same period also saw Canada forge a role as a partisan Cold Warrior, a loyal ally in the Western alliance against Communism. 1 The two roles - peacemaker and partisan - were not always compatible. 'Collective security' against the threat of totalitarian aggression was of course one way - Canadian leaders believed it to be the only way - of maintaining the peace in the era of superpower rivalries and nuclear weapons. But the role of peacemaker also required defusing tensions between the superpowers through diplomacy. Here Canada sometimes found it difficult to shake its partisan affiliation to play as effective a mediatory role as it might have liked - or as its image suggested. These contradictory pressures came to the surface during the Korean War, which will be discussed in detail later. Many analysts have stressed the internationalist and peacemaking role, sometimes by downplaying the partisanship. 2 In the 1960s, nationalist critics attacked what they viewed as Canada's abject subordination to American hegemony under

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the rubric of the Cold War.3 In the 1970s, the terms of the debate shifted towards revisionist and anti-revisionist critiques of the Cold War, in which the terms were widened to include consideration of economic as well as purely idealistic factors in the making of policy.4 From our perspective, neither the internationalists nor the nationalists have been a great deal of help in explaining how Canadian foreign policy followed two somewhat divergent tracks in the late 1940s. Reading the past through the eyes of the present is always chancy, although unavoidable. But every effort should be made to understand how policy makers saw the world at the time the policies were being made. The world of the late 1940s had its own unique context. Its rules, which Ottawa officials followed as best they could under the circumstances, were shaped by ideas that appear very different when understood in the context of their time, as opposed to hindsight. With hindsight, we know that the Soviet Union set up its own bloc in Eastern Europe while supporting the extension of Communist regimes in Asia. We know now that the United States took up the mantle of Western leadership and prosecuted the Cold War with vigour, if not evangelism. We know as well that Canada played a role as a junior partner to the Americans. But Canadian officials in 1945-7 did not know these things. They did not know at the end of the war just how Stalin's Russia would behave beyond its own borders. They did not know that the United States would go beyond its obvious economic hegemony to place itself in the political and military forefront of the Western world. And as Canadian officials grew suspicious and fearful of Soviet intentions, they turned their energies towards encouraging the Americans to take the diplomatic leadership to which their economic and military power entitled them. The nationalist reading of the late 1940s is that Canada was bullied by the Americans into lining up in Washington's anti-Communist crusade. There is little in the historical record to buttress this interpretation. On the contrary, until the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 and the announcement of the Marshall Plan for European recovery two months later, a major preoccupation of Canadian policy makers was whether America would once again retreat into isolationism as it had after the First World War. Even after the public declarations of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, there were lingering concerns that the southern neighbour might relapse into isolationism, or into a nuclear-armed Fortress America. The formation of NATO in 1949 had, to Canadian eyes, the great advantage of enmeshing America definitively in European obligations. Only with the Korean War did doubts about American commitment to global leadership finally vanish - to be replaced by doubts of a different kind. In the earliest stages of the emergent Cold War, in 1945-6, Canada was rather more active than passive in its response to the task of building a new world order in which Western interests and ideals would be safeguarded. In this, Canada was in tune with the activism of its traditional partner and former imperial master, Britain. Far from being a victim of American bullying, Canada was at Britain's side in

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encouraging greater American participation and leadership in blocking Soviet ambitions (or what were believed to be Soviet ambitions) and thus in shaping what was to become a powerful Western alliance. Canada's partisanship was thus actually more intense than even the nationalists have admitted. This requires some explanation. TRYING TO KNOW THE RUSSIANS

The Soviet Union was an enigma. The tenuous solidarity of the wartime alliance with this power was already cracking as the Allied armies swept from east and west into Nazi Germany, and it disintegrated rapidly with the collapse of the postwar peace conferences. But what did Stalin, and Stalin's state, want? Canada had its own reasons for trying to solve the Soviet puzzle. The Gouzenko affair had brought home to Canadians that the USSR acted towards this country as if it were a hostile power with secrets to be stolen. And it had brought the spotlight of world attention on this reticent, provincial country. Canada could not, under these circumstances, simply behave towards the Soviets as if nothing had happened. In the USSR, the Canadian ambassador reported that his post-Gouzenko status had sunk to the very bottom of the diplomatic hierarchy. Canada had to develop a Soviet policy. In 1945-6, Canada's two great English-speaking allies had not condensed their views of the USSR into a coherent and united position. This position took shape in 1947-8, and by that time Canada's Soviet policy was part, albeit a small part, of the input into that common front. A distinctive Canadian policy on the USSR was not as much out of the question as it might have been even five years earlier. Canada had an intelligent and wellinformed man in Moscow in the person of Ambassador Dana Wilgress, who had had long experience in Russia, dating from before the revolution. Diplomatic dispatches from Moscow during this era are unusual for their liveliness, intellectual curiosity, and energetic attempts to understand and analyse the enigmatic Soviet state and society.5 Wilgress was listened to with respect, not only by his masters in Ottawa, but by the State Department and the Foreign Office as well. At their request, his dispatches were circulated in Washington and Whitehall, and his views on what was happening in the USSR and its implications for Western policy were part of a debate in Anglo-American diplomacy that included the influential views of George Kennan of the United States and Frank Roberts, the British ambassador in Moscow, as well as other leading policy makers in the Atlantic capitals. The debate was between those who took a moderately conciliatory position towards containing Soviet expansion and a somewhat more hard-line group whom Wilgress himself characterized as the 'tough school.' The latter was headed by Kennan, who went public in 1947 with his famous 'Mr X' article, 'The Sources of Soviet Conduct,' in Foreign Affairs, in which he argued that firm isolation and containment (political, economic, and military) of the USSR would eventually lead to the collapse of Communist power.6 This debate crossed national boundaries, with advocates of both positions found in the

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three capitals.7 In Canada the 'tough school' was represented by Arnold Smith and others in External Affairs. Both sides were essentially in favour of 'containment' of the USSR, but they differed sharply over the severity of means and over the identification of the fundamental wellsprings of Soviet actions. In Canada, the Wilgress school 'won' over the Smith school, but on the wider stage it was the Kennan position that defined the American policy, only itself to be swept aside by even harder Cold War positions as the 1940s drew to a close. 'FIRM BUT FAIR'

Even if the characterization of the Kennan position as 'tough' is accepted, it would be quite wrong to call the Wilgress position 'soft' (although such views would soon be characterized as such by the Cold Warriors in the Atlantic capitals). As early as September 1945, before the public revelation of the Soviet spy scandal in Ottawa, Wilgress lamented that 'the advent of the Truman administration has coincided with the ascendancy of those advisers who have been preaching "toughness" towards the Soviet Union. I am not sure that toughness for the sake of being tough may not at times take the place of that policy of being "firm but fair" which I would like to see applied to dealings with the Soviet Union.' Wilgress readily noted a Soviet 'readiness to play with fire' that tended to increase the danger of conflict with its former allies, and admitted that suspicions about Soviet intentions were only too plausible. Where he differed from the 'toughs' was in his willingness to try to see things through Soviet eyes - not because he was rationalizing or apologizing for Soviet conduct but because he felt it was simply not realistic to draw conclusions about Soviet motives based solely upon Western perceptions.8 'The Western world,' wrote Wilgress, 'is living in dread that the Soviet Union is out to spread Communism throughout the world. Do they ever stop to think that the Soviet Union is also living in dread that the Western world is out to restore capitalism to the Soviet Union?' Wilgress fixed the cause of the Soviets' obsessive sensitivity about Western moves in a deep-seated 'lack of confidence in their own strength.'9 The problem with adherents of the 'tough' school was that they mistook the aggressiveness of the Soviets for confidence, whereas Wilgress believed it arose more out of insecurity. The consolidation of a Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe may have been ugly to contemplate, but to Wilgress it suggested defensive expansionism, an attempt to build a buffer against capitalist encirclement, rather than a first step along the road to spreading Communism throughout the world. Wilgress believed that Russian nationalism explained much more about Soviet behaviour than Communist ideology, and nationalism had regionally limited rather than global aims. Unfortunately, Wilgress pointed out, the 'tough' policy prescription had the effect of intensifying the Soviets' suspicions and insecurities, thus confirming them in their own mistaken analysis of Western motives. To make matters worse, 'the effect of this external threat on internal affairs within the Soviet Union

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was to consolidate and strengthen still further the position of the dominant faction.' 10 Wilgress had no doubt that Western unity under Anglo-American leadership was essential, and he was convinced that a policy of firmness was required with the Soviets. He recognized that there was a fundamental incompatibility between the closed, command economies of the East and the open, liberal capitalist economies of the West, and that friction was inevitable between the two. But this most emphatically did not mean 'that policy of toughness which in the minds of its advocates means treating the Soviet Union as an inferior or as a pariah, but a policy of firmness based on a coalescing of American and British policies on a high moral plain.'" His worry was that two dangerously self-absorbed views of the other side might come to predominate. As Wilgress correctly believed, the winter of 1945-6 was a critical period of flux that would be resolved in a pattern which would hold for many years to come. If the twin obsessions of West and East about each other could be removed, some level of cooperation might be established that would limit the friction. It was not to be. The twin obsessions became consolidated into the Cold War, which was to last for four decades. BRITAIN: BULLDOG OR BULLFROG?

As Wilgress saw matters from Moscow by the spring of 1946, the greatest friction in this crucial period following the war lay not between the USSR and the United States, but between the USSR and Great Britain. This came about for a number of reasons. The Americans were not yet ready to continue their wartime mobilization into the postwar era. The Soviets, realistic judges of potential military and economic strength, were very much afraid of the Americans. They were much less so of the British, who were battered by the war and facing rising pressures for decolonization of their Empire. Criticizing the 'irresponsible opportunism' of Soviet foreign policy, Wilgress indicated that Stalin's 'main object of attack at the moment is the British Commonwealth of Nations.' 12 The British for their part were in a relatively combative mood where their interests clashed with those of the Soviets, and these were in fact the major flashpoints of the early breakdown of the wartime alliance (Germany, southeastern Europe, and the Middle East). Ernest Bevin, as Labour foreign secretary, had reasons of his own to be anti-Communist, stemming from long years of fighting the Communists in the trade-union movement. Bevin was also being pushed by his permanent officials in the Foreign Office to take the front line against Stalin until the United States could be persuaded to assume a more prominent role. Much more than ideology was at stake here; Britain had real interests, material and strategic, that British officials believed were threatened by the Soviets. To many in Whitehall, the winter of 1945-6 was eerily reminiscent of 1940, when Britain stood alone against a totalitarian power dominating Europe, while waiting for the Americans to come onside. The irony of this is that Britain's forward position

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was driven precisely by its relative weakness: it was in effect bluffing Stalin to draw in the Americans. 13 This ambiguous stance is nicely captured in Elisabeth Barker's image of Britain as both 'bull-dog' and 'bull-frog.' As bulldog, Britain clung to its old positions in the world until forced to withdraw in an orderly fashion; as bullfrog, 'Britain inflated its own importance and exaggerated its own diplomatic and military strength so as to impress both friends and enemies.'14 The face Bevin tried to present to Stalin was that of the indomitable bulldog guarding the Empire; what Stalin saw was a puffed-up little bullfrog. In this, Stalin badly miscalculated. The Soviet Union's crudely bullying response to Britain eventually brought about the very result he had wished to avoid: full-scale American intervention in the leadership role in an English-speaking anti-Soviet alliance. By choosing Britain as a soft spot in the Western flank for probing, Stalin succeeded in putting American backbone into Western resolve. As Wilgress had explained to External Affairs in November 1945, the most important factors in East-West relations were British aggressiveness towards the Soviet position in eastern Europe combined with the ascendancy of the 'tough school' in the United States.15 The Truman Doctrine of 1947 was an American response to Britain's admitted incapacity to fight the Soviet-backed Communists alone in Greece, but the doctrine also sounded a note of global responsibility for the containment of Communism that went far beyond the specific situation that prompted it. 16 In 1940 Britain did not stand quite alone against Hitler. Beside it stood the British Commonwealth, including Canada. Britain's rerun of 1940 during 1945-6 similarly involved the white Dominions. When Churchill issued his celebrated 1946 'iron curtain' speech in Fulton, Missouri, he approvingly cited the U.S.-Canada Permanent Defence Agreement:17 This principle,' he recommended, 'should be extended to all the British Commonwealths [sic] with full reciprocity.' Thus, he envisaged Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and various British possessions around the world welded into a kind of outer perimeter of defence against the Soviet threat.18 Canada was the oldest Dominion, and it shared the North American continent with the United States - and was also a large land buffer between the USSR and the United States. Canadians could not duck the responsibilities of history and geography as an English-speaking alliance took shape against the USSR. Nor did any Canadian official argue against participation in this development. The question was not whether such an alliance should take shape, but how it should take shape and how it should conduct its relations with the Soviet bloc. 'THE LIMITS OF OUR EFFECTIVE INTERVENTION'

Arnold Smith was an External diplomat who did not buy Wilgress's views on Soviet motivations, and who more closely fitted Wilgress's epithet of the 'tough school' than any other Canadian observer of the USSR. Smith had been working in the Baltics in 1940 when the Soviet Union brusquely and brutally crushed the short-lived indepen-

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dence of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania; the memories of this takeover made him profoundly suspicious of Soviet intentions. Smith served in Moscow under Wilgress during the later war years. He did not support the views of his ambassador. As early as April 1945, in the temporary absence of Wilgress, Smith transmitted four lengthy and contentious dispatches urging a 'strong policy' by the West against the USSR. A covering letter under the name of the Canadian charge d'affaires, Leon Mayrand, disputed Smith, who had demanded a tough policy to induce the USSR to 'integrate' its economy and policies with those of the Western powers. Mayrand, echoing Wilgress, argued that this was a strategy of capitalist encirclement that would only deepen Soviet suspicions and widen the gap between East and West, not narrow it. Mayrand was particularly bothered by Smith's assumption that a united West could compel concessions from its adversary at apparently little cost to itself. 'Mr. Smith's memoranda are useful in drawing attention to the difficulties of dealing with the Soviet Union. These difficulties, however, will not be removed either by politeness or by "toughness" on our part, but only by a persistent effort to face troublesome problems and to solve them before they become explosive issues. In any such solutions the limits of our effective intervention should be clearly recognized.'19 Smith returned from Moscow to take charge of drafting the royal commission report on the Gouzenko affair. In this capacity, he had the opportunity to carry on extended conversations with Gouzenko on Soviet espionage and subversion in the West. The report itself was written in a manner that made the ideological nature of the struggle with Communism paramount. Communism was the means whereby Canadians were subverted to serve the interests of a hostile foreign power. Given its wide international circulation and its subsequent popularization in journalism and film, the report was a major statement of Canada's position in relation to the emergent Cold War, particularly its depiction of a great ideological struggle for the minds of people. Some observers of Canadian foreign policy have concluded that Smith's hard-line views were a minority position within External Affairs.20 As we shall see, this is technically true in relation to the official External interpretation of Soviet foreign policy, but in a larger sense the argument is somewhat beside the point. Smith had a hand in shaping the image of the Cold War both in Canada and in the wider world. The ideological uses of the Gouzenko affair were constrained, however, by the concerns of External Affairs, and of the Prime Minister, that Canada not place itself in the vanguard in relations with the USSR. Neither the cautious Mackenzie King nor his advisers wanted to precipitate a diplomatic break with the USSR. Hume Wrong hastened to advise Smith during the drafting of the report that the investigation should be 'regarded as a surgical operation and that we must make an effort to reestablish working relations with the Soviet Government.' Wrong indicated that 'the report ought not to draw general conclusions about Soviet activities in foreign countries but should confine itself to describing the detailed sample of the way they carried on in Canada and the way in which these activities were directed by Soviet agencies in Moscow.'21 This was done, and despite the glacial treatment of Wilgress

120 Canada in a Cold War World as Canadian ambassador in Moscow after the release of the report, there was no diplomatic break. Since the Soviets had admitted that unauthorized information had indeed been passed by Canadian citizens to their embassy, they were not in a strong position to moralize. In any event, the implications of the royal commission's findings went well beyond the narrow question of Canada-Soviet diplomatic relations. When Churchill passed an advance text of his 'iron curtain' speech to Lester Pearson, Pearson in turn had provided the former prime minister with an advance text of the first Gouzenko report. Pearson and Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, agreed that the royal commission report 'had a very considerable relationship to Mr. Churchill's speech because of the frank and strong criticism of Russian policy in the latter; a criticism which will, of course, be made more impressive by the presence ... of the President and the apparent sponsorship that this gives Mr. Churchill's utterances.' Secretary of State James Byrnes, on the other hand, was doubtful about the wisdom of publishing the interim report at that time. Yet under pressure from a hardline 'get-tough-with-Russia' antagonist in the White House, Admiral William Leahy, and a president tired of 'babying' the Russians, Byrnes had begun to stiffen in his attitudes, a stiffening reflected in a more openly anti-Soviet speech he had just delivered in New York. Byrnes indicated to Pearson that he 'appreciated an apparent connection between this statement, his own speech ... and Mr. Churchill's in Missouri. He felt that the timing of these events and the way they all fitted into the new U.S. policy of frankness and toughness with the Russians would make it difficult for the latter to believe that there had been no previous timing agreement between the three Governments. It almost looked as if the three things were stages in a planned campaign.' Pearson, addressing Norman Robertson in Ottawa, commented that 'you will agree, of course, that such a reaction on the part of the USSR would be quite natural and less unreasonable in this case than in some others, even though we know there is no such relationship or agreement.'22 Smith was not content with making his influence on policy felt indirectly through the commission report. In the winter of 1946-7, he made his views public. In the same way that Kennan went public with his famous 'Mr X' article in Foreign Affairs, Smith also penned in the Canadian equivalent, International Journal, under the pseudonym 'AHC,' his argument that the breakdown of the wartime alliance was entirely the fault of the Soviets.23 This was no longer an unpopular or unexpected view to the public, already well primed by the official version of the Gouzenko affair to expect only the worst from the Soviets. But within the privacy of the government's own offices, Smith's 'tough' view was not uncontested, as a controversy that arose in 1947 demonstrated. 'THE APPETITE FOR SECURITY GROWS WITH EATING'

In August 1947, Escott Reid, assistant under-secretary of state for external affairs,

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prepared a top-secret document entitled 'The United States and the Soviet Union: A Study of the Possibility of War and Some of the Implications for Canadian Policy.'24 This twenty-three-page paper constituted a 'rough first draft,' which, although Reid himself called it a 'scissors and paste job ... prepared in a good deal of a hurry,' was never revised into a final polished memorandum 'of the kind which I think would be useful ... to help us clear our minds on this fundamental question.' Even in its unfinished form, the Reid memorandum, passed around to all the senior officials in External and to the minister of external affairs and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, constituted the closest thing to an authorized Canadian appreciation of the nature of the Cold War at its outset. Although it was challenged in some of its parts by a number of officials, most notably Arnold Smith, the broad outlines of the position articulated by Reid seem to have approximated the 'official' thinking of the Canadian government.25 Reid was influenced in his thinking by Wilgress's earlier dispatches from Moscow, but reflecting the worsening international situation by the summer of 1947, he, along with the government of Canada, had moved some distance away from the relatively moderate interpretations of Soviet behaviour of 1945-6. A year and a half after the public revelation of the spy scandal, the dangers of Soviet advances were taken much more seriously. More than Wilgress, Reid was willing to grant a role for ideology in driving Soviet behaviour, but he believed that national self-interest was a major factor as well. Ideology made the Soviets aggressive, while self-interest made them defensive. The result was a peculiar combination of confidence and fear. He stressed that these combinations of ideology and self-interest, confidence and fear, were also characteristic of American behaviour - and that this similarity was ironically a cause of grave misunderstanding between the two powers. 'Each side desires to expand its defence area because each side believes that the other constitutes a menace to its way of life. It constitutes a menace because its way of life is so different from the way of life of the other.' Reid was in no doubt that a 'fundamental cleavage inevitably exists' between the Soviet 'police state' and the Western democracies. The issue was how this cleavage could be managed in such a way that peace was not threatened. The prognosis in the summer of 1947 was not bright. The Soviets were strengthening their iron grip on their bloc while the United States (just as clearly an 'expanding power') was busy extending its global reach. This mutual expansion was bringing them into increasing conflict around the world, from Korea to Finland. Even an agreement on the boundaries of their defence areas would likely represent only a temporary stabilization of an inherently unstable situation: 'by its very nature a desire on the part of a great power to extend its defence area is an illimitable process. The appetite for security grows with eating.' More than Wilgress, Reid worried about the Soviet use of Communists abroad to further Soviet aims. 'Such policies are plainly incompatible with friendship or coop-

122 Canada in a Cold War World eration as we understand these terms.' He admitted that Soviet subversion abroad could be earned on for a prolonged period without precipitating a world war. The Soviet leaders were, above all, realists (here the tones of Dana Wilgress became unmistakable), and they would not easily be led into disastrous adventurism. They might, however, be pushed into war if they saw their own position eroding too far, too quickly (this was a clear swipe at the 'tough' school). The emphasis on Communist subversion as an arm of Soviet expansion led Reid not to embrace the all-out confrontation theory of the tough school, but to emphasize certain liberal implications for Western policy. The USSR posed as the defender of colonial peoples: 'If the Western powers are unable to remove racial discriminations rapidly and to satisfy the demands of colonial peoples for self-government, the Western powers may find the vast majority of the colonial and coloured peoples hostile or unfriendly to them in the event of war with the Soviet Union.' Similarly, if the Western states, especially the rich United States, were unable to take adequate 'preventive measures' against economic depressions, the loyalty of the European working classes would be doubtful as well. In short, Reid's antidote to the Sovietsponsored Communist threat was a combination of political liberalism and global Keynesianism. Reactionary political tendencies in the West would be very damaging: 'A denial in the United States of democratic beliefs by witch-hunting, unfair legislation against labour, racial discriminations, would weaken the appeal of the Western world.' These prescriptions were personally congenial to Reid's own leftof-centre political views. But they were couched in terms of balance-of-power arguments drawn from political realism. Reid's policy prescription, widely shared by Western leaders throughout the Cold War era, was that the balance of power should be defined as an 'overwhelming balance of [Western] force relative to that of the Soviet Union.' The West, he stipulated, should 'use the threat of this force to hold back further extensions of Soviet power, but they [should] not provoke the Soviet Union into any desperate gamble.' Part of this force would be American-backed economic assistance to Western Europe (the Marshall Plan); a European security guarantee against Soviet aggression (the germ of NATO, which would sprout in two years); and a 'middle way' option for supporting non-Communist left-wing and progressive political forces in European countries. Every effort, he argued, must be made to ensure that any diplomatic break with the USSR or any disengagement of the Soviets from international organizations be clearly at their, rather than Western, instigation. Reid critically examined the argument that the USSR should be expelled from the United Nations, and strongly rejected it. The idea that Soviet membership in the world body prevented the 'free' nations from doing certain things together was dismissed; nothing prevented joint action outside the United Nations. In anticipating NATO, he suggested that collective security arrangements could be made outside the United Nations without amending the U.N. Charter. 'Thus the Western nations can, without driving the

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Soviet Union out of the United Nations, do virtually all those things which, if they tried to do them within the United Nations, would drive the Russians out.' On the other hand, maintaining Soviet bloc membership kept the bridges open for future softening in the Soviet aims, a possibility that could not be ruled out. Overall, Reid's perception of East-West relations could be described as that of a liberal Cold Warrior, close to that of the American Cold War liberals on the left of the Democratic party, although perhaps more critical of the American role in the deterioration of relations. His report struck a note relatively congenial to the philosophy of the dominant Liberal party in Ottawa, and it would, if it had been made known to them, certainly been welcomed by the leadership of the CCF opposition. The Tories might have been less pleased, especially by the underlying theme of global liberalism and Keynesianism. THE CASE OF REID VERSUS

SMITH

Reid drew from his analysis the moral that 'firmness need not be accompanied by rudeness. Our detestation of totalitarianism and all that it stands for should not lead us into treating the Russians differently from the way in which we treat any other country with which we are not on particularly friendly terms. We should endeavour to follow a course which is neither that of excessive flattery nor of excessive ostracism.' This was actually in contrast to George Kennan's view that the sources of Soviet expansion were unchangeable until Soviet power was broken, and that only the 'adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points' would suffice to block inexorable Soviet expansion.26 As Reid's paper was passed around External Affairs, it became apparent that not all his colleagues were in agreement. Robert Ford, now charge d'affaires at the embassy in Moscow, was not impressed, despite a perfunctory sentence praising an 'excellent and inclusive survey.' Ford dissented from the notion he detected of a defensive containment of the USSR within its present sphere. To Ford, there was no likelihood of any mellowing or change in the Soviet system, with or without Stalin. The Soviets were a 'resourceful and dynamic group with vast ambitions, a philosophy attractive to millions, and with allies and sympathizers everywhere in the world.' A protracted Cold War would only be to the Soviets' advantage: 'in this war of nerves, we may have many of the physical resources on our side, but it is a moot point if the Americans and ourselves are capable of withstanding successfully the impact of Soviet obstruction and propaganda over a long period of time.'27 Among the hard-liners within External, it was French-Canadian officials who stood out. Pierre Dupuy, Marcel Cadieux, Laurent Beaudry, Jean Desy, and C.R Hebert, all to some degree wished to emphasize the apocalyptic ideological struggle between Western spiritual values and the godless materialism of the Soviets. Hebert wanted the churches to be used as offensive weapons in the struggle to undermine

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Communism from behind the Iron Curtain. Dupuy even suggested ('ominously' in Page and Munton's word) that Reid's paper discussed the whole subject 'in precisely the manner in which the Soviets would wish to have it discussed by the entire world.' 28 This francophone reaction faithfully reflected the fervent anti-Communism then dominant in Catholic Quebec. The minister of external affairs, Louis St Laurent, very much shared the perceptions of the USSR held in his community. As we shall see, he was not averse to striking these themes rhetorically in public, but in this case he returned Reid's paper without seriously disputing its direction. Whatever his private views, St Laurent was unwilling to impose them upon his officials. Instead he seemed content to allow a consensus to be formed from within. As it turned out, this consensus stopped short of the Quebec Catholic view. The most serious challenge to Reid was mounted by Arnold Smith, who was by this time teaching at the National Defence College in Kingston. In December 1947, Smith penned a lengthy memorandum outlining his dissent and enclosing a fortytwo-page document entitled 'The Russians and the Rest of Us.'29 Smith insisted upon a much harder and more unforgiving view of the Soviets as a land apart, a fundamental concept captured in the polarized title of his paper. The USSR, in his view, represented a totalitarianism worse than anything yet seen in the world, including Nazi Germany. Like Hitler's Germany, Stalin's USSR was inherently expansionist, and its expansionism arose inexorably out of the inner logic of its totalitarianism. Smith strenuously objected to any implied sharing of the blame between the USSR and the United States for the risk of war. The fault lay entirely on the Soviet side. Any suggestions that Soviet expansionism was defensive in nature would not only lead to a fatal appeasement policy on the part of the West, but were illusions resulting from a carefully orchestrated 'cover and deception plan' on Stalin's part. The only safe course was to assume that the Soviets would be aggressive 'indefinitely' and would be stopped only by the remorseless application of force on the part of the West. Nor was Smith impressed by Reid's Cold War liberalism. He doubted the depth of the real causes for the revolutionary ferment in the Third World and in parts of Europe that the Communists were exploiting. Instead, these were instruments of Soviet penetration, 'efforts made by Communist parties or their front organizations to create distrust and haired between continents and colour-groups, between nations, and within nations between economic and social classes and national groups.' He did not spell this out, but the implication was left that liberal programs to alleviate the causes of unrest were just another form of appeasement. This hard-line analysis situated Smith close to the hawks in the United States and the language of National Security Council document NSC-7, which appeared three months later. 'The ultimate objective of Soviet-directed world communism is the domination of the world. To this end, Soviet-directed world communism employs against its victims in opportunistic coordination the complementary instruments of Soviet aggressive pressure from without and militant revolutionary subversion from within ...'30 Smith's strongest policy prescription was to expel the Soviets from the

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United Nations, thus completing their ostracism from the community of nations and welding the international organization into an anti-Soviet alliance led by the United States. If Reid wished to maintain bridges for the future, Smith wanted to burn them. Besides, he wrote caustically, there was no reason to assume that any mellowing of the Soviet system was likely or even possible. One of the controversies set off in External by Reid's paper had to do with the ultimate source of Soviet behaviour. Was it ideology, was it old-fashioned greatpower politics, or was it the interests of the ruling faction that drove the engine of Soviet expansionism? Reid, along with Wilgress before him, saw a combination of motivations at work, but devalued the ideological explanation. To Reid, ideology was more important as the distorting filter through which each power saw the other than as a positive source of international behaviour. Smith refused to see Soviet behaviour as limited great-power politics, but while he saw the Soviet rulers as driven by something different from the motives that drove other national leaders, he could not attribute this entirely to Communist ideology. Because Smith was so deeply contemptuous of Communism as a doctrine, he could not finally attribute belief in such a perverted and absurd system to a ruling class that he also took to be such a formidable and resourceful threat to Western civilization. 'The Soviet regime' he wrote in his own emphasis, 'is not inspired by a belief in the superiority of its own way of life. On the contrary, it seems to act on the assumption that its own system is inherently less attractive.' Thus Smith explained the prevalence of the secret-police system and the other ugly repressive features of the Stalinist regime. Here he was on solid ground; but when it came to translating the internal dynamic of Stalinism into its external projection in expansionism, Smith would not accept the Wilgress view that the outward drive was fuelled by the insecurity of the ruling faction (which, of course, led to the policy prescription of giving the regime security assurances, or 'appeasement,' as Smith would term it). At the very heart of the Soviet system, Smith discerned not a faith in Communism but a 'nihilistic pursuit of power for its own sake.' This Nietzschean notion of an amoral will to power lies like a black hole at the centre of Smith's analysis. He carefully repeated the point a number of times, but he never explained what he meant by 'nihilism.' One might speculate that this was a kind of intellectual shorthand for the atheism of the Soviet regime, since Smith came from a strong religious background. It did create problems for his analysis. On the one hand, 'nihilistic' Communism was a waning ideological force - 'intellectually and morally bankrupt' - certainly in the Soviet Union, but even in Western nations like France with large Communist movements. Smith's prognosis here was actually prescient, but he was at the same time forced to claim that 'Communism as a political force still remains virulent.' Reid himself insisted that 'the difference between Arnold Smith and myself is not as profound as might appear on the surface' and promised to incorporate some of his criticisms into a final version of his paper, which was in fact never completed.31 Events moved on in the wider world, and Reid himself became active in the negoti-

126 Canada in a Cold War World ations that led to the creation of NATO, the shape of which could be dimly discerned in his paper. Smith's central recommendation, that the USSR be expelled from or induced to leave the United Nations, did not become Canadian policy, or even American policy. But the view that Smith 'lost' the debate is somewhat exaggerated. Reid was right: on the essentials, the differences between them was not that great. Belief in containment of Soviet Communism represented a consensus by 1947. Neutrality in the Cold War was never an option for Canada. THE COLD WAR ( C A N A D A ) LTD

Looking back over these debates within the Canadian government over the nature of the USSR, one is struck by a rather odd feature. The participants in the debate were Canadian officials and diplomats, yet they paid scant attention to Canada and particular Canadian interests. British and American politicians and diplomats tended to interpret Soviet motives and actions squarely in relation to their own national interests. Wilgress in his Moscow dispatches barely mentioned any distinctive Canadian perspective, except in terms of Canada's particular interests in trade with the USSR. Smith's lengthy memorandum never mentioned Canada, except in passing as a partner in a U.S.-led West. Reid did devote two pages of his memorandum to 'some implications for Canadian policy,' but he apologetically introduced these as 'particularly weak' and promised to expand this section considerably and to be more precise on the Canadian policy implications. He never did. His superiors apparently did not feel it necessary that he do so. Reid made the obvious point that Canada was being brought into even greater dependence on the United States, as an Atlantic community took shape under American leadership. 'In the event of war,' Reid averred, 'we shall have no freedom of action in any matter which the United States considers essential.' In peacetime, even in the quasi-peace of a Cold War, Canada's freedom of action would be limited, but 'not non-existent.' Sometimes we might be led to differ from the Americans on matters of Soviet relations, and Canada's situation as an ally would make it 'wholly proper for us to tell the United States to stop rocking the boat or driving holes into its bottom.' Where differences might crop up, Reid cautioned, it was well to remember the distinction between governments and societies. There might well be crossnational cleavages on Cold War issues within American and Canadian society. 'Certain groups of Canadians and Americans will support U.S. policy, and other groups of Canadians and Americans ... will support Canadian policy.' This led Reid to speculate that the weight of Canadian influence that could be brought to bear on Washington was 'considerable' - 'if we play our cards well.' But the main conclusion he drew was that it was in the Canadian interest to avoid war, not only as an end in itself, but as a means of enhancing Canada's small measure of autonomy in relation to its giant neighbour to the south.32 There was one international crisis in which Canada did show some small measure

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of autonomy. The Soviet threat to West Berlin flared up in late 1947 with Soviet moves to cut off Allied access to that city. In 1948-9, an Allied airlift was mounted to supply the Western occupation zones of Berlin. Although asked to supply air transport, the Canadian cabinet, under Mackenzie King's cautious direction but with the concurrence of the defence minister, Brooke Claxton, repeatedly refused. Pearson was in favour of assisting the airlift, but the government had the benefit of the advice of General Maurice Pope, chief of the military mission in Berlin and a sharp critic of the tough school. ('To go to war on this issue,' Pope asserted, 'would be madness. Even if we won we should lose everything.') 33 Canadian efforts at a compromise solution at the United Nations were undermined by the United States, which, the Canadians believed, did not really want a non-military solution. As one observer comments on Canadian policy over Berlin: 'in avoiding an automatic response, she had succeeded not in maintaining her freedom of action but only of inaction.'34 By the time of the next major crisis, Korea, America learned to play harder ball with its allies, and Canada's small 'freedom of inaction' shrank yet further. The containment position may have 'won' intellectually within External Affairs, but it was, in the end, a pyrrhic victory. By the close of the 1940s, an American Cold War definition of limitless Soviet aggressive designs had become the party line of the Western Alliance, from which public deviation would not be tolerated. Since even George Kennan fell out of favour with the Washington hawks as being too soft on the Soviets, it is no surprise that the even more moderate Canadian interpretations of Soviet motives were lost in the new era of the Pax Americana. But then as Norman Robertson liked to tell his colleagues, even a 'Pax Americana is better than no Pax at all'. 35 And as partners in the Pax Americana, Canadians did find some genuine material benefits. 'IN THE INTERESTS OF PEACE, AND C A N A D I A N COMMERCE'

Two key elements in the new Pax Americana concerned the economic and military rehabilitation of Europe in the two stages represented by the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. These were critical developments for Canada, as they established an American-led Atlantic community under the aegis of the Cold War. The Soviet threat was crucial, but behind these collective economic and military security arrangements lay a complex of national interests, including those of Canada. If the appreciations of the Soviet threat within External Affairs had lacked national resonance with regard to specifically Canadian interests, this was by no means true with regard to the means of containing the Soviets. Here the linkage between the ideals of foreign policy and the more material level of national self-interest is more evident. The Marshall Plan has always had a good press and has most often been treated as an act of great generosity, far from the grubby environs of economic self-interest. The familiar image is simple: the United States selflessly offered vast amounts of

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money to rehabilitate the devastated economies of postwar Europe. Revisionist historians of the Cold War have attacked this version and set the Marshall Plan within a less altruistic context. But the revisionist view has not had an easy time of it.36 Canadian thinking on the Marshall Plan was, according to diplomat and scholar John Holmes, 'straightforward': 'there was so little difference between the public proclamations and the private planning ... that it is hard to relate it to the Byzantine politics of the revised version.' What Canada wanted, and saw in the Marshall Plan, was 'the revived prosperity of Europe in the interests of the Europeans themselves, of peace, and Canadian commerce.'37 Was not a more liberal trading world in everyone's interests, and was not Europe better off following Marshall than before, and thus was Canada's role not in the interests of peace and prosperity? This is not, let it be said, an inconsiderable argument. Certainly it was an enormous strength of the American position that its interests coincided so nicely with the material interests of the Western European capitalist economies, while the policies of the USSR towards the nations within its Eastern European sphere of influence were inimical to their economic development. But there is more to the story than this. Marshall Plan assistance was certainly an attempt by the United States to finance its export surplus: administration spokesmen were open about this before Congress. Yet the obverse of this, that Europe could only benefit from being put back on its feet, is a truism that obscures much else that Marshall Plan aid was intended to achieve. First of all, it had the political intention of consolidating the division of Europe, not merely by excluding the Soviet bloc from emerging trading patterns, but more importantly by rehabilitating German industry and making a revived West Germany the centrepiece of an American-aligned Europe. This led directly to German rearmament and to the brusque rejection of Stalin's 1952 offer to agree to a reunited, neutral Germany with a government chosen by free elections: a fateful step in the institutionalization of the Cold War in Europe. Marshall aid also came tied with strings: controls over internal economic policies that had the effect, in the short term at least, of reducing social expenditures and transferring national incomes from wages to profits (rather like the impact of International Monetary Fund loans to Third World countries today). The long-term goal was to enhance national productivity and thus overall standards of living, yet Cold War pressures for European rearmament threatened to keep working-class wage levels down well into the 1950s. Marshall aid was designed to undermine the European pro-Communist trade unions and political parties, and this was a central part of the overall strategy of American Cold War foreign policy, directed as much against the ideological enemy within as against the external Soviet threat.38 It did not succeed in blunting the strength of Communism in France and Italy, but it was a continuing cause of controversy on the left throughout the Western world, sharply dividing Cold War social democrats from those farther to their left. Not all of the latter were Communists, but anyone who criticized the Marshall Plan was soon labelled as in the Communist camp. Granatstein and Cuff have shown in well-documented detail why Canada found it

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necessary to get in on the Marshall Plan through offshore purchasing agreements and allocation of Marshall dollars to purchase Canadian wheat. The slow recovery of Europe denied Canada the large export surplus it had enjoyed with that continent before the war, while a massive infusion of American imports into Canada led to a foreign-exchange crisis. Getting in on the coat-tails of Marshall made good economic sense, perhaps the only sense under the circumstances, given the structural conditions of the world economy faced by Canada at this juncture. And as Cuff and Granatstein make clear, Canadian negotiators did a very good job in exacting the most advantageous deal with the Americans, striking a bargain that was harder than Canada's relatively modest position perhaps entitled it to.39 The national interest seemed to be served by participating in the economic recovery of Europe; by making a virtue of necessity - a trick at which Canadians excelled - we could interpret the national interest as internationalism. External Affairs Minister Louis St Laurent had already expressed the philosophy before George Marshall made his famous speech announcing the plan: 'Economic revival,' he stated at the outset of 1947, 'is a matter of great importance to us. We are dependent on markets abroad for the large quantities of staple products we produce and cannot consume, and we are dependent on supplies from abroad of commodities which are essential to our well-being. It seems to me axiomatic, therefore, that we should give our support to every international organization which contributes to the economic and political stability of the world.'40 Yet being a junior partner in the Marshall Plan had certain consequences, just as being a recipient of Marshall aid had consequences. Canada became deeply dependent on Marshall dollars; by 1949 more than half of Canadian exports to Europe were being financed in this way. Since this could not continue, Canada's only choice was to maximize its trade with the United States. Canada moved from multilateralism to bilateral dependence on the United States, and especially on U.S. imports of Canadian raw materials. The short-run economic consequences of Canadian participation in the Marshall Plan were undoubtedly beneficial; the long-term consequences challenged Canadian economic autonomy. Canadian interests were being increasingly identified with those of the United States not in the first instance because of ideology, but rather because the pursuit of the national interest led inexorably to external links that drew Canada always deeper within the American orbit. Perhaps stretching a point, one might say that the postwar Canadian interest in a liberal trading world led, step by step, to the current denouement of a bilateral freetrade arrangement with the most powerful economy in the world. In fact, this almost came off in the late 1940s, until Mackenzie King (perhaps remembering faint echoes of the Reciprocity election of 1911) got cold feet.41 The foreign-policy dilemma this economic reality posed was painfully summed up in an article by B.S. Kierstead, published in 1948, entitled 'Canada at the Crossroads in Foreign Policy.'42 Professor Kierstead argued that there were in fact no real conflicts of interest between Russia and America, that each had already tacitly rec-

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ognized the other's sphere of influence. The ideological conflict, however, infused what were really non-issues in various parts of the world with profound Cold War significance. 'The tragedy of today' was that the two great powers were 'politically immature, idealistic, evangelical.' It was characteristic of the Cold War that both powers demanded that 'everyone must take sides, must stand up and be counted among the company of the faithful'; allies had no right 'to their own national personalities.' The only way for smaller countries like Canada to act in the interests of peace was to 'avoid this polarization,' to stand up for themselves and 'refuse to be bullied into one camp or the other.' He then suggested specific modifications of Canadian policy along these lines: U.S. troops should leave Canadian soil; 'we should eschew joining in the hysteria of American denunciation of Russia'; Canada should orient itself towards the Commonwealth rather than America; and Canadian aid to Europe should be untied from the Marshall Plan and directed towards a Canadian-European trading system, with drastic restrictions on American imports. The alternative to the latter was 'economic vassalage, crisis after crisis ... a humiliating prospect which would weaken our ability to work for peace and the establishment of a secure world order.' Yet even as Kierstead wrote these strongly autonomist passages, the real world was breaking in upon him. Just as the article went to press, Kierstead added a rather poignant footnote admitting that relations between Canada and the United States were already so close that his economic prescription was 'politically impossible.' The prospects for an autonomist foreign policy had been sharply constricted. 'SCARE HELL OUT OF THE C A N A D I A N PEOPLE'

There were other factors at work as well, ensuring that even as Canada lined up on behalf of economic recovery for what seemed sound reasons of self-interest, partisan Cold War alignment and what Kierstead had disdainfully called 'joining in the hysteria of American denunciation of Russia' would be an integral part of this new 'internationalism.' These factors had to do with domestic politics, in both Canada and the United States. The Pax Americana signalled a profound shift from traditional American isolationism to a new globalism. There were powerful forces within the United States that had been habitually opposed to foreign entanglements; there were even more powerful forces deeply suspicious of the big government and vast state expenditures necessary to fund this global involvement; and there was public opinion hostile to spending and worried about foreign wars. The Truman administration effectively disarmed this Republican isolationist sentiment by packaging and selling what was in fact a multifaceted and far-sighted strategy for enhancing the global position of American business as an anti-Communist ideological crusade, thus appealing to the common denominator of American nationalism. The Soviet military threat was hardly imaginary, but it was deliberately exaggerated.43 Parallel to this was the culti-

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vation of fears of an alleged threat of Communist subversion from within, a threat that had far less substance than that of the Red Army. Truman took to heart Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg's advice that if he wanted congressional approval for global commitments he had to 'scare hell out of the American people.' Out of this grew the permanent Cold War lobby in Washington, a group that tended to drive successive administrations into extended commitments that had no obvious connections with the American national interest. It led as well to the ravages of McCarthyism and the witch-hunts for domestic Communists that damaged the fabric of American political life and helped drive the Democrats out of the White House.44 In his memoirs, published in 1989, four decades after the formative events in which he participated, Escott Reid notes that in rereading the speeches of St Laurent and Pearson in the late 1940s he was struck by 'the constant use of such terms as "communist expansionism" and "aggressive communist despotism" when what we feared was not communism but the Soviet Union.' Reid rather limply explains this apparent anomaly by Prime Minister Mackenzie King's diplomatic reluctance to allow his ministers to designate the USSR publicly as an enemy.45 Perhaps Reid, hermetically sealed within the inner world of Ottawa bureaucracy and international diplomacy, failed to see something that St Laurent and Pearson, as practising politicians, understood better. Whatever the national and international rationales for the Cold War alliance, anti-Communism plain and simple was an essential ingredient in selling the Cold War to the North American public, both American and Canadian. Reid, as well as some of the academic observers of Canadian foreign-policy making in this era who have tied their studies too closely to the internal documents of External Affairs, have failed to appreciate fully the impact of domestic politics, both American and Canadian, on foreign policy. The Truman administration thought it necessary to scare hell out of the American people. The Liberals in Ottawa deemed it advisable, for similar but distinctive reasons, to scare hell out of the Canadian people. No wonder Denis Smith titles his account of Canada and the Cold War Diplomacy of Fear. 'THE PRICE TO BE PAID': THE ' W R I G H T S ' AND ' W R O N G S ' OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP

That the Americans, the spirit having got into them, were going on a national ideological binge, was not unnoticed by foreign observers, friendly or otherwise. Growing signs of irrationality certainly came to the attention of the Canadian diplomats in Washington in the late 1940s. The interpretation made of these signs at the time seems rather perverse in historical retrospect. By the early 1950s, with McCarthyism apparently out of control, Canadians as well as Europeans were distressed by the American spectacle. Canadian diplomats in particular were affronted by the McCarthyite assault on the State Department. Later yet, one of their own, Herbert Norman, was to fall victim to the American witch-hunt. But in the late 1940s, Cana-

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dian diplomacy saw the stirrings of the anti-Communist hysteria in quite a different light. Hume Wrong was the leading advocate in External Affairs of what might be termed 'the price to be paid' theory. In the context of the time, Canadians, their memories of 1939 to 1941 still fresh, were as worried about American isolationism as the global interventionists in the Truman administration, but for somewhat different reasons. If their conception of the Canadian national interest led the foreign-policy makers towards a ready acceptance of international commitments favourable to the maintenance of peace and a world economy reconstructed along more liberal lines, it was crucial that the United States not revert to an economic and political Fortress America as it had done following the First World War. Wrong took the view that while there was enlightened leadership in the administration, there were severe defects in the American system that might cripple these liberal tendencies. These were the result, as he was later to explain, not of national character but rather of 'the political process by which national aspirations are transformed into acts of policy' - specifically, the division of powers and the constant electoralism of American politics. These features led to a kind of inconstancy of purpose, as national policy was swept this way and that by shifting waves of popular sentiment. Wrong believed that the best answer was that of the Truman administration: ride the tiger of anti-Communism on behalf of a 'vigorous foreign policy.' Wrong's views were best represented in the well-known 'Wright/Wrong' memorandum, 'Influences Shaping the Policy of the United States toward the Soviet Union,' written in 1947 by Wrong and by Hume Wright of the Washington Embassy staff. The Wright part of the memorandum was a blistering indictment of the ignorance, arrogance, and bellicosity of Americans in their anti-Soviet crusade abroad, and of the perniciousness of anti-Communist witch-hunts within. The Wrong part of the memorandum was a cheery conclusion that these 'extravagances' were the 'necessary popular foundation' for the kind of foreign policy that Canada wanted - 'for example they are part of the price to be paid for the Marshall Plan'; 'without them the rest of the world would be worse off.'46 Wrong was deeply impressed by a story told to him by Dean Acheson about how aid to Greece and the Truman Doctrine had been run past a recalcitrant Congress early in 1947. The British request for a U.S. bailout 'was the occasion and not the cause' of Washington's move, Acheson confided. At a meeting with congressional leaders, Secretary of State George Marshall failed to impress with his pleas, and things had gone 'very sourly indeed.' Then Acheson had stepped in. 'To save the situation, he imparted into the proposals for financial aid to Greece the openly antiCommunist aspects which were incorporated in the President's speech to Congress [this was in fact the origin of the famous 'domino' theory]. This had done the trick, and the meeting ended in an entirely different atmosphere with promises of support from all or most of the Republicans present.'47 This was a lesson Wrong never forgot.

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Canadian policy makers did not just silently witness the use of anti-Communism in the United States. Less well known is an anti-Communist campaign led by the Liberals in Canada in the late 1940s, for somewhat similar domestic purposes as in the United States, although with rather different results. Canadian policy makers in an executive-dominated parliamentary system, embedded in a more deferential, elitist (perhaps at the time less democratic) political culture, had fewer worries about the tides of popular sentiment than their American counterparts, but the Canadian state was by no means insulated from civil society, or from public opinion. The policy elite in Ottawa did demonstrate superior skill at managing public opinion and inducing influential groups in society to allow a degree of relative autonomy in foreign policy, skill that must have been the cause of admiration among any members of the American policy community who noticed. In the course of this, however, antiCommunist and anti-Soviet ideological currents were encouraged that in turn shaped and constrained the very liberal-internationalism they were supposed to serve. In a later chapter, we examine in detail the campaign to sell the Cold War to the Canadian public. For now, it is important simply to note that the Canadian government in the late 1940s faced its own problems of potential isolationism and dissent from an activist Cold War foreign policy. At the centre of these concerns was French-speaking Catholic Quebec, whose isolationism had been manifested as recently as the war. Louis St Laurent, as a French-Canadian minister of external affairs and prime minister, was acutely aware of the reluctance, bred by history, of his community to embrace an expanded and active role abroad. But St Laurent was equally aware of the deep, visceral Catholic-in spired anti-Communism of Quebec society in this era. Indeed, he himself shared these sentiments. A relentless public insistence on the anti-Communist basis of the new foreign policy was a way of persuading French Canada to consent to the new directions. The Liberals were extraordinarily successful in this, so successful that their achievement has tended to be passed over by later historians. When Canada in 1950 agreed to supply troops to a war in far-off Korea, there was very little outcry from Quebec, certainly nothing comparable to what had happened in the two previous wars. Official anti-Communism had worked a wondrous alchemy. Similarly, a stress on ideology served to defang the Tory opposition in Ottawa and the provinces. Conservatives had been traditionally pro-British and anti-American. To the extent that the developments of the late 1940s were moving Canada out of the fading orbit of the British and into the waxing light of American hegemony, the Tories might have represented a potential obstacle to a Cold War consensus in Ottawa. Again, anti-Communism was the magic ingredient in bridging Tory loyalty from the old empire to the new, especially after the blustering anti-Communist ideologue George Drew moved from the premier's office in Ontario to the office of the leader of the official opposition in Ottawa. An additional political advantage for the Liberals was that the WASP and often anti-French Tories were unable to form a

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common front with the equally anti-Communist but pro-Liberal Catholic French Canadians. The Liberals could thus play the anti-Communist card on both sides of the table with little fear of hurting themselves. Scaring hell out of the Canadian people did have its disadvantages. Public opinion was not simply a malleable instrument to be shaped to the government's liking. Once aroused and played upon by government and media, public opinion could itself become a constraint on the government's freedom of action. As we make clear in later sections of this book, anti-Communism became an autonomous factor, which, only partially under government control, wreaked considerable havoc in Canadian society. The effect was to drive Canada closer to the very American model of an emotional national crusade that the fastidious liberals in the Ottawa elite so sincerely detested, even though they had helped precipitate it. ' A T I M E O F F E A R A N D H O P E ' : NATO

With the domestic decks cleared, Canadian officials could concentrate on the development of a permanent Atlantic alliance. Canada did play a fairly significant role in the negotiations that led up to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Escott Reid, a key figure in this story, later recounted it in a book entitled Time of Fear and Hope.4K The fear was obviously of Soviet Communism; the hope was that from this fear might spring collective security and the basis of a new Atlantic community. Much has been made of the famous Article 2 of the Atlantic Charter, inserted at the dogged insistence of Canadian negotiators, that was supposed to make the alliance something more than a mere military arrangement. As Escott Reid admits in his book on the making of NATO, St Laurent and Pearson were most anxious to strengthen Article 2 during the drafting, mainly for domestic electoral reasons: NATO seemed a much more saleable package for the 1949 election if it went beyond the military to the social and cultural aspects of Atlantic solidarity.49 In other words, its liberal-internationalism was clearly seen as an important part of the public packaging of the treaty, alongside its straight anti-Communism. Certainly the hand of pro-NATO social democrats, for example, would be strengthened if something more than big battalions were involved. In a major speech in early 1948, Lester Pearson pointed to a new Western alliance that would not be in contradiction to the United Nations if the following conditions were met: first, that it not be a provocative, aggressive alliance against any one state; second, that it not be an instrument of power or imperialist politics of any of its members; third, that it not be a merely military alliance. There were two positive qualities Pearson sought as well. Such an alliance must include provisions for dealing with indirect aggression, by which Pearson meant the 'spreading of subversive, soul-destroying ideological germs.' Yet, good liberal that he was, he also recognized that 'there is no effective Maginot Line against ideas.' Hence, the fifth condition,

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which was in fact the seed from which Article 2 would germinate: that the alliance must be one of social, economic, and cultural cooperation to alleviate the conditions in which 'indirect aggression' through subversion could thrive.50 In the negotiations leading up to the treaty, Canada pushed for two items in particular: Article 2 and the inclusion of 'indirect aggression.' The two concepts were linked. Escott Reid recalls that he understood the latter phrase to refer to attempts launched by the Soviet Union to undermine the independence of a member state by intimidation or subversion, through the instrumentality of local Communist parties. This was to be the curative clause, while Article 2 looked to prevention. Both were, of course, decisively political and ideological in their intent, and in their implications for the domestic politics of the member states. Communism would be made as effectively illegitimate in Western Europe as anti-Communism was in Eastern Europe. But the phrase 'indirect aggression' went a bit too far. Reid recalls that the British 'knocked the proposals down with an argument so strong' that the clause disappeared altogether: 'the signatory powers were attempting to interfere in the internal affairs of other states. As such it would be attacked by the communists and some non-communists as the beginning of the new Holy Alliance.'51 The other more liberal prop, Article 2, did survive in somewhat emasculated form, with 'culture' removed at the insistence of the Americans. References to strengthening free institutions were there, and Canadians, then and later, seemed proud of their tenacious bargaining, which had yielded this article against U.S. indifference. Yet later observers have seen the article as stillborn. Dean Acheson scornfully dismissed Article 2 as public relations and wrote that 'the plain fact, of course, is that NATO is a military alliance. Its purpose was and is to deter and, if necessary, to meet the use of Russian military power or the fear of its use in Europe.'52 As a military pact, NATO also served to embed a rearmed West Germany within a unified military command. Lord Ismay, the first secretary general of NATO, summed it up succinctly when he told a group of British Tory backbenchers in 1949 that 'NATO exists for three reasons - to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.' 53 The liberal-internationalists had used anti-Communism as a domestic weapon to help secure consent to what they hoped would be a form of collective security within a broader framework of a stable international order and a more liberal world economy. A generation of Canadian diplomats have spoken warmly about the influence they have quietly been able to exert, in common with other smaller European powers, over American leadership within the framework of NATO. The problem with quiet diplomacy is that we have to take their word on trust, since there are necessarily few public indications of that influence. But even if it is the case that the framework of NATO provided greater opportunities for behind-the-scenes coalition building than would have been possible in a direct bilateral alliance with the United States, NATO itself was something different in practice than the Canadian framers had envisaged. What Canada got out of NATO, and the Marshall Plan before it, was

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an anti-Soviet military alliance under American domination; a reconstructed world economy in which Canada became ever more dependent on its powerful and wealthy neighbour; and a world rigidly bifurcated between two bellicose superpowers armed with nuclear weapons, leaving a problematic role for middle powers like Canada with an interest in peace. ' C A N A D A DOES NOT CAST A S H A D O W BUT STANDS IN O N E '

Canada's unique perspective on East-West relations was, for practical purposes, somewhat beside the point. It is clear that Canadian officials did not fully share in the evangelical sense of mission that eventually moved the Americans, although it is just as clear that their suspicion of the Soviets was as deep, and perhaps had begun earlier. They would have preferred that the Cold War be conducted with greater caution, care, and circumspection. Above all they placed greater weight on the need to avoid war and the requirement of giving the Soviets room to save face and to compromise at the edge of crisis, less weight on rhetorical bellicosity and chest-thumping triumphalism on the part of the West. These were nuances within a Western consensus that had formed by 1947, but they were nuances that were rarely noticed by the senior partner in the alliance. Since the Canadian analysis of the world situation had led Canadians, in close cooperation with the British in 1945-6, to place a heavy priority on enlisting American leadership of a Western bloc, Canadians were compelled to stress themes that would especially appeal to the Americans, thus undermining the particularity of their own view of the world. This bias was further deepened when the exigencies of domestic politics, especially the need to maintain the support of French Canada for external policy, led the Ottawa elite to play upon anti-Communist ideological themes in selling the new directions to Canadian society. Popular anti-Communism then became itself a Cold War constraint upon the policy makers. Canadian national economic interests, seen above all in terms of a liberalized world trading and investment environment, also moved Canada towards American leadership, (and with it, the rhetoric that justified the Americans to themselves) as well as towards a continentalism that imposed a structural rigidity upon Canadian freedom of action. Even where Canadians tried to encourage a wider Western alliance, to bring in Europe to redress the imbalance thus created, NATO under American direction became a military alliance, while Europe developed in a economic direction that was ultimately to exclude Canada and drive it even closer into the American embrace. There is an air of inevitability to this story. It is very difficult to imagine Canada in the circumstances of the late 1940s moving in a markedly different direction. A pro-Soviet policy was of course out of the question, but even neutrality a la Sweden or Switzerland seems highly dubious. The Swedes and the Swiss were not neutral economically, culturally, or ideologically. They were, however, neutral in the formal

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sense that they eschewed direct alliance in NATO. Whether such a course adopted by Canada might have allowed a greater degree of autonomy in foreign policy is a moot point. Given Canada's geography, it is highly unlikely that it would have been permitted the luxury of formal neutrality by the United States. It is even less likely that, in the improbable event of neutrality, distinctive Canadian views would have made any great difference to the course of events in the East-West conflict. Could Canadians have lined up as they did with the Americans, while maintaining a greater willingness to air their own views publicly, where these differed from those of the Americans? Open criticism was rarely, in these early years of the Cold War, resorted to by the circumspect Canadians, so we can only speculate about its potential results. One occasion when it was done was during the Korean War, and the results, as we shall see later, were not encouraging to Canadian pride. A more generally critical stance would no doubt have been too ambiguous to be tolerated in an age of great moral certitudes and rhetorical excess. At the end of the day, the greatest rallying cry of the Cold War, heard on both sides of the great divide, was 'Are you for us or against us?' In alliances of nations, as well as among organizations of people, the demand for loyalty always distinguishes the leader from the followers. The Cold War from the Canadian foreign-policy perspective has most often been viewed in terms of Canadian relations with the USSR. But this was actually the less important aspect. More important was the decisive push the Cold War gave to the continentalization of Canadian foreign policy and to the heightened appreciation of the fundamental asymmetry this involved. As the late John Holmes, a wise and seasoned veteran of postwar foreign policy making, suggested a few years ago: 'It is an uneasy existence, life alongside an extraordinary power by divine right. The Power isn't really very good at seeing little sparrows fall, and it is difficult just to attract His attention. There are in fact some arguments for not doing so. The ways and means of living our unequal lives has puzzled us for centuries and will continue to do so. We have to do most of the puzzling ourselves because it is a subject that interests Americans only faintly and fitfully.' 54 Another more detached but equally sceptical observer of Canada's North American fate, Dalton Camp, recently wrote: 'Diplomacy, someone said, is the shadow power casts. In power terms, Canada does not cast a shadow but stands in one ... [There is] a library of Americana, all confirming what Canadians know and their governments refuse to admit: No one down there much cares, much less remembers, what we do ...'55 Canada's role in the genesis of the Cold War has never been of much interest to Americans. Given that Canada stands in the shadow of American power, this is hardly surprising. Despite its inevitability, it is surprising that Canadians have been relatively uninterested in this fact, for it is a crucial link on the road to continentalism. The irony is that, pace the nationalist critics, there was no plot to sell out Canada to the Americans. Instead every step along the way was taken to protect Canadian national interests, as the Ottawa elite understood them, and as far as circumstances permitted. The road to Washington was paved with good intentions.

6 Stand on Guard: In the Defence of Canada

In 1949 the Department of National Defence issued a White Paper entitled 'Canada's Defence Programme.' The only kind of war which would involve Canada,' it asserted in apocalyptic tones, 'would be a war in which Communism was seeking to dominate the free nations, in other words, a war in which we would be fighting for the one thing which we value more than life itself, and that is our freedom as a nation and our freedom as a people - freedom to speak and meet and vote and worship as we like ... a war for survival ...'1 There were few dissenting voices among those consulted on postwar defence-policy directions for Canada. There were differences in emphasis, certainly, and controversy over which particular program, which weapon system, and which specific form of international cooperation should be adopted. But there were really no differences on the larger questions. The military threat to Canada came from the USSR, and Canada's best hope of staving off this threat was to cooperate with its closest allies, especially the United States. Nobody in authority seriously disputed either of these propositions. The few Canadians who did thereby demonstrated to those in power that they were marginal and undeserving of a voice in the making of policy. On this, the politicians, the generals, the bureaucrats, and the diplomats were in basic agreement. Behind them stood the mass media, where only very rarely were differing ideas given any play. PARADOXES OF NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY

The existence of a basic policy consensus did not mean that there were no contradictions within that consensus. There was in fact a fundamental contradiction at its very heart. The military problem was posed as a threat to Canadian sovereignty: Canadians must stand on guard against the threat of Soviet attack on their territory. The military solution was posed in terms of a voluntary diminution of that same sovereignty: closer integration with the United States in continental defence; forward deployment

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of Canadian forces in Europe under NATO (that is, U.S.) command; and the commitment of Canadian forces to collective-security measures on far-flung shores such as Korea under U.N., (that is, U.S.) command. For continental defence, Canadian territory had to be made a field of operations for the U.S. Air Force, and Canadian soldiers had to operate with equipment that met American specifications and under battle plans drawn up by American planners. Ultimately, the Canadian defence industry became an integrated, regional element of American defence production. Looming over all this was the spectre of nuclear war. Canada frantically scrambled in the immediate postwar years to defend itself against the threat of nuclear war, but in so doing it became a firmly subordinated part of a wider military machine that planned for the possible use of nuclear weapons to deter, or even to win, a third world war. Canadians recognized their geopolitical position as a likely nuclear battleground. There was apparently no escape from the paradoxes of national sovereignty in the nuclear age. Canada had never been, and was unlikely to become, a Switzerland or a Sweden - countries that, despite close economic and cultural integration with other Western countries, retained a capacity to declare effective neutrality while great neighbouring powers fought wars to the death. In the past, Canada's loyalty to the British Empire had brought it into full participation in two world wars well before the United States. Canadians had no tradition of neutrality: quite the opposite. Looking to the future, Canadians did not have the geographic advantage of strategic irrelevance that Switzerland and Sweden enjoyed: on the contrary. In the nuclear age, it might reasonably be said that there could be no neutrality, in the sense that all countries would suffer the catastrophe of an atomic war whether they were players or spectators. But Canada could not enjoy even the moral superiority of the spectator. Given its strategic position as the land mass intervening between the two hostile superpowers, it would be in a conflict from the beginning whatever its official stance. If neutrality was an untenable or impractical option, so was the assertion of national sovereignty within the Western alliance. Titoism could be a nationalist stance struck by the Yugoslavs against Soviet hegemony in the East, and Gaullism a nationalist stance later struck by the French against Anglo-American hegemony in the West, but no comparable stance seemed possible for Canada, which had, moreover, no will for such a daring and difficult project. The defence of national sovereignty had always been and continued to be defined in terms of Canada's larger loyalism, first to the British Empire and then, in the Cold War years, to the West under the protective shield of the United States. There was an inherent paradox, rarely posed in these early days but noticed with some frequency in subsequent decades: how much national sovereignty could actually survive its defence? THE WORLD'S LONGEST UNDEFENDED BORDER

Formal military cooperation with the United States was much older than the Cold

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War, dating from 1938 when Mackenzie King and American president Franklin D. Roosevelt exchanged pledges of mutual military assistance against any enemy attack upon North America. When Britain went to war with Nazi Germany in September 1939, Canada was close behind, but the United States remained neutral for more than two years, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. During the traumatic period when the Commonwealth stood alone, great efforts were made to urge the Americans to come onside. Such efforts even included the operations on American soil of an intelligence network, British Security Co-ordination (BSC), under the direction of a Canadian, Sir William Stephenson (code-named 'Intrepid'), to spread pro-British and anti-German propaganda among American officials and media.2 Roosevelt, handcuffed by powerful isolationist sentiments at home, was sympathetic to the anti-German cause and did what he could to offer indirect assistance. This had dramatic consequences for Canada when Roosevelt, shortly after the fall of France, invited Mackenzie King to meet him at Ogdensburg, New York. The Ogdensburg Agreement of August 1940 established a Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD), with equal representation from the two countries, to plan the coordination of the defence of the continent for the duration of the war and, by implication, after the war as well. 'Seen in retrospect,' two historians reflect, 'the Agreement marked the shift from Canada as a British dominion to Canada as an American protectorate.'3 More was to follow. In the Hyde Park Declaration of 20 April 1941, the two countries agreed to 'mobilize the resources of this continent' by coordinating their defence-production programs.4 These and a host of other wartime bilateral arrangements were, in the view of the most recent analysis of Canadian defence policy, 'a milestone, in that the United States had formally replaced Britain as Canada's principal ally.'5 This can hardly be construed as an American plot. It was Britain's weakness that left Canada with little choice but to look to America for the defence of its own territory.6 In any event, by 1940-1 the die was cast. When the war was finally over, Canada's future defence plans would henceforth be shaped in a continentalist mould. The Cold War reinstated this relationship, but it did not create it. TOWARDS FORTRESS NORTH A M E R I C A

Canadian foreign and defence policy were pulling in opposite directions at the war's end. The generals, not surprisingly, did not want a return to the threadbare era of 1930s austerity in national defence. The Prime Minister, however, was insistent upon full-scale demobilization and a severe reduction of the military budget. Initially, King got his way. Yet the foreign-policy makers in External Affairs were quickly drawing Canada into a series of new international commitments with wide implications for potential military operations on a global scale. By 1949 an obligation for a permanent Canadian military presence in Europe was in the cards with the

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formation of NATO. A year later, Canadian troops were drawn into a shooting war in far-away Korea, as a result of the Canadian commitment to the United Nations. Later yet, the U.N. connection would lead to the deployment of Canadian peacekeeping forces in trouble spots around the world. Postwar foreign policy thus precluded both isolationism and an isolationist defence policy. Despite the global implications of new foreign policy directions, the continental defence arrangements that had come into force during the war continued to be the main focus of Canadian defence planning for peacetime. Even the most isolationist of Americans could appreciate that defending the American homeland against attack was a legitimate priority for defence dollars - especially in the new nuclear age when the USSR might soon wield the same long-range weapons of mass destruction that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And even the most isolationist could appreciate the importance of Canada to continental defence. Consequently, while External Affairs was trying to encourage the Americans to adopt a more interventionist foreign policy in Europe, National Defence was already coping with a broad range of pressures for more integration with the American armed forces in the name of continental defence. Some of these developments were apparently mundane. In the late 1940s various initiatives were undertaken to standardize equipment to accord with U.S. specifications. There are for instance endless (and endlessly boring) records in Washington and Ottawa archives of the deliberations of a joint committee on screw threads. Although such matters might appear to be merely technical, they were in fact packed with significance for the transformation of Canada's military alignment. Once closely tied to the British, Canadian defence forces were being drawn inexorably into closer and closer integration with the Americans. British and American screw threads, for instance, were different. Canadian forces in this period dropped the British and adopted American specifications. Of course this made sense, given the emergent realities of integrated continental defence production. Even on this mundane level, the shift away from Britain towards America was being played out. Canadians had experience of direct intergovernmental cooperation with the American military during the war years, and they also had the first experience of an American military presence on Canadian soil, especially in the North, which had become a staging route for strategic bombing of the Axis powers. Major defencerelated projects (such as the Alaska Highway and the Canol pipeline project in the Northwest Territories) had been built under American supervision. As American eyes turned to the USSR as a potential threat, the strategic significance of the Canadian North to American defence rose sharply. Shortly after the war's end, a major defence exercise in the Arctic, code-named 'MUSKOX,' was carried out, with American assistance carefully concealed in the official press releases.7 Such delicacy towards Soviet feelings did not survive the impact of the Gouzenko affair in early 1946. Although official spokespersons were quick to insist that MUSKOX had

142 Canada in a Cold War World no anti-Soviet implications, this pretext was soon discarded as the Cold War settled in - as was any public downplaying of American participation. Given the hesitations of Mackenzie King, some interesting questions can be asked about the role played by the Canadian military in bringing about continental defence integration. Were the Canadian armed forces a conduit for American policy priorities, forming a bureaucratic lobby from within on behalf of continentalism? As early as November 1945, General Andrew McNaughton let it be known privately to the American secretary of the PJBD that he 'fully realized the importance' of the U.S. view that in any future world conflict the North American continent would have to be defended 'directly' rather than from Asia or Europe as in earlier wars, and that he 'would lose no opportunity to influence the Canadian government in this direction.' 8 Perhaps less innocently, Major General F.F. Worthington, senior officer in charge of the Western Command, communicated to the American consul general in British Columbia in 'an entirely unofficial and informal way' his decisively proAmerican views on cooperation 'in its most comprehensive sense.' Indeed, Major General Worthington advocated complete integration, complete standardization of equipment, and even the placing of Canadian forces under overall American command. Despite the sweeping nature of his proposals, he believed that he had wide support among the senior military, but foresaw 'serious difficulties with "politicians,"' as he describes them, in both countries 'who are quick to oppose anything they believe is in derogation of sovereign rights.' Nevertheless, he proposed to foster military-to-military cooperation with the end in mind of advancing integration, presumably against the wishes of the 'politicians' if need be.9 Elements of the Canadian military did act as a lobby from within. But the military was not itself entirely united; some high officers maintained reservations about buying the Pentagon line outright. At the same time, there were key figures among the 'politicians' and the civilian bureaucrats who shared significantly in American perceptions and who did much to hasten the process of integration. Certainly it would be misleading to suggest military-civilian tensions along pro- and anti-American lines. But for professional reasons alone, the military tended to be a positive factor in furthering integration, and indeed this tendency accelerated as time went on. In late May 1946, a Military Co-operation Committee (MCC) was formed on the recommendation of the PJBD. This committee was made up of military people who would develop joint defence plans. The MCC showed an alarming tendency to develop grandiose projects for a Fortress North America, based on exaggerated perceptions of the imminence of an external threat. Both American and Canadian officials restrained and modified some of the wilder plans, and unwelcome publicity in the Canadian press further cooled the official reception in Ottawa.10 When the Canadian side of the MCC delivered a briefing to the cabinet defence committee in July 1946 on a draft joint appreciation of a basic security plan for North American defence, Mackenzie King was disturbed enough to note in his diary that Canada could no longer afford the cost of defending itself and that, in the future, 'our coun-

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try would be a mere pawn in the world conflict.' 11 Although the implications may have been alarming, King and his cabinet colleagues had no positive alternatives before them. The Achilles' heel of Canadian autonomy was intelligence, or the lack thereof. Without an external intelligence agency of its own, and with poorly developed military intelligence sources available, the Canadians, including the senior military, were at a considerable disadvantage. As the chief of the air staff explained to the ministers, 'if the Appreciation which was derived principally from U.S. intelligence, was sound, then the Plan also was sound.' l 2 The problem was that the Canadians, military and civilian alike, had neither the means to contest the validity of the American version, nor the will. Canadians by and large shared the American perception of the Soviet threat to North America. 'Every cent spent on the defence of Canada,' Defence Minister Brooke Claxton later retorted, 'assists in the defence of the United States.' There is, Claxton pointed out, 'only one enemy and that is Russia,' and Canada was the only avenue of attack. 13 By November 1946 the Canadian government had endorsed the basic thrust of the MCC plan, and stated so in a joint declaration with the United States in early 1947. Granted that there was a clear stipulation that each country retained control over military activities on its own territory, and that the joint declaration did not constitute a binding treaty, there was a decisive statement of intention to deepen cooperation and integration considerably. Given the inherent disproportion in size and strength of the two countries, cooperation meant that Canada would conform to a U.S. agenda. In 1947 the Defence Research Board (DRB) was established to focus Canadian contributions to military research and development. The DRB's first chairman, Dr Omond Solandt, knew 'more British secrets than any American and knew more American secrets than anyone from the British Isles.'14 There were few, if any, Canadian secrets kept from the Americans. The DRB, and Canadian military research and development in general, were firmly fixed within the web of continental planning. Canada had been involved in the research on the atomic bomb during the war. Other forms of scientific destruction also drew in Canadian participation: biological and chemical warfare research certainly had some Canadian input, 15 but this was strictly branch-plant work. Canada did not contribute to the larger strategic thinking within which the various methods of waging war were situated.16 Weapons research did draw Canadian science and Canadian industry, as well as Canadian universities, into the wider Anglo-American network of security classifications and clearances, a key element in the emerging national security state. The military often insisted upon security standards that were higher than even the RCMP thought necessary and that often went beyond what the government was willing to support. In this they were reflecting the imported criteria of McCarthy-era America. In the grim context of an apparently imminent threat of nuclear war, preparedness for all-out mobilization was high on the agenda. By 1948 plans were well under way for revision of the 'War Book': emergency planning and emergency powers in the

144 Canada in a Cold War World event that the worst happened. Total mobilization of the country's resources would be required. In 1948 an Industrial Defence Board was established to advise the cabinet on the availability of strategic materials, human resources, and the military uses to which Canadian industry could be put in wartime, in close cooperation, of course, with American plans.17 Emergency planning also laid emphasis upon the control of subversive activities and subversive persons. Elaborate plans were drawn up for press censorship, the suppression of civil disturbances, and the internment of subversives. Both the civil and the military power would be involved in internal security. Internment camps under military control would take care of potentially large numbers of Communist or pro-Communist fifth-columnists to be identified in peacetime and rounded up at the outbreak of hostilities by the RCMP. Here the military and police sides of the national security state could be clearly glimpsed working hand in hand.18 All this could be carried out under the draconian authority of the War Measures Act, parts of which remained in place long after the close of the Second World War. During the Korean War an Emergency Powers Act was passed to give the government more limited authority (including the power to nationalize uncooperative industry) under conditions of limited war. But the War Measures Act, with its sweeping centralization of power in Ottawa and its suspension of civil liberties, was always at hand if required. THE URGE TO M E R G E

In 1949 the dread news came that the USSR had successfully tested an atomic weapon. Although the days of intercontinental ballistic missiles still lay in the future, defence against the manned bomber threat to North America from the North took on a new urgency. And with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 the possibility of all-out war seemed tangible indeed. In this context, continental military integration under overall American command proceeded rapidly. This took the form especially of the establishment of U.S. bases and U.S.-run installations on Canadian soil. A long-term lease for an American Strategic Air Command base at Goose Bay, Labrador, was announced in 1952, confirming an earlier arrangement with the Newfoundland government before that British colony joined Canada in 1949. The Goose Bay negotiations were attended by concern over the question of Canadian sovereignty, and the Canadian government did not grant any further such leases.19 Even so, tensions over U.S. overflights of Canadian airspace continued. In the early 1950s, cabinet from time to time found itself discussing such matters as the fact that U.S. aircraft reported intelligence sightings over Canada directly to the United States while ignoring Canadian air-defence command, or U.S. demands that USAF planes be allowed to patrol over Canadian territory adjacent to large U.S. cities.20 On other occasions, there was publicity surrounding high-handed actions of U.S. personnel that interfered with local people as they went about their business. These were small irritations illustrating the inevitable asymmetry of the relationship

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between the elephant and the mouse. There were, after all, no Canadian air bases in Florida or Canadian intelligence-gathering aircraft in American airspace. Nuclear weapons on Canadian soil under American control were the ultimate measure of the continentalization of defence. Sovereignty issues aside, the nuclear component meant that Canadian territories around U.S. bases would be enhanced as potential targets for a Soviet nuclear attack seeking to wipe out America's retaliatory capacity. This was little remarked upon in the early period, although later it became an important theme for critics in the 1960s. Perhaps the most serious and far-reaching aspect of continental defence was the development of early-warning detection installations against enemy air attack. Beginning in the late 1940s, a series of radar lines was constructed. The Pinetree line in the south, partly on American and partly on Canadian soil, was a joint venture, some parts manned by the RCAF and others by the USAF. Farther north, the Mid-Canada line was constructed and manned by Canada. More controversial was the project for the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line in the Canadian Arctic. The Canadian government was never fully convinced that the DEW line was in fact necessary, and it had hoped, by taking responsibility for the Mid-Canada Line, to avoid the vast expenditures projected for building a sophisticated set of installations in the High Arctic.21 But in the end, a glum cabinet faced the reality that if the Americans, for good or bad reasons, wanted such an installation they would have it, one way or another. The cabinet learned that with the Americans pressing hard, it was 'virtually impossible to withhold agreement'; there was 'no alternative but to approve'; it was 'difficult to object.' The prime minister and his colleagues finally arrived at the tortured conclusion that since Canada's public image as an autonomous country could not bear the inevitable American backlash that would come from continuing to oppose the DEW line, it was better to announce Canadian consent and thus give the impression that Canada was one of the authors of the project.22 As Littleton neatly comments, 'ministers were confronted with a dilemma that has since become almost traditional for Canadian politicians who must deal with American military priorities. They could co-operate while trying to make a necessity look like a virtue; or they could follow the improbable course of refusing to collaborate on the basis of the national interest.'23 But even making a virtue of necessity did not in this case entirely succeed, leaving a residue of Canadian bitterness, especially when Canadian feelings were insensitively bruised during the construction of the DEW line by Americans who often showed little appreciation that the installation was being erected on foreign, not American, soil.24 Military technology is an illusive master. The final push for the DEW line had come with the Soviet testing of a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb in 1953. Yet after the expenditure of billions of dollars to make the line operational, the Soviets tested their first intercontinental ballistic missile - thus suggesting that early radar warning of manned bomber attacks would eventually become technologically superfluous.25

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Continental defence integration had developed on a somewhat ad hoc basis. Despite the infrastructure of the PJBD and the MCC, politicians (on both sides of the border) tended to modify and accommodate the sometimes grandiose plans of the military to the existing limitations of national sovereignty. But such integration would logically culminate in an integrated command structure under an alliance formalized by international treaty. Such a plan was developed in the mid-1950s and resulted in the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) agreement of 1958 whereby Canadian forces operating on Canadian territory are placed under the command of an American general at American headquarters. From the point of view of sovereignty, NORAD's operational capacity to strike back quickly at an apprehended Soviet attack upon North America meant that Canadian forces could become involved in a shooting war before the Canadian government, let alone Parliament, could approve entry into hostilities. NORAD was in this sense the embodiment of the vision of Major General Worthington in 1946, removing the politicians from direct American-Canadian military-to-military relations. There is a very curious story surrounding the acceptance of NORAD by the Canadian government. The project (initially under the barbarous acronym of CINCADCANUS) had been concocted jointly by both countries' military planners, who had tried to keep the politicians out of the picture as much as they could. Still, the matter could not simply be left to informal agreements between generals, given the political significance of integrated command. The minister of defence, Ralph Campney, had intended to bring the secret draft (already approved by the U.S. president) to the cabinet defence committee in early 1957. An election intervened and the Liberal government was defeated. The outgoing Liberals quite properly would not approve such a far-reaching agreement, despite the urgent prodding of General Charles Foulkes, chairman of the chiefs of staff. The Conservatives had scarcely arrived in their new offices, after twenty-two years in opposition, when Foulkes and the military 'stampeded' (in Foulkes's own word) the new government into NORAD. Working through his old friend George Pearkes, now installed as minister of national defence, Foulkes secured the agreement of the new prime minister, John Diefenbaker, on the grounds that it had been all but officially approved by the previous government (which was certainly untrue). Diefenbaker's glib acceptance of such a far-reaching agreement without submitting it to the (not yet constituted) cabinet defence committee, let alone the cabinet as a whole, was astonishing. But it seems that External Affairs had some serious objections to at least parts of the NORAD pact, especially concerning the lack of provisions for consultation with the Canadian government on important decisions to be made by the command structure. Diefenbaker, briefly reserving the External Affairs portfolio in his own hands, refused to consult with his officials, whom he mistrusted. So Canada was swept into a fundamental renunciation of sovereignty without any proper form of approval, at the insistence of the military.26 Ironically enough, it was John Diefenbaker's own government that first paid the price; it was defeated in 1963 over the contentious

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issue of arming Canadian-based BOMARC missiles (part of NORAD's air defence) with nuclear warheads. In this case the U.S. government and American NORAD commanders pushed - and the Canadian government fell. Of course, the path towards NORAD had opened long before. It is hard to see how, after Ogdensburg, Canada could have arrived at any other destination. Participation in the Cold War simply speeded up the trip. But as the NORAD story indicates, even occasional efforts by civilians to slow the pace were shunted aside by a military with an overriding urge to merge.27 Needless to say, there was never any real public debate about the merits of NORAD, or the entire direction of continental defence, from the Canadian point of view. THE EUROPEAN OPTION

Nor was there any real debate over the other major military alliance that Canada entered, NATO. Canada's not-insignificant role in the creation of the Atlantic alliance has been recounted earlier. NATO's roots, in Canadian minds at least, involved more than a military alliance. The reality, whatever the illusions of Canadian diplomats, was that to the principal partners of the alliance, the military element of NATO was central. Certainly the Americans, as Dean Acheson later asserted, did not for a moment consider that NATO would be anything other than a military arrangement.28 But the diplomatic and political goals of the alliance as seen from Ottawa were always entwined with certain military considerations. The inexorable attraction of continental military integration in the atomic age was accompanied by definite drawbacks. Bilateral relations with a superpower left little room for the junior partner to manoeuvre. On the other hand, Canada's traditional European counterbalance to America was fading as British power went into prolonged decline. The revivification of Europe through an Atlantic alliance offered more than diplomatic ballast: as a military alliance it presented Canada - and the United States - with an alternative to Fortress North America. Two recent writers have summarized the situation in the late 1940s as follows: With the decline of the Anglo-Canadian alliance, the rise of the United States to superpower status, and the strategic realities of the nuclear age, a multilateral security pact afforded a desirable alternative for Canada to a strictly bilateral security arrangement with the United States ... Ottawa was still concerned about its sovereignty and independence. However warm the bilateral relationship with the United States, and however complementary the two countries' strategic outlooks, the inevitable pressures toward integration in military matters ran counter to Canada's desire to see itself, and to be seen by other states, as a distinct international actor — even on security issues. Thus, NATO appeared to offer Canada both security and a means of maintaining its independent status in the world.

NATO was thus both an end in itself (military security) and a means to other

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(political) ends. But was Canadian military participation in NATO really necessary for Canadian security? There are a number of answers to this question, but all of them must be placed within the context of the world of the late 1940s when NATO was brought into being. The analogy of 1940 was still fresh in the minds of Canadian policy makers: a free Europe divided and conquered by a totalitarian state. Canada, like Britain, had always seen its own security in terms of preventing of any one power from dominating Europe militarily. The USSR was a totalitarian state with a huge army that had recently overrun all of Central and Eastern Europe and had quickly established a series of satellite regimes under its ruthless domination. That much was obvious. But did the Red Army constitute a credible military threat to those parts of Europe that it had not reached when the Germans surrendered in 1945? In retrospect, the scenario of a lightning Soviet blitz through Germany and France to the English Channel and beyond seems exaggerated, to say the least. The Soviet Union had suffered human losses (now estimated at twenty-five million people or more) in the war, that were almost unimaginable to the nations of Western Europe. The economic reconstruction of the USSR was a daunting task. The USSR was in no position to precipitate another world war, and in no position to absorb Western Europe in the event of victory. There is little reason to think that Stalin, however bloody-minded, seriously entertained the extravagant notion of actually invading Western Europe. Stalin, and his successors, were much more concerned about protecting themselves through the maintenance of a security belt in Eastern Europe. They failed to make clear the limits of their defensive expansionism, and this not unexpectedly encouraged Western European states to assume worst-case scenarios.30 It should also be realized that what we now understand to be Soviet weakness was not widely seen that way at the time. What was perceived only too clearly was the capacity of the Red Army to occupy and hold down all of Eastern Europe, and the fear this engendered in Western Europe. Even so, at the time not all Canadians were swept off their feet by the immediate threat of the Soviet military spectre. In 1948, for example (on the very eve of NATO's birth), there was much controversy among Canadian military and diplomatic personnel in response to the alarmist views of a German-based USAF colonel with extensive intelligence connections. This individual was assiduously spreading among his fellow Western officers a message that boiled down to 'let's get it over with now and A-bomb the Reds before they gobble up all of Europe.' A Canadian liaison officer warned that such views perversely overrated the Soviet military threat: if this thinking were typical of the American military, then 'the Russians are certainly succeeding in their war of nerves.' Such 'defeatist' appreciations of the western military position derived from U.S. intelligence sources that remained suspect in many Canadian eyes. General Maurice Pope, stationed in Berlin and an important Canadian military voice critical of the emerging Cold War mentality,31 declared his 'amazement' at such views. 'It was,' he suggested acutely, 'one more instance of the United States habit of appreciating situations in

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terms of the other side's capabilities rather than in terms of the probability of his doing so.'32 Given such views in Canadian circles, it is not surprising that so much emphasis was laid upon the supposed political, as distinct from military, elements of NATO. Yet it was the military side that won out. Even after this had been made clear, Canadians continued to use their marginal influence to carp at the Americans. In 1953, for instance, after U.S. and British planes had been shot down by the Soviets over the Berlin air corridor, the United States wanted to add Canadian Sabre flights to beef up the Allied side. The Canadian cabinet demurred: 'it was possible,' the ministers concluded, 'that the cold war would deteriorate and it was not desirable that Canadian forces should be placed unnecessarily in the position where they might be a factor in that deterioration.'33 Canadians liked to believe that their quiet diplomacy served to restrain aggressive American behaviour. With the onset of the Korean War, NATO took on real military muscle, and Canadian contributions to the alliance's integrated multilateral command structure in the 1950s included a Canadian infantry-brigade group stationed in West Germany, an air division stationed in France and West Germany, and a heavy commitment of naval and naval air forces to the defence of the North Atlantic. Other forces were on standby for transfer to Europe in the event of general mobilization. These commitments, once entered into, proved long-lasting, surviving the economic and military recovery of the European states, and being cut off finally in the 1990s only on the grounds of Canadian fiscal austerity. As a counterbalance, NATO was something of a mixed blessing. Despite its multilateral structure, NATO military command, especially in the early 1950s, was about as much dominated by the American armed forces as was the defence of North America. It was precisely this domination that later led the nationalist French leader Charles de Gaulle to pull France out of the unified command. Canada thus did not escape U.S. hegemony by its participation in NATO, even if it mitigated it. And there was a paradox for Canadian sovereignty inherent in this two-front defence plan. It was somewhat bizarre for Canadian officials to plead lack of resources as an excuse for allowing greater American military presence on Canadian soil while at the same time maintaining a major commitment of Canadian men and materiel on the European continent. If anything, the European commitment hastened the subordination of Canadian defence to American command on the North American continent. Canada, as we shall see in a later chapter, committed itself to a military role in Korea from 1950 to 1953. The actual role, involving both naval and ground forces, was perhaps more politically symbolic than militarily substantial. Yet more than 25,000 armed forces personnel took part and more than 300 died in action, with another 1,200 injured. The minimum cost to the Canadian taxpayers was $200 million, although the defence minister admitted that taking into account indirect costs and overhead, the total might be as high as $1 billion.34 Global military prepared-

150 Canada in a Cold War World ness did not come cheap. In 1952-3, the annual estimates for the overall defence expenditures of the federal government rose to $2 billion - a figure forthrightly described by the minister of national defence as a 'huge sum.'35 Indeed it was, representing more than 7 per cent of the entire Canadian gross national product and onethird of total federal government spending. Less than a decade after the close of the Second World War, Canada had apparently become a peacetime national security state. A MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?

The Korean War engendered an economic boom in which government defence orders stimulated the economy. Military spending was Keynesian pump-priming acceptable to business and other conservative interests, even though Keynesian welfare expenditures called forth diatribes against government profligacy from these same quarters. Military Keynesianism also tended to reconcile workers to the national security state by providing jobs. In the United States, the Cold War performed a crucial ideological function by providing a discourse of patriotism and anti-Communism to legitimate the diminution of class conflict and the continued hegemony of business. Others have gone farther and identified a 'military-industrial complex' (the phrase is actually from President Eisenhower's farewell address in 1960), that fattened upon the Cold War. In this view, a bloated military and a highly protected and privileged defence industry fed upon the promotion of the Soviet threat. Some have gone farther yet and identified this complex as the cause of the Cold War, finding naked economic self-aggrandizement at the base of high-flown rhetoric about the defence of freedom. How far this explains American behaviour in this era is a question beyond the scope of this book. But we can address the issue of whether the concept of a 'military-industrial complex' helps to explain the dynamics that drew Canada into the Cold War. The evidence for such a theory turns out to be weak. The role of the military in policy making in Ottawa was not unimportant, but it was rarely decisive. Even on those occasions when the military intervened to press their point of view upon the politicians and bureaucrats, it is highly unlikely that they changed the course of history. For instance, the role of General Foulkes in pushing the Tories into NORAD in 1957-8 has been recounted here. Yet, however questionable Foulkes's conduct from the point of view of responsible government, it would be doubtful in the extreme that Canada would otherwise not have entered into the NORAD agreement - or even that the Liberals would not have done so if they had continued in office. At most, the military may have pushed the government a little faster than it would otherwise have gone, but the destination was the same. Nor did the Canadian military have the kind of independent prestige that the U.S. officer coips has traditionally enjoyed. There were no generals like Eisenhower elected prime minister, and there were no generals like MacArthur who could chal-

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lenge a prime minister publicly and threaten the government.36 Perhaps this was inevitable, considering the Canadian generals' modest status relative to the generals commanding the armed forces of the senior military partner, first Britain, then the United States. Canadian military men never became folk heroes for ordinary Canadians in the way that Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, or Douglas MacArthur became heroes in America. Consequently the armed forces did not bring a great deal of charisma and clout to the counsels of government. As for the other side of the military-industrial complex, business saw opportunities in a burgeoning defence sector and some industrialists took advantage of them. So did the 'Government party': the Liberals assiduously sought out defence contractors and insisted upon a contribution to the party's campaign fund based on a percentage of their government business.37 At the same time, government acted to limit - although not to remove - the capacity of private contractors to lobby for purchases of specific weapons systems, equipment, or parts by creating the Canadian Commercial Corporation, an arm's-length purchasing agent for all defence procurement that operated strictly on a tender basis. This arrangement made it more difficult, although not impossible, for Canadian producers to play the Washington lobby game: pushing particular weapons to the individual services, which would then lobby for acceptance by the defence secretary. In any event, Canadian producers tended to lack the capacity to develop and sell large weapons systems, but were instead more attuned to plugging into existing programs, usually developed by American producers. In the United States, defence lobbying went well beyond selling particular weapons. The defence industries were also major lobbyists, directly or indirectly, for the entire package of aggressive Cold War policies initiated in the late 1940s. Behind the scare stories of the Soviet threat and the Communist menace one could often find the inspiration of businesses with more than a passing interest in a huge defence budget. American policy makers in the state sector were lobbied extensively by such interests on behalf of Cold War foreign- and defence-policy agendas. Interservice rivalries over appropriations, abetted by particular interests, helped to intensify a spiralling arms race. In the Canadian case, there is some evidence of organized lobbying by the defence sector. The blue-chip Canadian Industrial Preparedness Association (CIPA) was formed in 1947 to represent the pro-Cold War position before government and the public. By the first year of the Korean War, CIPA membership had increased sixfold to more than 300 executives. CIPA's message of anti-Communism and the need for a warfare (as opposed to a welfare) state fed upon the earlier efforts of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce to spread the gospel of free enterprise through a nationwide propaganda campaign featuring a pamphlet authored by the anti-Communist crusader Watson Kirkconnell, accompanied by tub-thumping Cold War speeches around the service-club rubber-chicken circuit. These campaigns may have had some impact in pushing the government towards more repressive domestic Cold

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War policies, especially in immigration controls and in the consideration of tougher anti-Communist legal controls,38 but when one looks for evidence of direct impact upon foreign and defence policy the pickings are surprisingly meagre. The crucial decisions linking Canada to the Western defence alliance, from North American air defence to NATO to the Korean War intervention, were not taken at the behest of powerful private interests. The Canadian state acted relatively autonomously in these policy fields in relation to domestic capital. Much more significant as an influence upon decision makers was the external environment, especially the enormous resonance of American decisions and American policy directions. Thus, the concept of a military-industrial complex is of only limited use as an explanatory factor for Canada's military entry into the Cold War.39 There is a paradox in this: the Canadian state was less dependent upon domestic capital because it was more dependent upon an external power. Relatively autonomous in the domestic sense, the Canadian state was inextricably dependent in the national sense. Many specific benefits did accrue to those corporations that were able to adjust their interests profitably to the dominant Cold War ideology. This was sometimes at the expense of other competitors, other sectors of capital, and labour. All this can be illustrated by the phenomenon of 'strategic stockpiling,' which began in the late 1940s and became an important factor in the organization of particular sectors of North American business.40 The theory was that the threat of war or indeed even competition with the USSR required the stockpiling of 'strategic' materials. The theory was enunciated in the Paley Report, commissioned by President Truman and released in 1952, which advised that the U.S. government should aggressively seek self-sufficiency in raw materials and energy. The result was to downplay the impact of market forces on resource sectors to allow for government-subsidized production and stockpiling that could not be rationalized on the basis of market demand. This strong state-led resource strategy had very striking implications for Canada, a resource-exporting hinterland to the industrial United States. Its effect was sharply to accelerate the traditional Canadian emphasis upon a staples-resource export economy and to arrest further the development of indigenous Canadian industry. As Melissa Clark-Jones has shown in detail, the stockpiling policy had the clear effect of strengthening large capital at the expense of smaller business, since it was the giant multinational corporations that could reap maximum advantage from the policy (and indeed had contributed most to its framing). Moreover, stockpiling greatly strengthened the hand of the companies against their trade unions: it was easier to win strikes and weaken the unions when the companies were sitting on huge surpluses underwritten by government. In short, those sectors of big business that were able to cash in on the Cold War not only enhanced their own profits but strengthened their position relative to their class rivals - all in the name of patriotism and the national interest. This at least was the case for American capital. For Canada the matter is rather more complex. The specific self-interest of some big businesses was certainly served by stockpiling. But this had perverse effects

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upon the Canadian economy as a whole, serving to strengthen dependency and a deformed pattern of development. The Cold War neither initiated nor concluded the long process that led from the protectionist National Policy of the late nineteenth century to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1988. But at a key historical moment in the integration of Canada as a subordinate part of the American economy, it offered a language that legitimated the placing of private self-interest in profits above the interests of national sovereignty. The irony is that it was precisely the goal of national autonomy that drove the Americans to adopt stockpiling policies in the first place. But the Cold War meant different things to the senior and junior partners. IN SEARCH OF THE ELUSIVE DEFENCE SPIN-OFFS

One persuasive argument about the effects of the swollen Cold War defence budgets in postwar America has been that they have assisted in bringing about relative social and political stability. Military Keynesianism stabilized the economy, helped provide relatively high employment levels, and reduced the potential for domestic conflict over the allocation of resources. Specifically, two forms of conflict were reasonably well contained. Class conflict, especially the clash of capital and labour over profits and wages, was moderated and managed within a framework of defence-related jobs and a patriotic ideology of anti-Communist Americanism that inspired workers as much as bosses. Regional conflict within American federalism has also been managed by judicious applications of defence appropriations to various regions of the country. The pot of dollars has remained high enough over four decades to allow for considerable regional redistribution and regional industrial development around local defence industries. President Eisenhower even gained congressional approval for the multibillion-dollar U.S. national highways system by selling it as a national-defence scheme. Some critics of the arms race have hypothesized that a major function of the Cold War was to hold the diverse and often conflictual elements of both the American and Soviet states together.* The balance sheet for Canada is once again more mixed than that for the United States. Certainly Canadian workers welcomed the jobs stemming from the defence budget. There were, however, not as many of these as there were in the U.S., given that defence spending here did not generate the same degree of research and development and industrial production. To the extent that it did stimulate resource exports to the U.S., the connection of resource-sector jobs to the Cold War was indirect rather than immediate. While the ideology, so powerful an instrument for integrating the working class into the American Dream, did have some echoes in Canada, they were more diffuse and less compelling than in the States. In America, the Cold War simply gave a contemporary language to American nationalism, always a potent *The Soviet state at least has confirmed this theory by its collapse following the end of the Cold War.

154 Canada in a Cold War World force. In Canada, the message was more mixed and even contradictory. Canadian nationalism might even be seen as anti-American and thus subversive of Cold War solidarity (and indeed was often labelled as such by right-wingers within the Canadian trade-union movement). Not surprisingly, then, the integration of the working class did not proceed as smoothly as in the United States, as reflected in more internal political conflicts within the trade-union movement and less enthusiasm on the part of Canadian organized labour for the aggressive prosecution of the Cold War abroad and a defence-driven economy at home. Canadian workers were seemingly more concerned about building a welfare state than a warfare state. The regional pork-barrel effects of defence spending were similarly mixed. Canada, like the United States, is a federation covering a large territory with diverse regional economies and uneven development. By the time of the Korean War, when defence was accounting for one in three federal government dollars spent, the potential for using this money to counteract regional disparities was great. James Bickerton has published an illuminating study of regional development in Nova Scotia that addresses the regional effects of the Korean War defence boom on that chronically depressed province. Bickerton points out that defence spending precluded and substituted for rational equalization or regional-development assistance policies. During the 1950s, defence spending in the Atlantic provinces grew by more than 100 per cent, and in Nova Scotia, where most of this growth occurred, defence-sector salaries and wages were 10 per cent of personal income (as opposed to 2.5 per cent in Canada as a whole). Yet more than 90 per cent of the value of equipment purchases went to the industrial heartland of Ontario and Quebec, and less than 5 per cent to the Atlantic provinces. In other words, while defence spending did contribute to employment in the region, 'the federal government's purchasing power was not used to provide any significant boost to the region's industrial base.'41 What was true for Canada in relation to the United States was thus true for the Maritimes in relation to central Canada! Even in the halcyon days of big spending in the early 1950s, there was not enough money to bring about real regional development. But the very size of the defence budget acted as a barrier to enacting policies designed for the special needs of depressed regions. There was thus no replication of the American model under which regional development was, and still is, largely funded out of defence dollars. There was another major way in which Canada diverged from the American Cold War path. By the mid-1950s, with the armistice in Korea and the decline of tensions in Europe following the death of Stalin, external reasons for maintaining high spending on defence were less compelling. In the United States the combination of America's assumption of the role of world policeman and the internal dynamic of Pentagon capitalism acted as a ratchet to keep defence spending high; after Korea a levelling off in the later 1950s was followed by a sharp increase in the early 1960s. There was neither the will nor the means in Canada to sustain the levels of spending reached in the Korean War era. The Liberals in the mid-1950s and the Conserva-

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lives after their victory at the polls in 1957 and the onset of a major recession the same year were both determined to reduce a defence budget they knew the country simply could not afford. In fact, from the late 1950s on, the proportion of the federal budget devoted to defence declined sharply. It was at this time that the federal government began to move directly into regional economic development programs, filling the void created by the winding down of defence spending. In the mid-1960s, a Liberal government under Lester Pearson took advantage of a renewed period of economic growth to greatly expand social services, especially medicare and pensions. Expenditures on health and welfare replaced defence as the largest component of the federal budget and have retained this position ever since. The same Liberal government carried out the unification of the armed services against considerable opposition from the military. In short, the welfare state decisively won out over the warfare state. This outcome casts an ironic light upon the 'military-industrial complex' thesis as applied to Canada. If such a complex existed, it was not particularly successful at sustaining its privileges. 'SHUTTING DOWN THE NATIONAL DREAM'

The saga of the Avro Arrow jet fighter closed the first postwar decade of Canadian defence policy and practice. The Arrow story has subsequently taken on the dimensions of a great Canadian tragedy, lamented in articles, books, videos, and even a play as an example of everything that has doomed Canadian industry to an underdeveloped and secondary position in the world. In the title of the most recent account, the termination of the project was Shutting Down the National Dream.42 An earlier book, alluding to an alleged conspiracy to rewrite history, was ironically entitled There Never Was an Arrow.43 The memory of the Arrow is now encrusted in myth. But the historical record is more ambiguous than the legend. The Arrow was an unusual, if not unique, Canadian product: a sophisticated hightechnology jet aircraft interceptor based on Canadian research and development, to be produced by Canadian workers in Canadian plants, with world-class capabilities and export potential. The government committed itself to giving financial support to the project, based at the A.V. Roe plant in Toronto, and to making the Arrow (or CF105) the centrepiece of Canadian air defence against the threat of Soviet bombers. The problems were many. Among them was the sharply escalating cost of the project, which was described at a 1955 cabinet meeting as 'frightening.' The ministers foresaw the day when it 'might have to be admitted that the cost of adequate air defence was more than Canada could bear.' Even the testing of the aircraft involved large expenditures of tax dollars before it could be determined if it was operational. And at the end of the road there was the prospect of getting caught in the technological treadmill of the arms race: new weapons systems were scarcely in operation before they had been rendered obsolete or obsolescent in the face of yet more advanced competition. Could Canada compete in this league?

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Another concern was the dawning realization of government officials that the technical capabilities of the Arrow were strangely beside the point when it came to export orders. The Americans declined to get involved in the project, even though they had nothing comparable at the time on their own drawing boards. The reason was simple: in the words of the U.S. secretary of the air force, 'it would be impossible for the U.S. government to participate in developing it, or to commit themselves to buy it, because of the strong influence of the U.S. aircraft industry in Washington.' 44 Similar information came from Britain and other NATO countries. The chilling truth, ministers realized, was that 'we could not expect the U.S. and U.K. to adopt a Canadian plane rather than develop one of this importance themselves.'45 Canada could hardly afford to underwrite an extremely expensive venture at the cutting edge of military technology if the Canadian armed forces were to be the sole customer. At the same time, the domestic consequences of cancelling the project were severe. A.V. Roe and Orenda Engines (which was developing the craft's turbojet engine) told senior Tory cabinet ministers flatly in late 1957 that 'they were almost entirely dependent on defence contracts for their operation.' If the Arrow were to be cancelled, the companies would go into liquidation. This would involve layoffs of thousands of workers at a time when a general recession was taking hold of the North American economy. By the spring of 1958 almost a quarter of a billion dollars would have been spent on a plane that had not yet flown. The Tones' dilemma was intense: should they throw good money after bad or should they call a halt, cut their losses, and brave the consequences? In light of later criticism of their decision in early 1959 to cancel the project, it is only fair to record that their Liberal predecessors had had considerable doubts themselves. C.D. Howe, the Liberals' former industrial czar, privately admitted that if his party had remained in office it would probably have taken the same decision as its successor.46 In the event, the project was cancelled, the plants were closed, and thousands of jobs were lost. Prototypes were scrapped and even the plans were destroyed (There never was an Arrow!'). Canada's career as an independent producer of military technology came to an abrupt halt. The same year Canada and the United States entered into the Defence Production Sharing Agreement. Under this scheme, a continental market in defence products was established. This has had the intended effect of concentrating the Canadian defence industries on the production of specialized parts for export, mainly to the United States. The Canadian armed forces purchase most of their equipment and weapons systems from American sources, while at the same time the United States is the largest market for Canadian defence products.47 Whether the Arrow could or should have been saved is an open question. The myth of the Arrow has quickened Canadian pride in the country's capacity to compete in the world, and deepened Canadian sadness that such a symbol of national excellence was strangled in its infancy. But myths are truths made larger than life. In reality, Canada could not have sustained a world role in advanced-weapons-systems

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research and development. In any event, would Canadian nationalists really have wished to spearhead Canadian industrial technology by a Cold War-driven war toy? By the late 1980s it had become all too apparent that American Pentagon capitalism had hampered American industry in its ability to compete with Japanese (and European) high technology, which has more often been driven by commercial rather than military markets. If the Arrow were indeed the 'national dream,' perhaps it was better it was shut down, before it became a national nightmare, a path of military rather than commercial research and development booby-trapped with endlessly escalating costs, all of it dependent upon continued Cold War competition. K E E P I N G US SAFE FROM T I G E R S ...

Canada never was invaded, or even attacked, during the entire duration of the Cold War era. Nor was Western Europe, where Canadian NATO forces were stationed. Perhaps, by these crude standards, Cold War defence policies and the American nuclear deterrent really did work. There were costs, of course: huge peacetime defence expenditures and the inexorable integration of the Canadian armed forces into overall American command or into alliances under American leadership. To defend itself against the threat of one superpower, Canada gave up some of its sovereignty to the other superpower. Was it worth the cost? This question cannot be answered without reference to the reader's own set of values and judgments about friends and enemies. But in light of more recent rereading of the history of the 1940s and 1950s, and in light of the collapse of Communism, the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, and finally the implosion of the Soviet Union itself at the dawn of the 1990s, a nagging doubt remains about the course followed by Canadian policy makers in the first postwar decade. The following story illustrates this doubt. A man is seen tearing up little bits of paper and throwing them from the window of a moving train, each time repeating: 'May this train be safe from tigers!' When questioned about what he is doing, the man responds that the procedure obviously works. After all, he points out, the train has never yet been attacked by tigers ...

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PART FOUR: THE COLD WAR IN OTTAWA

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7

Security Screening Civil Servants

T H E P R O B L E M : 'A T H O R O U G H N A T I O N A L H O U S E - C L E A N I N G ' 1

The Gouzenko affair brought home to Ottawa the insecurity of the age of espionage. For cabinet ministers and senior civil servants, perhaps the most distressing aspect of the affair was not so much the revelation of Soviet duplicity (which most of them had always suspected anyway) but the betrayal of trust by public servants. The civil servant was expected to be a servant, dutiful and subordinate. Moreover, there was an Ottawa obsession with secrecy; the business of government was to be done quietly and anonymously.2 The royal commission that investigated the Gouzenko charges shattered this myth of the civil service. In the wake of the commission's report, the question was how to set about recreating the conditions of the original ethos, this time on an enforceable basis. The recommendations of the royal commission stressed the federal government's failure to 'prevent unauthorized transmission of information.' Ottawa was urged to 'take such steps as may be considered desirable' to prevent such events from recurring; specifically, the commission recommended that 'consideration be given to any additional security measures which might be practical to prevent the infiltration into positions of trust under the Government of persons likely to commit acts such as those described in this Report,' and 'that all security measures should be co-ordinated and rendered as uniform as possible.'3 This was to be one royal commission whose recommendations were followed closely. Some right-wing newspapers took the opportunity to demand a 'thorough national house-cleaning' of disloyal persons and opinions, with 'pinks and leftists' who 'do not accept the basic political ideology of the Canadian people' barred from the public service. The leader of the Social Credit party in the House of Commons, essaying a style later perfected by Senator McCarthy in the United States, charged that the government service 'has been shot through and through with Communist party sympathizers,' adding that the Liberal government was responsible for the

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'vast spy rings,' since 'there seems to have been very little difficulty for Communists and other of very doubtful loyalties to secure highly important and key positions in the government service.' Solon Low's answer was to allow the RCMP to 'take off their gloves' and for the Commons to select a 'continuing watchdog committee on subversive activities' similar to the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. An Ottawa newspaper reported that in the wake of the commission's report and Low's charges, a 'purge of Communist party members and avowed sympathizers "of doubtful loyalty" from the civil service' would soon get under way.4 The stage seemed set for a witch-hunt. Within the year, the Truman administration in Washington initiated its Loyalty-Security Program, under which all federal employees, military personnel, and employees in defence-related industries would be tested for membership in or 'sympathetic association' with a list of so-called subversive organizations. Those who failed the test would be dismissed. State and municipal governments followed with similar programs. All in all, it is estimated that at least 13.5 million Americans fell under these programs5 - a number roughly equivalent to the entire population of Canada in this period. Communism was equated with disloyalty, and a reign of terror ensued for Americans suspected of being too left wing. T H E P O L I C Y : 'A D I F F I C U L T A N D D E L I C A T E T A S K '

The Liberal government in Ottawa proceeded in a rather different manner. The Vancouver Sun perhaps came closest to reflecting Liberal intentions when it suggested casting a 'leery' look at public investigations and legal prohibitions against Communists or Communist sympathizers. The question, the Sun concluded significantly, 'should be one of government policy rather than statute.'6 Canada, as usual, looked to British precedents. Norman Robertson, under-secretary of state for external affairs, after examining British security procedures, recommended a single interdepartmental body in Ottawa to perform the tasks of coordination and control of internal security. This body, Robertson urged, should be housed under the auspices of the Privy Council Office, chaired by the secretary to the cabinet, with permanent representation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the RCMP, and External Affairs. This model was very much one of civilian control of security, closely tied to the cabinet. There was one other model put forward. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had a more elaborate plan for combining external intelligence gathering and domestic counter-espionage and security under military coordination. Both proposals went before the cabinet defence committee, where Robertson's British-style model was judged more acceptable. One effect of this decision was that henceforth domestic security was administratively separated from external intelligence gathering, which in Canada was to be pretty much restricted to Defence Intelligence. In May of 1946, the defence committee recommended the establishment of an advisory Security Panel under the chairmanship of cabinet secretary (or clerk of the

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Privy Council) Arnold Heeney, with a permanent secretary to be drawn from the armed forces. The terms of reference for this panel were 'to advise on the co-ordination of the planning, organization and execution of security measures which affect government departments, and to advise on other such security measures as may be referred to it.'7 The panel was specifically created as an advisory and coordinating, rather than an executive body. The cabinet, as was proper under a system of responsible parliamentary government, would be the policy-making body in this area. The Security Panel would offer general advice to the cabinet when asked, but most of its attention was to be devoted to advising individual government departments on detailed security matters. The most sensitive question for the panel, which began meeting in the summer of 1946, was clearly that of security clearances for employees. This 'subject is one which is likely to cause considerable public feeling if it becomes known that the government has laid down, as a matter of policy, that persons in certain categories should be vetted.' The idea of a secret police that inquired into the personal associations and past histories of civil servants was, of course, bound to be controversial. To carry out this task the government inevitably turned to the RCMP. The force's Special Branch (later called the Security Service) had grown dramatically during the war and had experience in making the kind of enquiries the government expected. It had also amassed useful dossiers on individuals and organizations that it believed to be subversive, particularly on left-wing groups.8 Especially appealing to the government was the almost reverential respect accorded to the Mounties by the Canadian people. If the Cold War demanded a secret police to compile dossiers on Canadian citizens, no body was likely to attract less criticism in the process than the RCMP. Security screening of public servants had been going on for some time under RCMP auspices,9 but it had not been systematically organized from the top. As Gouzenko showed, existing screening had been ineffectual in preventing spies from penetrating the bureaucracy. The Security Panel set about to systematize the process. Individual departments would send requests for clearances on individual employees or applicants for employment to the RCMP. The latter would investigate and then pass a security report to the department for evaluation. The principle that the final responsibility for determining the desirability of employing personnel should rest with the department itself was affirmed. 10 This merely skirted the real problem. Each department was required to designate a security officer. But these officials were not particularly well qualified to evaluate or interpret the information gathered by the RCMP. Someone had to make a decision on whether the information amassed presented a convincing case that an employee constituted a 'risk.' Of course, the very fact that it was the police who decided what constituted 'fact' and how the facts fitted together already directed considerable power over the careers of civil servants into their hands. The police would not only gather information, but would themselves evaluate it and, in effect, make de facto recommendations on whether individuals were security risks.

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In late 1946, the panel prepared a draft document for the consideration of cabinet. Two types of report might be requested: a simple check of the civil servant's name, and of close relatives, against the RCMP files (its 'subversive indices,' as it called them); or a full-scale 'field' investigation for 'top secret' positions, usually involving direct interviews with former employers, associates, and neighbours. With an eye to minimizing unwanted publicity, the panel also recommended that 'wherever possible, arrangements be made for the vetting of personnel before they are posted to a position of trust and, where necessary, they be employed temporarily upon work of an un-classified nature.' The recommendations were sent to the prime minister with an accompanying caution from Arnold Heeney that the problem 'is an exceedingly delicate and difficult one' to which the panel had addressed 'reasonably satisfactory' proposals. Heeney added that the aim was to meet the concerns of the Gouzenko report while at the same time avoiding 'any system which would be capable of improper application or anything in the nature of victimization.' Heeney thus expressed a concern for the rights of the individual employee that was not uncharacteristic of the civilian members of the Security Panel. The cabinet accepted the panel's report without change. 11 Not all members of the Security Panel were as liberal or as publicly reticent as the civilians. Commissioner S.T. Wood of the RCMP told an Ottawa newspaper in early 1946 that a 'purge' of the civil service 'parallel to that now ordered in the United States by President Truman' had already been initiated by 'special RCMP investigators.' 'Communists, persons of doubtful loyalty and fellow travellers' had been barred, and a 'number of persons with Communist leanings or associations, quietly resigned their posts' following the royal commission report, 'thus facilitating a widespread "weeding-out" process.' Moreover, civil servants were themselves asked to assist the hunt by 'constant vigilance of their office associates.'12 This story, which appeared in a newspaper read by many Ottawa civil servants, contained all the elements characteristic of the witch-hunt already descending on Washington, even the appeal to employees to report on the opinions of their fellow workers. Not surprisingly, public comments like that of Commissioner Wood drew the attention of opposition members in the House of Commons. The cabinet decided that references to 'vetting' of personnel in a booklet on security prepared by the panel should be deleted and 'not used in any government document on the subject,' presumably because of the alarm such a term might spread. The ministers approved a statement that '"National loyalty" is an aspect of security and it is not considered possible or desirable to establish any rigid criteria for testing loyalty in this sense.' It was central to the American system - called the American Loyalty-Security Program - that loyalty and security were double criteria of suitability. That is to say, employees might be compelled to prove their loyalty to the state. The Security Panel and interdepartmental discussions had concluded that the American loyalty criterion was 'objectionable on grounds of principle.' The Liberal cabinet did not want loyalty tests, and it certainly did not want to have specific criteria for loyalty put on

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public record.13 On the other hand, the ministers were uneasily aware that it was the divided loyalties of the civil servants in the Gouzenko affair that had led them to pass on Canadian secrets. The Security Panel now set about the 'difficult and delicate task' of drafting for the approval of cabinet a set of firm guidelines for uniform treatment of security enquiries. Even as they were at work, however, the cabinet itself was faced with decisions that set certain precedents: some of the civil servants named in the royal commission had by now been acquitted in court proceedings. What was to be done about their employment status? Of six employees charged and subsequently acquitted, five had their employment terminated, and one (who was clearly innocent) was allowed to return. 14 Thus the principle that a government job is not a right but a privilege that may be revoked for raisons d'etat was affirmed emphatically. Acquittal in the courts on charges of espionage did not entitle any of the former employees to reinstatement. In the course of drafting guidelines for the government, the Security Panel became uneasily aware of a basic contradiction. There was pressure to widen the number of jobs requiring clearance because departments tried to be as broad as possible in defining sensitive or vulnerable positions to avoid responsibility for security leaks. But the RCMP, despite its public enthusiasm for cleaning the stables, was already signalling that it could not handle the projected volume of requests for field checks. Asked to choose between a system that would call for security clearances for all government employees and one that would screen only those dealing with classified material, the Security Panel opted for the latter, but stated its belief that 'a security enquiry of all persons appointed to positions within the government is desirable as and when possible.'15 When the report appeared before cabinet, it was accompanied by a cautious admonition from Heeney to the prime minister that as chairman of the panel he was 'not altogether satisfied with the result', but that the proposals represented 'the least objectionable policy that can be devised at present with any prospect of practical application.' Indeed, when the full cabinet finally discussed the question in 1947, almost a year's consideration by top civil servants and cabinet ministers lay behind the new policy.16 Nobody could say that the most careful consideration had not been given to the matter. The secret cabinet directive on security investigation of government employees opened with a statement that appeared to establish a conscious distance between Canada and what was currently happening in the United States. 'The establishment of precise and rigid standards for determining the "loyalty" of government employees, along the lines adopted in the United States, is open to serious objection on grounds of principle and would not in fact ensure that only individuals reliable from the security standpoint are employed in the government services.' Demonstrating a firm sense of realism, the directive declared flatly that 'no system of security investigation which can be devised can provide a sure guarantee against unreliable ele-

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ments,' and to rub the point in, added in a footnote: 'it is open to question whether the activities of any persons named by the recent Royal Commission would have been discovered by any conceivable system of "screening."'17 'Nevertheless,' the directive went on, 'it is important to make certain that the maximum care is taken to ensure that government employees are completely trustworthy. Those who serve the State should be loyal to the State, and complete reliability from a security standpoint is a fundamental aspect of loyalty.' If the deputy head of a department were apprised of 'reasonable grounds for concluding that an applicant or employee in his department is unreliable ... he should be refused employment, or, if already employed, he should be either transferred to a position in which he has no access to material of a confidential nature or dismissed.' This was itself an important modification of American, although not of British, practice, and indicated that simple doubts about loyalty, as such, were not necessarily grounds for dismissal. Very importantly, the directive did state that the government, 'if required to state reasons for transfers or dismissals, should explain their actions on grounds of personal unsuitability rather than on grounds of "security."' This was a distinctive characteristic of the Canadian system. In the United States and Britain, those who lost their security clearances - or, in the American case, those judged to be disloyal were told what had happened to them, and sometimes had recourse to a form of independent review or appeal. Civil servants in Canada who were judged personally unsuitable for a post had no right of independent review of the decision. The only appeal was to the deputy minister of the department in question. Since it was the deputy minister who also was responsible for the decision to deny a security clearance, any appeal of the decision was scarcely to an independent arbiter. This procedure would appear to qualify the Canadian system as more illiberal than the American or British systems. The question, however, has two very different aspects, and any judgment must be qualified. On the negative side, an employee had no rights. Moreover, the denial of security clearances under the cover of 'unsuitability' was clearly, and consciously, an attempt to protect sources of information and the RCMP and its methods from scrutiny. On the positive side, the government clearly wished, by avoiding public notice, to minimize the kind of politicization of security issues that led to the nightmare of McCarthyism in the United States. Theoretically, under the Canadian system an employee could be denied a security clearance without ever being 'named' and thus coming to the attention of potential witchhunters in the public arena, and without jeopardizing future employment prospects elsewhere. The principle is obviously one of some complexity and ambiguity. If questions were raised in the Commons, as seemed likely, the directive provided ministers with a kind of model answer with which to deflect opposition: The government are acutely aware of the problem and are discharging their responsibility to ensure the safety of the State without interfering with the traditional principles of just treatment. In the government's view, loyalty is not susceptible to any precise

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series of tests and, after mature consideration, it has been decided not to set up an elaborate organization to determine and adjudicate upon the loyalty of government employees. Rather it is the conclusion of the government that loyalty is an aspect of efficient public administration and it should be so regarded.' The directive also laid down some specific procedures for launching the security system. First, four government departments or offices and six government agencies* were declared 'vulnerable,' thus making all their employees subject to security screening, 'bearing in mind the limited administrative facilities' of the RCMP. The RCMP was designated as the sole agent to undertake enquiries, except in the armed services, where Defence Intelligence would also be involved. Other departments and agencies would have to classify sections and positions as to vulnerability. Everyone having access to material of a Top Secret' or 'Secret' classification would undergo a field check, while those with access to 'Confidential' or 'Restricted' material would have file checks run on them. All candidates for employment in vulnerable departments would require full investigations, as would candidates for other departments, depending upon the RCMP's capacity. A questionnaire was prepared for all civil servants requiring clearance. This questionnaire did not probe personal political beliefs or political associations but did enquire into the names of immediate relatives.18 Once the information was supplied, the RCMP could begin systematic work, whether by simple file check or by more extensive field investigation, as circumstances required. One question that caused dissension within the cabinet itself was whether Communists should be dismissed from public employment. The Liberals in the end baulked at outright dismissal of permanent civil servants. Instead they opted for a British-style model whereby 'persons who were members of or associated with the Communist party should not be employed by the government in positions of trust or upon work of a confidential character' (fascists were also thrown in for balance); this policy was officially announced in Parliament. 19 Applicants for a civil service position who fell afoul of the screening process would not be hired; those, however, who already had positions would not be dismissed, but simply kept out of jobs requiring a security clearance. There were a number of reasons for this compromise. The Liberal government had no intention of encouraging a witch hunt within its own bureaucracy. At the same time the government was clearly averse to any proceeding against a permanent civil servant that might end up in the courts in a wrongful-dismissal suit, where the Crown might be obliged to provide evidence to substantiate its actions against its employee and even face cross-examination about its sources of information. The protection of sources for security reports was, to both the RCMP and the government, sacrosanct. *The Prime Minister's Office, the Privy Council Office, External Affairs, and National Defence (including the entire armed forces and the Defence Research Board), Atomic Energy, Eldorado Mining, the National Research Council, Canadian Arsenals, the Canadian Commercial Corporation, and the RCMP.

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Association with Communism had become very unhealthy for any state employee. But what exactly constituted Communist associations? In the United States, the Loyalty-Security Program involved the preparation of an 'Attorney General's List' of 'subversive' organizations. When first published in 1948, it contained the names of seventy-eight separate groups. Among other things, this list constituted a guideline for detecting 'disloyal' public servants. The Attorney General's List was in violation of the tenets of liberal democracy (and was eventually abandoned after court challenges), but at least it offered a public reference. The same sort of process was at work in the Canadian security system, but the 'listing' was done secretly so that nobody outside of the RCMP and some top public servants could do more than guess at what was considered to be a Communist front organization. Once again, a peculiar and convoluted mixture of motives was involved. On the one hand, civil servants' careers could stand or fall on the basis of private associations that were legal and legitimate, and those whose careers were adversely affected might have no knowledge of which association had brought about their misfortune, and thus have no means of appealing against the judgment. On the other hand, the very secrecy in which the process was shrouded minimized the public damage to the organizations that were considered 'fronts' by the security officials. In the United States the organizations named in the Attorney General's List suffered public discredit by official condemnation; the climate of fear extended inevitably to liberal or mildly progressive organizations in general. The Canadian way is rather more difficult to judge. There might be no Attorney General's List, as such, in Canada, but public servants were in no doubt about the fact that Communism was being officially proscribed. In the fall of 1948 the Cold War erupted within one of the major publicservice staff associations. The Civil Service Association of Ottawa (CSAO) passed a resolution that no person with 'Communist affiliations, past, present or in the future [!], be allowed to hold office in the executive of the association.' The executive also called upon its members to 'expose any evidence of Communism which may come to their attention' and initiated an educational program to warn about the dangers of Communist infiltration, including the distribution of a booklet entitled 'How Communists Operate.' These actions were taken after what was described in the press as a heavily attended and very 'bitter' debate of the CSAO Council. No one was actually expelled from the executive as a result of this resolution, but many members were reported to be indignant that their leaders were indulging in 'Red smears' to divert attention from the membership's economic demands. One member insisted that 'it is not our role to be a sort of Gestapo policing each other. Surely the Department of Justice and the RCMP can be depended upon to find Reds, if any.' Indeed, the rank-and-file outcry against a witch-hunt seems to have been sufficiently strong that the CSAO subsequently dropped the entire issue.20 On the other side of the question, the Ottawa Civil Liberties Association, which included civil servants among its membership, deplored the fact that secret files on civil servants' political opinions were being amassed. The existence of unspecified

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standards, determined in secret, which play a part in deciding the appointment, advancement or dismissal of federal public servants in Canada could be regarded as a serious weakness in the ... system.' 21 But the various civil-service associations (forerunners of today's unions) did not challenge the government's encroachments upon the civil liberties of public employees. There was no effective collective bargaining at this time within the federal government, and civil 'servants' were used to having their political rights severely limited as a condition of their employment. No objection appears to have been raised, for example, against the lack of a proper appeal procedure for employees who were denied security clearance. And even liberal voices in the country largely accepted the idea that since a government job was a privilege rather than a right, there could be no valid objection to the investigation of employees' political opinions and associations. Saturday Night magazine, which had an honourable record in defence of civil liberties during the Second World War, reiterated more than once that civil-libertarian arguments raised against security screening in the public service could only come from Communists. 22 THE PROCESS: 'IF A N Y O N E CAN S U G G E S T A BETTER WAY OF D O I N G IT ...'

With the new system firmly in place, requests for security checks flooded in from the departments - in such numbers that it appeared that the RCMP was being seriously overloaded. The Mounties complained that they had projected a flow of 100 enquiries per day (a projection soon exceeded), on the assumption that 60 per cent would have required file checks only. In fact the proportions were reversed: 60 per cent of the enquiries turned out to involve field investigations, most of these demanding 'an enquiry into some angle of the person's history ... in the city of Ottawa.' 'To cope with the problem by detailing additional men,' the assistant commissioner noted with some political acuity, 'would add to the number of investigators working in Ottawa and might encourage criticism of the whole scheme.' The RCMP was in fact told to assign additional personnel to Ottawa, but overload of the system became a chronic complaint. 23 The RCMP, despite its complaints about workload, was itself active in pushing the boundaries of the process outward. Just as Commissioner Wood had hinted in his early press interviews, the Mounties would not rest content with passively filling screening requests. As the official historians of the security service have written, the police, working from their files, adopted the procedure of 'following leads,' a process that 'turned up suspects in many departments.' They cite two instances of employees terminated as a result, one at the National Research Council. It is interesting to note that the first leads as a result of such procedures were traced to the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, both cultural agencies with little or no access to classified information. 24 Field investigations inevitably gave rise to publicity. In the early fall of 1949, read-

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ers of Maclean's magazine were told that when Ottawa housewives heard knocks on their doors, it was equally likely to be the milkman or the RCMP checking on a neighbour. To carry out the field checks, Maclean's sneered, 'the RCMP has been able to devise no more subtle method than ringing back door bells to gather up gossip of the neighbourhood.' The Security Panel, the magazine went on, 'are rather red-faced, about the whole business, though, and hint broadly that the RCMP has been stupid in its way of handling the job. The RCMP, equally red-faced, retorts that if anyone can suggest a better way of doing it, with their present staff and funds, they'll be happy to accept the suggestion.' Moreover, deputy ministers were privately reporting that resentment among staff, 'though concealed,' was 'profound.' Maclean's also raised the problem of which organizations were considered 'dangerous': 'the RCMP has a list, it admits, "as long as your arm." But the list they are willing to identify publicly is no longer than your finger.' The magazine quite properly worried about the 'civil servant who learns that membership in certain organizations will put his job or his future in jeopardy, but who can't find out what these organizations are.' But as Maclean's noted, public servants could console themselves with the 'reflection that at least the Red hunt in Ottawa hasn't reached the hysterical pitch of Washington's.' 25 Another unsettling aspect of security clearances that the Security Panel seems not to have anticipated came to light when a report from the RCMP arrived on what had been done in the first three months of full operation of the new system. Checks had been run on 5,465 people (over 70 per cent field investigations) and 213 adverse reports had been returned. It turned out, however, that only 27 of the 213 actually represented security risks, as the Security Panel, and the cabinet, had understood the category. The remaining 90 per cent or so of the adverse reports were for what the RCMP considered possible 'moral' or 'character' lapses. The secretary of the panel, in a memorandum to Heeney that scarcely concealed his irritation, stated that he was 'not at all satisfied' that the RCMP was operating upon useful criteria for establishing loyalty. The RCMP had assumed that 'anything in a person's record which could be considered a mark against him' constituted reason for an adverse report. But many of the RCMP criteria had 'no connection whatever with the purpose for which the loyalty checks were instituted.' A glance at some of these reports had yielded some alarming evidence of self-righteous moralism on the part of the police: 'one adverse report is based on the fact that an unfortunate, young unmarried woman had a baby during the war years, another young man was prosecuted for non-payment of a debt when unemployed during the depression.' The panel was warned about the 'dangerous implications' of a reaction 'if it became known that a procedure authorized by the government to check on a person's "loyalty" was, in fact, being used to report to deputy ministers every minor fall from grace of employees, both before and since they entered the government service.' To avoid a 'distorted picture,' a system had to be devised to differentiate between genuine security risks and 'merely minor infringers of our moral or criminal code.' The RCMP list came back amended with little red pencil marks beside the 'politicals.' 26

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Yet for all their evident distaste for the RCMP's modus operandi, the civilian members of the Security Panel could not deny that such non-political information might be at least potentially pertinent to determining security risks. The logic of a comprehensive security system was inexorable: people with something to hide in their past, with something to be ashamed of, could be potential targets for blackmail. A compromise with the RCMP was worked out, and thus was born the system of three different reports on security checks. A white form reported 'negative' results that is, nothing adverse could be found. A yellow form reported that 'information at hand, although not bearing directly on security, may be considered to affect the suitability of this person for employment in the public service.' This was the code term for those who had experienced 'criminal or moral lapses.' Finally, there was the form that indicated evidence of subversion or disloyalty - inevitably, this came in pink. Despite misgivings, the Security Panel thus presided over the birth of a system that institutionalized anonymous informing upon the private lives and beliefs of civil servants, with the objects of this information to be given no opportunity to see the information upon which their careers could stand or fall, or even to be told of what they had been accused.27 Despite the RCMP's chronic complaints about overload, a comprehensive security system developed a dynamic of its own that had a way of mocking all qualms about its scope and impact. In the fall of 1950, the RCMP had to report to the panel that its backlog had grown 'unwieldy': 'there had been an increase of 400% in volume over the past two years, with the actual number of cases processed increasing from 9,000 in 1948 to 37,000 in 1950.' A year later, Privy Council official Gordon Robertson reported his understanding that the backlog on file checks alone had risen to the astonishing level of 67,000.28 It was not only internal pressures from inside the bureaucracy pushing to expand the system. As the Cold War deepened and as the mania over the threat of internal subversion grew more inflamed in the United States, American pressures on Canada to fall into line became more and more insistent. The close linkages with the American military in continental defence and integrated defence production, the strategic importance of the Canadian Arctic to American defence planning in the 1940s and 1950s, Canada's role in NATO, and its military participation in the Korean War were together drawing the Canadian government into a web of relationships in which security questions became as much a matter of international obligations as of the national interest alone. It was as a result of these external pressures that the government was reluctantly compelled to extend its internal security system into two areas of the private sector where it had never really wanted to venture: private defence contractors and the Great Lakes shipping industry. POLICING THE DEFENCE INDUSTRIES

The Canadian government was increasingly involved in contracting-out to the private

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sector for massive defence contracts. And Canada was increasingly integrated into continental defence production: by 1957 American defence procurement in Canada was worth $127 million. 29 A large number of workers with private companies would necessarily require access to highly classified material, and security screening would thus have to be extended to private corporations with defence-related contracts. As early as 1948 the Security Panel was informed by the Department of National Defence (DND) that U.S. classified information would be released to Canada only if the security of all civilians who might come in contact with the information could be guaranteed. The key role in translating American preoccupations into Canadian policies was played by the Canadian military. With continental defence integration, the Canadian armed forces became an increasingly vocal lobby from within for advancing American policy priorities - which were also more and more their own priorities. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the matter of internal security. The Canadian military, through DND and its own security-intelligence arm, became aggressive conduits for the security preoccupations of the U.S. 'hawks.' In the Security Panel, DND representatives kept up a constant bombardment on the civilian officials, and even upon the RCMP, demanding that Canada upgrade its security to meet U.S. requirements. They did not always win these battles, by any means. Most often DND's expansive vision of security requirements demanded an unacceptable commitment of resources. After one battle in 1952 was resolved in favour of the civilians, Jack Pickersgill, Heeney's successor as Security Panel chairman, issued a rebuke to the military: it was, he declared, a 'bad principle' to enunciate a policy which was too 'impractical' to be realized.30 Sometimes the Americans stepped directly into the conflict. If the Canadians could or would not maintain a screening program up to American standards, the United States threatened extraterritorial extension of its security program to cover either Americans employed in Canadian projects or Canadians employed on American defence installations on Canadian territory. These threats to Canadian sovereignty were resisted, but at a cost. Quotas were established for monthly file checks by the RCMP that reserved just under 80 per cent to DND and to defence-related industries. The price of retaining formal sovereignty in such matters was thus the importation of American-inspired priorities.31 Canadian regulations stipulated that all defence contracts awarded by the government were to contain provisions with respect to security (including screening of employees), breaches of which would constitute default by the contractor.32 The most pressing problem was what to do with employees who failed to gain clearance. It was one thing to develop procedures with regard to the government's own employees but employees, of defence contractors did not fall under federal civil-service rules. To make matters worse, they were more often than not organized in trade unions and could not be dealt with without touching upon collective agreements and employee grievance procedures. The Security Panel knew that this was a matter of considerable delicacy.

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The issue first became public in 1951 when A.V. Roe, the aircraft manufacturer, fired an employee without explanation on what proved to be security grounds. The press picked up the story, and a sympathetic Conservative MP raised the matter in the House of Commons. The government was clearly embarrassed by the company's behaviour and let it be known publicly that defence contractors ought to be more mindful of the effects of their actions. As journalist Blair Eraser commented: 'From now on, Ottawa will take particular care to make employers understand that when a man is excluded from secret work it does not mean he should be dismissed. Ottawa has no power to compel an employer to keep a man on, but many an employer prefers not to displease the government. And the government will be very displeased indeed if there is another burst of unfavourable publicity.' The Security Panel had already laid the policy groundwork. Seeking to avoid the excesses of McCarthyism in the workplace while setting appropriate security standards for the defence industries, the panel encouraged firms to transfer employees to non-classified work if security required it, thus smoothing matters over without publicity. In the event that transfer to a non-sensitive position proved impossible, consideration would be given to high-level consultation between the company and key government officials to see if dismissal could be avoided, and even to the possible appearance by the employee in question to discuss the negative information in his or her file.33 The security screening system also had to deal with workers who were members of unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), considered to be Communistdominated or Communist-led. When UE workers first fell afoul of the screening process, their union took the position that it was their union affiliation that constituted the basis of the security problem. A particular point of objection was the refusal of the company to provide reasons. In response to one UE complaint, C.D. Howe, as minister responsible, stated that the government had not 'accused' the employee in question of 'any particular action or misdeed,' but would not reverse the ruling. The government further commented that 'the entire foundation of security work would be destroyed if any attempt were made to lay down rules of thumb for the purpose of determining this business of access ... It must evolve from the exercise of discretion which may or may not be based upon any definable reasons. It certainly would be destroyed were the reasons to be disclosed; and it is certainly not the policy of the Government to do so.'34 One UE security-related grievance went to an arbitration board, which denied, in a split decision, that a transfer constituted 'discriminatory' treatment of a union member. The decision noted that if the company had not complied with the government's security instructions, the contract would have been terminated - resulting in the lay-off of a much larger number of workers. Faced with this, UE decided not to push the matter any further. In fact, it proceeded to sign a collective agreement with Canadian General Electric that included a clause specifically denying employees the right to utilize grievance procedures for the purpose of nullifying government

174 The Cold War in Ottawa instructions in matters of national security in defence contracts. Clearly, even this Communist-led union recognized that discretion was the better part of valour, given the realities of power and circumstance. For its part, the Security Panel viewed this as an 'interesting development' and a model for other, less left-wing, unions. 35 Another twist to the story of industrial screening was the case of immigrant workers. The government was growing increasingly concerned during the early 1950s about the security risk allegedly posed to Canada by 'aliens,' even those who had been naturalized as Canadian citizens. The group of workers most affected by this rule turned out to be those of British origin. There was a demand in the late 1940s and 1950s for skilled tradesmen from Britain, and many answered the call. At this time there was no security screening of British immigrants prior to entry or of British applicants for citizenship, given the pro-British bias of the immigration system. Many of these skilled workers ended up in defence industries where security screening identified a number as Communists or left-wing security risks. A good number of these men lost their jobs, and there is evidence that some were deported as well.36 RED SAILS IN THE SUNSET

The other major venture of government security into the private sector had far less rational justification than the screening of workers in defence plants. The extension of screening to seamen on the Great Lakes made so little sense that Canadian officials scarcely made an effort to find a plausible excuse, other than to point their fingers at the Americans, who were the real authors of this bizarre example of Cold War hysteria. There was some desultory talk that Communist seamen might somehow sabotage the lock system on the Great Lakes from their boats as they were passing through, but the RCMP and the marine experts in the Department of Transport could barely keep a straight face when discussing this 'threat.'37 More to the point, the Great Lakes had been a focal point in the late 1940s for one of the most violent and controversial international labour battles in Canadian history: the death struggle for jurisdiction between the Communist-led Canadian Seamen's Union (CSU) and the Seafarers' International Union (SIU) led by the notorious American strong arm organizer Hal Banks. This struggle is discussed at length later in this book. The war was already over in Canada, won by the SIU, when fear of alleged Communist activities among various maritime unions erupted on the American waterfront. The U.S. Magnuson Act of 1950 empowered the Coast Guard to screen all seamen and waterfront workers, including those on the Great Lakes. Immediately, attention turned to Canada.38 Screening was no more than another strong-arm organizing tactic on the part of the SIU. In fact the SIU practised its own direct screening with its notorious 'Do Not Ship' list, which effectively blacklisted seamen out of favour with the SlU-run hiring halls. By the time the Americans pushed Canada into de facto implementation of the Magnuson Act on Canadian soil, the Communist CSU was all but eradicated, so

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even that justification was quite thin. Yet when Banks complained to a U.S. senator that Canadian seamen were entering American ports unscreened, the pressures on Ottawa became irresistible.39 The government's official regulations were enacted in time for the 1951 shipping season. Interestingly, there was no apparent intention to extend these regulations to cover deep-sea vessels plying Canada's two coasts. If Canada had its own interest in such screening, it should equally have applied to all Canadian shipping. As the Security Panel frankly recognized, however, the real point was to establish procedures 'adequate to meet any future representations from the U.S. Government.'40 Since failure to obtain a clearance would mean loss of livelihood for a Great Lakes seaman, an appeals process was necessary. In a meeting with the US Coast Guard, Canadian officials learned that a formal appeals procedure in the United States was actually an integral part of the screening process, offering seamen with security problems the opportunity to clear themselves by 'naming names,' or turning informer on their fellows. The Canadians decided to proceed in a different fashion. An appeal was made possible to advisory review committees set up within the Department of Labour. Labour unions (other than those on the Great Lakes) were to be represented on these committees. The final decision would be made by the minister of labour. There was clearly no intention to use appeals as potential Americanstyle fishing expeditions for more names. Some cases were overturned upon appeal, but where any connection with Communism was established, appeals were denied.41 The way the system operated did not interfere with the SIU hiring hall, nor with the SIU's own infamous blacklist. Because of the effect of the SIU's own prescreening, the new screening process found few subjects worthy of its attention. By November 1952, just under 23,000 applications had been received in total, but only 15 (0.06 per cent) had been refused. By contrast, under the Magnuson Act 1,821 American seamen had lost their jobs by the end of 1952.42 The whole rather bizarre process demanded the services of three full-time Mounties during each shipping season, yet the Security Panel was convinced that 'from a Canadian viewpoint' the regulations ought to have been scrapped. Yet disengagement from the embrace of Uncle Sam proved easier said than done. Even with the relative waning of the security mania following the decline of McCarthyism in 1954, the Americans were unwilling to relent in their insistence upon this pointless exercise. When a general review of security policy was undertaken in 1957, the Security Panel learned that for the year 1956, 4,554 Great Lakes seamen had been screened by the RCMP, as compared to 16,621 checks run for defence industries.43 T H E P O N T E C O R V O EFFECT The defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951 was the beginning of a series of spectacular security scandals in Britain. There were no revelations of such high-level 'moles' in Canada. In this sense the Canadian screening

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system might seem to have worked. Yet there was also evidence of what might be called the Tontecorvo effect,' after Bruno Pontecorvo, an atomic scientist who had spent a number of years at the Chalk River atomic energy plant before joining the British atomic research project in 1949. In 1950 Pontecorvo fled to the Soviet Union, where he continued atomic research work. Although the Canadian security system devoted its efforts to keeping 'subversive' seamen from plying traffic on the Great Lakes, and to keeping 'subversive' film makers from shooting Canadian documentary films, it altogether failed to detect an authentic Soviet agent in the midst of a top-secret atomic research plant. Despite subsequent charges that Pontecorvo had not been subjected to screening, there is clear evidence that the screening process simply failed in this case.44 Yet in fairness to Canadian policy makers, the Pontecorvo effect was not unforeseen in the initial planning stages of the vetting system. Indeed, the original cabinet directive of 1948 had specifically asserted that no security system could provide a sure guarantee against betrayal. After all, any really dedicated Soviet agent would presumably do everything possible to avoid any of the tell-tale signs that the screening process looked for. The demands of counter-intelligence would no doubt take many forms, of which screening was a relatively routine and sometimes defective aspect. But in the context of the ideological struggle that was the Cold War, the official proscription of left-wing beliefs and associations and their identification with subversion and treason assumed a crucial significance in itself as an aspect of public policy. Perhaps the screening system was as much about setting examples as about catching spies. Seen as a struggle against subversion, the Canadian experience in security is not without contradictions. In its purest, American form, the attack on Communism was waged publicly and without quarter, resulting in the spread of what Caute has aptly called 'the Great Fear' through virtually every institution and level of American society. Canadian political and bureaucratic elites chose to minimize rather than maximize the public impact of the campaign against subversion. The Liberal approach sometimes seemed to diffuse rather than sharpen the Cold War imperative to delegitimate left-wing opinion. These conflicting currents may be glimpsed in an otherwise trivial incident about which the Security Panel was consulted in 1949. The director of personnel for the Department of Veterans Affairs became exercised over information that two temporary staff members at a veterans' hospital, a nurse and a clerk, had Communist affiliations. The secretary of the Security Panel drew up a memorandum, noted by Norman Robertson, to the effect that the individuals in question 'are not employed in positions where they have access to classified material, and the only question that arises is whether they might use their positions to try to indoctrinate persons with whom they are in daily contact.' The anxious director was informed that the 'interests of security might be served to best advantage by re-allocating the employees in question to duties which would not bring them into active contact with many veteran

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patients, and at the same time inform the RCM Police of action taken in order that they may keep their indices up-to-date.'45 What can one make of this? Obviously the security system was about more than catching potential spies. More than this - and less. What could possibly have roused such concern? Was it the awful prospect of a sick veteran being administered a thermometer by a Red nurse? Apart from a zealous concern to protect the government's public image and abstracted from the atmosphere of the time, the concern seems somewhat bizarre. Yet in the United States at this time, people were publicly fired and much time was spend discussing such matters, as if the national security of the United States hung in the balance. Indeed, Senator McCarthy made considerable mileage with a similar accusation about the subversive politics of an army dentist. It is typical of the Canadian approach that responsible officials shared concerns that in hindsight seem so exaggerated. It is also typical that their reaction was so cautious, and so secret. If the campaign against subversion had been the only aim, then perhaps the sheer ideological terrorism of the American approach would have been more fitting. 46 Yet if the campaign against potential espionage had been the only aim, nobody would have given a second thought to a Communist nurse in a veterans' hospital. Once again we find a Canadian hybrid, but a very curious one. METHODISTS, MARXISTS, AND MOUNTIES

When pressed one day in the Security Panel, the RCMP representative allowed that perhaps 1 per cent at most of the civil service might be Communist or tainted with Communist ideas. In practice, the security process was, on the average, identifying 1 out of every 100 to 200 civil servants, or private-sector workers falling under screening, as a political security risk, although about 1 in 100 was being identified as a security risk on non-political (usually 'moral' or 'character') grounds.47 An examination of the lists of those refused clearance in the early years of the system's operation raises many questions. In retrospect, some of the names are surprising in light of subsequent career patterns that are far indeed from any left-wing connections.48 The police cannot be blamed for all the excesses of the system. In one case, Irene Baird, a former novelist, was declared a 'Communist' by Ernest Bertrand, a minister from Quebec, supported vehemently by J.J. McCann, easily the most conservative minister in the Liberal government. Asked to arbitrate, the commissioner of the RCMP 'reported finding not the slightest evidence to support the charge.' It took years for Baird finally to be given permanent status.49 On another occasion in these early years, the RCMP's own overzealousness at Red-hunting drew the objections of one powerful mandarin. On their own, without receiving a clearance request, the police sent in a pink slip on George Haythorne, director of a branch in the Department of Labour (later a respected deputy minister of the department, and later yet a representative for Canada on various international agencies). Haythorne, already a

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published authority on the labour market, was known personally to Norman Robertson, who sat down with the RCMP to go over the file. Robertson insisted that he was 'entirely satisfied' as to Haythorne's reliability. 'His evangelical ardour, which is in some ways a very useful quality for the position he holds ... has, on occasion, got him into company where he did not belong and led him into associations about which the RCMP were understandably uncertain.' Despite Robertson's intervention, which undoubtedly saved Haythorne's job, his name - as well as that of his wife, who also worked for the civil service - kept reappearing on the RCMP lists. But with the chairman of the Security Panel on his side, Haythorne was safe and his career did not suffer.50 Robertson's intervention in this affair led him to some serious reflections about the relationship between political dissent and loyalty. He began a letter to Superintendent John Leopold, the Mounties' most dedicated Red-hunter, who had earlier brought the Haythorne file to him. Robertson never finished this letter (Leopold would scarcely have appreciated it, in any event), but as he explained many months later to Superintendent George McClellan, who had asked for a statement from Robertson to attach to the file, 'I found myself beginning an essay on the history of political thought in Canada, with particular reference to the interesting relationships, conflicts and affinities between Methodism and Marxism. It is a big subject and I got bogged down in it...' Robertson described Haythorne as: an earnest hopeful and sincere Christian, whose concern about fulfilling what the Methodists used to call 'the social gospel' led him into study groups similar to those which we now know the Communists were using for recruitment and development. As an individual case I do not think it has any security implications at all, and I have no reservations to my judgment that his loyalty can be relied on in all circumstances. There are, however, some aspects of Haythorne's file which are of some interest in relation to security policy generally, and more particularly to policy respecting security clearances in the public service. In some ways his interests and experience and are fairly representative of quite a large and useful proportion of his generation. People who came out of college and got their first jobs in the early thirties started asking questions about politics and economics and ethics in the decade that began with the great depression and ended with Munich - or more precisely with the Soviet-Nazi Pact of August 1939. Those were the years that the locust has eaten, and earnest questioning souls like Haythorne and a good many others of whom you have record got pretty dusty answers to their questions. Some of them wandered pretty far afield in search of answers and came up with queer ones. In the process, curiosity and honest doubt led some pretty close to the Communists - a few may have joined them - many more worked with them in various United Front organizations in the days of the Spanish war and Nazi domination. For the great majority, the Hitler-Stalin pact ended this phase with finality. 51

At this point Robertson broke off his meditation.

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Such was the hysteria of the age that not even so senior a civil servant as Robert Bryce, clerk of the Privy Council under both the St Laurent Liberal and Diefenbaker Conservative governments and chairman of the Security Panel for much of the 1950s, could escape the smears of the witch-hunters. Bryce was chairing the Security Panel in 1957 when the diplomat Herbert Norman, accused of being a security risk, took his own life. (The Norman affair is discussed later.) Bryce himself had been a contemporary of Norman at Cambridge in the 1930s, and had later introduced Norman to a Japanese Marxist economist (an association that cost Norman dearly). Worse, Bryce had taken part in a Marxist study group at Harvard that included Norman. In the spring of 1958, a year after the tragic conclusion of the Norman affair, the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee had publicly named Bryce as a possible Soviet agent. Astonishingly, the senior civil servant responsible for Canadian security had been publicly tarred by the arm of the American Congress as a security risk.* Bryce showed Prime Minister Diefenbaker the notes he had used for a talk on agricultural policy to the study group in question and convinced Mr Diefenbaker that there was nothing in this talk and nothing in his past that would 'indicate in any way participation in communist activities on his part.' The minister of external affairs sent a protest to Washington and, in the House of Commons, complained forcefully that 'once again an investigating committee of the United States Congress has made public the name of a Canadian civil servant in complete disregard of the Canadian government's views forcibly made known to the congress only a few months ago as to the fair and proper way to deal with matters of this kind [a reference to the Norman affair]. I am sure that all Hon. Members of this House will share the Canadian government's disappointment at this turn of events.' Following this rebuke, the American witch-hunters drew in their claws, and the affair blew over. Unlike Norman, Bryce survived, his career intact.52 'I NEVER H E A R D OF AN UNJUST RESULT'

The cases of Haythorne and Bryce indicated, in different ways, that prominence and prominent friends could counteract McCarthyite smears. But one cannot help wondering whether those less prominent, without defenders in the elite, did not suffer many unremarked injustices. Indeed, the screening process seems to have affected mainly temporary employees and candidates for positions within the service. As late as the fall of 1950, the Security Panel noted that 'there still has been no single case of dismissal involving a permanent civil servant.' Some had been transferred to non-sensitive positions, and others had failed to win positions for which they had competed, but none had been dismissed. This is in sharp contrast to the Loyalty-Security Program in the *Since it was later revealed that the subcommittee had its sights trained on no less than leader of the opposition and future prime minister Lester Pearson, perhaps this was less astonishing than it seemed.

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United States, and the moderate record reflects the extreme caution and aversion to publicity with which the Security Panel operated. Dismissal of a permanent civil servant might raise questions not raised by the non-renewal of temporary positions or the rejection of candidates in competitions. The ideal result from the point of view of the Security Panel regarding a permanent employee under suspicion was that the person in question, realizing that his or her career advance seemed blocked but not knowing exactly why, would eventually resign and pursue a career elsewhere. Indeed, one such case was thrashed out in the panel when a permanent employee whose RCMP file 'showed strong evidence of Communist sympathy' could not be given a lateral transfer to a non-classified position, given the technical nature of his work. The case went to cabinet, which sent it back to the panel for advice. Norman Robertson as chairman saw objections to dismissal: It was a very grave penalty to impose for participation in activities, the exact nature and consequences of which might be difficult to prove. In all similar cases reviewed to date, it had been possible to separate the individual from the Public Service without raising contentious issues. It might be desirable, however, to have the Deputy Minister put the case quite strongly to the individual concerned, suggesting that he resign as an alternative to dismissal. He might be given a good technical reference on retirement, and should be able to obtain new employment without serious difficulty.5 3

Perhaps these civil servants really did believe that an employee who left under such circumstances would be able to obtain new employment 'without serious difficulty.' They may have been unaware that the RCMP made a practice of pursuing 'security risks' into the private sector. A number of people who experienced security problems while in government employment later found that they experienced difficulties with private employers as well. When enquiries were made they learned that the Mounties had informed their employers of their allegedly suspect political associations. Very occasionally, such cases reached the light of day when questions were raised in Parliament or in the press. Generally, however, the victims suffered in silence, not wishing to draw yet more attention to themselves through publicity.54 In practice the Canadian way in security was less liberal than its architects believed it to be. So great were the advantages of secrecy that the government rejected the idea of any formal appeal board in the case of civil servants, despite the fact that appeals had been admitted in a limited and grudging way in the case of the screening of seamen. The panel once considered a British-style appeal board in 1948-9, but as Heeney carefully pointed out, the real problem was the RCMP's evidence: 'It would be most undesirable if the information contained in such reports were available to anyone other than those persons immediately responsible for taking action. The information was necessarily of a tenuous character; it could not be regarded as evi-

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dence, and its distribution on any but a most limited scale would be damaging to the reputations of the employees concerned.' This view was reinforced when Gordon Robertson returned from a Commonwealth Security Conference in London in 1951 and summed up the prevalent wisdom on the subject: 'I have the impression that our policy, while it is not completely in line with that of the United Kingdom, is for the most part fully as satisfactory and that we have a distinct advantage in not having the Board of Advisers and appeal procedures which they have set up.' 55 In 1956-7 serious consideration was given to outright dismissal of known Communists from the government service. Some appeal process would have to be considered for cases of dismissal, as opposed to transfers out of sensitive positions. The RCMP commissioner pointed out that it was a matter of distinguishing between cases involving classified information in which 'doubt must be resolved in favour of Canada' and cases risking no classified information, in which 'doubt must be resolved in favour of the individual.' The problem of opening up evidence in such cases deterred the government from pursuing dismissal cases any further. Instead the RCMP was expected to track any suspect individuals who failed to gain security clearance.56 Occasionally, the consciences of ministers were troubled by the decisions they had to make in individual cases. Brooke Claxton, as minister of national defence, had more than the normal number of individual security cases land on his desk. The philosophy of the Liberal elite in handling these decisions is ably summarized in a letter written by Claxton after retirement to his friend Dean Acheson, the former American secretary of state. Commenting on the differences between Canadian and American practices, Claxton had recourse to his own experiences as cabinet minister:57 Wide though the differences in our systems of government are generally, I don't suppose that this divergence has ever been shown up to such an extent as in the way in which we have handled security matters ... As you can imagine we had quite a few cases arise in the three services. Each of them was referred to me personally. 1 discussed the case with the Deputy Minister and the service heads as well as with our own security officers ... I found the R.C.M.P. and our own service security people to be quite reasonable and surprisingly little 'bloody-minded'. In a fair proportion of cases I would refuse to act but would give instructions that the man should be watched or gradually shifted to a less sensitive position ... In not one of these cases did we have evidence to justify a trial and I must say that in my experience of over ten years in the government dealing with such matters and discussing them with my colleagues, as well as people in other countries, particularly the United Kingdom, I felt that our manner of dealing with them was not only more likely to ensure security but did less damage to the individual... [There was] in such cases a right of appeal to me and the appeal was made in a formal letter addressed to me. It was not the practice to have hearings. I would simply review my own decision and tell him that no reason was seen for changing it.

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The fact that there was no appeal to someone else troubled me a good deal, as you can imagine ... [A]ny alternative was worse. In the result, I am sure the decision was right in practice ... I know that in principle the fact that the minister is more likely to be right than a tribunal is beside the point. The truth is, 1 suppose, that experience in a good many cases helps him to blunt the edge of any doubts he had. In Parliament the Cabinet simply refused to make available information or papers. A matter of this kind never got before the Parliamentary Committee ... As a matter of fact we had very little trouble. There were not too many cases. They were given no publicity. Nothing was done to prevent the person from getting other employment which he could do without difficulty ... There is a good deal to be said for the view that it was the publicity given to your cases and to the manner of dealing with them which created the turmoil. Under our system McCarthy had no place to go and as I say I never heard of an unjust result.

The note of imperturbable smugness, so characteristic of late St Laurent Liberalism, is itself part and parcel of the Canadian approach to security matters. Few perhaps would wish to quarrel with Claxton's relative evaluation of the American and Canadian experiences, but the implicit argument that the Canadian system was beyond reproach is another matter. Yet he was quite right that there was 'very little trouble.' There was very little trouble because the Ottawa elites secured the security system from public criticism. When, for example, Conservative MP Davie Fulton put a question on the order paper in 1950 seeking a statistical summary of the effects of screening in the public service, a private response was prepared for Fulton encouraging him to withdraw his question. It was pointed out that persons might have to be transferred or even dismissed on security grounds. 'I could not and would not,' Prime Minister St Laurent confided, 'attempt to furnish particulars and statistics of these transfers and separations. No possible public interest would be served by my attempting to do so. I am satisfied that our efforts to maintain a high standard of security in the public service would be prejudiced by such an attempt, and I am sure that unwarranted private suffering would follow it. I hope that, in the light of these explanations, the Member for Kamloops will agree with me that it would not be proper to let his question stand as an Order for Return.' Needless to say, no statistics were produced.58 Secrecy was a double-edged sword: the self-assured competence of the Liberals could scarcely be challenged when their actual record could never be evaluated. ' W H O BY HIS WORDS OR ACTIONS SHOWS HIMSELF TO BELIEVE IN M A R X I S M - L E N I N I S M ...'

Despite its apparent self-satisfaction, the government took steps in the early 1950s to revise the security procedures in light of experience. The main spur was the perennial problem of overload on the RCMP, along with the contradictory pressures from the hawks in DND to increase yet further the load on the system. A protracted

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wrangle between DND through its joint security committee on the one side, and the Security Panel and the RCMP on the other, prolonged the process of revising the cabinet directive of 1948 until 1952. The problem from the perspective of the panel was that the screening net had been cast too widely. The RCMP pleaded that not only its manpower but even its physical facilities were inadequate to meet existing obligations, let alone the expanded demands of DND.59 In September 1952, a new cabinet directive on security was issued superseding that of 1948, summing up, in effect, the outcome of the internal struggle, and incorporating the modifications in procedures suggested by some five years' experience. When the Security Panel presented its final draft to cabinet, it did so with some diffidence, noting that it had not been united in its recommendations. It did suggest that it was providing as high a standard of security 'as existing facilities for screening will permit'; even if it were 'not entirely ideal' it was 'generally adequate.' The cabinet ministers were told that the 1948 standards simply could not be met without putting 'an unbearable strain on the police': 'it was not desirable to have the formal directive lay down standards which could not be met.' Nor was any beefing-up of the RCMP's staff to do more screening deemed necessary or appropriate. The government seemed to be saying that enough was enough.60 The 1952 directive, which continued in effect (with modifications)61 until 1963, vested considerably more discretion with the Security Panel, directing departments to consult with the panel over the kind of positions to be termed sensitive, as well as the nature of the screening to be done. In cases where the Mounties were asked to carry out more investigations 'than they can competently handle', requests would be sent to the panel for a decision on whether they were necessary at all.62 Apart from the more efficient administrative procedures the 1952 directive established, it has one other aspect worth attention. Under the general category of 'policy' the directive revised the language regarding the definition of disloyalty: Loyalty to our system of government is an essential qualification for employment in the public service of Canada. Therefore a person who is a member of the Communist party, or who by his words or actions shows himself to believe in marxism-leninism, or any other ideology which advocates the overthrow of government by force, should not be permitted to enter the public service. Such persons discovered within the public service must not be allowed access to classified information, and their continued employment by the government may be undesirable. There is always serious doubt as to the loyalty of a person who was previously a member of the Communist party or who at one time by his words or actions showed himself to believe in an ideology which advocated the overthrow of the government by force ... Where a reasonable doubt remains, and where national security is involved, that doubt must not be resolved in favour of the individual...

Subversion was thus clearly spelled out as the criterion of disloyalty, almost to

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the exclusion of espionage. Interestingly, an earlier draft proposed by the Security Panel had been more moderate in tone, with warnings that there were 'no precise standards or any simple tests' for determining trustworthiness. However, in the intense Cold War atmosphere of 1952, the cabinet ministers wanted something more hard-nosed. The stipulation that those who showed by their 'words' that they 'believe in marxism-leninism' should be excluded from the public service indicated in decisive terms that a main aim of the security system was the ideological struggle. The administrative scope of the system may have been tightened and streamlined, and the wide net originally cast pulled in somewhat, but in terms of overall philosophy the 1952 directive represents a hardening of the Cold War mentality. THE 'FRUIT MACHINE'

By the late 1950s, the Cold War climate of opinion in the West had reduced the ideological attraction of Communism. The attention of security experts began to turn towards the risks posed by character and moral weaknesses. Homosexuality as a form of 'illicit' or 'deviant' sexual behaviour was thought to make individuals especially vulnerable to blackmail. The case of the Canadian ambassador to Moscow, John Watkins, who had been entrapped in a homosexual encounter by the Soviets offered one example close to home - although in this case Watkins may have resisted blackmail. 63 The 'vulnerability' of homosexuals, of course, lay entirely in the intolerance of the society. And their vulnerability was greatly increased when they became identified as security risks. Once started on the pursuit of homosexuals, the RCMP went far beyond its original mandate - no doubt reflecting the mixture of contempt and anxiety towards sexual 'deviants' to be expected in an ultra-masculine (and virtually all-male) police force. A special squad was set up in 1956 to identify homosexual public servants and inform their bosses. This search eventually reached crazed proportions with clinical and psychiatric testing schemes. This involved a so-called 'fruit machine,' which was supposed to offer a technological answer to the problem of detection! Although the fruit machine proved to be one of the force's loonier failures, the frenzy of the homosexual hunt mounted in the 1960s. By early 1960, 98 had been dismissed and 15 had resigned or retired. By 1967, as many as 8,200 files identified 'known or suspected' homosexuals, of whom close to 3,000 were employed in the public service. This number exceeded even the most expansive estimates of the number of Communists and Communist sympathizers in government. By the late 1960s, a hundred or more adverse reports were being sent each year to departments, and although the total number of those dismissed or resigning is not available, it certainly numbered in the hundreds. Dismissal of public servants, especially some of the best and the brightest, was not universally applauded by senior civil servants and even cabinet ministers with more liberal perspectives on such matters than the

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police. Yet many were driven quietly out of government, indeed far more than ever suffered under the earlier Communist hunt.64 THE E X P E R T C O M E S TO OTTAWA

The Security Panel required greater expertise to control the burgeoning internalsecurity process. The expert was Peter Dwyer, a British Intelligence man with extensive experience in Sir William Stephenson's wartime British Security Co-ordination and with MI6 in Washington after the war. Dwyer's arrival in 1952 appears to have strengthened the panel's expertise and its influence.65 It was as a direct result of Dwyer's expertise that a change was effected in the structure of the Security Panel and thus of the control mechanism for administering the security program in Ottawa. Upon his arrival Dwyer immersed himself in the Security Panel minutes and documents. He soon came to the conclusion that 'while the Panel has acted as a useful point of reference for departmental security problems and has initiated some valuable guidance on security matters generally, it has not so far concerned itself with what appears to me to be the heart of the matter - the operations and the targets of foreign intelligence services within Canada.' The point of domestic security, Dwyer reminded Norman Robertson, should be to counter foreign espionage, not to pursue domestic political goals. The Security Panel, however, 'does not appear so far to have examined this problem very closely. We seem to have been throwing up earthworks without very much consideration of the firepower of the real enemy.' He very pointedly noted that the Security Panel had become increasingly preoccupied with 'more or less trivial matters of physical security' such as standardized office passes and filing-cabinet locks. Why not split the current Security Panel into two bodies, one to carry on ongoing administrative matters, the other 'free to deal with matters of broad policy?'66 Shortly after this review, the cabinet approved a reorganization of the Security Panel. The Security Panel as such would now be comprised exclusively of senior civil servants of deputy-ministerial or equivalent rank and would deal with 'major policy decisions or particularly difficult security cases.' They would be relieved of the 'inescapable detail' of security matters that would now be regularly considered by a Security Sub-Panel made up of slightly lower-ranking bureaucrats with more specialized security functions. Thus the commissioner of the RCMP would sit on the Security Panel, while the head of the RCMP Security Service would sit on the subpanel. Both bodies would have a permanent secretariat located in the Privy Council Office. Peter Dwyer was to be secretary to both bodies.67 Quite simply, this new arrangement meant that security was becoming a routine bureaucratic function in the government that would not under normal circumstances draw the detailed attention of the deputy heads of departments. Dwyer was the apparatchik maintaining the continuity of policy and administration within the government. Dwyer's abilities in counter-intelligence were later praised by masterspy Kim

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Philby.68 It was said that while posted in Washington for MI6, Dwyer definitively identified Klaus Fuchs as an atomic spy. He has, moreover, a reputation among Canadian writers as a liberal among conservative Cold Warriors.69 Dwyer did try to fix the government's sights on espionage rather than the inappropriate target of political dissent, but, like all Western intelligence people in this era, his interpretation of the Soviet threat was quite expansive. This could have some distinctly illiberal consequences for security policy. When international detente was briefly in the air in 1956 following Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech to the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Communist party, Dwyer advised the government that it must redouble its efforts at counter-subversion, since the Soviet threat was now more menacing than ever, given its newly deceptive guise. Specifically, this meant that Dwyer recommended a much harder line against alleged Communists in the public service. As Dwyer explained, 'the presence of communists within the public service, even without access to classified information, was a matter of concern which would probably increase if the new Soviet policy [of detente] were effective.' With both the DND hawks and the RCMP hoping for a more hard-line anti-Communist stance, a debate was precipitated about a further extension of the screening system to cover all public servants. Dwyer's advice was that the more the Soviets modified their hard line, the stiffer Canada should make its own hard line.70 Saner heads ultimately prevailed, and this proposed transformation of a security program into a full-fledged American-style loyalty program was unrealized. However, the compelling arguments that carried the day were more those of administrative convenience than of liberal conscience (although the latter were not entirely absent). In reality, all the permanent members of Ottawa's security establishment, Peter Dwyer included, were more or less conservative Cold Warriors.71 CANADA'S MIDDLE WAY

By the mid-1950s, the screening program was rolling along as a well-established and very widespread operation. Throughout 1956 the RCMP carried out a total of 73,139 security screenings (exclusive of immigration and citizenship checks), of which more than 4 per cent involved field investigations. Defence industries accounted for 16,621, and the continuing screening of Great Lakes seamen for another 4,554. This left 51,964 for the public service proper. Of this latter figure, more than half were accounted for by DND (27,210).72 In other words, in any given year tens of thousands of public employees were being subjected to security screening. The security system in its first few years of operation was a relative success, despite its growing pains, in the sense that it largely achieved the objectives set for it by the government. Although the excesses of McCarthyism were on the whole prevented in Canada, the launching of the Cold War within the Canadian state was

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accompanied by a degree of illiberalism greater than that experienced in Britain. There is a perplexing ambiguity about the self-professed liberalism of the mandarins who presided over the birth of the system, an ambiguity manifest in such matters as the secrecy within which security was cloaked, in the refusal to allow independent appeal boards, in the protected actions of the RCMP both within and in some cases beyond its general limits of responsibility, in the willingness to accede to U.S. pressures even when Canadian officials were highly sceptical about American arguments. Were it not for the Heeneys, the Robertsons, the Dwyers, and the Claxtons, things might have been much worse; but then again, they could have been better. Writing in 1951, the secretary of the Security Panel deplored the prevalence of McCarthyite hysteria in the United States. Canada's difficulty 'is to strike a happy medium between the dangers of unrestricted witch-hunting, on the one hand, and a too casual approach to the security problem on the other.'73 Canadians habitually pride themselves on finding a Middle Way. Perhaps the epitaph for the internal security system might be found in a particular kind of Middle Way: Canada practised only restricted witch-hunting.

8

The Dog That Never Barked: Anti-Communist Legislation

A leading preoccupation of Cold Warriors in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the legislative outlawing of Communism or, failing that, the legal restraint and regulation of Communist activities or the imposition of special civil disabilities upon Communists. To many who believed that Communism posed a grave internal threat to the security of Western nations, it seemed axiomatic that the state should use its powers to curtail that threat in the most direct fashion possible. Others, often including those who shared feelings of alarm about the Red menace, rejected the notion that if Communism were bad there ought to be a law against it. This latter group tended to worry about the effect upon liberal democracy if the state intervened against a political party on the basis of its policies. Would we not then be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, adopting totalitarianism to fight totalitarianism? The former group dismissed this argument, saying that democracy had to toughen itself against an unscrupulous and undemocratic enemy or risk losing democracy itself in the process. This debate raged throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s in various Western countries, at greater or lesser levels of intensity depending on their particular circumstances. The United States was the site of the most forceful debate and went farthest among the English-speaking countries along the route of legal sanctions against Communism. The United States already had on its books the 1940 Smith Act that compelled members of parties judged totalitarian to register as agents of a foreign power. The same act provided for the detention of such persons in times of war. In 1951 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Smith Act in the Dennis case (later reversed in Yates, 1957). In 1948 Congress passed, over President Harry Truman's veto, the Taft-Hartley Act, which required all union officials to file annual anti-Communist affidavits. In 1950, Congress, again overriding Truman's veto, passed the McCarran Internal Security Act. The McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952 contained repressive anti-Communist features. In 1954 Congress passed the Communist Control Act. In addition, state legislatures passed their own local

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McCarran-type acts. All in all, the United States went a long way down the road towards embedding Cold War obsessions in the laws of the land. But by the midand late 1950s, after the peak of the Red mania had passed, the courts began seriously applying the Constitution to these legislative innovations, and in a series of judgments sharply cut back on the permissible scope of government intervention. South Africa outlawed the Communist party in 1950. The emergent federal republic of West Germany banned the Communists from participating in elections. In Australia, an attempt was made to outlaw Communism that was, for constitutional reasons, submitted to the voters in a national referendum. This is the only instance of a clear-cut anti-Communist law being placed directly before the people in this era. Interestingly, it lost.1 Some Western countries such as France and Italy were unable to outlaw Communism for the simple reason that these parties had more followers than any other. Others saw no need. Britain refrained from legislating against Communism, under both Labour and Tory governments. Pointed to by many as a beacon of liberality in an illiberal age, Britain avoided the extremes of McCarthy-era America, although here too there were quiet anti-Communist measures built into the fabric of British administrative practice.2 'IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD ...'

Canada appears to have adhered more closely to the British than to either the American or the Australian models. While the Australian debate was raging, Labour party politicians opposed to the Communist Party Dissolution Act and the Australian Council for Civil Liberties cited Canadian prime minister Louis St Laurent as one of the 'most tolerant, broad-minded ... democratic' leaders in the Western world for his stand against such legislation. 3 At the time, and in retrospect, Canadians congratulated themselves on their greater moderation and liberality. The Americans have been judged erratic and extreme by contrast. It is true that McCarthy-era America seemed to have lost its head. Americans themselves eventually concluded that things had gone too far. Today McCarthyism is a dread epithet hurled by Americans of all political persuasions against their opponents. The legislative excesses of the era have been mainly repealed, rendered impotent by court decisions, or left to lie fallow. Granted that, by virtually universal consent, America experienced an overheated reaction to the appearance of an internal Communist challenge. Does it then follow that the Canadian experience represents good sense and liberality? Canadians do not generally have a better record of moderation and liberality in relation to threats, real or perceived, to public order than their American cousins. In two world wars the level of domestic repression has been arguably higher in Canada than in the United States. Both before and after the early Cold War era, Canadians have at times lost their heads. As recently as 1970 the kidnapping, by a tiny terrorist group, of a diplomat and a provincial cabinet minister precipitated the invocation of

190 The Cold War in Ottawa the draconian War Measures Act with its powers of arbitrary arrest, suspension of habeas corpus, censorship of the press, and of making certain activities retroactively illegal. All this was based on exaggerated - perhaps deliberately exaggerated claims of the extent of the threat that were widely accepted by the public and the press at the time. During the early Cold War era, this country did enact some special anti-Communist legislation. Federal laws concerning treason and sedition were strengthened. Emergency-powers legislation was passed to allow in peacetime some of the extraordinary powers of the War Measures Act. Immigration and citizenship laws were amended in an expressly anti-Communist mood. More extreme measures were considered by Ottawa and debated in public. Moreover, as a federal country, there were also the provinces to consider. The second most populous province, Quebec, had in the 'Padlock Law' as formidable an instrument for anti-Communist repression as could be found anywhere in the Western world. In 1953^1 Quebec added explicitly anti-Communist provisions to its labour code. THE DOG THAT NEVER B A R K E D

The federal government did not pass any equivalent of the Smith or McCarran or Taft-Hartley acts. It refused point blank to outlaw the Communist party. It rejected calls to impose explicit civic disabilities upon those labelled Communist. These refusals did not take place in a serene atmosphere free of pressures. There were many voices crying out that 'there ought to be a law.' Some demanded a revival of old illiberal laws like the notorious section 98 of the Criminal Code that had been repealed in 1936. Others wanted new laws appropriate to a death struggle against a totalitarian enemy. The dog that barked in the United States, in Australia, in West Germany, and in other Western countries, was there in Canada as well. But in Canada the dog stayed fairly silent. To Sherlock Holmes, the dog that never barked was a crucial clue to a mystery. The absence of a barking dog is a clue to the Canadian mystery as well. At the centre of the solution is the key role of the Liberal political and bureaucratic elites in Ottawa. It was the Liberal elites who were the gatekeepers of the public agenda. It was the Liberal elites who controlled and guided the ship of state through the shoals of the Cold War. It was the Liberal elites who left their distinctive stamp on events. The Liberal elites had, like all effective elites, a commanding sense of public purpose and a healthy instinct for self-preservation. It was the latter instinct that dictated that the anti-Communist dog be kept muzzled. ' H O W CAN WE GET AT T H E S E P E O P L E ? '

Calls for special anti-Communist legislation began in the immediate aftermath of the Gouzenko spy affair in 1946 and reached a crescendo in the years from 1948

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through 1951. These calls can be divided into a number of areas. General outlawry of the party led the list, followed by tougher labour laws, strengthened immigration and citizenship rules, and beefed-up national-security police powers. George Drew, the leader of the official opposition in the late 1940s, was a particularly vociferous exponent of outlawing the party. Drew was especially fond of the old section 98 of the Criminal Code enacted in the wake of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919 that made the teaching or advocacy of certain ideas unlawful and that was used to declare the Communist party an 'unlawful association' in the early 1930s.4 In 1949, Drew argued that in light of the Communists' 'worldwide pattern of treachery,' section 98 should be reintroduced in an 'amended, strengthened and improved form.' 5 This would be one way of outlawing the party. Section 98 had the further attraction for Drew that it was originally a Tory measure that had been repealed by the Liberals. The Canadian Legion began passing resolutions on outlawing Communism (as well as purging 'subversive' veterans from its own ranks) in 1948.6 The Canadian Chamber of Commerce went into high gear on the Communist issue in 1948-9. At its annual convention in 1948, it was reported that 'the menace of communism has been one of the underlying themes of the entire convention. Almost every major speech so far has contained some reference to this growing danger and the necessity of strong action to meet it.' 7 A resolution was passed demanding that Communists be barred from government employment (they already were), educational, transportation, communications, and other vital services. Yet however upset the Chamber of Commerce was about Communism, it was not quite ready to suggest outright banning as the best answer. Since the Liberal government was unwilling to entertain such a suggestion, for reasons that will be touched on in a moment, it was left to an independent backbench MP from Quebec, Wilfrid LaCroix, to introduce a private member's bill into the House of Commons to ban the Communist party. This bill was very loosely drawn up, and it provided for extreme penalties, even for such minor matters as being in attendance at a Communist meeting. Twice a sceptical government allowed the bill to be 'talked out,' the usual fate of private members' bills. Then in 1950 George Drew introduced a motion that 'this house is of the opinion that appropriate legislation should be introduced so that communist and similar activities in Canada may be made an offence punishable under the Criminal Code.'8 Drew's reference to 'Communist and similar activities' was unfortunate. The looseness of the wording drew much criticism, but the principle of outlawing a political party provoked a revealing debate. Many suggested that existing laws on sedition were probably adequate to deal with any dangers.9 Even the right-wing Social Credit party, long an advocate of tough anti-Communist actions (including the creation of a Canadian equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee) could not agree with Drew. As Solon Low, Social Credit party leader, put it: '[Communism] is something that cannot be banned by an act of parliament... It is only when that state of mind is

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translated into action which may be a threat to the security of the nation that we can get at it through process of law.' Even the RCMP appeared doubtful. 'One highranking RCMP officer' broke the force's usual close-lipped silence on policy matters to say to a reporter from the conservative Toronto Telegram: 'We would not like to see them driven underground. Keep them out in the open as much as possible and we have a pretty fair idea of what they are up to.' 10 When the Financial Post took a serious look at the issue in the spring of 1950, it began by asking a cross-section of prominent Canadians: 'Is outlawry an effective and desirable defense against Canada's Communists?' The Post's respondents were overwhelmingly opposed. Most suggested that more positive methods for increasing the attractiveness of liberal democracy offered a better answer. In an accompanying editorial, the Post agonized over this 'portentous question.' The editors wondered about the 10,000 Torontonians who had just cheered the 'Red Dean of Canterbury,' the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, at one of his pro-Soviet road shows. They guessed that only a few hundred were card-carrying members, while 'most of the rest are Communist sympathizers and stooges - men and women whom it would be difficult if not impossible to nail down under any law for overt acts against Canada.' 'How,' the bemused editors wailed, 'can we get at these people?' It was a tough question, and the Financial Post could not, for the life of it, come up with much of an answer: 'the dilemma of the anti-Communists is to evolve a formula which will win general public acceptance and which promises to be really effective.' They made no concrete suggestions concerning such a formula. They did however, add one cautionary note attuned to the realities of the Canadian state: 'All that is being done now in Canada to keep an eye on Communist activity cannot, for obvious reasons, be revealed.' 11 Canadian Business was similarly caught on the horns of the anti-Communist dilemma. Citing the RCMP and the Chamber of Commerce newsletter, the magazine suggested that the answer to the question of outlawing Communism came in two distinct parts. The first involved specific overt acts. Such acts could be punished by existing laws covering sedition, espionage, and subversive activities or prevented by the kind of security screening that the Canadian government had put in place, and by 'a calm but well-informed and alert public opinion, capable and quick to detect the communist party line in whatever camouflaged form it may take ...' The second part of the problem was ideological, and more complicated than the first. Communism was a doctrine. Outlawing it might frighten off the dupes and fellow travellers, but at the same time this involved a risk of doing 'damage' to 'the very thing we are trying to protect.' 12 There was thus no consensus for outlawing Communism, even among those who might be considered George Drew's natural allies. Canadian capital could, however, be more forthright about another possible avenue for anti-Communist legislation. A Canadian Taft-Hartley law to rid the unions of Communists - who also happened to be among the most militant and effective union organizers - was something that

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business could agree upon. During the spring and summer of 1948, business groups lobbied Ottawa for an anti-Communist clause that would decertify any union with party members on its executive. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and its local board of trade affiliates, joined enthusiastically in this campaign.13 Its proposal was formally presented to a parliamentary committee studying amendments to the federal labour code.14 The response was not encouraging. The proposal, commented one reporter after checking with all parties, 'doesn't stand a chance.' The Liberals were strongly opposed, but so it seemed were the opposition parties, including the Tories. 'The method proposed by the chamber would be difficult to enforce and would create enormous strife in labor ranks.'15 The Communist issue did not fade away, however, and the following year the Chamber of Commerce was back, as insistent as ever.16 It was perhaps spurred in its lobbying by the decision of a Labour Department board of conciliation to reject as without legal justification a management-inspired clause in a collective agreement that bound the union to expel any member who, in the opinion of the company, was either a known Communist or engaged in 'Communist activities.'17 Clearly, present law was an inadequate instrument. More impressive were the efforts of the tradeunion movement to rid itself of Communists through direct purges. Yet even this process, already well under way, did not deter the business lobby from continuing to pester the government about introducing another Taft-Hartley.18 Nothing came of these efforts. Business lobbies had more success in another area of deep interest to capital, immigration and citizenship. Business was greatly agitated in the late forties that Taft-Hartley, if it were not emulated in Canada, might have a directly negative impact on labour relations in this country by rebound, as it were. Given that a great many Canadian unions were international (that is, with U.S. headquarters), including some of those most tarred with the brush of Communism, there was a danger that American Communist union officials might turn to Canada as the major focus of their organizing activities. A strong business lobby was called into being around the spectre of Reid Robinson, an organizer for the Mine-Mill and Smelter Workers. Robinson, a red flag to the northern-Ontario mine owners since the wartime strike in the Kirkland Lake gold mines, was crossing into Canada on union business. A massive lobby on Ottawa, orchestrated by the mineowners but taken up by the Chamber of Commerce, local boards of trade, and other sources of business pressure, demanded that foreign Communist union organizers be barred at the border and any already in the country be deported. In this campaign, business was tacitly supported by the CCF and by trade unionists who backed the CCF. The campaign was in fact successful, but as it turned out no special legislation was needed. Although in the United States a special act (McCarran-Walter) was required to bar Communists, Canadian immigration officials could do so quite effectively under the wide latitude for administrative discretion built into Canadian practice.19 This was the fate of most business concerns with immigration. Certainly business

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wanted Communists of all description kept out - and this was in fact done quite competently by the immigration authorities, but with no need for special legislation. When changes were made to the immigration and citizenship acts, or more often to the regulations under the broad authority of the legislation, they appear to have been mainly inspired by the concern of the Canadian security establishment with Canada's international obligations as part of the Cold War alliance, rather than by any domestic pressures. Except for a few extreme voices here and there, those who wanted the flow of immigration into Canada kept politically clean knew that the state was already doing the job. After the machinery for security screening was in place (by about 1947-8), there were thus few calls for legislative overhauls or for McCarran-Walter-type acts in Canada. 'WE ARE THE "WOOLLY-MINDED INDIVIDUALS'"

The Liberal government that had overseen the secret detentions under the War Measures Act in the Gouzenko affair and that had established the extensive machinery for security screening in the civil service and for immigration would not on the face of it seem a credible target for McCarthyite attacks about coddling Communists. But then the Truman administration that had launched America's global role in the Cold War, enunciated the Truman Doctrine, intervened in Korea, and initiated the Loyalty-Security Program in the U.S. government might seem an unlikely target for McCarthyite charges of 'twenty years of treason.' Yet it was so targeted. In the more sedate capital to the north, the leader of the opposition, George Drew, did try to play the anti-Red card against the Liberals, but with little success. Drew's failure, and the failure of any other proto-McCarthyite to appear on the Canadian scene, is another variation of the mystery of the dog that never barked. Publicly, the Liberals responded to Drew in a number of ways, all of which served to render the blustering Tory leader impotent on this issue. First, they emphasized their own concrete achievements in the realm of protecting national security. Always this note of self-congratulation was accompanied by a rider: it would be indiscreet and irresponsible to say too much about such matters. As St Laurent explained in a good rural-Quebec metaphor: T do not think it would be in the interests of security to describe too particularly the safeguards we are attempting to set up, just as trappers do not try to make their traps too obvious when they are placing them in the paths that game sometimes follow.' A variation of this argument was expressed by the Liberal justice minister, Stuart Garson: 'Just as those who plot against the security of Canada do not discuss their plans in the forum or from the house-tops, so we who prepare counter-measures to frustrate their plots could make few greater mistakes than to specify and advertise what we have done and what we are prepared to do.'20 This argument had the advantage of taking the initiative from the opposition, while invoking raisons d'etat to preclude further examination. Given that national security was an area in which Canadian governments had traditionally

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exercised wide discretion and anticipated respectful deference from the public, Drew was left looking less authoritative than bumptious. A second response to Drew was to suggest that proposed remedies might be worse than the disease. Communists, it was said, were more easily confronted while they were in the open. Driving them underground would only make their detection and defeat more complicated and might even make martyrs of them. External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson told the Montreal Rotary Club in 1949 that 'there is much to be said for having people like the communists organizing in the light rather than to have them hidden underground.' 2I A third response was what might be called the democratic anti-Communist argument. This was an argument more or less invented by the Liberals, and one that did them good service. It is best captured in a 'fighting' speech delivered by St Laurent in Windsor, and later in other locales, soon after he assumed the office of prime minister. St Laurent took as his text the idea that Canadian society, rather than the state, could be counted on to combat Communism. He particularly cited trade unions as free associations of society that were to be trusted with the burden of the Cold War. 'No one,' he declared roundly, 'will ever convince me Canada needs a Taft-Hartley act.' He deplored the fact that there were those, even in public life, who regarded organized labour as the enemy of society. 'I am not one of these. I believe the right to organize is a good thing, not only for labour but also for society.' St Laurent offered a 'pro-labour' solution to the Communist problem in the unions. There were, he said, two ways to fight the enemies of freedom: 'One is to shout until we are red in the face and to urge repressive laws, to demand prison terms and concentration camps, to start down a road at the end of which we would lose the freedom we are trying to protect. The other way is to proclaim our faith in our free institutions by making those institutions work; to proclaim our faith in the brotherhood of man by treating our fellow citizens like brothers; and to proclaim our faith in social justice by working day and night to end injustice, exploitation and repression.' Canadian labour had used its trust with 'moderation and judgment' in St Laurent's opinion, and could be confidently expected to carry out its own 'housecleaning.' The alternative Taft-Hartley route was not pretty to contemplate. 'We in Canada do not want the kind of trade unions that are a branch of the government and a part of the police or gestapo,' he suggested in a reference ostensibly to Czechoslovakia, that was actually a thinly veiled allusion to what might happen if Canada went too far down the wrong road.22 Lester Pearson added his voice to the democratic argument. In reply to the president of the Canada Starch Company who insisted that by, refusing to pass a TaftHartley act, 'government is in effect forcing business to treat with communists,' Pearson pointed out that Communists could and did participate in elections. 'The good judgment of the electors has ensured that Communist representation in our legislatures is kept to a minimum. Similarly, the good judgment of members of trade unions can and should protect the interests of these associations by preventing them

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from falling under Communist domination or remaining under the control of Communists if that control has been established.'23 In short, the people can be trusted to be effectively anti-Communist. A fourth dimension of the Liberal argument, closely allied to the third, relied on a defence of liberalism. Drew's road, the one being trodden by McCarthy-era America, was illiberal, a betrayal of the principles of a free society. St Laurent professed faith in freedom, however threatening the totalitarian menace. For example, he told the House of Commons, the very freedom of expression that Communist front groups were utilizing - to the discomfort and rage of the Drews - showed 'the best possible contrast between what happens in a democratic country that is confident of its ability to maintain its democratic institutions, and what is enforced by fear and police in the totalitarian states.' There were 'no doubt some Canadians who think that the strong hand, the padlock law and such measures are the appropriate methods to be adopted.' St Laurent was more confident. Communism, he said, was already diminishing in influence without such measures by the federal government, and Canada would be the better for it.24 By 1951, the Liberal government, continuing to feel somewhat beleaguered on the Communist issue, and already looking ahead to some legislative bones to throw to the anti-Communist wolves, believed that it was time to prepare a kind of definitive statement of the Liberal position. R. Gordon Robertson, a young mandarin already plugged into the Ottawa security establishment as well as the Western intelligence establishment, set out to assist Justice Minister Garson in drafting such a statement. Robertson began by asking an even younger civil servant from Quebec to look up all the relevant policy statements by all the parties and to survey the influence of Communism among Canadian ethnic groups. This task was undertaken by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, briefly on the staff of the Privy Council Office in 1950-1. Trudeau, soon himself the object of McCarthyism in Duplessis's Quebec, produced a report that Robertson described as 'just what I wanted.' The Trudeau report made clear that the Liberals did indeed have a distinctive and fairly consistent position, the opposition parties less so.25 A draft of Garson's projected statement was gone over very carefully by Gordon Robertson. Norman Robertson (no relation), the mandarin's mandarin, also vetted the draft and commented extensively. It was the latter who added one comment that may serve as a kind of epigram for the delicate nature of the Liberal position. In the first draft, Garson had quoted, as a kind of straw-man, a business spokesman for repression who sneered at 'woolly-minded individuals who would allow the communists freedom of speech.' 'Surely,' Robertson interrogated the drafter, 'that is, in part, the basis of the entire government position - we are the "woolly-minded individuals."'^ Garson delivered the definitive expression of Liberal philosophy in an off-therecord talk to the Canadian Newspaper Managing Editors Association at Quebec City on 28 January 1951,27 As Garson spoke, he was flanked by Commissioner S.T.

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Wood of the RCMP, who later added further confidential remarks about how government policy was implemented. Carson's remarks were thoughtful, calm, and measured as he undertook a point-by-point refutation of the hard-line anti-Communist approach. Each of the elements of the Liberal approach described above was elaborated in a persuasive manner. He did leave open the possibility that a Liberal government might strengthen certain elements of the sedition and treason sections of the Criminal Code, to bring them up to date in dealing with the threat of Communism in the 1950s, but he left his listeners in no doubt that the main thrust of the Liberal way of containing Communism was to rely upon free institutions and the good sense of the people. 'Perhaps,' Garson mused, 'the most powerful weapon which we have against them is our freedom.' Against the examples of the United States, Australia, or South Africa, where legislative outlawry of Communism had been attempted, Garson was happy to contrast the Canadian approach: T do not think that so far the outlawing of the Communist party is as wise and far-seeing a policy as the one which we have been following. I hope that this does not sound complacent; but in which of these countries have they less actual troubles and difficulties of one kind or another with Communist activities than we have in Canada? ... We have tried to follow a course of action which we think fits the Canadian situation.' ' D O N ' T T H R O W AWAY T H E B A B Y F R E E D O M '

The Liberals apparently believed, as Lester Pearson once suggested in inelegant language: Tn trying to deal with the menace of communism we must be careful we don't throw away the baby freedom with the dirty bath-water, communism.' 28 The Liberal argument was one that had special meaning for many Canadian observers at the time. The contrast with south of the border was striking. Canada, under the guidance of its Liberal elite, seemed to be reaffirming faith in free institutions just as the Americans were rushing to enact illiberal measures. One man very close to the action who felt that liberal principles were being strengthened was J.W. Pickersgill. Pickersgill devotes a chapter of his memoir of St Laurent to detailing the Prime Minister's public devotion to liberalism over the Communist issue. He closes the chapter by recalling that T was not surprised, but greatly pleased by St. Laurent's liberal attitude ... which ended attempts to create an issue about Communist activities in Canada.' 29 Pickersgill's account stops just short of 1951, when the Liberals, under St Laurent's leadership, did enact special legislation - not broad and sweeping legislation, but changes to the Criminal Code specifically to deal with the perceived threat of Communism. Early in 1949, St Laurent wrote to his minister of justice, Stuart Garson, enclosing a letter from a parish priest at Timmins, Ontario, concerning the refusal of the secular state to outlaw Communism. With his letter, St Laurent set off a process that ultimately resulted in a series of amendments to the Criminal Code.

198 The Cold War in Ottawa There are, as you know, a great many, even of our own people, who feel that it would be desirable to put some sort of curb on the activities of these Communists. The Bill No. 3 of Mr LaCroix is perhaps not the right way to do it, but it is a bill that would have to get consideration and I would be glad if you could look at it and see if there is anything at all that we could sponsor, which would not amount to a recant of our repeal of the old section 98 of the Criminal Code and which would nevertheless be in line with our present policy to refuse to employ Communists in the Civil Service.

The Prime Minister went on to reiterate his public stance about letting the trade unions carry out their own anti-Communist purges. However, in view of the persecutions in communistic countries, public opinion in Canada seems to have been aroused, and our friend Mr Drew is certainly trying to curry favour in Quebec by his declarations against allowing communist activities here in Canada. Perhaps you might consider whether it would be desirable to impose certain disabilities in respect of public offices on avowed Communists and also in respect of public propaganda.30

St Laurent's tentative suggestion was not without Liberal precedent. His predecessor, Mackenzie King, in his farewell address to the National Liberal Federation a year earlier, had hinted at the wisdom of clamping legal restraints upon Communism's 'multifarious activities.' 31 King was suitably vague about details, but it was reported from Ottawa early in 1949 that the Justice Department and the RCMP were at work examining 'measures to strengthen the laws on sedition so that subversive activities may be more vigorously curbed.' St Laurent himself told the House early in 1949 that there was a bill on the order paper 'dealing with the possibility of taking effective action to counteract the activities of communist parties.'32 The legislative timetable was soon derailed by the calling of a general election for the spring. St Laurent and the Liberals were returned with a triumphant majority in the election. Drew's Tories failed to make any dent in the Liberal armour with the Communist issue, especially in Quebec, where Drew, despite an alliance with an assortment of Quebec nationalists, was widely perceived as a pro-British Protestant imperialist and enemy of Catholic French Canada. Drew did not give up on the issue, however, and in subsequent sessions of Parliament he kept on firing. It became apparent that the Liberals were not entirely impervious to these attacks, despite their success at the polls. In 1950 Canada was drawn into participation in the Korean War. The traditional resistance of French Canada to foreign military entanglements was overcome largely by an emphasis on Canada's global commitment to fighting Communist aggression. The Cold War had become a shooting war, and even moderate press opinion grew alarmist about the quasi-wartime threat of sabotage or treason by Communism's fifth column. Saturday Night gave over one of its columns in the spring of 1951 to an undocumented, unsubstantiated charge that 'Canadian employers are worried by evidence of increasing communist activity in their plants - by

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cases of actual sabotage of machinery and products ... Some incidents have caused sizable financial losses and hurt to the defence program and the national economy.'33 The government felt strongly enough about attempts to undermine the war effort in Korea that the cabinet seriously considered laying a charge of treason against Dr James Endicott of the Canadian Peace Congress for remarks alleging American use of germ warfare in North Korea. As will be seen in a later chapter, only the magnitude of the penalty - death - deterred the ministers from such a drastic action. Clearly, there were limits to Liberal liberalism. Only days after Stuart Garson had delivered his strikingly liberal statement to the newspaper editors at Quebec City, he passed on suggestions from the RCMP for legislative amendments 'providing internal security against Communist subversion' to key bureaucrats - with, he claimed, the 'general approval' of his cabinet colleagues. The RCMP recommendations covered everything from the Criminal Code to the immigration and citizenship acts and the customs tariff act,* called for national fingerprinting, for a Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Attorney General's List of subversive organizations, and for the barring of Communists from holding elective office in federal, provincial, or municipal governments.34 More than this, the RCMP memorandum included a section in which, in effect, the entire Liberal position was condemned: 'Legislation which is honestly aimed at curbing the activities of the Communists, and yet allows them full civil liberties, will provide for neither one thing nor the other ...' Since the Communist party was a conspiracy to use 'the liberties and rights provided under the Democratic form of Government; such as free speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of association ... for the sole purpose of taking those very liberties away from the people,' it was evident that any legislation 'must furnish strong medicine to isolate the disease.' Primly keeping an eye on the foibles of their political masters, the Mounties concluded that this was 'not necessarily to say that a complete banning of the [Communist party] is essential or even feasible. The only criterion should be the effectiveness of such measures.' If Garson's colleagues really did generally approve of the drift of the RCMP recommendations, such approval is very difficult to square with Garson's own statement in Quebec City. The Liberals were not perhaps all of one mind, nor were they necessarily consistent. Most of the RCMP recommendations were ultimately rejected on the advice of such senior bureaucrats as Norman Robertson and Gordon Robertson. The latter concluded a rejection of most of the RCMP recommendations with a biting rejoinder to the Mounties' obiter dicta: 'it would be fatal to lose sight of the possibility that the democratic system can be destroyed by injudicious efforts designed to save it. There must be recognition that the attack of communism is not *To bar any 'books, printed paper, drawings, paintings, prints, photographs or representations of any kind' that teach or advocate 'ideologies sympathetic' to 'any communist organization' from entering the country.

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simply against the national security of Canada but also against the fundamental principles of the democratic system ... [TJhere may be very substantial and important grounds of democratic principle [for not outlawing the Communist party]. It is not tine that "the only criterion should be the effectiveness of such measures."'35 Perhaps it was the job of senior civil servants to recall the Liberal politicians to their principles. It was not, however, possible to halt the process of legislative change completely. In April 1951, Garson appeared before the cabinet with a series of amendments to the Criminal Code related to drunken driving, illegal bookmaking, and seditious libel. Only the latter provoked much discussion. 36 Sedition, traditionally a catch-all category for dealing with revolutionary words and ideas, could be made into a legal trap for the Communists. The sedition section had been the trade-off the Liberals gave the Tory Senate for the repeal of section 98 after their return to office in 1935. Now it was to be strengthened. Any member of an association whose purpose it was to use force to effect change in government or the social order, or who advocated such use, or organized activities that included the advocacy of such use, would be presumed to be a party to a seditious conspiracy. The presumption rested with the prosecution, that is to say, an accused would have to demonstrate innocence or be presumed guilty. The main difference with the existing provision was that mere membership in a seditious organization would be an offence; the state would no longer have to demonstrate seditious intention on the part of the individual, only on the part of the organization. The penalty was to be increased from two to seven years' imprisonment. Garson explained his rationale. Under the law, as it stood at the present time, it would be difficult to secure more than a very few convictions. The proposed amendment would permit the directing heads of communist groups in Canada to be charged simultaneously on evidence supplied by agents of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police ... For several years now the Labour Progressive party had claimed orally and in writing that it was devoted to the promotion of peace through peaceful methods ... It was therefore obvious that convictions could only be secured on the strength of evidence supplied by undercover agents.

The point seemed to be that only if a widespread dragnet could bring all or most of the leadership of the party into court at the same time would it be worthwhile for the RCMP to uncover its penetration of the party (which would be necessary to give evidence and secure convictions). In short, the Liberals seemed to be contemplating exactly what the Tories had attempted under the reviled section 98 in the early 1930s with the mass arrest of leading Communists and the well-publicized Rex v. Buck et al. political trial. How exactly did such a plan differ from the 'Drew' road of repression? Lester Pearson, acting as a voice of conscience for the Liberal way, was dubious. He pitched his doubts in the necessary language of the era: what, he wondered,

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if the 'courts might be placed in the embarrassing position of giving a clean bill of health' to the Communists in view of the party's professedly peaceful objectives? Prime Minister St Laurent was confident that the amendment would produce the desired result of a successful simultaneous prosecution of 'all or most of the ringleaders.' In the course of the discussion, Garson revealed some interesting information: 'the communists were well aware of the fact that federal agents were active within [their] ranks ... During recent years there had been two purges aimed at ridding the Party of such agents. The purges had, however, been unsuccessful in achieving the desired results.' As it turned out, it was precisely the question of protecting RCMP agents in place within the party that made the government change its mind about introducing this amendment. Garson, refreshed by further discussion with the RCMP, now somewhat lamely informed his colleagues that 'unless some unforeseen developments occurred, it was not proposed at the present time to initiate prosecutions under the new section.'37 The Mounties, he admitted, were of the opinion that while the provision might be useful if prosecution were to be undertaken, 'it would probably be preferable to refrain from prosecuting in order that under-cover agents might continue to keep the Police informed, at all times, as to the nature and extent of the Party's activities in Canada.' Pearson had been given an opening for counter-attack. If the Liberals put such a provision on the books, would there not be immediate public demands that the Communists be declared a seditious organization and prosecutions be launched? (Ministers could no doubt hear George Drew's blustering tones ringing out in the House.) Did the disadvantages then not outweigh the advantages? Pearson asked. His colleagues quickly grasped the point. Even St Laurent reluctantly admitted the force of Pearson's argument. After 'considerable further discussion' (a Privy Council euphemism for a fierce debate among ministers), the proposed new section was withdrawn. Sedition, in any event, is a notoriously difficult concept in law. As Mr Justice Kellock stated in the 1950 Boucher case, in which the court struck down a Quebec law used to persecute religious dissenters: 'No crime has been left in such vagueness of definition ... and its legal meaning has changed with the years.' In this same case, Mr Justice Rand, always the civil libertarian, pointed out the fundamental flaw in sedition laws. Society requires the 'clash of critical discussion': 'Freedom in thought and speech and disagreement in ideas and beliefs, on every conceivable subject, are of the essence of our life. The clash of critical discussion on political, social and religious subjects has too deeply become the stuff of daily experience to suggest that mere ill-will as a product of controversy can strike down the latter with illegality.' 38 Nevertheless, in 1953-4 an amendment increased the penalty for sedition (without changing its definition) to seven years. Sabotage as an offence first appears in the Criminal Code in 1951, defined as an act 'for a purpose prejudicial to the safety and interests of Canada or the safety or security' of the armed forces of other countries 'lawfully present in Canada,' an act

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that 'impairs the efficiency or impedes the working of any vehicle or equipment, or causes property 'by whomsoever it may be owned' to be 'lost, damaged or destroyed.' This provision was clearly inspired by the 'Communist sabotage mania' of the Korean War era - a mania not supported by any evidence remaining in the government records. And it extended to the protection of American military bases in Canada. There were rumours, although never more than rumours, that it was the United States that had insisted on this Canadian legislative amendment. The provision was revised in 1953-4 to make clear that legitimate trade-union activity could not be considered sabotage and to change the language from a 'purpose prejudicial to the safety and interests of Canada' to 'prejudicial to the safety, security or defence of Canada,' thus narrowing the scope of the section. In any event, sabotage could be covered under the existing Official Secrets Act,39 so the precise rationale for the new provision is unclear. More significant changes were proposed for the criminal offence of treason. During the war there had been a Treachery Act, which was no longer in place in peacetime. Treason was defined in section 46 of the Criminal Code to include assisting an enemy at war with Canada. In 1951 this was changed to assisting armed forces against whom Canada is engaged in hostilities even though a war has not been declared. This was clearly designed to cover a Korean-type conflict, and perhaps the case of someone like James Endicott, who was broadcasting charges of germ warfare from China. Treason might also mean using force for the overthrow of the government of Canada or a province, or divulging military or scientific information to a foreign state. The provision on divulging military or scientific information was new. In 1953-4 a further provision was added, to the effect that anyone commits treason who without authority makes available to an agent of a state other than Canada military or scientific information 'that he knows or ought to know may be used by that state for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or defence of Canada.' The point here was to create a 'provision during the Cold War similar to the Treachery Act which applied during the Second World War.'40 Atomic espionage of the kind undertaken by Klaus Fuchs or Julius Rosenberg was not covered by existing treason sections in peacetime, and the maximum sentence under the Official Secrets Act was only fourteen years. Placing the provision in the treason section allowed the death sentence to be meted out. The hard and militant atmosphere of wartime that surrounded the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States was apparently not absent from Liberal minds after all. This recommendation was tabled in the House in April 1952 and went to the Senate for detailed study. Senators disliked two aspects: the death penalty and the inclusion of the phrase 'interests of Canada.' The latter was dropped so that prejudice had to be to the 'safety' of Canada. The provision was also removed from the treason section and placed elsewhere to allow for a maximum sentence of fourteen years. The House of Commons restored the provision to the treason section of the code precisely because the elected representatives wanted the death penalty available, at

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least in wartime. Garson stated that 'this new sort of treason is in line with the great change which has come over the offence of treason from what it was in feudal days when it might have been an act of disloyalty to a personal king. But today there could be disclosure of information with regard to the H-bomb or the atomic bomb which might have consequences much more serious for the state than even a personal attack upon the monarch.'41 One authority wonders if, after all the changes, 'the subsection adds anything' either to the Official Secrets Act or to the treason section. The 1969 Mackenzie Commission on security found much overlap with the Official Secrets Act and could not understand the reasoning behind the separate section.42 Other minor changes were made, including removal of the medieval provision defining as treason the 'violation' of a female royal consort (with or without her consent!) that is still, bizarrely enough, part of the British treason law. There was also an Emergency Powers Act passed in 1951 to grant certain powers to the government while a 'state of international emergency ... that threatens the security of Canada' was in existence. The latter phrase refers to the Korean conflict and perhaps more generally to the Cold War in its darkest and most belligerent phase at this time. The Emergency Powers Act was to enable the government to carry out defence preparations, regulate the economy to meet the needs of defence, and safeguard it from disruption caused by defence preparations or by emergency measures taken in other countries. The government did not want to invoke the War Measures Act, in that 'it is not desirable that the wide powers conferred by that Act to interfere with the fundamental liberties of the individual should now be brought into operation.' The Emergency Powers Act expressly did not include the powers of arrest, detention, exclusion, deportation, or censorship granted in the War Measures Act. It also provided for closer parliamentary supervision.43 Under the authority of this act, certain specifically anti-Communist measures were facilitated, the most extensive being the security screening of seamen on the Great Lakes, the peculiar futility of which has been described earlier. Apart from this, the Emergency Powers Act does not seem to have been of particular consequence. More significant from a civil-liberties standpoint were the plans being drawn up at this time for detention of dissenters in the event of war, when the more draconian War Measures Act would be invoked. Curiously enough, it does not appear that any of the Criminal Code amendments passed in 1951 and 1953-4 ever resulted in the laying of a charge against any Communist.* One might conclude from this that they never posed as significant a threat as everyone, government and opposition, seemed to think. Then again, the RCMP may never have actually wanted to use such legislation. In either event, the purpose of these legislative exercises seems to have been cosmetic rather than substantive. There was unfavourable comment from some quarters in the press about the dim* Years later, in the aftermath of the October 1970 crisis, charges of seditious conspiracy were laid against five persons associated with the Quebec separatist movement. AH sedition charges failed in court.

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inution of civil liberties that was threatened by the amendments. As we have seen, the Senate made some changes along the lines of restricting the scope of some of the provisions. There was a campaign against the amendments launched by a group called the League for Democratic Rights. This group proved to be a collection of the usual suspects.44 Garson reported to his colleagues that a 'well organized communist campaign has been launched against certain provisions in the Criminal Code revision respecting subversive activities.' This campaign was particularly directed at trade unions, but the minister happily indicated that 'the more important labour unions had been very co-operative in counteracting the campaign.' Garson was given authorization to make a public statement denouncing the campaign as Communist-inspired and promised to consult with the unions before doing so.45 WHY THE DOG DIDN'T BARK

The Liberal elites had weathered the storms of the McCarthy era without succumbing to extreme legislative measures. Their record was not perhaps quite as clean or as straightforwardly liberal as some of their defenders then or later have maintained.46 Yet even when St Laurent and his justice minister weakened and hesitated in the face of the anti-Communist onslaught, the net result, as embodied in the Criminal Code amendments, did not amount to anything as repressive as some of the legislative projects in the United States or Australia. The dog never barked or, at least, never barked loudly enough to draw much attention. To return to the mystery at the heart of this chapter: Why did the dog remain quiet? We can reject certain hypotheses. The 'liberal Liberal' argument fails on closer examination because liberalism was never completely applied (certainly not to matters that lay within the prerogatives of the Crown, or of administrative discretion). Nor were the Liberals, as we have seen, completely consistent in their devotion to liberalism, even where they claimed to be applying it. A better characterization of Liberal behaviour might be that it represented enlightened antiCommunism. The Liberals claimed - and there is no reason to disbelieve them that their measured and moderate actions were better calculated to be effective than the hasty, hysterical, and often ill-conceived measures of McCarthy-era America. The American inquisition produced martyrs: Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, the Rosenbergs and their orphaned children. There were no such martyrs in Canada to capture the public imagination and fuel dissent. Only once did the Liberals come close to producing a martyr, when they almost charged James Endicott with treason, but they withdrew in time, and Endicott and his Peace Congress remained on the fringe of Canadian public life. If George Drew had had his way there might have been many such martyrs, and in the opinion of the Liberals, no better control over Communism. Anti-Communism was not just something the Liberals were compelled by circumstances to deal with. They had, very much like the Truman Democrats, actively

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built up the Communist issue for their own political ends. As described in the earlier chapter on the origins of Cold War foreign policy, the Liberals had actually stirred anti-Communism to help gain public acceptance of such new global responsibilities as the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Korean War, rearmament, and growing continental air-defence integration with the United States. This appeal had been particularly directed towards two possible sources of opposition to junior partnership with the United States in the Cold War: traditional pro-British conservatives in English Canada and traditional isolationist sentiment in Quebec. The twin spectres of George Drew and Maurice Duplessis reminded the Liberals of the need to protect their flanks. By steering a moderate middle way through these shoals, the Liberals were also able to neutralize yet another potential source of opposition: the social democrats in the CCF and the mainstream of the labour movement. They too were enlisted in the Cold War without the strife and antagonisms generated by state interventions on the model of Taft-Hartley legislation and the kind of McCarthyism that alienated Cold War liberals in the United States (the equivalent of the Cold War social democrats in Canada). Above all, the Liberals were too secure in their position atop the Canadian establishment to panic. Entrenched in one-party dominance that extended over twentytwo years of unbroken Liberal majorities from 1935 to 1957, when they finally did fall from power (long after the initial shocks of the Cold War had passed), exercising an unprecedented degree of centralized hegemony over the provinces, enjoying the esteem of managing an economic boom, and basking in the prestige of an international role never before played by Canada, the Liberals had wide room to manoeuvre.47 An important part of this margin rested on their virtually unchallenged hegemony over federal politics in Quebec. With a French-Canadian prime minister and a solid bloc of Liberals from Quebec in their caucus, they could afford to pick and choose among the issues that were important to French Canada. Since Drew and an Ontario-dominated Protestant Tory party were hopeless pretenders to Quebec affections, an anti-Communist alliance of English- and French-Canadian conservatives was out of the question. Specifically, this allowed the Liberals to use antiCommunism in Quebec for purposes of foreign and defence policy, and then to downplay anti-Communism as a domestic concern, however strongly the issue played within Quebec. It was not credible to portray the Catholic French-Canadian patriarch St Laurent as some sort of pro-Communist centralizer; Duplessis failed to make an end run around Ottawa using the Communist issue. This brings us back to the rationale for the Liberals' enlightened anti-Communism. Anti-Communism, as the Truman Democrats could testify as early as 1948, could be like the genie released from the bottle. The Democrats tried to use the genie to get their Cold War agenda in foreign and defence policy approved by the press, the public, and the Republicans in Congress. But the genie got out of control and returned to them in the shape of an avenging McCarthyite monster that drove its creator from the White House and Congress, destroyed individuals and their careers

206 The Cold War in Ottawa along the way, poisoned the wells of American political life for a generation, and enforced a rigid and inflexible stance towards the outside world upon succeeding administrations. Made more secure by the circumstances of history and politics than their Democratic counterparts in the United States, the Liberals played the anti-Communist card skilfully and with a sense of self-restraint - and thus ultimately of self-preservation. Liberals like Lester Pearson understood the dangers that Liberal anti-Communists were running and the delicate knife-edge that had to be negotiated. The Liberals, on the whole, did successfully negotiate passage through this era with their brand of enlightened, Canadian, anti-Communism. That was the mark of a truly effective elite and the key to the mystery of the dog that never barked.

9 The Antagonists: Cops versus Commies

KNOCKOUT IN THE FIRST ROUND?

At the heart of the Cold War in Canada were two antagonists. Each, like a prizefighter, was backed by forces outside the ring. On the one side was the Communist party of Canada; behind its corner was Stalin's Soviet empire and the power of international Communism. On the other side was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, backed by the Canadian state and the combined forces of the Free World. The first round in this contest appeared to end in a quick knockout. If there was any doubt about the fatal impact of the Gouzenko affair of 1945-6 on the Communists, it should have been dispelled by the flurry of measures that followed Gouzenko. The apparatus of the national insecurity state (security screening of public employees, immigrants, and applicants for citizenship), official approval for widespread surveillance and penetration of the Communists by the police, official proscription of Communism and Communist-front activities as treasonous and disloyal, and the rapid spread of anti-Communism into the fabric of Canadian society all of these would seem to indicate that the Communists were in fact quickly overwhelmed, that there was really no contest at all. Yet the RCMP refused to declare victory and insisted, indeed, that its antagonist was alive and well and growing ever more dangerous. It was a strange contest, a shadow-boxing show with serious consequences. Who were these antagonists who sometimes looked as if they were champions of irreconcilable forces of history, at other times like participants in a Punch-and-Judy show? SOLDIERS OF THE INTERNATIONALE: THE COMMUNISTS

At the end of the Second World War, the Communists (under the temporary name of the Labour Progressive Party) were only twenty-four years old as a party. In their relatively brief history, they had struggled throughout the 1920s against stiff resis-

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tance from municipal and provincial anti-Red squads in the major cities of Canada, against concerted federal assault under Prime Minister R.B. Bennett's 'iron heel of repression' in the 1930s, and against illegality and internment in the early war years. In face of implacable opposition from state and capital, the Communists had made some modest but impressive gains. A handful of Communists had been elected to provincial or municipal office in Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and a few other centres. In 1943, Communist electoral efforts were capped with the election of Fred Rose to the House of Commons as MP from Montreal-Carder. Many years of hard work had paid off for Communist labour organizers with strong footholds in a number of industrial unions, a number of which could even be said to be 'Communist-led.' Some tenuous links had been formed with other sectors of Canadian society, especially among certain immigrant groups. A very fragile influence among a small number of intellectuals and artists could be discerned. Yet in no sense could it be said that Communism had taken root in the mainstream of Canadian life. The party was still very much a marginal phenomenon. 1 Much of the difficulty encountered by the Communists in looking for a breakthrough was the 'alien' face the party presented to Canadian society. This quality can be discerned in many forms. The party's ideology was alien to many Canadians: Marxism was unfamiliar in a cultural milieu dominated by Christianity; even the rhetoric of Communism was couched in a language ('scientific socialism,' 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' 'surplus value') that mystified more than it illuminated. The Communists themselves tended to be 'alien' (Jewish, Finnish, Ukrainian, etc.) in a country in which people of Anglo-Saxon origins were still culturally dominant. Yet even these difficulties could have been overcome were it not for the most fundamentally alien aspect of Communism. Never in its short history had the Communist party of Canada deviated from strict devotion to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and to the 'correct line' as defined by Moscow for Communist parties worldwide. There was no question that Communism was not Canadian, as such, but 'international' - and that in practice internationalism meant following the dictates of the Kremlin. 2 There was perhaps a certain amount of hypocrisy among some of the anti-Communists who expressed horror at the Communists' ties to Moscow. An important segment of the Canadian elite had always been itself loyal to the symbols of another country. Many Tories, and not a few Liberals as well, had been fervent British imperialists for generations. As the Cold War settled upon Canada in the late 1940s, the symbols of yet another country began to supplant those of Britain, as fidelity to American leadership of the Free World became a dominant Canadian value. Perhaps the Communists' problem was not so much that they were attached to another country but that that they were attached to the wrong country. Sentimental affection for the Soviet Union was a taste shared by a tiny minority of Canadians. For most, especially after the breakdown of the wartime alliance and the postwar polarization into military blocs, the USSR evoked only feelings of fear, loathing, and incomprehen-

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sion. To the extent that the Communists were perceived as apologists for Stalin, that fear, loathing, and incomprehension were readily transferred to Stalin's Canadian disciples. No amount of retroactive special pleading can absolve the Communists of most of the blame on this score. If they were depicted in the press as abject tools of a hostile totalitarian power, their behaviour usually justified the description. Indeed, they had themselves offered an astonishing hostage to their enemies when their only member of Parliament, Fred Rose, was arrested and convicted on charges of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union, and warrants were issued for the arrest of the national organizer, Sam Carr, on related charges. That some members of the party were enlisted on behalf of Soviet espionage was bad enough, but the direct involvement of two of the most prominent party figures in such an affair was a sign of such egregious stupidity that no recovery could ever be expected. Try as the party leadership might to deny knowledge of espionage, the Gouzenko affair firmly fixed the image of Communism as an arm of Moscow in the Canadian mind. No tendentious conspiracy theory of an American-RCMP plot to discredit Communism (as suggested by party apologists) could explain away a wilfully self-inflicted wound. With their slavish loyalty to Moscow the Communists not only shot themselves in the foot as a party; they also harmed the entire Canadian Left, non-Communist as well as Communist. There was among many Canadians a dream of a better world, more egalitarian, more cooperative, a world in which the invidious and exploitive division of society into classes would eventually disappear to be replaced by a sharing community of free men and women. There was a tremendous amount of raw idealism among the Communist militants, an idealism that provided the wellsprings of dedication that made the party work. The idealism was shared by the many nonCommunist socialists often found in the social-democratic CCF. Bitterly divided as they might be by doctrine and approach, men and women of the Left were united by their dreams of a better world. Yet it was precisely those dreams that the Communists' attraction to Moscow did so much to betray. The Cold War imposed a fatal logic on the Left. The state maintained that the Communists were mere tools of Moscow, and the implication, by extension, was that all forms of left-wing ideology were tainted with disloyalty. For their part, the Communists seemed bent on proving the truth of this description by acting as persistent apologists for the Soviet Union. Broader 'front' activities such as the Communist-influenced peace movement were drawn into Soviet apologetics. The political effect in the context of the Cold War was to discredit leftist or progressive ideas among their potential constituents. The Cold War imposed a kind of mirror-logic upon its protagonists. By definition, opposition to 'our side' constituted support for the 'other side' - and was thus disloyal, subversive. To the extent that some left-wing dissenters could be found who willingly fitted the stereotype of apologist for the 'other side,' all dissent could be broadly discredited, with the result that social democracy as well as Communism

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experienced difficulties. The train of logic did not stop there. Stung by the Communists' moral compromise of the Left, the social democrats turned to another form of complicity, this time with the repressive forces of the Canadian state. The CCF and social democrats within the trade-union movement reinforced the Cold War mentality of the state by joining in the condemnation of Communism as illegitimate and thus an appropriate object for ostracism and repression. Worse, ideas of the Left that happened to coincide with the Communist line of the moment were denounced as illegitimate, and Cold War issues became loyalty tests. If CCFers or trade unionists were against the Marshall Plan or NATO they would either have to recant their views or be expelled as members. Thus the non-Communist Left joined with the state in constructing a narrow concept of the limits of legitimate dissent in Canada.3 The Communists may have been to 'blame' in some sense for this reaction, but the effect for the Left in general reverberated far beyond the original cause. In short, the mirror-logic of the Cold War led to a tangled skein of consequences. Perhaps the only safe generalization is that all of these consequences served the Right far better than the Left. Subservience to Moscow was not the only mark that supposedly distinguished the Communists. They were apparently committed to violent, revolutionary means, while the non-Communist Left generally adhered to constitutional parliamentarism. This is, in fact, a serious oversimplification of a relatively complex position. There appears to be no evidence that the Communists ever actually conspired to effect the violent or revolutionary overthrow of the Canadian state. The only legal victories won against the Communists by the state from the 1920s on were on the terrain of abstract ideas (as in the prosecutions against the party leaders under the notorious section 98 of the Criminal Code in the Rex v. Buck et al. trial of 1931), or under narrow, specific criteria established by emergency powers (such as opposing the war effort from 1939 into 1941 while the extraordinary Defence of Canada Regulations were in effect), or for espionage or espionage-related offences by individuals associated with the party in the single instance of the trials arising out of the 1946 Gouzenko affair. Nor is there any evidence from within the party itself that its leaders ever attempted, or even discussed attempting, to overthrow the state in any immediate or concrete sense - rhetoric aside. Nor did the party actually advocate the overthrow of the state, in the sense of inciting followers to take up arms or violently assault the institutions and the personnel of the state.4 To the Communists, revolution always seemed a goal for a future stage of class struggle. For the present the tactics were mainly parliamentary in focus, with the occasional addition of peaceful and legal extra parliamentary tactics 'mass' propaganda campaigns given expression in leafleting, petitions, demonstrations, etc.; support for strike activities; and attempts to disseminate ideas through party newspapers and publications, and occasional party-sponsored cultural events. None of these activities were in themselves 'revolutionary,' even though they were intended to fit into a long-term political strategy that foresaw the sharpening of the

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class struggle and the eventual development of a truly revolutionary situation. As such, they could be seen by the security forces as subversive actions seeking to undermine constitutional government from within. Subversion might be understood as a preparatory stage in the process of revolutionary overthrow of government, but there is no reason to assume that subversion would lead inexorably to revolution. To the state Security Service, ultimate ideological intentions overrode the lack of concrete evidence of revolutionary success. In this there was a curious complicity between the Canadian state and the Communists. Both dramatically overestimated the revolutionary challenge posed by Canadian Communism. In the eyes of the Communists' opponents, especially the social democrats, a certain odium surrounded Communist infiltration of non-Communist activities or associations. Infiltration was viewed as the undermining from within of free institutions by conspirators who concealed their true affiliations and motives. The Communist strategy of 'boring from within' did no doubt contain elements of clandestinity and deception. It is scarcely surprising that the CCF would react with hostility towards covert actions by a rival on its left. Yet attempts to expand party influence through participation in such associations as trade unions, civil-liberties associations, peace movements, and issue-oriented citizens groups are perfectly normal tactics of leftwing parties. Indeed, the social-democratic left was just as interested in such 'infiltration,' which it practised with particular success in the labour movement - as for that matter did the Liberal party, also. Besides, to the limited extent that the Communists did so surreptitiously, their behaviour was hardly unconnected with the suspicion with which they were viewed by the state and the broader society: the charge of conspiracy is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether revolutionaries or not, the Communists did have a somewhat startling reputation for an influence out of all proportion to their small numbers (the highest estimate of party membership made by the RCMP was 18,000 to 21,000; a more realistic conjecture by U.S. intelligence in 1953 was 10,000).5 It was a strange twist of Cold War mythology that Communists were widely viewed as larger-than-life supermen who could wreak untold havoc if unchecked. Nowhere was this exaggeration more in evidence than with regard to Communist 'front' organizations and Communist 'infiltration' of non-Communist associations. The Communists expended much energy in organizing and managing several front groups - that is, groups that were not ostensibly Communist but were under some measure of Communist control or influence through active Communist membership. Most of these efforts were quite wasted. Housewives' leagues, 'democratic' youth federations, 'progressive' arts clubs, leftist ethnic organizations, etc.' attracted little more than the usual suspects - that is, committed Communists. Communist literature makes many references to 'mass meetings' that were, in truth, barely attended. Only two fronts ever attracted much non-Communist support. One was the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society, which began during the war with the active encouragement of both government and business but quickly deflated after the

212 The Cold War in Ottawa Gouzenko affair hit the headlines. After 1946 the masthead of the society continued to carry the names of a dwindling number of prominent Canadians from the arts, academia, and journalism who were not themselves Communists. The one 'front' (so identified by the press and by the RCMP) that was reasonably successful was the Canadian Peace Congress, but precisely because the peace movement had broader popular support than the Communist movement, the party was never completely able to control the congress, although it did certainly exercise a strong influence over the congress's activities. On the whole, the impact of Communist fronts upon Canadian society was not very impressive - except to the file keepers of the RCMP and a handful of alarmist anti-Communist journalists who painted pictures of vast spiderwebs of interlocking associations under the ultimate discipline of Moscow. Hard-pressed party militants would have been grateful if the reality had been even half as impressive as the publicity. As for infiltration of 'innocent' associations, the same exaggerated notion of the extended reach of Communism also prevailed. The RCMP was particularly awed by the superhuman capacities of even one or two Communists to control large numbers of unwitting dupes. According to the RCMP's internal Intelligence Bulletin, 'the Communists' practice of putting their fingers into as many pies as possible must always be kept under observation. Whether it is an international movement or a small town women's sewing circle, the reds try to get in and if they are successful, they exert every effort to get to the top. And their tactics are extraordinarily successful.' Suppose some people want to set up some organization or other, the Mounties ruminated, but do not know how to go about doing it : 'Usually there is a Communist handy who does know about these things and he or she is welcomed into the group.' Thus another association with a 'completely innocuous non-political purpose ... can be used to whatever ends the Party desires.'6 An example was a 'genuine non-political' student organization, which was deemed to be like a lamb before the approach of the Red wolf: 'it may be merely a question of time before it is gobbled up by the Communists.' 7 The Mounties were especially concerned about Communist infiltration of civil-liberties associations. This had the perverse effect of dismissing all civil-liberties arguments as Communist-inspired: like a rotten apple, even one Red could spoil an entire barrel. In mundane reality, Communists were not larger than life. Nor were non-Communists so spineless and malleable that they could be shaped at will by a conspiratorial minority. People belonged to organizations and associations because they had goals they wished to advance. If clandestine Communists worked on behalf of these aims, they would be welcomed. If they twisted the group to advance their own aims, they would be resisted. If they 'took over' a group, they always risked precipitating the departure of most members and thus inheriting an empty shell (which sometimes did happen). No better illustration of the limitation of Communist subversion of non-Communist organizations can be found than the trade-union movement. The Intelligence

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Bulletins circulated among members of the service give some indication of what the Mounties considered important subversive threats.8 Next to the Communist party itself, labour unions appear to have attracted most attention. The justification for surveillance was not that trade unionism, as such, was subversive, but rather that Communists working within trade unions were necessarily subversive. As the Mounties put it in a Bulletin dated 1 May 1946: 'But for the ever-present Communist-inspired propaganda and the continual appearance of known Communists in the labour picture, one could safely assume that the current campaign for wage increases is a genuine effort by labour to improve the workers' economic position, however, with the Communists in the picture we can not lose sight of the avowed purpose of Communism to destroy Democracy as we know it.' During the era of the anti-Communist purges in the labour movement, both the Security Service and the anti-Communist majority within the labour movement were in apparent agreement on the principle that Communism in unions was subversive. This was essentially a definitional equation. It is striking that the Security Service seems never to have addressed the question of just what dangers to security were actually posed by Communist unionists. The argument that they were attempting to use the union movement for their own ulterior party motives could just as well be directed at CCF-NDP unionists - but never was.9 The idea that Communists could somehow turn the objectives of union members away from wages and working conditions towards revolution or fanatic support of the USSR flies in the face of everything that is known about the conditions of success for union organizers: if they do not deliver in terms of contracts, they are likely to be unsuccessful. To the extent that Communist unionists were successful, it was because they were good trade unionists, not revolutionaries. Often enough they were good trade unionists, and, as such, sometimes they survived even the worst Cold War assaults.10 For a more realistic assessment of Communist influence in Canada we must turn, rather ironically, to American intelligence sources. A State Department intelligence report from 195311 came to quite sanguine conclusions regarding the Communist threat north of the border: Politically, the Communists have lost ground steadily in recent years, and they are not likely to regain it... The Communist movement in Canada is small, apparently well organized and disciplined, but it cannot be considered a major threat to the stability and security of the country. US-Canada relations and generally Canada's relations with the rest of the free world are not basically affected by the existence of a Canadian Communist movement... Communism as a political movement cannot make much headway; it enjoys legal status but little standing with the majority of voters ... [SJcreening and surveillance of Communists in sensitive governmental and industrial jobs are fully capable of dealing with any potential sabotage or espionage ... [There is] a growing awareness of the need to deal effectively with the menace of Communist infiltration and control. Since about 1950 the anti-Communist campaign in Canada has paralleled that in the US and has achieved positive results ... Communist influence on

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Canadian public opinion is not thought to be very significant. No national decisions in the cold war are significantly affected by Communist propaganda. In Catholic Quebec anti-Communism is more vigorous and sustained than in most provinces and Communist attempts to penetrate the province or to influence provincial policies have no chance of gaining acceptance.

As the Cold War assaults mounted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Communists soldiered on as an isolated and unpopular sect. Meeting the people became an increasingly onerous and emotionally draining experience for party militants. Standing on a street corner trying to hand out party leaflets to hostile and uncomprehending passersby became, for all but the most hardened, an unrewarding, even painful task. Members of a sect, Communists were sectarians - with all that that implies. Isolated, scorned, vilified, proscribed by the Canadian state, and condemned by the mainstream organizations of Canadian society, the Communists turned inward, trying to reinforce each other's failing faith in a millennial future of socialist transformation, even as the concrete evidence of such a transformation was slipping away. Turning inward can sometimes be a pathological reaction, especially for an organization dedicated to transforming the world. The scant remaining examples of success tended to be only those ventures where party members had hidden their identities and concealed their aims, such as their involvement in certain unions or in the peace movement. When the party dared to put its name and its principles forward, it usually suffered humiliating and discouraging defeats. Faced with this implacable reality, the dedication, idealism, and ideological zeal of the ordinary comrades could, in turning inward, take ugly and self-destructive forms. As the 'vanguard of the proletariat' the party was supposed to be a disciplined instrument of revolution; when things went wrong and the vanguard became directionless, 'discipline' could become a very nasty tool of internal scapegoating. Believing in the notion of 'democratic centralism' and the propagation of a single 'party line,' the Communists had very little capacity to handle internal dissent and division, short of the denunciation and expulsion of critics. Expulsion from a party that had become an all-encompassing cause, a source of profound emotional self-definition, was for most a traumatic experience from which many would take years to recover. Recollections by old Communists of this era stress the depressing atmosphere of failure, of idealism soured, of personal conflicts and hurts not easily forgotten. What to many in the Depression era and during the war years had been a vibrant, warm, deeply purposeful community of comrades had become something shrunken, withered, deformed.12 Those who remained untouched by this disillusion tended to be the hard, cynical apparatchikss of the party whose consciences seemed untroubled by unreflective enforcement of the Moscow line, come what may. Political failure was evident on all sides, as one by one the party's hard-won positions in Canadian society fell away. One old-time party organizer, J.B. Salsberg, managed, astonishingly enough, to get himself re-elected to the Ontario legislature

The Antagonists 215 in Toronto's Spadina district in 1951, while Canadian soldiers were battling North Korean and Chinese Communist troops in Korea. But in 1955 even the legendary Salsberg fell victim to the Tories during a ferocious anti-Communist campaign in which newly arrived Eastern European immigrants, with their visceral hatred of Soviet oppression, enlisted.13 Less than a year later, Salsberg quit the party in the fallout from the worst internal crisis the Communists ever suffered. In October 1956 the Hungarian people rose up against Soviet oppression and were soon crushed by the tanks of the Red Army. Never had Moscow's prestige fallen lower, and local Communist parties throughout the Western world reeled from the effects. Compounding this crisis was a far more devastating blow to the cohesion of Communism. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had earlier, in a secret session of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, denounced at great length and in considerable detail, the monstrous crimes of the late Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. As word of this momentous session began to leak out, the effect on Western Communist parties was catastrophic. After the long years of uncritical adulation of Stalin and Stalin's Russia, Khrushchev's revelations yanked out the foundation stone of many Communists' fundamental faith. Internal criticism boiled up within the Canadian party. One particularly damaging aspect was the evidence of official anti-Semitism in the USSR, which shocked the many Jewish members of the Canadian party. A dramatic debate took place in the party council, with the eventual result that the hard-line Stalinist leadership of Tim Buck was reaffirmed. A mass exodus, not only of the rank and file, but of some of the most prominent party figures soon followed. The party crisis of 1956-7 forms a closing bracket for the period of the early Cold War covered by this book. The opening bracket was the Gouzenko affair of 1946. The decade between these two brackets was one of decline, marginalization, and failure for the party. The Cold War was not kind to Canadian Communism. T H E COPS: T H E R C M P S E C U R I T Y S E R V I C E

The RCMP Security Service* was not born out of the Cold War, although it did grow tremendously in size and importance as a result of the Cold War. The origins of the Security Service go back to the labour unrest that followed the First World War. The Mounties had always been fighting a cold war against Soviet Communism, their primary target since the Russian Revolution. Among the highlights of the state's unrelenting hostility to Communism and the revolutionary Left are the following: the repressive response of the state to the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919; the passage of section 98 of the Criminal Code in the *The RCMP branch devoted to counter-subversion and counter-espionage underwent many name changes over the years (Intelligence Section, Special Branch, Security Service, etc.). For simplicity, we will refer here simply to the 'Security Service' regardless of its formal designation.

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wake of the strike and the prosecutions brought against Communist leaders under the section in 1931; the small 'wars' fought against Communists by police in major cities in the 1920s and 1930s; the deportations of foreign-born Communists and labour organizers between the wars, and especially in the early 1930s; the passage of the notorious 'Padlock Law' in Quebec in the late 1930s and the failure of the federal government to disallow such an illiberal (and unconstitutional) law; and the outlawing of the Communist party and associated front organizations, the banning of Communist publications, and the internment of Communists under emergency powers during the Second World War. For these campaigns, the Mounties were usually enthusiastic foot-soldiers. The official historian of the RCMP has written that during the interwar years, 'the principal target of RCMP intelligence ... was the Communist Party of Canada and its front organizations.' Even pro-Nazi and pro-fascist groups were no more than a 'secondary objective.' 14 In early 1939, Charles Rivett-Carnac, head of the Security Service, advised the government that Communists represented a menace far worse than fascism. Fascism, he insisted, did not require the 'overthrow of the present economic order - and its administrative machinery.' As proof, he pointed out that 'a modified form of capitalism now exists' in the Nazi Reich. 'Fascism,' he concluded, 'is the reaction of the middle classes to the Communist danger and, as perhaps you are aware, the Communists describe it as "the last refuge of capitalism.'" 15 As late as 1952 an official publication of the force called Law and Order in Canadian Democracyy could express regret that Nazism had unfortunately 'fallen into the hands of demagogues and sadists' and thus failed to provide Germany with a 'bulwark against the encroachment of Communism.' 16 None of this, it should be pointed out, had anything to do with counter-espionage. After the Gouzenko affair, close surveillance of Communists was often justified on counter-espionage grounds, since Communism was believed to be a breeding ground for Soviet spies. But the origins of anti-Communism both in the state generally and in the RCMP in particular had independent, ideological roots. Communists were first seen as subversives rather than as potential spies. Counter-subversion as anti-Communism was thus integral to the Security Service's definition of its role. It is thus fitting that throughout the first postwar decade the counter-subversion branch of the Security Service was called simply the Anti-Communist Section.17 Indeed, anti-Communism was part of the fundamental philosophy and self-definition of the RCMP. The Mounties were the watchdogs of the state, the thin line at the edge of civilization where the law was enforced and order formed out of disorder. In the twentieth century the spectre of revolution began to haunt the Mounties. 18 Crime was the everyday tactical challenge to the practice of law and order, but revolution was the strategic challenge to the very notion of order itself. The Communists, who apparently embodied twin threats to the existing order - overthrow both of capitalist property and of the state - were the ultimate enemy. The Gouzenko affair and the emergent Cold War were thus less of a cause than a rationale for a stepped-up anti-Communist role for the RCMP in the immediate

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postwar years. As Security Service chief Rivett-Carnac explained to his immediate superior in early 1947, just as the Cold War was coming into clear focus:19 'The safeguarding of the internal security of the Dominion, bearing in mind the promise of events in the international field and the situation regarding subversive activity as a National and International problem, appears to assume a position of predominance over all other subjects, not only now but more especially in the future. With regard to this point there seems little room for discussion, and it is as well, perhaps, to bear this carefully in mind from the standpoint of our own very definite responsibilities in the matter.' According to the monthly Intelligence Bulletin that followed the public revelations of Soviet espionage in 1946, the role of the Communists had been no surprise to the Mounties: 'information originally obtained dovetailed with information already in our possession with amazing accuracy and opened up new avenues of investigation providing new pieces for the jig-saw pattern.'20 But the RCMP apparently had no evidence of Soviet espionage activity before Igor Gouzenko and his documents fell on it from the sky, as it were. There are grounds for believing that the RCMP did a reasonable job once it had addressed itself to this problem.21 But on two critical points, counter-espionage dovetailed with traditional anti-Communism: it was the Soviet bloc that was identified as the sole source of espionage against Canada, and it was domestic Communism that was identified as the primary reason why Canadians betrayed their country. From the late 1940s on, anti-Communism was the official governing principle of an extensive internal security system with impact upon a substantial number of Canadians, among them public employees, immigrants, and applicants for Canadian citizenship. This is of much greater significance than might appear on the surface. For one thing, it situated the Security Service in a close relationship with the senior public service and established its continuing presence in the ongoing discussion of government security policy at the Security Panel. The conservative anti-Communist ideology of the Security Service was given particular resonance within the councils of government by the service's privileged place in a key area of administration. At the same time, the demands of security screening offered another set of opportunities to the Security Service. It is standard procedure in counter-espionage that when an agent is discovered, it will, where appropriate, be preferable to 'turn' or 'double' that agent rather than publicly reveal his existence. By analogy, when a subject of security screening tests positive, there is always an opportunity to transform that person into a source of information on the group or association that led to the positive result. To the individual, of course, the alternative may well be the loss of a job and the end of his or her career, or the denial of Canadian citizenship and the threat of deportation. Thus the incentive to cooperate is not inconsiderable. In this way the screening system offered the Security Service special opportunities to gain footholds within the kind of left-wing groups it had traditionally seen as subversive. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI moved beyond the status of a branch of the executive to that of a body that actively encouraged congressional and even free-lance anti-Commu-

218 The Cold War in Ottawa nist witch-hunters in McCarthy-era America. The RCMP showed no inclination to follow suit. In fact, it had little quarrel with the Liberal government's philosophy of maintaining anti-Communism under tight state control. The Security Service did not like McCarthyism any more than the Liberals, perceiving it (no doubt correctly) as a threat to authority. In 1955, the head of the Security Service, C.W. Harvison (later RCMP commissioner), in a lengthy memorandum to the commissioner touched upon the attitude of Parliament to security and intelligence:22 'at times there has been a reluctance to accept the need for a Security Service. Members have shown a very strong and proper interest in protecting the rights of the individual and an understandable aversion toward the necessary intrigue and secrecy of intelligence work. Widely publicized reports of the work of civilian anti-subversive organizations investigating communism in the U.S.A. have in no way served to allay the fears of Members that anti-subversive activities may get out of hand if not closely controlled.' The RCMP saw itself as the legitimate cutting edge of the state's defence against Communism. It does not appear from the evidence of Security Service documentation we have been able to obtain that a particularly sophisticated understanding of the nature of Communism was developed within the service. An exaggerated impression of the potential of Communists for disruption was endemic - a reflection of widespread fears in Western societies in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although the Communists never did fulfil the Mounties' expectations that they would foment mass disorder or carry out acts profoundly damaging to Canada, their definitional status as 'subversives,' and potential spies, generally proved adequate for surveillance purposes. Not all observers were impressed by the Mounties' capacity as Communist hunters. The American consul in Vancouver reported to Washington in 1948 that The 'Special Division' of the Vancouver office of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is staffed by not more than six men, only two of whom have a complete realization of the problems involved in investigating the spread of Communism in this province ... It is recognized by the persons directly charged with the operation of the 'Special Division' that their work is sketchy and haphazard and that they are aware only of the top-level Communists whose activities and public statements make it impossible to ignore them. They are frank to admit that not more than 5% of the adherents of the Communist Party in this area can be identified ... It is believed that a similar condition exists throughout Canada ... high officials of the Headquarters staff are frank to state that the majority of the officers are either unaware of or are unprepared to cope with subtle Communist infiltration ... [Continuous efforts are required to maintain the morale of the 'Special Divisions' and that even now they are operating on skeleton staffs without sufficient manpower to engage in any surveillance or to act other than as compiling officers with reference to public activities of the Party ... [T]he mass of Communists in this Province and presumably throughout Canada is free to come and go as it wishes without let or hindrance or without the slightest knowledge on the part of security or otherwise interested agents.23

The Antagonists 219 The dispatch closed with an admonition that every care be taken that nothing in it be communicated to the Canadian government or to the RCMP. No doubt Canadian practice would be found wanting by the standards of J. Edgar Hoover's America - it is no surprise that this same consulate invited Hoover himself to address Canadians on the Red menace. Yet the description of the ineffectuality of the RCMP was quite probably overdrawn. To less zealous eyes, the Mounties seemed to be doing an exemplary job of keeping tabs on homegrown Communists. Indeed, documents in the U.S. State Department files drawn largely, if not exclusively, from RCMP files offer the best evidence of just how widely and deeply the Mounties were in fact probing into Canadian Communism.24 For many years one of the chief Red-hunters in the RCMP was John Leopold, who had made a dramatic appearance in the witness box in the 1931 trial of Tim Buck and other Communist leaders as an ex-undercover Communist known as 'Esselwein.' Leopold, who had been described during his former guise by the prominent CCF politician M.J. Coldwell as the 'most rabid Communist organizer in Regina,' was later in his RCMP guise described by an official in the Prime Minister's Office as the 'notorious' Sergeant Leopold who specialized in looking for 'Reds under every bed.' Penetration of the party by the RCMP (whether through agents like Leopold or through sources paid or otherwise maintained by the police) clearly continued and was perhaps even stepped up in this era. There is, for instance, a clear reference made by the minister of justice to his cabinet colleagues in the early 1950s to a continued presence within the party that the RCMP was anxious not to jeopardize.25 Throughout this period, the Mounties' intelligence product, as seen by the consumers in government, tended to be strong on facts - their files offering a Who's Who of party activists, and a broad and sometimes detailed knowledge of fronts and associated activities based on an apparently wide number of sources across the country - but weak on analysis and interpretation. The Security Service's own internal history notes that by 1953 'the simple expansion of information on Communist subversion had reached optimum value: processing the sheer quantity involved was proving impossible, negating the point of collecting the material in the first place. Quality of intelligence was perceived to be suffering for the sake of quantity.' At this point the RCMP had amassed active files on 21,000 individuals and 2,300 organizations (most of these trade unions). Before the era of electronic data processing, this paper blizzard was so unmanageable that the Mounties were forced to cut back voluntarily. In 1954, 17,000 files on individuals were deactivated, and in 1958 several thousand were scrapped altogether as no longer useful.26 The Mounties tended to be moralistic and alarmist in their security assessments: Communists were ubiquitous, tireless, always larger than life, and more evil than anyone else seemed to understand. Leopold may have been extreme, but the 'Redsunder-the-bed' mentality was widespread within the service. Moreover, to such minds the leopard never changed its spots; any apparent evidence to the contrary

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was sure to be labelled as enemy disinformation. In 1957 the RCMP cautioned the government that the apparent exodus from the party following the 1956 upheaval in no way allowed any relaxation of surveillance: Although there has been a decrease in actual party membership, resulting from internecine strife following the denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the subsequent revelations of anti-semitism in the Soviet Union, most, if not all, of those who ceased activity or dropped Party membership still require investigation and surveillance. In other words, it cannot be accepted that they no longer retain subversive intention simply because they have had a disagreement with one aspect of party policy. As a matter of fact because of their separation, in some instances, our task has been made more difficult.

This was part of the force's rationale for a larger appropriation from Treasury Board. Contrary to later stereotypes, the RCMP was usually quite able to distinguish between Communism, as such, and social democracy or other forms of left-liberal thought. For instance, in a commentary in the Intelligence Bulletin for September 1946, an anonymous Mountie (probably Rivett-Carnac) warned Security Service operatives not to misconstrue an apparent leftward trend among Canadian 'intellectual leaders' who 'are now inclined to view national and international conditions and problems with a more flexible attitude conducive to interpreting solutions with a socialistic coloration.' Despite the potential opportunities this opened for the Communists, there was not the slightest departure from the fundamentals of democratic thinking as defined by Western democracies. Nor is there likely to be any such departure in spite of the radical trend, for personal rights and liberties which exist only within the just dispensations of democratic procedure are too jealously guarded in Canada and more particularly by those regarded as the 'intelligentsia' ... Attempts by the men of the Kremlin and their agents to make capital of discontent and unrest in the ranks of University professors, scientists and the like, can be expected with perhaps a measure of success, but one thing would appear certain, that whatever they champion, no matter how radical [sic] they think, what they accept will fall far short of Communism, Kremlin style.

They were generally able to distinguish liberals and social democrats from Communists. On the subject of Communism narrowly defined, the Mounties were very much the defenders of the existing order (as one might expect of any police force) but not of much guidance to government other than as reinforcers of the conventional wisdom. To judge from the minutes of the Security Panel in those years, Mountie advice was usually gruff, blunt, sometimes acerbic, but not particularly thoughtful or incisive. Even though the civil-service mandarins had little choice but to accept these counsels, as they usually lacked any alternative source of security intelligence,

The Antagonists 221 they often harboured reservations about the usefulness of what was offered them by the 'Horsemen' (as the Mounties were sometimes called behind their backs). None of this brought immediate success to the Security Service in terms of greatly enhanced organizational status or vastly increased budgets. During the war the Intelligence Section, as it was then known, had expanded rapidly, reaching almost 100 employees at headquarters with scores more in specialized units in various field divisions. War's end brought quick demobilization and the Intelligence Section did not escape. When Gouzenko defected, the Intelligence Section had been reduced to a 'small group at Headquarters,' with only two officers, and a total of perhaps two dozen men across the country.28 Gouzenko had three immediate effects. First, specialization in counter-espionage began, with the assistance of the British secret service. Second, overall numbers in the service began to increase. Third, the Intelligence Section, which had simply been a part of the Criminal Investigation Branch, was reorganized into the Special Branch, which by 1950 reported directly to the commissioner rather than to the director of criminal investigation. In 1956 the branch became the Directorate of Security and Intelligence. The increased prestige of the Security Service is reflected in the fact that two successive officers in charge of the section in the early and mid-1950s later became commissioners. By 1970 the service had increased fifty-fold from its early postwar numbers. The efficiency and professionalism of the service was, however, somewhat questionable. Early in 1947, Rivett-Carnac, about to be promoted out of the branch, wrote a report on the reorganization of the Special Branch.29 He insisted that 'no concerted effort' had been made to 'place Intelligence matters on a properly organized functioning basis.' He identified a number of administrative problems for the RCMP in fulfilling its important new security duties. First was the shortage of trained personnel. In the field, he found only a single province that met his standards of an 'efficient organizational set-up.' One province had a single corporal employed on Special Branch matters and 'net resources' of one informant who was paid twenty dollars per month. Nor was he much impressed with the quality of personnel: 'in some cases personnel have been selected for work in the Special Branch who are obviously unsuited, by reason of lack of intellectual capacity, for this type of work.' Police mentality did not necessarily lead to the kind of analytical capacity RivettCarnac desired, nor was there any special training offered for Special Branch recruits. He recommended that the branch be upgraded, freed from the Criminal Investigation Branch, and infused with the talent of some civilians unencumbered with the limitations of police mentality and training. All these recommendations were eventually followed to a degree, but the limiting factor was always financial resources. Despite the 'large significance' of the fight against Communism, and the amount of money expended by similar agencies in allied countries, such as the FBI and Britain's MI5, Rivett-Carnac asserted that 'as far as Canada is concerned, we have only scratched the surface of requirements.'' Not surprisingly, this was to be a constant lament of the force in this era - one

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backed from time to time with insistence that the government's security-screening programs could not be adequately met without more men and money being invested in the Security Service. Ironically, it was only later, in the 1960s and 1970s, when considerably more resources were indeed placed in the service that its activities began to attract growing public resentment. In the early Cold War era, the service may have been lean and government support perhaps niggardly in terms of the results expected, but public satisfaction seemed to be high (or so we might at least infer from the lack of criticism from press and Parliament). Certainly when wouldbe anti-Communist crusaders (such as Tory George Drew) tried, more or less unsuccessfully, to stir public fears of Communist infiltration, fingers were never pointed at the RCMP for laxity, but rather at the politicians. Despite his criticism of police shortcomings in this area, Rivett-Carnac was clearly trying to save the security field for the force to which he had devoted his career. He was making a pitch to the self-image of the Mounties. Take hold of the area of counter-espionage and counter-subversion, he advised, or 'otherwise our position may be rendered insecure and the brightness of our star in the field of Canadian affairs diminish accordingly.' This was a note to be repeated many times over the following decades, until the Security Service was finally wrestled away from the Mounties and 'civilianized' in 1984. In this era, the Mounties maintained a firm grip over security intelligence. The force could thus lend its legendary prestige (the Mounties were perhaps the quintessential symbol of Canada) to the anti-Communist Cold War crusade. At the same time, the Mounties could enhance their own legitimacy as an organization by identifying themselves as being at the heart of the struggle against Soviet Communism. Later the image of the RCMP would suffer for the excesses of its Security Service, especially among Canadians of liberal and leftwing views. In the late 1940s and 1950s there was little or no such public criticism on the left - except from the Communists, a fact that only served to confirm the Mounties' status as 'good guys'. Yet if the Mounties had a relatively easy run of it in the early Cold War days, with criticism from both right and left muted, those charged with the task of battling Communism did not always find the task personally rewarding. Civilians employed by the Security Service saw little chance of advancement and found the work monotonous and unrewarding. 'Resignations were common after very few years of service: continuity was lost, collective experience never gained.' For those higher up, worse was often in store. 'While boredom beset some of the rank and file,' the service's internal historians note, 'tension gripped those in charge.' An internal report in the early 1960s referred to 'severe emotional disturbances' and documented several cases of breakdown.' Commissioner McClellan wrote to one officer who was forced to retire for health reasons: 'Only those of us who went through some of these experiences together will really understand how much of each of us was consumed in some of those difficult operations which we had to carry out.' 'Security work was anxiety producing work,' the official historians conclude, 'in

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which much could go wrong but for which the diligent practitioner could never expect public reward.'30 It was a tough, dirty job fighting the Commies, but someone had to do it. In the bureaucratic battles for more money, men,* and status within the state, the Mounties faced an often difficult time. One theme, which recurred again and again, was the question of the inappropriateness of the police mentality for security and intelligence work. A related theme was the unsatisfactory role of civilian analysts within the Security Service. The two themes were brought out in 1955 in a lengthy (108-page) memorandum prepared by Mark McClung, one of the first civilian analysts hired in the Security Service.31 McClung decried the hold that police mentality and the police hierarchy held over security work and proposed an elaborate, even grandiose, alternative of a secret 'Internal Security Service' staffed by civilian professionals, although still under the broad jurisdiction of the RCMP commissioner. Many of his specific points regarding the inadequacies of staffing, training, management control, and especially of analysis and interpretation, made as they were by an insider with some experience, rang true. Some were accepted, but the broad thrust of McClung's report, tending toward the creation of a partially separate, civilianized service, was 'emphatically' rejected by the head of the Special Branch, C.W. Harvison, and by the commissioner, L.H. Nicholson.32 McClung claims that this marked the end of his effective role within the branch. Although John Sawatsky sees the McClung memorandum as a progressive policy document, ahead of its time, McClung had not in fact presented a very well-thought-out blueprint. Indeed, Harvison had little difficulty in demonstrating some crucial flaws in the plan.33 Serious reform of the service would have to wait for the major RCMP scandals of the 1970s.34 The Mounties had some good reasons for wanting to retain the security-intelligence function under their wing. Not only did it offer access to the higher levels of Canadian government decision making, but it also opened a valuable window on the world to a rather provincial police force. Western intelligence sharing and cooperation in the Cold War in general, and the RCMP's role in immigration security screening in particular, led to the development of strong ties with security and intelligence agencies abroad. There had always been links with British Intelligence, given the traditional imperial connection, but it was American linkages that grew apace with the intensification of the Cold War. Liaison between the FBI and the RCMP had begun in the 1930s, strengthened when America entered the war in 1941, and then expanded rapidly with the Cold War. Many of these linkages developed without any effective overall Canadian governmental authority: in effect the security and intelligence agencies were developing their own transborder ties. The Mounties found themselves increasingly drawn into an 'international intelligence *'Merf is used advisedly. As a paramilitary police force, the RCMP was very much a masculine preserve. Women could aspire at most to be stenographers or typists for the boys in uniform.

224 The Cold War in Ottawa community.' 35 For their part the Mounties found these ties beneficial: they gained a niche on the wider world stage, made valuable contacts among the serious players in the great game of Cold War intrigue, and gained access to intelligence that they could never have amassed on their own. In a more subtle fashion this access also strengthened their hands within Canada. In the persistent battles fought by the police to protect their sources from any outside scrutiny - by courts or even by civilian officials in government - the international connection became a kind of trump card. If any light were cast upon their sources, they would always argue, these sources would be closed off immediately by the friendly foreign agencies that had supplied them on the understanding that they would be kept secure. This could sometimes be an excuse for covering up mistakes and deflecting criticism. 36 These ties were by no means an unalloyed blessing, even from the police point of view. In 1955 the commissioner of the RCMP wrote to the minister of justice complaining about two duties 'which cause us more trouble than all our other work combined.' 37 One of these had to do with the exchange of intelligence with the United States. Indeed this exchange had become a public headache for all concerned. The problem was directly related to the junior status of the RCMP vis-a-vis Uncle Sam. The RCMP had always avoided undertaking the gathering of intelligence abroad. Nor was there any Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), both of which gathered external intelligence and carried out operations on foreign soil. The advantage of plugging Canada into the wider Western intelligence community was that Canada gained some access to foreign intelligence that it would not otherwise possess. This was especially important in screening immigrants and visitors to Canada, since without intelligence sharing the Canadian authorities would have little or no information upon which to act. However, nothing comes without a price. In the world of intelligence sharing, the key has always been exchange, the quid pro quo. Unfortunately, Canada had little to offer in exchange other than the RCMP's security files on Canadians. The U.S. authorities, including the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Hoover's FBI, had more or less unimpeded access to the RCMP's dossiers on 'subversive' Canadians. Many Canadians found themselves barred from entering the United States under the draconian provisions of the U.S. McCarran-Walter Act, based upon information supplied by the RCMP. An increasing barrage of public criticism in the early 1950s embarrassed both the government and the RCMP. To make matters worse, the FBI had few scruples about passing information to congressional witch-hunters, sometimes to devastating effect. The tragic case of Herbert Norman is perhaps the most notorious, but it is not the only one. The RCMP was by no means simply the victim of American excesses. A darker aspect of the international intelligence community is the degree to which an organization like the RCMP, in a country like Canada, which was a very junior partner in the Western alliance, was drawn inexorably into the assumptions, the values - the cul-

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ture, as it were - of the dominant partner as embodied in its intelligence agencies. This became a hidden, and thus covert, form of American domination of Canadian life to the degree that the RCMP, with its privileged position in the state, reflected the American Cold War discourse. To be sure, the RCMP (and the Canadian state generally) was itself firmly committed to the Cold War. But American Cold Warriors represented the American national interest, which did not always coincide with specifically Canadian interests. When RCMP officers visited their counterparts in the United States to ask for intelligence data that would be selected and interpreted by the Americans, when they attended conferences or training sessions designed and run by the Americans, when American-sponsored visitors came to Ottawa to impart knowledge of the wider world situation to the local boys, a dominant discourse was being defined in which the Mounties played much more of a passive than an active role. It could hardly have been otherwise in an alliance of such unequals, but that perhaps is the point. As the McDonald Commission on the RCMP commented carefully many years later, there was a definite 'danger of Canada's security intelligence agency adopting the outlook and opinions of a foreign agency, especially of an agency which has come to be depended upon heavily. The danger is particularly acute because Canada does not have its own foreign intelligence agency, so that a Canadian Security Service may become extremely dependent on foreign agencies for covert information ... The RCMP Security Service has had few members capable of providing analyses of foreign situations with possible effects on Canadian security.'38 And so the champions of the Free World within the Canadian arena, just like their opponents, had a foreign power behind them, manipulating, defining, encouraging, and insisting on a certain 'line'. One road led to Moscow, another to Washington. A choice, certainly, but there would have been more choice had there been another, Canadian road. THE U N I T Y OF OPPOSITES

The antagonists were opposites - Reds against redcoats; revolutionaries against conservatives; soldiers of Moscow against the guardians of the West. There were similarities as well. Both aspired to be disciplined, dedicated, austere, and ideologically motivated elite corps of fighters. Both believed that just beneath the tranquil surface of life in bourgeois Canada seethed deep currents of revolutionary ferment. Both, in different ways, were bedazzled by visions of disorder. Both believed that the fate of humanity turned on the outcome of the contest between Communism and capitalism. Both believed that they were front-line combatants in a conflict of epic dimensions. In epic conflicts, normal rules are suspended. Both antagonists could be zealous, self-righteous, and humourless. Both employed secrecy, duplicity, cunning. As they slipped into the shadows, both antagonists moved into a bizarre twilight world where fact and fantasy, wish and reality, mingled together.

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Somewhere in this netherworld may lie the central riddle of the Cold War itself. In dedicating themselves to this twilight struggle, the antagonists had become mirror-images of one another. Perhaps this was a microcosm of the Cold War and of the two ultimate antagonists, the United States and the USSR - except that they, unlike their surrogates in third countries, were armed with the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. It would be many years before Canada, and the world, would begin to wake from this spell.

10 'Freda to the Professor through Grierson': The Persecution of a Film Maker

C A N A D I A N C U L T U R E I N T H E COLD W A R : ' N O T H I N G B U T A N EMPTY SHELL ...' As Canada entered the era of the Cold War, there was one piece of armoury much less in evidence here than in the United States: the cultural weapon. As befitted the leader of the Western world, America deployed its culture as a strategic item, a very big gun on the front line. American mass culture was much appreciated and demanded in the world, just as it is today. Hollywood, for instance, was an engine of the positive American trade balance, as well as America's cultural ambassador to the world. American cultural industries were simply in another league compared to the dour, didactic, and altogether unattractive products of Stalin's grim propaganda factories. America's hugely successful cultural Cold War had two phases: first, the purging of left-wing tendencies in the home centres of cultural production, and second, the export of effective pro-American cultural products abroad.1 The former phase was most strikingly exemplified in the Hollywood witch-hunts carried out in the late 1940s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the latter by subsequent revelations about CIA clandestine funding of Cold War culture abroad. Canadian culture was not there in the front lines as the bugle sounded. Culturally, Canada was still very much a colonial country as it emerged from the Second World War. Canada imported much of its culture, mainly from Britain and the United States, and exported very little. Even Cold War events that took place on Canadian soil were appropriated and transformed into U.S. mass cultural images: the Gouzenko affair was made into an American movie, shot on location in Ottawa with American stars. The Iron Curtain was then imported into Canadian theatres like any other Hollywood product. During the war, Canada made a modest start at mobilizing cultural production as a projection of national prestige. This was centred, typically, on the federal government, and especially on the National Film Board (NFB), which began to gather

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some international appreciation in the early 1940s. Attempts by various artists and writers to encourage the federal government to carry over this rather unprecedented support for the arts into peacetime met with little success. Then in 1949 the government created the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences under the former high commissioner to London, Vincent Massey. Part of the reason for this action was Liberal concern to reclaim the affections of a certain kind of cultural nationalist intellectual ('people who read books,' in Brooke Claxton's phrase) who might otherwise be favourably inclined to the Liberals but were leaning to the CCF.2 The Massey Commission reported in 1951, when the Cold War was at its highest level of intensity. The commissioners wrote that 'as our Report goes to press, we find ourselves working against a darkening horizon in the international world.' Defence, they noted, was the biggest single item in the federal government's budget. Was culture then irrelevant? 'Are not tanks needed more than Titian, bombs more important than Bach?' No, they reasoned: 'If we as a nation are concerned with the problem of defence, what we may ask ourselves are we defending? We are defending civilization, our share of it, our contribution to it. The things with which our inquiry deals are the elements which give civilization its character and its meaning ... Our military defences must be made secure; but our cultural defences equally demand national attention; the two cannot be separated.'3 Massey's attention was fixed upon a more immediate and modest problem: how to protect 'our share of civilization,' the fragile elements of an indigenous Canadian culture, and how to encourage them to grow to maturity. In this perspective, there was an external threat, but it was not that of Communism, which had so transfixed the Americans. In fact, it was the Americans themselves, and their enormously fertile and expansive cultural industries. Under the rubric of the 'forces of geography,' Massey warned of the dangers to Canada of American private-sector sponsorship of the arts (about all that was available in Canada before Massey). Canada had paid a 'heavy price' for its dependency upon American charity, Massey asserted, citing the steady 'brain drain' of Canadian talent south of the border. 'The American invasion by film, radio and periodical is formidable'; 'a vast and disproportionate amount of material coming from a single alien source may stifle rather than stimulate our own creative effort.' 'We are,' Massey intoned gravely, 'now spending millions to maintain a national independence which would be nothing but an empty shell without a vigorous and distinctive cultural life.' 4 America represented a cultural threat not because the commissioners were antiAmerican but because America was the engine of mass culture. Massey's idea of national culture was high culture that educated citizens for their task of defending civilization. 'American mass culture was a threat to liberal democracy that was similar in nature if not in degree to communist totalitarianism. The alternative proffered for Canada was high culture as national culture.' 5 Yet if the major barrier to a distinctive Canadian culture was indeed the United

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States, Massey's message went unheeded by some who preferred to wage America's cultural Cold War on Canadian soil. Indeed, it was within one of the federal cultural institutions most strongly supported by the Massey Commission, the National Film Board, that one of the ugliest Canadian Cold War purges took place. In this and the following chapter, we examine the cultural Cold War waged within this federal cultural agency. The irony of this struggle is that its effect was only to weaken precisely those institutions of Canadian culture to which Massey had pointed with some pride and hope. Once again, the Cold War deepened American domination of Canadian life. 'A M O R E C A N A D I A N WAY ...'

The story of the Red scare at the National Film Board is the perfect illustration of what the Cold War meant to Canada. A promising centre of film-making excellence and a Canadian contribution to world cinema was stifled and deadened. Under the rhetoric of anti-Communism and absurd charges of 'espionage,' 'sabotage,' and 'subversion,' a purge was carried out. Jobs were lost, careers were blocked, talents were wasted. National security was invoked, but the real beneficiary of the purge was the powerful private-sector movie lobby, centred in Hollywood and extending into Canada through the American-owned theatre and distribution chains. The loser was an indigenous Canadian film industry. All this constitutes a standing rebuke to the bland liberal myth that McCarthyism was something that happened in America but not in Canada. Yet the lesson of this story is worse yet. As Rick Salutin has written, the Americans have actually celebrated the Hollywood witch-hunt by the House Un-American Activities Committee that took place in the late 1940s. The victims eventually became martyrs, even heroes. The victims in Canada have been ignored, relegated to silence. Tn the U.S., the film witch hunt all happened under klieg lights and TV cameras. It was impossible to miss. Here it was done in a more Canadian way: secretive, subtle, even polite. And yet our version was, if anything, more pervasive than the red scare in Hollywood. It began earlier, lasted most of a decade, and the aftermath is with us still in the form of the film industry we have - or do not have.' 6 'It began earlier ...' It indeed began long before the Cold War was officially unveiled. It began where the National Film Board began as a dynamic and creative force within the Canadian government and Canadian society. To be precise it began with the arrival in Canada of John Grierson. ' O N E I N C H T O T H E LEFT O F T H E G O V E R N M E N T '

Grierson, a Scottish film maker with a glittering international reputation, was a leading pioneer of the documentary film as an art form and a tool of propaganda. Grierson arrived in Canada in 1938 on a mission from the Imperial Relations Trust, but

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was persuaded in 1939 by the Liberal government of Mackenzie King to head up a new film board that was slated to play a leading propaganda role for the government in the impending European conflict. He stayed for the duration of the war. In 1943 he added to his film role by heading up the Wartime Information Board (WIB), which coordinated all government information. He was, in short, the czar of Canadian wartime propaganda. But it was on the NFB that he left his imprint. The NFB quickly assumed a role as a leading international exemplar of the documentary film. At the end of the war, a most promising future apparently awaited Grierson's Canadian legacy. Grierson made an indelible impression upon all who came in contact with him: 'He was short, wiry, and sandy-haired, a firebrand of a personality whose wide blue eyes could rivet the person being addressed, while a staccato of phrases ranging from Calvin to Spinoza, from Marx to Gobineau, from Goya to Charlie Chaplin, from the greatest English poetry to the most vulgar epithets, peppered the mind like a machine-gun burst.' 7 To those who worked with and for him, he was a genius, an inspiration, a charismatic figure. For others, especially for those whose interests either within the state or in the private sector crossed his blazing path, he was a dangerous man, a megalomaniac - a genius perhaps, but an evil genius.8 Already in Britain in the 1930s he and his associates had gained a reputation as left-wing and radical, a reputation that had not escaped the notice of British Security. Despite his success and his power in wartime Ottawa, this was Grierson's Achilles' heel, as events in 1945-6 would show. In his letter of resignation as film commissioner in the summer of 1945, Grierson noted that his efforts at promoting a new internationalism were not 'without occasional criticism from unimaginative and isolationist quarters.' Grierson, however, naively believed that Canada was, in his words, a 'progressive and unselfish nation.' 9 Events would call this faith into question. Grierson liked to describe his politics as 'one inch to the left' of the government in office. That inch turned out to be the equivalent of a mile so far as the government was concerned. Around him, Grierson built a school of progressive (or left-wing, depending upon whose characterizations were involved) young film makers. In a war against fascism, left-wing ideas could be cloaked within the official line. Sometimes, as in films like Inside Fighting Russia and Our Northern Neighbour that dealt sympathetically with life in the Soviet Union, Canada's ally, the politics could excite some open criticism. On one occasion, the NFB's political sympathies brought down direct government censorship. A film called The Balkan Powderkeg depicted events in Greece and Yugoslavia where popular (and left-wing) resistance movements had driven out the German armies of occupation. In Greece the British government was now in direct opposition to the Communist-led resistance (out of this conflict the Greek civil war and the Truman Doctrine of intervention against Communism would ultimately emerge). Mackenzie King had recently been burned by an angry response by Sir Winston Churchill to what the British prime minister took to be

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some slight by the Canadian government on the British position in Greece. Now King was disconcerted to learn that a Canadian-made film about to open to wide circulation in the United States in January 1945 took what his adviser Norman Robertson called a 'forthright' and 'liberal' editorial attitude, with its plain talk about royalist dictatorships in Greece and Yugoslavia and its sympathetic presentation of the viewpoint of the working-class resistance movements that found themselves in conflict with British troops. This was a red flag to King, who was excessively cautious at all times about foreign relations, especially with his senior allies, Churchill and Roosevelt. Robertson carefully pointed out that the NFB 'has done a good deal of excellent work and has shown quite remarkable powers of enterprise and initiative usually lacking in agencies of government.' This was because 'it has been relatively free from the restrictive controls by the more cautious Departments, such as ... External Affairs.'10 King, to the contrary, decided that External Affairs should be consulted by the NFB in making films touching on foreign relations. As for Balkan Powderkeg, it was ordered withdrawn from circulation, twice.11 There was also the question of style. The documentary style of Grierson and his close collaborator, Stuart Legg, was very much that of the 1930s and 1940s. Vivid, forceful images of people and things in motion flooded his films: soldiers, workers, the great engines of warfare and production. Staccato musical scores raced from crescendo to crescendo. Narration was stentorian. The deep voice of Lome Greene boomed out authoritatively on the sound tracks of the World in Action and the Canada Carries On series. The narration summed up what the images and sounds together were designed to convey: a didactic message of the travail and triumph of ordinary people the world over in mastering their own destinies. A powerful 1943 film, The War for Men's Minds, climaxed with a crashing crescendo of images, the last being footage of Chinese refugees walking and crawling on hands and knees towards the camera. 'The people of the earth,' thundered the narrator, 'march forward into their new age, march forward in the certainty that the gates of hell cannot prevail against them.' 12 The message was democratic and 'progressive,' but also strident and assertive - and certain to raise the hackles of conservatives.13 The NFB was highly innovative in one area: the context of film distribution. A program for 'non-theatrical' distribution was developed during the war. This involved showing films to groups such as trade unions, and public presentations in smaller rural centres, even, weather permitting, in outdoor settings where town residents could gather. Films were especially developed for such audiences, as with films stressing labour themes, or agricultural life. The idea was to use the film medium to allow people to see themselves and people like them, rather than the Hollywood never-never land of fantasy.14 Animators from the board attended and led discussions following the films. This was a strikingly innovative approach to a democratic cinema. There were plans for carrying this over into the postwar period, to stimulate popular debate about the nature of social and economic postwar recon-

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struction. Exciting as these ideas were to many Canadians, to others, powerful persons among them, they were subversive and revolutionary notions. Grierson's administrative style was equally well designed to get his way and to make enemies in the process. He was not a civil servant but a public-sector entrepreneur and impresario. He built an empire from his Ottawa office — but not in the approved bureaucratic style. As heads of rivals rolled, it was widely rumoured that he had a special relationship with the Prime Minister that enabled him to make end runs around normal procedures. Although Mackenzie King did tend to bestow favour on fellow Scots, there is no evidence from the King diaries of much personal contact between the two men. They did have dinner together one evening in 1941, after which King confided in his diary that he was impressed with Grierson's knowledge of propaganda and publicity, 'but not particularly taken with his personality.'15 When the wolves came out hunting for Grierson at the end of the war, King merely watched, coldly and unhelpfully. Bureaucratic enemies were one thing. Deadly foes of John Grierson also came from outside the Canadian government. Critics and enemies abounded in the private sector. The combination of Grierson's left-wing politics and the competitive threat posed by the NFB to privately produced films was too much for many to bear. Even during the war years, private-sector critics were fastening on Grierson's alleged 'Communist' tendencies. In the spring of 1942, H.E. Kidd of Cockfield, Brown Advertising wrote to Brooke Claxton, MP, to complain about Grierson on behalf of many of his business clients. Kidd was an invaluable supporter of Claxton in his Montreal riding and was later to become the secretary of the National Liberal Federation. Claxton was soon to become a cabinet minister and one of the most important political figures in Liberal party organization. 16 Kidd's complaint to Claxton was to the point: 'I have heard from some of our clients that Mr. Grierson is getting a reputation as one of the most dangerous characters in Canada. Somebody had seen the documentary film [Inside Fighting Russia] ... This film deals with Russia. It glorifies, in the opinion of my informant, the Communist faith and is a very insidious piece of propaganda for Communism.' Claxton, who as an innovator in political-advertising techniques had some real appreciation for Grierson's technical genius, shot back a forthright defence of the film commissioner: I don't know where people get their ideas about John Grierson. He is undoubtedly one of the leading producers of documentary films in the entire world and Canada's films are the one shining good point in all its publicity ... If John Grierson is a dangerous character, it is high time we had more of them. In fact, I state that positively we need more dangerous characters in Canadian life, people who do things just as well as they can without thought of the political consequences, who are willing to throw up their jobs the second there is the least sign of interference from any improper source, who speak the truth in terms that ring around the world. If the film about Russia shows Russia sympathetically, thank God for that! It is high time this

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country began to recognize that it is not decent to kick in the face the ally on whose courage and ability to make sacrifices our security depends. If we can learn anything from Russia about fighting, organization, caring for children in day nurseries, and so on, then let us learn about it and have no compunction about copying it, if it is better. Adverting to John Grierson, he is full of ideas which he expresses with great fire and brilliance. He is not a communist; he is not a socialist.17

Opposition to Grierson's NFB from the private sector was, in the Canadian context, a two-headed beast. One head, much the smaller, was that of the private Canadian film industry which did not, in truth, amount to much. It could, and sometimes did, act as a Canadian lobby against any expansion of the publicly owned NFB. The other and very much larger head was that of Hollywood. Hollywood, that export dynamo of American cultural industries, was well represented in Canada by the U.S. Embassy and by the American-owned theatre and distribution chains. The core of Hollywood production was, of course, feature films, which the NFB did not produce, and which the Canadian government had no intention of sponsoring. Yet the NFB did represent at least a marginal rival, especially in the pre-television age when people still depended on the cinema for images of news and events in the world. Above all, the NFB represented a breeding ground of Canadian talent under public auspices that had the potential of forming a nucleus of an indigenous Canadian film industry after the war. Hollywood was (and is) quite intolerant of any rivalry in its market on the northern half of the continent. Grierson's radicalism was the hook that his enemies needed. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI opened a file on Grierson in 1942. It had little in it until 1945, but it included an allegation from an informant who, on the apparent basis of watching a few NFB films, charged Grierson with being a 'communistic sympathizer.' 18 Difficulties between the NFB and the American government were already evident during the war when the U.S. Department of Defense gave the Washington office of the NFB considerable trouble over distributing training films. 19 U.S. diplomatic personnel in Canada kept close tabs on Grierson and his doings during the war. Reference to Grierson in the files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the predecessor to the CIA) can be found as early as 1943 when an informant noted that 'Grierson rates a lot of attention from yours truly.' 20 In 1944 the American vice-consul in Toronto passed on to his ambassador in Ottawa a fascinating report on 'American motion pictures in the postwar world,' based largely on conversations with the American president of Famous Players Canada Ltd, the leading distribution chain. Some concern had been expressed about a campaign for restrictive legislation directed against the American industry to make it compulsory for 20 to 25 per cent of films shown in Canadian theatres to be of British (Commonwealth) origin. Grierson allegedly was playing a leading role in this campaign, along with Canadian and British interests. The vice-consul further reported that Grierson had considered establishing a local Canadian feature-film

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industry but had given up the idea because he understood that the Canadian market was not large enough. He had been toying with the notion of a Canadian company filming in the United States, that is, competing on Hollywood's own terrain. The Famous Players executive had a better idea: attempts on the part of Canadians to produce pictures in the United States could be greatly discouraged, and the enactment of restrictive legislation possibly obviated, if American producers, in conjunction with the appropriate American government departments, would devote more attention to the Canadian theme. Canada wants to be advertised and desires much more publicity than has heretofore been given it in American films since it thoroughly realizes the value of the motion picture from the intellectual point of view. Motion pictures would advertise to the world Canadian institutions, culture, social problems, its people, its political and commercial status ... If the Americans will not do this, then the British will endeavour to do so, to the detriment of the American film industry in more ways than one.21

This was an early indication of what later became the 'Canadian Co-operation Project,' Hollywood's made-in-America alternative to an indigenous Canadian film industry. The British Grierson had been identified by Hollywood and the U.S. government as a competitor to their interests in Canada. Early in 1945 there was unfounded press speculation that Grierson was being offered a position operating a special film unit in the U.S. State Department. U.S. diplomats in Canada were disgusted at such news: 'It is somewhat surprising,' the consul general in Toronto suggested to the ambassador, 'that this person should be given official sponsorship in view of his antecedents.' Another American, a source for U.S. intelligence, encountered Grierson in the lobby of the Chateau Laurier about this time and took the opportunity to question him about the rumour. Grierson denied there was anything in it (there was nothing in it, in fact). Grierson also showed some insight into what the Americans were about. In the words of the American, [A] round-faced stranger, introduced as Mr. Cameron,* came up. 'Meet Dana Doten,' said Grierson, 'he's an American agent.' 'Agent of an American movie company?' he asked. That is fine. I want to talk about American films.' 'No, you don't understand,' said John, 'Dana is a secret agent for the Americans.' 'Yes,' I hastened to add, 'I am a secret service agent, but today I'm not wearing my uniform.'2 2

Within a few months, jokes about 'secret service agents' would seem very unfunny indeed.

"Probably Donald Cameron, later a senator, who was a director of the NFB.

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'THE BASIS OF THE P R E S U M P T I O N IS NOT V E R Y C O N S I D E R A B L E '

The day the earth shifted under Grierson's feet was the day that Igor Gouzenko defected with his sheaf of espionage-related documents from the Soviet Embassy just a few days after Grierson quit Canada and the NFB to set up a new film company in New York with his associate, Stuart Legg. The names of a number of people associated at one time or another either with the Film Board or with the Wartime Information Board were drawn into the net cast by the Gouzenko investigators. Some of these names were, at best, peripheral to the enquiry, being no more than names of people known to associate with others who were suspected of involvement in espionage. Others were apparently more directly implicated, including three who were ordered detained or subpoenaed. Besides working for the NFB or the WIB, all these people - those directly and those only peripherally implicated - had one thing in common: they were known to have or were suspected of having left-wing views and associations. Given the suspicious cast of mind of the Taschereau-Kellock Commission investigators and their tendency to assume guilt by association, this was damaging enough. But there was worse. The name of an employee of the NFB who had been Grierson's secretary for a few months during the war appeared in Gouzenko's Soviet documents. Described by Colonel Zabotin, the Soviet military attache in Ottawa as a 'lady-friend of the Professor [i.e., Dr Raymond Boyer],' Freda Linton was, in the opinion of the commissioners, a '"contact" or medium through whom information was received from various agents and funnelled through Fred Rose or otherwise to the Embassy.'23 Linton certainly associated with Communists: she had worked with Fred Rose and indeed had a 'relationship' with Canada's first and last Communist MP.24 In the notebook of Lieutenant Colonel Motinov there was an entry relating to Linton:25 Professor. Research Council — report on reorganization and work. Freda to the Professor through Grierson. According to Gouzenko's testimony, the Soviets had grown restive about having such a useful contact stationed in an organization as unimportant as the NFB. They wanted to get her into the National Research Council where she could work with her friend Raymond Boyer. 'It looks,' Gouzenko testified, 'as if Colonel Zabotin was to place Freda to work with the Professor, using Grierson's influence to get her into the position.'26 Gouzenko, it might be pointed out, had at best second-hand knowledge of these matters. In any event, Linton never did go to the NRC, nor was there any evidence adduced that Grierson had ever suggested such a move, even though the head of the NRC happened to have an office near that of Grierson. Grierson had met Colonel Zabotih once, in a diplomatic context. We are left with what Grierson himself, under questioning by the commission, called a possible 'presumption on the

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part of the Russian Embassy, or somebody there, that I would be of service to them.' 'The basis of the presumption,' said Grierson, 'is not very considerable.'27 The basis of presumption upon which the commission was operating did not have to be very considerable. The commission dealt in presumptions that were quickly elevated to certainties. Grierson, although by now no longer associated with the Canadian government, was called back from New York to testify twice before the secret sessions of the commission.28 Freda Linton had prudently disappeared and could not be questioned about just what 'Freda to the Professor through Grierson' might have meant. Grierson was on his own. The commissioners and their counsel, E.K. Williams, probed and poked at 'Freda to the Professor through Grierson' without getting anywhere. In exasperation, Williams finally threw up his hands: Q. Then it comes down to this, I take it, Mr. Grierson, that this entry ... is something that you cannot make any suggestion on that you think might be helpful to the Commission? A. I am afraid not, sir. Q. You cannot make any suggestion at all; that is what you mean? A. I mean it has no reference to me that I can think of, either through Linton or directly.

Obviously unimpressed, the commissioners turned to questioning Grierson about other employees of the NFB and the WIB. The thrust of the questioning was ideological. They wanted to know about the political views of people who had worked for Grierson, and about their connections with the Communist party. John Grierson was being subjected in camera to something soon to be familiar in the public hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee or of Senator Joseph McCarthy's senate subcommittee in the United States. He was being asked to deliver up his former associates to the inquisition. What, he was asked, of a professor employed by the WIB. Was he a Communist? 'I would not think he was a member of the party,' Grierson answered. 'We have,' intoned the inquisitor, 'a lot of evidence that people would deny being members of the party, but their views were very apparent.' After further parrying, a fall-back position was put: 'Would you say he was a communist sympathizer?' Grierson deflected the enquiry into a digression on Plato's conception of liberty. Plato was apparently not on the list of suspects and Grierson was quickly pressed about the party affiliations of another WIB employee, Frank Park. Did Grierson not choose Park for the job because of his alleged Communist sympathies? Had Grierson not chosen Linton as his secretary and later promoted her to another NFB position because of her association with Fred Rose? Grierson denied these insinuations. The commissioners drove home the point of their questioning. Q. There has been proved before the Commission the existence of an astonishingly large number of Communist cells masquerading as study groups. There has been proved here before the Commission that an astonishingly large number of persons working in these

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cells and drawing other people into them were employees of the Film Board ... I am asking you whether, first of all, you would have any knowledge that that was going on; and, if you did not, how could you explain that so many of them - ? A. An astonishingly large number? Q. Yes; how could you explain that so many members of the Film Board would be engaged in these activities? Q. First of all, I am surprised that - definite partisan political activity? Q. Oh, definitely; subversive political activities. A. It makes me choke a little. I can only say this. Naturally, in recruiting for the Film Board I was reaching out of the sky for the people, as you know, in the sense that many people had gone to the Army, and I had not much access in the latter years to that clique of people. I was dealing with 4-F'ers* too, almost exclusively, in the last two or three years. I had not much choice. I went for the brightest I could get, because I had to train them fast. Remember, you had very few people in this country who knew films or the handling of films ... Q. And you had no reason to suspect from your contacts with these people that some of them might be active workers for the Soviet Union, in subversive activities in Canada? A. If I had dreamed of it, I would certainly have fought it. Q. And did you not sense at any time that kind of atmosphere or an extremely leftist atmosphere in the personnel of the Film Board? A. No. I had a sense of atmosphere of progressive thought, we will say, in the vague sense we have used it before, that was very good for Canada ...

The air of desperation that crept into these last answers may have come from the sudden blow to Grierson's pride. His cherished, if vague, notion of 'progressive thought' was judged by the government inquisitors as antithetical to the interests of Canada. Everything that Grierson had stood for in his creative career was being labelled as subversive. The commission was relentless in its thrust. They did not stop with Grierson's employees. Williams had bluntly inquired: 'are you a Communist or communistically inclined?' Grierson tried to throw them off with a discourse on the political role of public servants in the Whitehall tradition, and on the great forces of Catholicism, liberal democracy, and international socialism. Williams wanted to keep on target: 'Would you say then that the effect of all this is that you are not a member of the Communist party?' 'Oh, no,' Grierson agreed. Williams had another punch in reserve: 'That is officially. What would you say about subscribing to any of their views? Would you say that your inclinations were of the leftist variety?' Grierson was against the wall. 'Not at all; I do not think that way. I am entirely a person who is concerned with the establishment of good international understanding. I mean, I get as much from Gobineau as from Marx.' The commissioners were not interested in Gobineau29 - presuming they had ever heard of him - but they had certainly heard of Marx. *That is, men ineligible on medical grounds for military service.

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Taking the various strands of allegation together (the Motinov note and the suspect politics of the NFB), it was Commissioner Kellock who moved in for the final kill: Q. Now, Mr. Grierson, all these other people being communists, the note would make sense to me if Motinov or Zabotin or whoever it was knew you as a Communist — A. Unless Q. Just a moment until I put a proposition to you, - knew you as a communist. That would make sense to me: that Zabotin would say, 'We will get Grierson to put Freda in the National Research Council, because we know that Grierson belongs to this clan, or we know he will do it for us.'

Grierson's denials were fruitless. He had made a rather pathetic appeal to 'the French members of the Commission' that the NFB had done a 'really good job' of bringing English and French Canada together, but this sort of self-justification was brusquely waved aside.30 It was Communism and Communism alone that the commissioners were interested in, and they were certain that they had found it. 'I H A V E B E E N S U S P I C I O U S O F H I S S Y M P A T H I E S W I T H C O M M U N I S M '

So was Mackenzie King, the man who had hired Grierson in the first place. As King avidly read the secret reports coming to him from the early stages of the investigation by the RCMP and the commission, his diary entries became wildly paranoic about Communism. Even his personal valet fell under suspicion as a Red. On 20 February, five days after the dozen suspects had been seized and taken to the RCMP barracks, he noted suspiciously that Grierson had written to him and had tried to get in touch over the appointment of a successor as head of the NFB. Well before Grierson's appearances before the commission, King had already formed his own opinion:31 'I recall how I stopped a play [sic - probably the film Balkan Powderkeg] which the Film Board had put on, which he had conceived, and which would have created a terrible sensation at a time of war, had it proceeded. I have been suspicious of his sympathies with Communism, etc. His name appears in the evidence as one who clearly was in touch with the head of the [Soviet] military organization here and with other Communists.' King, who had some considerable difficulty disentangling the Communist conspiracy from anti-Semitic fantasies about 'Jews and Jewish influence,' 32 was not done with suspicions about Grierson and his NFB. The next day he warned Brooke Claxton, the minister responsible for the NFB, about Grierson: T told him in confidence that Grierson's name had come into the evidence regarding contact with the leading Communists at the Embassy. I had always been a little concerned about what he was doing in that regard. On no account to allow him to influence his judgment as to a successor. I said I thought it would be well to have the whole situation at the Film Board looked into as there

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was reason to believe there was quite a Communist nest there. It had been reported at different times.' Claxton, as pointed out earlier, had once been a defender of Grierson and other such 'dangerous characters.' But the past had become another country. With Gouzenko and the Cold War, 'dangerous characters' were no longer innovators but 'security risks.' ' O N E OF THE MOST S U B V E R S I V E C H A R A C T E R S NOW A L I V E '

Although Grierson was gone from Canada and would never be welcomed back to any government position,33 his status as a security risk was quickly internationalized. The RCMP had sent the FBI a full report on everything they had on Grierson.34 A truncated version of his testimony was published in the royal commission report; the behind-the-scenes allegations of Communism against Grierson by the FBI and the State Department now spilled out into the public domain. His future in the United States was foreclosed when his visa renewal was refused. Then, in a move that shocked the Americans, he was named in 1947 as adviser on mass media to Julian Huxley, director general of UNESCO. This would give Grierson a diplomatic passport to return to the United States. To say that we are all astonished at the appointment,' reported the American Embassy in Ottawa, 'would be an understatement.'35 This appointment precipitated another flurry of pressure by the Americans, this time on UNESCO. An American-inspired purge of 'Communists' on the staff of the United Nations and its agencies was getting under way at this time. Grierson was thus a target of McCarthyism twice, first in Canada, then at the international level. The flap over the UNESCO affair precipitated much diplomatic traffic between Washington and Ottawa. The Americans considered Grierson a Canadian and wanted Canada to disavow his appointment. This the Canadian government refused to do, on the ostensible grounds that they lacked jurisdiction, since Grierson was actually British. Privately, the Canadians wondered if the Americans were not becoming a trifle hysterical on the subject of Grierson. The Washington-Ottawa correspondence is interesting for the light it casts on the ambivalence of senior Canadian bureaucrats towards their erstwhile, if eccentric, colleague - and to the entire issue of American-style anti-Communism. Norman Robertson had confided to Lester Pearson in late 1946 that 'I am myself morally certain that he knew nothing whatever of his sometime secretary's connection with the Soviet spy ring, and I should be sorry to think that he felt he was suffering from it. Innocence and omniscience don't easily go together, and John finds it very hard to accept the fact that his secretary never told him she was sleeping with Fred Rose.'36 Pearson was thus somewhat puzzled when the U.S. ambassador to Canada claimed during the UNESCO flap that Robertson had told him that Grierson 'was strongly tarred with the Red brush.' Robertson flatly denied having ever said anything like this. T was from time to time ... puzzled and irritated by Grierson's

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lack of political judgment in handling the affairs of the Film Board, but came to the conclusion ... that he was not at any stage a conscious agent of the Communists.' Robertson added that Grierson really has some messianic illusions about what he can do through the medium of the film and the agency of UNESCO to achieve mutual understanding between Eastern and Western countries. I think he is mistaken in this, and that the results of his efforts may be mischievous rather than helpful, but I think his objectives are honest if inflated. To my mind it is a great pity that the United States ever refused him an immigration visa, and it would be a mistake to make an issue over his appointment to UNESCO. He may do much good there, just as he did in the Film Board, but he will need a strong advisory committee to keep him on the rails.

Similarly, Canada's ambassador in Washington, Hume Wrong, reacted testily to enquiries from the State Department about whether Canada would repudiate Grierson at UNESCO. 'We have not taken a position for or against Grierson's appointment and we are not in the least likely to do so,' he shot back. Not content to leave matters at that, Wrong echoed Robertson in defending Grierson from the smears: I think that he is far too strong an individualist to accept the discipline of the Communist party and to follow that or any other party line. I regard him as a radical, with socialist sympathies, and with, furthermore, an exaggerated conception of what can be done through his chosen medium, the documentary film, to bring about international understanding ... During the espionage investigation by the Canadian Royal Commission, nothing arose that could be regarded as proof of direct implication of Grierson. While he may at times have taken a line which was pleasing to the parties to the conspiracy, I cannot believe that he ever acted as a conscious agent.38

Strange and conflicting rumours swirled around the Canadian position on Grierson. Huxley claimed that Canada had recommended him for the job. This was denied. Then right-wing elements within UNESCO began whispering that Canada was ready to resign from UNESCO if Grierson were not fired, and that if Grierson returned to Canada he 'would be put under arrest.' These rumours were of course, 'absurd,' according to Pearson, who traced the problem unerringly to the Americans. The U.S. ambassador, Pearson confided to Wrong, 'has gone completely off the deep end in respect of this appointment and feels that unless we do something to eject Grierson from this organization, not only will the whole organization itself flop, but that Communism will run rampant throughout the world. There is no reasoning with him on the matter of Grierson, whom he considers to be one of the most subversive characters now alive.' 39 Canadian officials were not united on the Grierson issue. Arnold Smith, always the most hard-line Cold Warrior in External Affairs, was in touch with some rightwing opponents of Grierson within UNESCO at the United Nations in New York,

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where he was part of the Canadian delegation. 'My own view,' he told Pearson, 'is that in relation to the developing political trends the Grierson appointment was a rather foolish move on Huxley's part; not because there is any reason at all to think that Grierson has ever been engaged in anything illegal, but because he is well known for markedly pro-Soviet views, and because I think that UNESCO should be international [?] and democratic in flavour.' 40 Grierson himself then got into the act by calling Hume Wrong in Washington to complain about his treatment. 'He is clearly convinced,' Wrong believed, 'that the RCMP are responsible for his troubles and he seemed incredulous when I said that enquiries very recently made in Ottawa had confirmed my view that this was not the case.' Naively, Grierson wanted to write to Mackenzie King to 'ask him to telegraph Acheson [the U.S. secretary of state] on his behalf.' A wiser Wrong tried to dissuade him from this step, perhaps knowing how negative King was about Grierson.41 A couple of months later Grierson came to see Norman Robertson at Canada House in London, where Robertson was high commissioner. He confided to Robertson that through investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee* he had learned more about the source of his problems. It was, he said, U.S. film interests. Their fears were that a Grierson established firmly in the United States 'would play hob with the rudimentary American documentary film industry.' ('This,' Robertson commented drily, 'was a variation of the infant industry argument which, I may say, rather surprised me.') Moreover, they were worried that leftwing American documentary film makers would group themselves around Grierson and thus secure a wider rostrum for 'mischief-making activities.' Robertson was dubious about the role of Hollywood. Playing it straight, he told Grierson that in my innocence I had assumed that the United States Government was worried about the unresolved sequence 'Frieda [sic] to Grierson to the Professor [sic]' [Robertson had got the sequence a little garbled] and that until Frieda's story was told, people who had been closely associated with her were bound to be more or less smeared. He assured me he now knew that this had had nothing to do with the case ... All together it was a rather queer and not very illuminating conversation. Certainly it did not leave me with any clearer impression than I had before of where Grierson really stood. In fact, I thought I detected some disingenuous overtones in the whole conversation that made me wonder if I had not gone too far on several previous occasions in going bail for his bona fides.42 THIS WONDERFUL WORLD

The pressures on UNESCO proved too much, and within a year Grierson had resigned his position, thereby protecting the agency from an American assault that *HUAC was about to begin its well-publicized witch-hunt in Hollywood in the fall of 1947; its investigators may have been scouting the lie of the land in advance.

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might have proved fatal, given the weight of U.S. dollars in funding the United Nations at this time. The price of peace was not only Grierson's job, it was also complete American domination of UNESCO's media programs. Grierson returned to his native Britain to take up a position as controller of film activities for the Central Office of Administration. The shadow of the witch-hunt followed him. A Tory rose in the House of Commons to question Grierson's 'extreme Left' views.43 A year later, Grierson and his associate, Stuart Legg, who had followed him back, commenced enquiries about returning to Canada once again to make a film on British-Canadian trade. From London, External Affairs' Dana Wilgress cabled Ottawa: 'No doubt you are aware that both Grierson and Legge [sic] have been accused in the U.S. of having Communist affiliations. Regardless of whether or not there is any substance to these accusations, it would be embarrassing for us to be engaged in a joint enterprise with the United Kingdom in which Grierson and Legge would be the most active participants.' When it came down to a question of Legg's visiting Canada in connection with the film, the Canadian government was very circumspect. So long as he could proceed directly to and from Britain without travelling in the United States and so long as 'as little public attention as possible' was drawn to Legg's presence, they would grudgingly agree. After all, if Grierson and Legg were employees of His Majesty's government, Canada could hardly call them persona non grata.44 In fact, that is just what they had become. Grierson himself retired from government employment in the mid-1950s and returned to his native Scotland. Here he approached the Canadian press baron Roy Thomson, who had just acquired the Scottish independent television network. Grierson produced for Thomson a long-running and commercially successful public affairs show, This Wonderful World. Then, late in life, with the passions of the early Cold War spent, he returned to Canada, where in the late 1960s and early 1970s he taught film to students at McGill University, among them a younger generation of radicals.

11 'A Communist Nest': Witch-hunt at the NFB

'QUITE A COMMUNIST NEST' John Grierson was a celebrated victim of the Cold War. But the passions that had fuelled Grierson's persecution were by no means spent with his flight from North America. The National Film Board was Grierson's permanent Canadian legacy. The Prime Minister of Canada believed that the NFB was 'quite a Communist nest.' So did many others. In the late 1940s the witch-hunters moved in on the NFB. Grierson's wartime communications empire was already in disarray at the time of his departure. At one point during the glory days of the NFB and the Wartime Information Board (WIB) he had apparently tried to gather the CBC under his wing, a move that would have allowed him to command the state-run film, print, and radio media. In fact, the man who succeeded Grierson as manager of the WIB in 1944, Davidson Dunton, did go on to head the CBC. But by war's end, the WIB was wound up and its staff returned to private life or moved into other government positions. There had been a plan to maintain a core of the WIB as a peacetime government information agency, but this plan was abruptly scotched. The NFB could not be so easily dispensed with. It was very much a going concern and, as it owed its existence to the National Film Act, it was not formally linked to the war, as such, however useful it had been to the war effort. But Hollywood and the American theatre chains together with the private-sector film industry in Canada, such as it was, were gathering forces to nip in the bud any postwar flowering of a public-sector Canadian film industry. Ross McLean, Grierson's successor at the NFB, lobbied to decrease U.S. domination of the Canadian industry and even proposed the imposition of a quota system to ensure at least minimal opportunity for Canadian films to be seen in theatres in Canada. 1 But the Canadian government, increasingly under the sway in the postwar years of C.D. Howe, economic czar, 'minister of everything,' and forceful exponent of continentalist economic development, had no interest in subsidizing a local film industry.

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At the end of 1947 a deal was struck between Howe, representing Canada, and the Motion Picture Association of America (with the Grierson-hating American ambassador looking on approvingly). Known as the Canadian Co-operation Project, this arrangement sealed the fate of a Canadian feature-film industry; in exchange for not imposing quotas, Canada got travel shorts extolling Canadian vacations into U.S. theatres and brief mentions of Canada in Hollywood movies.2 The sole official voice raised against the Co-operation Project was that of Ross McLean, who proposed legislation forcing the Hollywood interests to reinvest one-third of the profits from their Canadian operations in Canadian film production.3 This forlorn proposal earned him, needless to say, the undying enmity of the Hollywood interests and their local protector, the U.S. Embassy. Nor did it win him any friends among the Liberal cabinet ministers, intent as they were upon cementing a functional partnership with the United States in the continental economy. The Co-operation Project presented another problem to the NFB with the appointment of a bureaucrat in Howe's ministry as liaison for the project. Archibald H. Newman interpreted his role in a most expansive fashion, styling himself as no less than 'Government Film Co-ordinator' and aggressively attempting to undermine the NFB at every turn. It soon became clear that Newman was in effect an agent operating within the government on behalf of Hollywood and the private Canadian interests. In vain the board asked the government to scale down Newman's hostile activities and pretensions to override the NFB's responsibilities under the National Film Act. Newman for his part asserted that his 'was a private enterprise department,' and he made no secret of his ambition to run the NFB out of business altogether.4 He very nearly succeeded. Other avenues still remained for the NFB. Its own strength was in the documentary film, and there was also the coming field of television. In this context, the enemies of the NFB were quick to pick up the scent of blood from the Gouzenko affair. As we have already seen, the U.S. government pursued John Grierson himself with a vengeance. Within Canada, suspicions about the subversive nature of Grierson's child, the NFB, were voiced in the House of Commons and the press. The 'progressive' atmosphere at the NFB, of which Grierson had been so proud, was, in the new context of the Cold War, highly suspicious. There were many young idealists in the organization. Some were socialists, some were sympathetic to Communism, and some were party members. The wartime attitude of a common front of progressive forces, particularly strong at the NFB, had suddenly become bureaucratic anathema. The spectre of a purge loomed on the horizon. The purge did not happen immediately. In fact it took more than three years from the public revelation of the Gouzenko affair for the full force of the new anti-Communist security mania to hit the board. Questions were being raised during those years, and there is evidence that a few employees whose politics were loo blatantly close to those of the Communists either were dropped or quit. 5 But the systematic application of the purge did not formally get under way until 1949-50. There were a

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number of reasons for this lag. The government was in the process of creating the machinery for a comprehensive internal security screening process. The cabinet directive setting the basis of the new system did not get final approval until early 1948, and the first RCMP reports on individual civil servants did not appear until the end of 1948. And Grierson's successor as film commissioner, Ross McLean, took a principled stand against the excessive application of 'security' criteria to the creative work of the film board. That stand kept the anti-Communists at bay for a time. In the end, it only made the final struggle sharper and more dramatic - and ensured that McLean himself would be the leading casualty of the purge. McLean had not been Grierson's first choice as successor; if he had been, he would never have been appointed. As it was, he had to wait a couple of years for his appointment to be made 'permanent', only to have it terminated two years later. McLean seemed an unlikely figure to play the role of principled defender of artistic freedom. He came with impeccable Liberal party credentials. A onetime journalist, he had worked in the Liberal national office on publicity for the 1935 election. Following Mackenzie King's return to office in that election, King had rewarded Vincent Massey, president of the National Liberal Federation, with a coveted appointment as high commissioner to Britain. McLean had gone with Massey to London as secretary to the high commissioner. It was while he was in this post that his eye was caught by Grierson's work in documentary film, and McLean was instrumental in persuading the King government to invite Grierson to Canada. When the latter agreed to stay and head the new film board, Ross McLean was appointed his second in command. Not a film maker himself, McLean was a rare kind of bureaucrat: he recognized, rewarded, and protected creative talent where he found it. And despite his Liberal connections, he allowed political fashion to dictate neither the content of the films produced by the board, nor the affiliations and beliefs of the people who worked for him. His own views seem to have been moderately left of centre. In a memorandum to Grierson in the fall of 1945 (just a few days after Gouzenko's fateful but as yet secret defection), McLean reflected that 'during the forthcoming months it is quite evident that it will be even more difficult than it was during wartime to secure a common concentration on agreed public purposes ... The only overall co-relating and motivating agency is Government.' The CBC and the NFB, he believed, were the only organizations able to 'secure the development of [Canada's] creative talent.' If private media were to develop such a capacity it could only come through government encouragement. 6 A liberal nationalist, McLean was no doctrinaire advocate of state ownership over private enterprise: he simply believed that in Canada, government must play a leading role in encouraging indigenous culture. However innocuous such views might have appeared during the war, in the gathering postwar conservatism they could be made to seem very much out of place. And in the end, McLean's Liberal connections provided no protective coloration. Although as a civil servant he had to cooperate to a degree with the security-clear-

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ance system, he was nevertheless one of the very few individuals in official Ottawa who stood up to the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s. To the RCMP, McLean was a weak figure with an 'inferiority complex', manipulated by a sinister clique of Communist sympathizers (the 'big four') who really controlled the board.7 Given his powerful enemies, it was not surprising that McLean was swept brusquely aside - indeed, as it turned out, right out of the country. Many in Hollywood found that dedication to principle in the face of the witch-hunt landed them in prison and on the blacklist. Ross McLean was a man of equal principle. He did not have to go to prison for his pains, but he did have to go into exile, the Canadian equivalent of the blacklist. The minister responsible for the NFB after the war was perhaps the most rightwing member of the King government, Dr J.J. McCann. As minister, McCann chaired all meetings of the film Board. McCann, a small-town doctor from the Ottawa Valley, was a man of narrow and rigid views, based on a conservative Catholicism formed at the turn of the century. The NFB did not fare well under the doctor's care. McCann's initial assault on the NFB was based not on ideology but on tightfisted cost-cutting. In 1946 McCann bluntly told McLean of the government's determination to 'reduce staffs and to economize wherever possible.' He demanded that the Board 'ask itself whether it was desirable to maintain an organization which ... had been increasing its expenditures year after year.' Impervious to pleas about the value of the work undertaken by the board, McCann enforced a severe 10 per cent overall cut in the NFB's 1948 budget. Although 133 persons had been cut from the staff between the end of the war and the spring of 1947, McCann demanded further cuts totalling another 100 employees. He insisted that failure to do this had resulted in 'considerable talk that the National Film Board should be done away with entirely.' To press his point, McCann did not shrink from citing newspaper editorials attacking the alleged politics of the staff. McLean reacted angrily, pointing out that 'we are living in an era when it is the fashion to indulge in name-calling.' 8 The NFB was learning that it was not just film that ended up on the cutting-room floor. As always in cost-cutting drives, certain activities were more likely than others to draw the axe. McCann specified that distribution should be given up and handed over to 'other organizations.' McLean tried to oppose this' but could not stop the minister. This issue was much more important than it appeared: as we have seen, the innovative qualities of the NFB during the war had been as much in the development of its distribution 'circuits' as in the films themselves. A democratic cinema required more than democratic content; it required a democratic and participatory context in which the films were shown. The NFB had moved in this direction during the war and had tried valiantly to maintain the momentum in peacetime. The development of a network of local film councils across the country was strong evidence of grass-roots participation. An interesting prospect of decentralized production was raised early in 1949 when a local group in Huron County produced a film on a local

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subject that McLean described as a 'very creditable effort.' McLean suggested that the NFB advance some financial assistance to this group 'as a stimulus to other county councils in making films about their areas.' The minister thought this 'opened the way for a dangerous precedent.' The exciting prospect of a decentralized interchange rather than a top-down relationship between producer and consumer was throttled by a government that wanted no such innovation. When public protests were received against the destruction of the non-theatrical circuits, the majority of the appointees on the board dismissed them as impairing the efficiency of the board's business operations.9 The new and crucial medium of television was already being beamed into some Canadian homes close to the Canada-U.S. border. The government was planning Canadian production, which would eventually arrive in 1952. McLean argued for a leading production role for the NFB. However logical his claims (what other agency had such expertise in the visual medium?), McLean's pleas were in vain. The NFB was blocked out of television production. This decision enormously diminished the relevance of its future role. McLean did not lose every contest with McCann. Proposed alterations to the National Film Act in 1948 included substituting the governor in council for the board as the final authority. This would have destroyed the autonomy of the NFB altogether. McCann had gone too far, and McLean was able to rally the other board members. The legislative plans, which had ominously included a 'national security' clause overriding the NFB's responsibilities, were dropped.10 But government interference with decisions about the content of NFB films was already well advanced. For instance, early in 1949 the United Nations had asked the NFB to produce a film for it on human rights. The government reminded the NFB that human rights were a 'controversial subject,' so controversial that the cabinet itself would have to decide whether the film should be allowed to go ahead. Similarly, McCann questioned the value of trade-union films. McLean responded by referring to the 'contribution made by the trade unions to social progress through the development of collective bargaining and the expansion of the democratic idea.' These were courageous words, and in the political context of 1948 they must have done little to enhance McLean's and the NFB's standing in the eyes of a suspicious and increasingly conservative government.11 Looming behind all these skirmishes was the Communist issue. An NFB film shot in China included the first Western footage of Communist-held Yenan. External Affairs considered the film too pro-Communist. McCann held up distribution.12 When the government's new security-screening system came into effect, the NFB, under McLean's firm guidance, simply refused to classify any of its positions as 'vulnerable' (that is, requiring security clearances) and sent no requests for screening to the RCMP. When the first lists of those denied clearances in the public service came back to the Security Panel from the RCMP at the beginning of 1949, Arnold Heeney, chairman of the panel, wrote on the covering memo: 'What about

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NFB?'13 McLean could not hold out for long. The push came from the armed services, which demanded assurances that training and other films done for them that involved classified material would be handled according to security procedures. In response, some 250 people in the production, technical services, and administrative sections of the board were declared to be in 'vulnerable' positions; the screening process for these people was begun with questionnaires filled out and returned to the RCMP. McLean's own recollection was that the RCMP identified 36 employees as security risks; in cases where clear evidence of disloyalty could not be provided, McLean stood by his people.14 This was in the spring of 1949, but as the new prime minister, Louis St Laurent, was informed, 'on several occasions recently action was taken to remove from the staff persons who appeared to be undesirable.' 15 In other words, the purge had already begun before the formal procedures were under way. In one case, the NFB staff council had protested to the board about a dismissal, to no avail. The board had pointed out that as there was no appeal procedure against security-related dismissals in the civil service, the NFB had no authority to entertain appeals on its own. 16 Through the spring and summer of 1949 these events were going on more or less behind the scenes. The Liberals had won a landslide victory in the 1949 election. George Drew's abrasive Communist-bashing had failed to stir the electorate, and the Liberals seemed confident about pursuing a relatively quiet and low-key process of security clearance of the public service. A new minister was responsible for the NFB. Robert Winters was a contrast to Dr McCann (who, however, remained a member of the board). Young, smooth, affable, with a quick and radiant smile, the Nova Scotian minister seemed less dourly moralistic than his predecessor. Style aside, however, Winters was very much a member of the conservative wing of the party, closely attuned to the private sector, which in this case meant Hollywood. McLean had no choice but to follow the Security Panel directive and allow the RCMP to begin the process of amassing personal information on employees and checking with neighbours, associates, etc. Rick Salutin has described the atmosphere: 'They [the RCMP] asked some employees to inform on others. Some private film makers were asked to provide incriminating information, and at least one happily drew up his own list of possible subversives. People began leaving the board, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes with an ambiguous reference to "budget cuts." New people moved in. Some were assumed to be informers, others enforcers of the new political line.' 17 From the evidence of the RCMP's own files, the scope and pervasiveness of the surveillance was remarkable. Even small private gatherings of colleagues were infiltrated by informants, and everything from idle office gossip about extramarital affairs to glib characterizations of people's politics ('radical ideas,' 'Socialistic,' 'an associate of suspected Communists') was solemnly amassed in the files. Some employees were placed under constant surveillance at home and followed closely whenever they went out after hours. The only limits were technological: there is no

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evidence of tapped telephones or bugged apartments, but Mounties in concealed locations carefully noted the time and place of private conversations between suspects. When the NFB arranged to show films to civil servants during their lunch hours in an Ottawa office building, Inspector Leopold of the Mounties sent out orders that 'general observations of these programs' be maintained by 'suitable contacts' with reports to be produced when 'developments of interest' occurred.18 Reading these files, one might almost think that there was some deadly game of espionage and counter-espionage going on -until one remembers that the 'suspects' were nothing more than documentary film makers! The effect on staff morale was disastrous. Yet the mechanisms of the purge would probably have ground on in relative secrecy under the direction of Winters were it not for a dramatic expose that burst like a bombshell in the press in late 1949. 'FILM B O A R D MONOPOLY FACING MAJOR TEST?'

In the 19 November issue of the Financial Post, splashed across the front page, was a headline 'Film Board Monopoly Facing Major Test?' The story indicated that the Department of National Defence (DND) had yanked its classified film work away from the NFB and that there was 'no chance' that this would change until the RCMP had declared the NFB staff 'okay.' The article also quoted 'trade union leaders' to the effect that NFB labour films were 'promoting the Communist unions.' The main criticisms in the article came from commercial film makers condemning competition from a state-owned rival. It was noted with considerable satisfaction that the DND work denied to the NFB had gone instead to Associated Screen News and Crawley Films, two commercial firms. The article constituted an acute embarrassment to the government on several counts. The Tories were quick to exploit this embarrassment in the House of Commons. Even the CCF joined in. Clarie Gillis, the CCF member for Cape Breton South, was particularly virulent in his proto-McCarthyite attacks: 'It was not yesterday that this Film Board became suspect. We remember the espionage trials. We remember Freda Linton and the position she occupied on that board. We remember ... [Grierson], who is no longer in this country.' He confessed that his own party had defended the NFB in the past, but now called for complete security screening of all employees; if the people of Canada could not be assured that the NFB 'are working for us', 'the whole thing should be folded up.' 19 Brooke Claxton as minister of defence was no help at all to the NFB in his responses. Elements of the press quickly picked up and kept alive the Red-baiting innuendoes of the opposition.20 All the bile and suspicion that had been festering since the Gouzenko affair had come to the surface. There would be no going quietly into the night for McLean and the NFB. The U.S. Embassy in Ottawa was exultant. Washington was sent a three page dispatch, which reported that the NFB 'has been a rather suspect organization ... the suspicion has lingered that Communists found refuge there.' Reverting to a philis-

250 The Cold War in Ottawa tinism that was perhaps never much below the surface among critics of the NFB, the embassy mixed anti-Communism with anti-intellectualism: 'To this day the Board seems to attract the "parlour pink" and very culture-conscious types, who are regarded with distrust by more pedestrian members of the community.' They also reported that McLean had 'expressed his private opinion that hope for expansion have [sic] been dimmed considerably by the disclosure. He feels that a large scale "house cleaning" will ensue with the result that the Board's production and efficiency will decline.'21 The Americans were rubbing their hands in anticipation. Ten days after the Financial Post story hit the news-stands, McLean was on the carpet at a meeting of the board. He aggressively counter-attacked. The Post article, he stated unequivocally, was a 'co-ordinated and combined attack against the Government, the NFB and the National Film Act.' He traced the leak to A.H. Newman, the NFB's deadly antagonist at the Canadian Co-operation Project. Newman, breaching all rules of government confidentiality, had deliberately tried to deal a deathblow to the NFB. McLean pointed to another suspicious aspect of the timing of the story: it coincided exactly with the Montreal and Toronto hearings by the Royal Commission ort National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the Massey Commission). Headed by Vincent Massey (McLean's old patron in Ottawa and London in the 1930s), the commission was unfriendly towards the penetration of American mass culture into Canadian life. It represented a potential lifeline for the NFB, and McLean had already used the commission's hearings to make a culturalnationalist case for his board, much to the displeasure of Winters, his minister. As later noted by the Ottawa Citizen, of the more than 100 briefs presented to the commission that mentioned the NFB, 'only a fraction contain adverse comment on the Board,' while the 'overwhelming majority' were favourable, many even urging expansion of the NFB. McLean pointed out that the private film producers had not presented their unpopular views publicly to Massey. Instead they had chosen an indirect method of attack on the NFB.22 Focusing on the security issue, McLean pointed out some interesting facts. First, not a single case of a breach of security or unauthorized leak of information had been brought to the attention of the board. If DND had information about such breaches or about specific individuals, it had not communicated them. Instead, there were only vague allegations and generalized suspicions. Secondly, and rather pointedly, he noted that while more than 200 NFB employees had already been screened, only 5 out of 200 at Associated Screen News and 14 out of 50 at Crawley Films had undergone screening - yet they had been awarded the DND contracts. Despite the logic of his argument, McLean found only a single defender on the board. Donald Cameron argued that the Post article and the discussion about security 'was striking at the very foundation of the NFB.' He also insisted that Claxton had let down the board by his answers in the House. But Cameron carried no one else with him, and in the end he too acquiesced in the inevitable (although that did not prevent the government from dropping him from the board within the year). As

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discussion turned sharply against McLean, the commissioner knew that he was up against the wall. In desperation, he admitted that the 'only way in which the whole matter of the security of the Board could be cleared up was in having the entire Board [i.e., staff] screened.' This gained him no respite, only a sharp rebuke from the Labour Department representative on the board that such views had never been communicated to the board before. At this point, Robert Winters, as chair, asked McLean to leave the room. Discussion, of which no record is available, continued in camera. According to a pencilled reference on the Labour Department representative's copy of the minutes, the subject was 'confidence in the commissioner.' At the end of the meeting, the board confirmed the recommendation of Winters that McLean not be reappointed.23 McLean had, it appears, known his fate in advance. There is a letter from McLean to Winters dated 22 November (three days after the Post article but a week before the fateful board meeting) in which the commissioner indicated that he had remained in the post as a 'matter of public duty,' but did not wish to be reappointed. In a face-saving formula that would convince no one, McLean added that this decision had 'nothing whatever to do with our recent discussions or with recent discussions in the press or Parliament.'24 Ralph Foster, McLean's deputy commissioner, also resigned, citing his bewilderment over how 'the criticism of a few individuals whose motives must be easily recognizable has outweighed for some reason the many positive expressions of appreciation for the work of the Film Board.' He explained to McLean that 'I could not remain after the statements that have appeared in the newspapers about you and your work.'25 Mass resignations were considered, but the idea was abandoned, for two reasons. First, McLean himself convinced the angry and desolate staff that mass resignations would only serve to destroy the very thing they had worked so hard to achieve. Second, as Gary Evans points out, 'they could not resign because it would be generally believed that those who resigned were security risks. The dilemma was whether to stay and wait to be fired ... or quit and be branded forever a "security risk" with no hope of obtaining employment in Canada or in the United States.'26 For his part, McLean stuck to his principles. In his last communication to the board, he affirmed that 'I am bound to repeat my confidence in the loyalty and good faith of those who have been carrying on the Board's work under my direction and with considerable distinction.' 27 He left a farewell gathering of some 300 friends and colleagues with the message that he doubted 'there is another government department that has shown a more democratic spirit than the National Film Board.'28 McLean himself clearly had no future in the Canadian government, to which he had devoted the last fifteen years of his life. Ironically, his escape route was the same as that of Grierson before him. He accepted a position with UNESCO in Paris. As with Grierson, the shadow of the witch-hunt followed: attempts (no doubt inspired by the Americans) were made to remove him from UNESCO on security grounds.

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The NFB as a whole had been declared a 'vulnerable' agency. This meant that every position in the organization, from office boy and secretary right up to the top required security clearance. Bizarrely enough, this placed the film-making agency (and the International Service of the CBC) on the same footing as a select group of government departments and agencies such as the Prime Minister's Office, the Privy Council, External Affairs, Defence, and the RCMP that were considered so close to classified information that all positions were sensitive. A security officer approved by the Security Panel and the RCMP had been sent into the NFB from the outside.29 By February 1950, 579 security questionnaires had been completed and were being processed. As a parting shot while taking his leave, McLean left a memorandum in which he declared that since its declaration as a 'vulnerable' agency, the board had received no report from the RCMP or elsewhere 'which would justify me in taking action to remove anyone from the staff of the Board for reasons of security. Had such a report been received I should of course have taken the necessary action.' 30 When McLean's interim successor as acting commissioner, Alan Field, reported to the board that there was no reason to question the loyalty of any member of the staff, he too was asked to leave the meeting, and further in-camera sessions followed. The government wanted its own man in place as film commissioner. This was Arthur Irwin from Maclean's magazine, a man who had no experience in film but was considered politically trustworthy enough to clear out the 'Reds' and 'parlour pinks.' So anxious was the government to obtain Irwin that it offered him a salary 50 per cent higher than that allowed McLean and even promised him an ambassadorship at the end of his term. Irwin recalls that he insisted on cross-examining the RCMP on its list of thirty-six alleged security risks. This was an unusual procedure, apparently not appreciated by the RCMP. In the end, Irwin accepted three names as risks. When consulted, Norman Robertson independently came up with the same three, all of whom were dismissed.31 According to Salutin, one of these was the brother of a well-known member of the Communist party and another had belonged to a Communist-front organization as a teenager.32 When George Drew charged in the House that the government was covering up Communist infiltration of the NFB, the results of the purge, although not the actual names, were announced to Parliament. The cabinet had decided, as a matter of policy, that it would be an 'injustice to the "very few employees" to indicate the names of persons in whom it had not been felt possible to have confidence.'33 'THE PRESSURES, THE UNEASINESS, THE OPPORTUNISM'

The number of three dismissals was widely viewed as the definitive number of those purged, and the government's refusal to disclose names has been seen as evidence of its liberal intentions. 34 Neither claim stands up to scrutiny. Very cleverly, Jack Pickersgill and Norman Robertson designed a Woods Gordon 'management study' of the

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NFB's operations, ostensibly to improve its administrative efficiency, but that 'in addition to the security investigation,' 'might indicate that changes in personnel could be made without injury to individual reputations.'35 The number of employees affected by the purge is not readily identifiable. It is absolutely clear, however, that the three dismissals represent a mere fraction of the total. As the management consultant's report at this time showed, the majority of the NFB staff had been hired on three-month renewable contracts.36 'Dismissal' is a technical term in the public service, referring specifically to permanent government employees; contract workers could be easily and quietly terminated by simple failure to renew their contracts. Moreover, as has been pointed out, the purge had already taken a toll well before McLean's termination and the parliamentary announcement: at least one of these cases had been an outright dismissal on political grounds that was not included in the 'total' of three. Finally, and most importantly, political purges typically yield two kinds of victims: those who are publicly sacked, and those who quit quietly to avoid the stigma of being sacked later. Recollections of former NFB employees make it clear that, in the atmosphere of fear and suspicion prevailing in the organization, subtle hints from above and simple apprehension often precipitated individual departures. These do not show up on any neat tabulations, but they were every bit as much the result of the purge as the formal dismissals. In Salutin's account there is a remarkable example of the subtle mechanisms at work: Evelyn and Lawrence Cherry had been driving forces at the board. 'One day we were invited up to Mr. Irwin's office,' says Evelyn. 'He asked us some innocuous questions, then he said, "Would your assistant be able to carry on the agricultural section if you were gone?" We said, "Yes, our assistant has been well trained." That was all that was said. Some time later I resigned. I suppose 1 should have refused to quit, made them fire me. But I was physically exhausted. There had been all that incredible energy expended during the war. Then with peacetime, the pressures, the uneasiness, the opportunism. And always less and less work. I guess at that period we spoke up less than at any time in our lives.'37

As for the liberalism of the officials who presided over this purge with such meticulous bureaucratic care, perhaps the best they should hope for is to have their actions passed over in discreet silence - which is indeed what has generally happened. Even their pious rationalization that not naming those dismissed showed consideration for their future career prospects elsewhere proves in practice to have been a self-serving illusion. Veterans of the NFB purge report that the RCMP vindictively followed them wherever they went, blighting their careers outside government after their government careers had been destroyed.38 A purge is a purge, and a witch-hunt is a witch-hunt. They are made only more distasteful by an applied gloss of liberal hypocrisy. The Americans were more honest, both in the public nature of the witchhunt when it was in full cry, and later in the vindication of the victims, who have at

254 The Cold War in Ottawa least been given the retroactive honour of public recognition of the evil that was done to them. Just how thin the liberalism of the Ottawa establishment could be is shown by what happened after Arthur Irwin took over and the purge was given its brief public notice. By the spring of 1950, Norman Robertson reported to the Security Panel that the new film commissioner 'had taken hold effectively and with a keen sense of responsibility in regard to the security problem.' Indeed, security considerations now outweighed all others. The Cold War hawks in the armed services, willing conduits for American demands on the Canadian security system, remained unsatisfied with a report from the RCMP that all regular employees of the NFB had been fully investigated (some 600) and that file checks on new employees were automatic. A military representative informed the panel that DND's relationship with the U.S. service authorities 'might be seriously prejudiced by lack of confidence in the NFB ... There had already been some indications that the U.S. Army might refuse to release certain films to DND in view of the adverse publicity on the National Film Board. To rectify this situation, it would be necessary to give the U.S. Service absolute assurance that the NFB had been cleared for security as a vulnerable agency of the Canadian Government.' Two years later, in the face of yet another RCMP backlog crisis in the screening process, a general decision was made to limit file checks to government personnel with access to 'Secret' and Top Secret' material. With the concurrence of the RCMP, however, an exception was made for the NFB and the CBC's International Service, where all employees would be subject to file checks. Norman Robertson explained that 'by virtue of their employment in these agencies such personnel might be in a position to damage vital facilities or prove a security risk in other respects, notwithstanding that they might not have access to documents and other material of a classified nature.' 39 It is hard, looking back, seriously to credit such concerns to otherwise intelligent civil servants. Hindsight of course always offers an advantage. Is it possible, given the context of the time, to take the politicians and bureaucrats at their word? In pursuing the NFB, were they sincerely concerned with perceived risks to national security? In this interpretation, one might conclude that innocent people were simply ground up as an accidental and unfortunate by-product of this process. Such an interpretation is seriously misleading. The NFB never represented any threat to national security, even if it had been filled with conscious agents of the Kremlin. It had little or no access to classified material (the DND charges were making a mountain of a very small molehill), and was far from the centre of decision making. As the Ottawa Citizen shrewdly pointed out at the height of the Red scare, 'on the basis of the spy revelations in 1946, the defence department is not to be suspected any less than the film board as a probable haunt of spies and indeed, since the film board has a greater reputation [for] individualism in the form of uncut hair and baggy pants, a self-respecting spy should probably be directed to army headquarters for the best cover, rather than to the film board offices.'40

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The Kremlin understood the strategic insignificance of the NFB very well, for this was the essential basis of the 'Freda to the Professor through Grierson' note that had lain like a deadly lodestone under the entire Red scare at the board. The point, as Gouzenko himself had explained, was that an agent in an organization like the NFB was of little use to the spy network; Colonel Zabotin had wanted to place Linton in 'some more important department.' The security issue was always a red herring. As we have tried to show, the witchhunters had other fish to fry, most of which had little or nothing to do with security. The ultimate point is that powerful interests had a stake in using the national-security issue as an ideological weapon. As a cultural or ideological agency, the NFB did have a role to play - or not play, if it so chose - in the Cold War. As the Western world was gearing up for the ideological struggle against Communism in the late 1940s, film was a prime weapon. Hollywood itself went through a fierce purge to strip it of left-wing elements. Out of the Hollywood investigations and blacklists came an industry better honed as a powerful propaganda engine for the American Cold War crusade. The NFB played a much more modest role than Hollywood, but it too was purged of its left-wing elements. If the profit margins of certain powerful private interests widened as a result, so much the better. After all, was the mortal enemy of Communism not capitalism? But protecting national security and state secrets from spies had absolutely nothing to do with it. The Ottawa Citizen, a consistent and eloquent defender of the NFB, summed it up best:41 'It seems clear that the attack on the Board represents a concerted effort by a group of small Canadian film producers and laboratories to destroy the Board; and that beyond this group stand the most powerful movie interests in the world, located in Hollywood. It seems fair to draw the conclusion that the baiting of the NFB in connection with security screening simply meant the use of another weapon to destroy it. Other government departments are also screened, but none has been subjected to such assault.' In purging the leftists in the NFB, was the government responding to a populist wave of anti-Communism and thus protecting itself in an age of mass political intolerance? This was a common explanation offered by American liberals for why the Truman administration went as far as it did in the anti-Communist purge. In the specific case of the NFB, the evidence points rather in the other direction. The attacks on the board all came from powerful political, bureaucratic and economic elites. There is virtually no evidence in the public record of any anti-NFB pressures from below. On the contrary. When the purge became public knowledge at the end of 1949, the government was flooded with protests from grass-roots organizations around the country. Labour unions, farmers' groups, cooperatives, universities, public libraries, local film councils and movie appreciation societies, women's groups, and small-town service clubs wrote to Ottawa in bewilderment, anger, and concern about the future of an organization they cherished.42 The Massey Commission was also receiving at this time many such votes of strong approval for the NFB in submissions and testimony by grass-roots organizations. As the Ottawa Citizen com-

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mented succinctly: 'The National Film Board has its defenders as well as detractors. Its critics appear to be chiefly persons connected with the private film industry ... [Tjhe board's supporters appear to be the public.'43 When Arthur Irwin was called in he was told that among his tasks was the restoration of 'public confidence' in the board. Film historian Peter Morris suggests the reference was really to the 'confidence of Ottawa politicians.' The public had never lost confidence in the NFB.44 This was the legacy of the NFB's democratic cinema. It had tried to bring films depicting 'real people in real situations' to the people. The people seemed to appreciate this. The elites did not. 'NOTHING LEFT TO TALK ABOUT EXCEPT OUR CHILDREN AND OUR DOGS'

It may well be that the grass-roots campaign of support saved the NFB as an organization. But organizational survival came at some cost. The cost was the loss of the original idealism and especially the strong, progressive, democratic thrust that had driven the creative work of the NFB in its better days. To put it bluntly, the NFB survived as an entity but became something tamer, less relevant, less threatening - and less vital. Peter Morris has written that in the decade following Grierson, the NFB moved from ' "mild protest" against the establishment' to a 'comfortable liberalism.' 'No protest is implied, nor apparently necessary: the guiding dictum need only be "peace, order and good government." But some of the "real people in real situations" who had no place on NFB screens speak eloquently by their absence.'45 In the eye of the Cold War storm during the early 1950s, the government even tried to make the NFB, along with the CBC International Service, into a positive instrument of Cold War propaganda. At the direct instigation of Prime Minister St Laurent, the cabinet directed the CBC International Service and the NFB to provide productions 'countering Communist propaganda outside Canada.'46 They were, in effect, to act as Canadian equivalents of the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe. In response, Arthur Irwin launched a new Freedom Speaks series of films 'to be used in the battle of ideas between the Communist and non-Communist world.' Given the budget assaults that the NFB under McLean had been forced to endure, it is interesting that this series was to be underwritten by a budget of a quarter of a million dollars (11 per cent of the total 1950-1 budget). Irwin's rationale for such a series specifically cited a special Canadian mission in the Cold War: 'this country is in a uniquely favourable position to operate in this field not being subject to the suspicion which is sometimes directed against our neighbour.' He even used the term 'psychological warfare"1 to describe the aim of the series.47 The Massey Commission was alarmed at this new direction, and posed several pointed questions about just what role in relation to Canadian culture Irwin's board was going to play. In response, Irwin admitted that the 'basic film production program' was actually being cut back, even while the new money was going into 'psy-

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chological warfare' films. The latter, he ambiguously argued, could serve a dual purpose, both for domestic as well as international consumption, and thus in part replace films designed for the Canadian audience.48 He did not address the issue of why Canadians should be the object of psychological warfare by their own government. To Robert Winters, Irwin submitted a seventeen-page memorandum entitled 'On the Use of Films in the Conflict with International Communism.' Canada, he argued was caught up in 'a ruthless campaign to engulf the world with a philosophy and a social system which is anathema to us.' NFB films could serve as one of Canada's 'weapons' in this war of 'life and death for the democratic world.' To Irwin, ideas were 'essential armament' against the Communists.49 But the militant wartime spirit of John Grierson's NFB could not be recaptured for a right-wing Cold War crusade. It was one thing to purge left-wingers from the NFB. It was quite another to turn the organization into an offensive weapon in the Cold War arsenal. The projected series died, 'gradually and quietly.'50 A study of the changing NFB approach to labour in the early 1950s shows another side of the attempted push to the right. The NFB became involved with anti-Communist work among unions, including cooperation with the AFL-CIO unions in their aggressive anti-Communist activities among European workers. The philosophy behind this was articulated by a board employee in a memo written in early 1950. 'It is regrettable,' the memo declares, 'that subversive elements do not seem to be diminishing in this country in spite of the progress made in combatting communist control in many of the larger trade unions ...' It goes on to suggest that 'witch hunting and red baiting' are effective in the short run, but that in the long run 'we have a job to do' in teaching Canadians about the positive virtues of their own system. This was where the NFB was to come in. The memo received strong approval from the top. Yet here again, as with the psychological-warfare series, the ideological promise could not be delivered in practice. Labour films shied away from too strong an anti-Communist slant and stuck closely to non-controversial nuts-and-bolts union issues (The Grievance, The Shop Steward) that emphasized labour-management cooperation. By the mid-1950s, one observer of the labour program concludes, 'the NFB was well established as a branch of the civil service whose position depended upon the maintenance of the status quo.' 51 This was short of militant anti-Communism, but also far short of the original progressive thrust of much NFB work. The NFB survived, but whatever else it had become, it had been drained of much of the drive for social change of the Grierson years. The witch-hunt succeeded in its objectives: Hollywood retained its monopoly, and the creative energies of an idealistic generation of Canadian film makers were broken. One of those purged, Evelyn Cherry, many years later recalled the essence of the Red scare:52 'The basic thing was an attack on the kind of film - of social meaning - we were doing. We felt deeply involved in the country and we were filming it. Canadians were seeing themselves and their country for the first time, and they liked it. We were a threat to the way things were and the way some people wanted them to continue. In the U.S.

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there were a few people doing it, but up here it was a movement - the National Film Board!' She remembered the sadness and the desperation as the purge settled over the board: 'We had great parties in the early days. We were so full of our work. Then the fear set in. After one of the parties I said to Lawrence, "Isn't it awful what's happened to us? We have nothing left to talk about except our children and our dogs."'

PART FIVE: THE COLD WAR IN C A N A D I A N SOCIETY

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12

The Debate That Never Was: Selling the Cold War

THE M A N A G E M E N T OF PUBLIC OPINION

In a democracy, governments are supposed to be responsible to the people and government policies are supposed to reflect, at least broadly if not in detail, the policy preferences of the people. In the late 1940s and 1950s there was a broad Canadian consensus supporting Ottawa's Cold War policies. It would be easy to assume, as many have, that government was simply responding to the demands of Canadian society. No doubt it was, but the government was also shaping and manipulating public opinion to support the policies it thought best for Canadians. Certainly, Ottawa seized upon the strong anti-Communist and pro-American elements already present in Canadian society and carefully built upon them to fashion a consensus that excluded or downplayed other elements of Canadian opinion. It is impossible to make sense of what happened in the Canada of the late 1940s without recognizing the active role that the state played in influencing the society. By contrast with the more clamorous democratic atmosphere of late-twentiethcentury Canada, the 1940s and 1950s were years when a relatively small cast of characters, mainly centred in Ottawa, had an effective voice in the making of national policy. The Canada of this era was more narrowly elitist (certainly less noisy, self-assertive, and populist) than it has since become. This was especially true of foreign-policy issues, traditionally something of a prerogative of the prime minister, his secretary of state for external affairs, and a handful of mandarins in the foreign service. Foreign-policy makers took account of certain broad realities of public opinion (that, for example, Quebec voters tended to be isolationist), but they approached these realities as if they were raw materials to be shaped, not commands they were to follow. The same was true for other aspects of national-security policy. The ruling Liberal party had a relatively smooth road. The Liberals were ascendant at the national level, winning no less than five consecutive general elections from 1935 through 1953. As the 'Government Party,' the Liberals were used to

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being in office, used to being in the limelight of international affairs, and used to being intimately connected to the Ottawa bureaucratic elite. Liberal ministers, once the sounding boards for regional and local feelings across the country, were increasingly preoccupied with running large departments of government with large bureaucratic programs. More and more, the Liberal leaders found themselves representing Ottawa to the country, rather than the country to Ottawa.1 In the end this would cost them office, but not until the first Cold War decade was passed. The Liberals were not simply responding to public opinion but were also guiding public opinion and even, to an extent, constructing public opinion. The policy preferences of the public did shape state policy, but the policy preferences of the state also shaped public opinion. Public opinion was not ignored, by any means, but it was often viewed by decision makers as a tool to effect the goals of the state. Public-opinion surveys were in their infancy in Canada in this era: relatively few in number and primitive in methodology by today's standards, they nevertheless signalled the beginnings of the contemporary notion of public opinion as a plastic medium to be sculpted by PR specialists capable of giving the right 'spin' to events and shaping an appropriate 'image' with which to sell a policy or a politician. It was more in this sense that government looked to public opinion on Cold War issues than as a source of democratic inspiration. How could public opinion be most efficaciously brought into line with the new perspectives on global alignment and the foreign commitments these required from taxpayers? Where were the weak points in public support and how could these be shored up? These were the sorts of questions generally addressed by policy makers to public opinion on Cold War issues. ' S C A R E HELL OUT OF THE C O U N T R Y ' : A P U B L I C - O P I N I O N STRATEGY

Even in the United States, the Cold War consensus that became so permanent a feature of American life for four decades, did not just happen, but was the result of careful preparation. Senator Vandenberg's famous admonition to Truman to 'scare hell out of the American people' if he wanted to gain bipartisan support for his interventionist foreign policy set the dominant tone. The key was to enlist fiscally conservative, traditionally isolationist Midwestern Republicans by appealing to antiCommunism. By and large it worked, although it also got out of hand in the form of McCarthyism. The other side of this same strategy was to isolate and defeat any opposition to the left of the Truman administration by painting it as soft on Communism. Thus, former vice-president Henry Wallace's Progressive-party challenge in 1948 was effectively Red-baited off the political stage. The Cold War consensus that emerged was a joint product of consent and coercion. Anti-Communism had deep, popular roots in the American political culture,2 but repression of dissent was also part of the mix.

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In Canada, too, there were potential sources of opposition to the Cold War alignment. Quebec was a traditional centre of isolationism and opposition to foreign military entanglements. The Tory right of the political spectrum in English Canada had traditional British ties and suspicions of American influence. And on the left, there were social democrats in the trade unions and the CCF who might have some doubts about the conservatism that was such a dominant aspect of the Cold War era. In Canada, too, 'scaring hell' out of the country turned out to be an effective public-opinion strategy. As in America, the state could count on deep wells of anti-Communist feeling in the public, but at the same time was not averse to using fear as a weapon against critics on the left. The construction of consensus was by no means a painless or natural process. Whether from left or right, criticism of the Cold War alignment could draw on feelings of Canadian nationalism, uneasy at the prospect of the increasing American domination that came along with American protection. One critic who voiced this nationalism most eloquently was a distinguished historian with strong Liberal ties, Arthur Lower. In a 1947 article in the popular magazine Maclean's, Lower asked whether, in light of new continental defence planning, Canada was fated to be the Belgium of the next war. Instead of thinking independently about the world situation, our own national interests were being lost in a 'sheep-like stampede' to shelter behind a made-in-America interpretation of an alleged Soviet menace. Instead of standing on our own feet, he argued, we were rushing headlong into absorption by the American colossus. 'It is hard,' Lower lamented, 'for those of us who dreamed a dream ... those who, with malice toward none, envisioned a new nation arising with its own way of life ... Those who wished to be neither American nor British, but just themselves -just Canadians.' 'Is this dream begun in 1867,' he wondered forlornly, 'so soon to be over and done with?' By 1948 he seemed more resigned: Canadians were simply transferring their colonial allegiance from Britain to America. 'The transfer is all the easier in that anti-Americanism is almost extinct among us and Great Britain and the United States are working happily together.'3 The Tory right represented a potential soft spot that never materialized. The old emotions of empire failed to take hold again in postwar Canada - or at least not sufficiently to excite anti-Americanism on any scale. The Conservative press tended to strike a generally pro-American line. There were reasons for this. Britain was no longer a great magnet for Canadian Tory loyalties, since Britain was now under a Labour government. In any event, Britain itself was an active and enthusiastic partner in the Cold War and had indeed been on the front lines in 1945-6 before the Americans made up their minds to undertake a full-scale commitment. But perhaps the key element in enlisting Tory support was the anti-Communist argument, one that went down very well indeed with conservative English Canadians. By 1948 there was no longer any danger that 'Empire emotions' would override American ties even among the deepest-blue sections of Tory opinion. When the premier of Ontario, George Drew, was chosen as the national Progressive Conservative

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party leader in October of 1948, he at once donned the mantle of a latter-day Cato, warning his fellow citizens that the Carthage of Communism must be destroyed if the homeland were to be preserved. The Toronto Telegram, as loyal a Tory paper as could be found, exulted in the spring of 1948 at the new Cold War orthodoxy that had settled over the country. Brandishing a speech by Louis St Laurent in which the then external affairs minister had described 'Communist infiltration' as a menace 'on a scale surpassing anything in history, even the Nazi regime,' the Telegram thought it appropriate to recall its own faithfulness to the anti-Communist creed even during the dark days of the Second World War when Canada was forced into an alliance with Stalin's Russia. 4 In the struggle of good against evil there could be no place for old-fashioned cavils about American domination of 'British' North America. Anti-Communism easily outweighed anti-Americanism on the Conservative scales. Another indicator of this shift in conservative thought from anti-Americanism to anti-Communism can be found in popular culture. The widely read genre of dimestore novels featuring Canadian Mounties as heroes battling crime had a long history going back to the nineteenth century. Traditional themes of Mounties defending British North America against American incursions gave way in the 1940s and 1950s to a different story line. Now the enemy was seen as Communist subversion, and the Mounties were 'part of a continental defence system in which the interests of Canada and the United States were identical.'5 In the face of this powerful redefinition of conservative loyalty, there were few able to hold fast to their traditional views. One who did was the historian Donald Creighton. Echoing some of the gnomic warnings of his colleague and friend Harold Innis, the distinguished political economist, Creighton publicly criticized American conduct of the Cold War and its implications for Canadian sovereignty in 1954 - and was showered with criticism, including a reproof from the leading Tory politician, and later prime minister, John Diefenbaker.6 Later, in the 1960s, the conservative philosopher George Grant would write a powerful and influential indictment of the 'defeat of Canadian nationalism' at the hands of Liberal continentalism, but in the 1940s and 1950s, Creighton's Tory anti-Americanism seemed old-fashioned and out of step. 'A L A R G E S E C T I O N OF OUR PEOPLE S U S P I C I O U S OF F O R E I G N ENTANGLEMENTS' French-Catholic Quebec was at the centre of domestic concerns for foreign-policy makers in this era. Isolationist, bitterly resentful of Canada's imperialist involvements in foreign conflicts in the past, twice forced to accept conscription by the Anglo-Protestant majority, Quebec seemed to present the greatest barrier to the postwar ambitions of External Affairs for a greatly enhanced international role for Canada, and even more for plans for a permanent forward commitment of Canadian

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forces to Europe after the establishment of NATO. With the benefit of historical hindsight, later observers have tended to downplay the significance of the Quebec factor to foreign policy: after all, Quebec did come onside, and even the commitment of Canadian troops to a ground war in faraway Korea in 1950 elicited less protest from French Canada than might have been expected. Perhaps this is to mistake effect for cause. It is precisely because the Liberal elite were so skilful in managing Quebec opinion that their achievement has tended to disappear from the historical record. In Louis St Laurent's Gray Lecture of 1947 on the principles underlying Canadian foreign policy, the first principle he enunciated was 'that our external policies shall not destroy our unity. No policy can be regarded as wise which divides the people whose effort and resources must put it into effect.' 7 Most later commentators have tended to pass over this as a mere bow backwards in the direction of Mackenzie King's cautious isolationism before St Laurent got on to the innovative new aspects of postwar policy. This is a mistake. Lester Pearson, then St Laurent's deputy, did not so mistake the subtlety of his minister. A year later, in a speech entitled 'Some Principles of Canadian Foreign Policy,' Pearson began by suggesting to his audience that 'foreign policy, after all, is merely "domestic policy" with its hat on.' Yet donning the diplomat's top hat does not alter one's nature: 'if we are weak and timid and disunited and jumpy at home, we will be the same away from home.' 8 He then went on to explain the changing conditions that had allowed Canada to take a more positive commitment to collective security than in prewar years. One major factor cited by Pearson was the threat of Communism. 'The crusading and subversive power of communism,' declared Pearson in crusading tones, 'has been harnessed by a cold-blooded, calculating, victoriously powerful Slav empire for its own political purposes ... In the face of this menace of aggressive communism, the democracies are brought closer together, all of them, and are willing to make concessions of national rights which they would never have thought of doing ten years ago.' To the quickening drumbeat of a militancy not seen before in peacetime Canada, Pearson summoned citizens to stand on guard against a ubiquitous enemy. 'Our frontier is now not even on the Rhine or rivers further east. It is wherever free men are struggling against totalitarian tyranny, of right or left. It may run through the middle of our own cities, or it may be on the crest of the remotest mountain.' Now 'certain principles of conduct and policy can be followed more openly by Canada today than would have been possible a few short years ago.' The key was the 'spiritual - if I may use that word without misunderstanding - nature of the struggle against revolutionary communism, which makes its appeal, on ideological grounds, to a large section of our people who previously had been suspicious of overseas entanglements'1 (emphasis added). The oblique reference to the 'spiritual' was directed to the fierce anti-Communism of a Roman Catholic church still dominant in Quebec society in this era, an anti-Communism that opportunistic Quebec politicians like Union Nationale pre-

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mier Maurice Duplessis were ready and eager to pander to in the most demagogic manner. The federal Liberal party was uniquely situated to take advantage of Quebec anti-Communism for a more activist foreign policy. With a Catholic French Canadian, whose standing with the church and whose anti-Communist credentials were above reproach (even by Duplessis), first as minister of external affairs and later prime minister, with the traditional Quebec parliamentary bloc of seats firmly attached to the governing Liberal caucus in Ottawa, and with a blustering antiFrench Ontario WASP in George Drew leading the opposition by 1949, the Liberals had all the right cards to play. And play they did. During the 'crusade' to sell NATO to the Canadian people, virtually all the anti-Communist stops were pulled out. Pearson set the tone himself. In 1948 he had delivered an address entitled 'Communism - the Myth and the Reality' in which he went beyond the simple equation of Communism with Nazism to declare that the USSR was an 'oppressor on a scale surpassing even Nazi Germany,' thus echoing a similar formulation in Arnold Smith's The Russians an.d the Rest of Us' position paper in External Affairs a few months earlier.9 St Laurent was even more direct. During a speech at the Richelieu Club in 1949 he pointed to a bishop at the head table and declared: 'Your Excellency, we would not like to see you stand the type of trial which Cardinal Mindszenty* had to undergo.' 10 Although it might take a hyperactive imagination to foresee that anything like that would happen in Quebec, the Liberal line in that province was that Canadian troops in Europe, or later in a shooting war in Asia, were standing on guard for God, church, and family against the armies of darkness. It was the Quebec variant of 'scaring hell out of the country.' Like the formerly isolationist Republicans of the American Midwest who were coaxed into globalism by an anti-Communist crusade, the formerly isolationist Quebecois were seduced by anti-Communism into support for collective security and the new Liberal 'internationalism.' A survey of Quebec opinion from 1945 to 1960 shows clearly that Catholic anti-Communism was the decisive factor in the shift of opinion in that province, and that American leadership of the Western alliance was a positive factor, given French Canada's traditional and continuing suspicion of British imperialism. 11 The latter point suggests an irony, in that the emphasis on anti-Communist ideology was also used to pre-empt opposition to closer Canadian involvement with the Americans on the part of formerly pro-British and antiAmerican Tories in English Canada. The Cold War could accommodate diverse crowds under its capacious umbrella. COLD W A R S O C I A L D E M O C R A C Y

The co-optation of both Quebec and English-Canadian conservative opinion behind *Mindszenty was a Hungarian prelate whose opposition to the Communist state had led to his trial and imprisonment.

The Debate That Never Was 267 the Cold War was a major coup for the governing Liberal elite. But these victories left much potential opposition untouched. It was the Left that posed the more uncomfortable ideological challenge to Liberal co-optation. Could crude anti-Communism and 'scaring hell out of the country' work as easily on the left as on the right? As with the taming of Quebec isolationism, there is a danger that historical retrospection fails to take the answer to this question seriously enough. The Left, understood broadly to include both the Communist and social-democratic expressions, did not do well in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the latter half of the 1950s, not only was the Communist party a pathetic ghost, but the CCF party was paralysed by a long and apparently irreversible decline. For its part, the labour movement was fairly static in membership and lacking the militant drive it had sometimes exhibited in the past. Radical political protest outside the two left-wing parties was scarcely any longer in evidence. Looking back from the vantage point of the present, the Left might seem to have been a toothless tiger of little consequence for the Cold War policy makers. Nothing, however, could be more misleading. The Cold War was waged against the Left. Anti-Communism was used not only to repress Communism but also to domesticate the social democrats. The trick in both cases turned on the effective manipulation of Cold War symbols. In the United States, the role of 'Cold War liberals' was crucial in the establishment of the consensus that sustained anti-Soviet policies in Washington. The old liberal wing of the New Deal Democrats legitimated the Cold War consensus by supporting America's global-policeman role abroad and an anti-Communism at home that stopped just short of McCarthyism.12 In Canada there had been no New Deal and no equivalent of American liberalism. The Liberals were the 'Government Party' in Canada, and liberals tended to be supporters of the establishment. But there was in Canada a functioning and moderately influential political party and political tradition that called itself socialist (and for which there was no equivalent in the United States). Canadian social democrats played the same role in legitimating the Cold War as liberals south of the border. Social democracy was largely, although perhaps not completely, converted to the Cold War by the end of the 1940s. The zealousness with which Cold War social democrats carried the anti-Communist fight, especially in the crucial trade-union movement, was of great assistance to the Canadian state and to the ruling Liberals in legitimating the establishment of the national security state. This zealousness allowed the government to refrain from much direct intervention in the union movement - where it could safely leave matters to the social democrats within the unions. It also provided the government with proof of a consensus supporting both foreign and domestic Cold War policies that included every 'legitimate' and 'democratic' tendency from the Tories on the right to the CCF on the left. Yet for this service the social democrats received precious little legitimation of their own. Indeed, they suffered a fairly steady deterioration of the political position that they had held at the end of the war. Of course, there were other reasons for this decline, but the Cold War

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did not help. The social democrats did a lot for the Cold War, but the Cold War did not do much for them. The Cold War on the left was not peaceful. The Cold War divided the Left by imposing limits on the boundaries of legitimate dissent, closing off certain options and possibilities as illegitimate, disloyal, or even treasonous. Political debate, which should be the very substance of a democratic discourse, was transformed into something narrow and constricting: a demand for a loyalty oath. The 'Are you with us or are you against us?' mentality appeared as a steamroller flattening opponents ruthlessly, imposing silence where clamour once reigned. The process began with the Gouzenko inquiry in 1946. In invoking the War Measures Act, the Canadian state had used illiberal methods to uncover what its security officials believed to be a Communist conspiracy against liberal democracy. This willingness to use extraordinary powers and suspend civil liberties where national security was threatened prefigured the Cold War atmosphere that was soon to settle upon Western nations. The social-democratic Left was faced with an immediate dilemma: could it distance itself from the Communist Left and at the same time protest the state's violation of civil liberties and the witch-hunt atmosphere surrounding the enquiry? Could it risk guilt by association if it appeared to be defending Communists, even it was only defending the civil liberties of suspected Communists and thus the civil liberties of all Canadians threatened by arbitrary state action? Above all, could social democracy itself emerge unscathed from a Red scare in which all left-wing ideas became suspect? Should social democrats, instead of contributing to the reactionary climate, set themselves resolutely against it, despite the possible costs in short-term popularity? These were complex and difficult questions, and they did not inspire a uniform response. But the dominant response, especially of the national leadership of the CCF and of the more influential thinkers associated with the party, was to duck the hard questions about state repression by citing social democracy's own strong and indigenous anti-Communism. To put matters simply, social democrats by and large lined up as supporters of the Cold War, both at home and abroad, by insisting that they had much more in common with the political Right and Centre and with capitalism than they had with Communism. Perhaps this was true. Certainly the Communists had been the immediate enemy of the CCF throughout the 1930s and the war years; they were, after all, competing with the CCF for the allegiance of the working class, and in this struggle there were no holds barred. Certainly the surreptitious tactics of infiltration so often practised by the Communists made for suspicion on the part of their opponents. Certainly the twists and turns of the party line over the years (from attacking social democrats as 'social fascists' before 1935, then switching to the 'popular front' after 1935; from opposing the 'imperialist war' from 1939 to 1941, then switching to a 'people's war' against fascism after the Nazis invaded the USSR; from supporting the 'progressive' Mackenzie King Liberals in 1945 to denouncing King as a reactionary warmonger after the Gouzenko

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affair) left the CCF with a deep contempt for the Communists' unprincipled lack of intellectual integrity. Certainly the Communists were abject apologists for a Stalinist oppression that the CCF found abhorrent and that they believed betrayed the ideals of socialism as well as democracy. There were many principled reasons for rejecting the Communists as legitimate socialists. But it must be said that the Cold War social democrats went a step farther than this and joined in a kind of popular front with the Right that they had earlier rejected on the left. Vehemently (and no doubt correctly) rejecting the maxim that there are no enemies to the left, the CCFers quickly slipped into a different kind of illusion by ignoring the enemies on their right. Early signs of this popular front on the right could be seen in the immediate reaction to the Gouzenko affair. Although there were some Canadians - an articulate minority - who condemned the methods used by the government, CCFers were not particularly prominent among them. Some of the braver voices raised in protest were those of liberals. An organized civil libertarian response was mounted, but it was largely directed either by people associated with the Communist party or by independent socialists to the left of the CCF. In 1946 there was no Canadian Civil Liberties Association in existence, but there were civil-liberties groups that had been organized during the war in some of the major cities.13 Little was heard from these in the Gouzenko affair; instead, a new, Communist-dominated group carried the ball - with quite predictable results given its political affiliations. The reason for this break is simple. The older groups were dominated by social democrats whose most immediate concern was to distance themselves from the Communists. For example, the noted civil libertarian (and CCFer) Frank Scott - who was a sturdy and effective opponent of Quebec's notorious anti-Communist 'Padlock Law' - was active not in public defence of the rights of the Gouzenko detainees but in a behind-the-scenes whispering campaign among other social-democratic civil libertarians designed to discourage participation with known or suspected Communists. The protest campaign was actively organized by, among others, C.B. Macpherson of the University of Toronto, a Marxist but not a Communist party member who later became known as one of Canada's most distinguished scholars. With little or no help from social democrats, Macpherson put his name publicly on the line in defence of civil liberties against the raison d'etat of national security. When there were voices raised demanding that he be sacked from his university post for his protest activities, it was the independent liberal nationalist Harold Innis, chairman of Macpherson's department of political economy, who quietly intervened to protect his Marxist colleague.14 To many social democrats, the Gouzenko affair precipitated a new era in which 'they' (the Communists) were not only to be distinguished from 'us' (everyone from socialists to Tories) but were not necessarily to be afforded the protection of liberal democracy available to 'us.' In the United States, the Cold War liberals endorsed the anti-Communist witch-hunt but then complained bitterly when they were them-

270 The Cold War in Canadian Society selves 'smeared' as Reds by witch-hunters who made few distinctions between shades of opinion and ideology on the left. In Canada, the Cold War social democrats were lucky that the anti-Communist repression was more confined to the state and more restricted as a partisan political phenomenon. The Liberal state, and even its security apparatus in the RCMP, generally understood that social democracy was a safe and potentially valuable ally in the struggle against Communism. Canadian social democracy was rarely itself the target of Red-baiting, as such. But as Redbaiters themselves, Cold War social democrats did much to poison the atmosphere of debate and thought on the left, just as the Communists had by their leaden subservience to Moscow. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the role of the CCF in the foreign-policy debate (if it can be called that) in the late 1940s, and nowhere was this aspect of the debate more pronounced than with regard to the economic and military rehabilitation of Europe in the two stages represented by the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. ' C A N A D I A N S OR RUSSIANS?'

The thinking behind the Marshall Plan has been described earlier. The great virtue of this plan from the Canadian point of view was that it allowed for the marriage of liberal-internationalist idealism with national economic self-interest. These were powerful enough inducements to bring many social democrats onside with the Liberal government. But this was only part of the story. Just as the American administration played the anti-Communist card to bolster congressional support for Marshall funds, so did the Canadian government use anti-Communism as a crucial argument. This went down well in isolationist Quebec. It also worked with the CCF leadership. But not all party members - including some CCF members of provincial legislatures bought the anti-Communist rationale for supporting the Marshall Plan. Some even saw reasonable grounds for socialists to oppose it. In reacting to this dissent, the CCF leadership used anti-Communism as the basis for enforcing a unanimous party line. Any CCFers, however prominent and otherwise loyal to the party, who publicly opposed the Marshall Plan were branded Communist sympathizers or dupes. Their alternatives were either to fall silent or to be expelled from the party. As similar moves were made by the social-democratic leadership in the trade unions, it became dangerous for socialists to advance any criticism of the Marshall Plan. Ostracism and isolation from the mainstream of Canadian socialism were effective sanctions: in the Cold War era it meant impotence and irrelevance since there was no longer any legitimate political space to the left of the CCF, and no alternative to the established trade unions. The patriotic bullying of the Marshall Plan debate was quickly followed by a similar spectacle over Canadian membership in NATO. Despite attempts by Liberal spokesmen to paint NATO as some sort of Atlantic community, it was primarily a military alliance. With the retaliatory creation of the Warsaw Pact, it was apparent

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that the seal had been set on the division of Europe into two hostile camps, each under the hegemony of a non-European superpower armed with nuclear weapons. Whether Canada should be supporting this kind of initiative was at the very least a matter for fundamental debate in Canadian society. Yet once again there was no debate worthy of the name because only one point of view was deemed acceptable. Opposition to NATO was taken as tantamount to disloyalty, and once again the Cold War social democrats in the CCF played a key role in enforcing this loyalty-oath mentality on party members and supporters. The worst internal struggle took place in Manitoba. Twice, first in 1945 and then later in 1949, two sitting CCF members of the Manitoba legislature were expelled from their party for being associated too closely with the Communists. One of the expellees in 1945 did subsequently join the Communists. The other, Berry Richards, was re-elected as an 'independent CCF' candidate, then reinstated in the party only to become subject to another expulsion move in 1949. Richards, along with another CCF MLA, led opposition to the Marshall Plan and NATO within the Manitoba CCF so successfully that the 1948 provincial convention condemned the Marshall Plan as 'imperialist' and 'reactionary' and urged Canadian support for an alternative international economic recovery program under the United Nations. This dissent from Cold War social democracy was also echoed within the British Columbia CCF, but was vehemently repudiated by the party's national leadership, which quickly secured the support of the national convention later the same year. When the same pair of MLAs began attacking NATO, the national party, egged on by the demands of a hawkish press, insisted that decisive action be taken against them. The 1949 provincial convention voted to expel both men. Their constituency associations, which happened to be the two largest in the province, were shaken and both seats were later lost by the CCF.15 Echoes were felt elsewhere. In 1949, Robert Carlin, who enjoyed the highest majority of any CCF MLA in Ontario, was expelled for alleged pro-Communism, after the party executive had compelled his local association to nominate another candidate to run against him (both lost, but Carlin finished well ahead).16 As late as 1954, a CCF member of the B.C. legislature was suspended by the provincial executive (under strong pressure from the national office) and ordered to stand trial before the party for bringing it into disrepute by denouncing anti-Communism as a reactionary screen for a big-business attack on the working class. He quit. 17 As CCF national secretary David Lewis explained on the question of NATO in 1950, 'any socialist party which fails to understand the nature of the present struggle and the ruthless character of communist policies for the destruction of western socialism, is not a socialist party at all, but either a dangerous confusion or a deliberate distortion.' 18 The national CCF leader in this era, M.J. Coldwell, was a passionate antiCommunist who shunned even the remotest formal contact with anyone whom he believed associated with Communists. At his insistence, for instance, the national caucus refused to meet with delegations from the Canadian Peace Congress (CPC)

272 The Cold War in Canadian Society (allegedly a Communist-front organization) on Parliament Hill, and rank-and-file CCFers were warned never to allow their signatures to appear upon CPC petitions urging nuclear disarmament. Coldwell was in a sense the consummate Cold War social democrat. Years later, in retirement from party leadership, he served as a member of a royal commission on security, where he distinguished himself as probably the most conservative Cold Warrior among the three commissioners. In an interview he recalled that of all his achievements in politics, his proudest was his assistance in the late 1940s in securing support for Canada's membership in NATO.19 There is no question about the sincerity of Coldwell, Lewis, and other convinced anti-Communists. Cold War social democrats honestly believed that Communism was inimical to everything for which they stood and that it was imperative that the party demonstrate its firm and unwavering support for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Korean War, and other such tests of Western resolve in the face of Soviet aggression. But though their sincerity is not in question, the disturbing fact is that they were too often unwilling to credit the sincerity of those fellow CCFers who disagreed with them. It is in this sense that Cold War social democracy pre-empted the debate on the left that should have taken place but never really did. The problem is encapsulated in an angry intervention made by CCF trade unionist Pat Conroy, secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Congress of Labour, when the CCL was debating NATO at its 1948 convention. Irritated by the argument that military pacts inevitably led to war, Conroy shouted: 'I would like to know if the delegates to this convention are Canadians or Russians!'20 'I H A V E V O L U N T A R I L Y B L O W N M Y B R A I N S O U T ' : C A S U A L T I E S O F T H E COLD WAR

The loyalty-oath climate that reigned on the left in this era was only a reflection of a wider climate of intimidation affecting Cold War dissenters in the society at large. Leslie Roberts, a freelance journalist with Liberal connections, published a book in 1948 called Home from the Cold Wars that essayed a kind of 'plague on both your houses' criticism of the superpowers. Although Roberts was denounced in the Communist Canadian Tribune as 'cynical' and 'confused,' his scepticism about American foreign policy immediately made him a target for surveillance by the RCMP and the American Embassy. Although the Americans relented after a personal interview, he continued to be the subject of close Canadian scrutiny whenever he travelled abroad. Roberts gave up a position he had held since the war on the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Council, and subsequently gave up writing about international affairs altogether.21 The case of another Cold War critic, Glen Shortliffe, had a similar result, following a more painful ordeal. Shortliffe was a social democrat with a United Empire Loyalist background who taught French at Queen's University.22 In the late 1940s

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he began a second career as a commentator on radio and in the press on international affairs. This would have been unexceptional were it not for the specific views he was advancing. In no way an apologist for the Soviet system ('brutality ... cruel stupidity ... the totalitarian mind') he also rejected what he called the 'hysterical hatefest' of the developing Cold War. The USSR, he argued, was weakened from the terrible devastation of the last war and posed no real military threat to the West, which held a position of overwhelming strength. Thus, he maintained, the West should take the initiative in seeking a settlement. He also insisted that Communism had indigenous roots in class conflict in both Asia and Western Europe and could not be dismissed as the Cold War stereotype of a Soviet fifth column. He predicted, quite correctly, that Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt regime in China would fall to the Communists. Above all, Shortliffe pleaded with his audience not to submit their reason to the prevalent hysteria: 'in an atmosphere of unreasoned fear, the god of "national security" becomes an insatiable master who knows no frontiers, and a social organism in a convulsion of terror is the very fabric of totalitarianism in itself.'23 In his view, Canada should be taking an independent position from that of the United States, seeking routes towards peace and reconciliation, cognizant of the legitimate revolutionary aspirations of oppressed peoples, and mindful of the dangers of bullying by the great powers even in the name of democracy. Shortliffe enjoyed giving his public commentaries, but as the Cold War tightened its hold upon Canadian society he worried that 'the world situation has just about reached the point where all public discussion of it will be drowned in bugle calls.' So it had. Soon enough Shortliffe himself heard the sound of bugles, leading the charge against his own exposed and lonely position. Some of the bugles were sounded on the left, by Cold War social democrats. Frank Scott rebuked him for an article in which he had tried to distinguish between the USSR and the legitimate aspirations for social change that took the form of Communism in some countries like France. By criticizing American policy while remaining silent about Soviet policy, Scott maintained, Shortliffe was in effect guilty of advancing the Soviet line. In response Shortliffe accused Scott of being 'scandalously unfair.' His attack was a 'symptom of the hysterical atmosphere which is rapidly reducing public discussion to a series of ritualist genuflections to East or West. As a trained social scientist, Mr Scott is admirably equipped to assess the value of his own contribution to that hysteria.'24 Scott was not alone. David Lewis attacked Shortliffe at a local Kingston CCF meeting as a 'Communist sympathizer.' He first learned of the wider waves his radio commentaries were making when the principal of Queen's University informed him in early 1949 that various persons had written to complain about the 'Communist' or 'fellow traveller' on the CBC who was bringing discredit to Queen's. The complaints had come not only from outside the university but from the Board of Governors. Such complaints were in themselves evidence of precisely that hysteria and unreason to which Shortliffe had been pointing. Unfortunately, the Queen's authorities were concerned about a recently

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launched fund-raising drive. Their anxiety that the campaign might be jeopardized was communicated to Shortliffe. While he was not directly asked to suppress his opinions, an indirect appeal was clearly made to his loyalty to Queen's. Faced with this challenge, Shortliffe's resolve collapsed: 'I am extremely sorry for the embarrassment I have unwittingly brought upon the University; I do not consider my views on freedom in the Canadian community to be sufficient justification for continuing to bring opprobrium upon my colleagues at Queen's and the fine traditions that we all try jointly to represent. I am therefore writing to the CBC to inform them that I will undertake no further broadcasts.'25 This was a very Canadian variant of McCarthyism. The academic freedom of a professor had been curtailed, but voluntarily, as it were. The Queen's authorities had not insisted that Shortliffe shut up, they had simply informed him of their concerns. Shortliffe had done the rest. Ironically, neither the principal of Queen's nor the CBC itself was happy with the implications of his decision. But the result was the silencing of one small voice trying to restore some balance to a public discussion that increasingly looked less like a discussion than a mobilization call. Shortliffe's retreat did not mean that his personal ordeal was over. In the era of McCarthyism, past opinions and past associations continued to haunt people, sometimes to their graves. As the historian of Queen's wrote, Shortliffe could 'never again ... feel himself to be, in the fullest sense, a free citizen.'26 Lest he forget, two rather brutal reminders were brought down upon his head, first by the U.S. and then by the Canadian government. In the spring of 1949 he accepted an attractive offer of a teaching post at Washington University in St Louis. When he had sold his house and was ready to move his family to the States, he was informed at the last minute that an investigation by U.S. immigration authorities had determined that he could not be permitted to enter the country. Press speculation immediately linked this decision with his controversial commentaries on the CBC. Luckily, he had not actually resigned his Queen's post but had prudently requested a year's leave of absence to see whether he liked life in the United States. When a senior professor died, Queen's was able to reinstate him in his old department in the fall of the same year - at a higher salary. The U.S. government later admitted that the information upon which it barred Shortliffe (presumably derived from RCMP files) was erroneous, but he was later to find that his own government was less forgiving. In 1954 he was invited to give French instruction to a group of army personnel at the Royal Military College summer school. Although he had been a lieutenant in the reserves since the war, and recently promoted to captain, he was suddenly relieved of his duties two days before classes began, on direct orders from Ottawa. No explanation was given. Shortliffe wrote to the minister of defence asking to have his name cleared of imputed disloyalty. Like someone hauled before a U.S. congressional witch-hunt, Shortliffe felt constrained to deny that he had ever been a Communist or even an 'intellectual Marxist.' 'I believe,' he pledged, 'in democratic constitutional government.' RCMP

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officers soon appeared on campus asking questions of his colleagues. At the close of 1954 he finally received a reply from the defence minister who stated that it was not the policy of the armed forces to choose instructors with an 'established tendency' to participate in 'public controversy.' This was, he assured Shortliffe, 'in no sense a reflection on your status as a Canadian citizen.'27 'Haunted by the thought that his name was indelibly affixed to some official list or lists of subversives,' Shortliffe withdrew from all aspects of public life. There is a deep sadness in his own words, written in 1961: 'I find it almost impossible to speak or write publicly about the country's public affairs, inasmuch as these are, by their very nature in a democracy, "controversial" ... I have turned my remaining energies into an interest in language laboratory techniques, which I feel fairly sure is a "safe" field of activity ... I think I have voluntarily blown my brains out. You are entitled to think me cowardly.'28 'A C O M M U N I S T

PLOT T O M A K E C A N A D I A N B R A I N S S U S C E P T I B L E T O

DOMINATION'

If those who had reservations about Canadian support for the American position in the Cold War experienced difficulties in getting their point of view across, the same could hardly be said for the other side. There was ample opportunity afforded to anti-Communist crusaders. Ideological zealots with a mission to scourge all trace of Communism from the earth were not as thick on the ground as they were in the United States in this era, where they constituted an evangelical growth industry, but some were active north of the border. With the highest officials in the land - the prime minister and the minister of external affairs, among others - persistently sounding anti-Communist notes, more extreme and intemperate preachers of the same faith thereby gained a certain legitimacy. Canadians are not perhaps as prone to waves of born-again religious enthusiasm as their American cousins, but even here there were fiery excoriations of the 'Great Satan' in the Kremlin sprinkled with the confessions of repentant sinners who had renounced evil for the ways of righteousness. At the fringe, as always, were the fanatics: anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, white supremacists. These groups were somewhat under a cloud following a war against Fascism and have been characterized as 'minute, sporadic, and low-keyed' in this period.29 Anti-Communism, however, offered a cloak for such opinions. In the late 1940s Ron Gostick founded his 'Canadian Intelligence Service,' which has ever since retailed anti-Semitism inside a coating of extremist anti-Communism.30 An ex-Communist who claimed to have done underground duty for the RCMP, Pat Walsh, added some gloss of credibility to the paranoid accusations. In truth, however, few if any respectable Canadians took such groups seriously. To many, they probably seemed the right-wing equivalent of the Communists: illegitimate extremists outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. The Communists were, however,

276 The Cold War in Canadian Society taken very seriously, by the state and especially by those who made it their business to preach against the Soviet menace. Among the latter were some respectable journalists who specialized in sensational exposes of Communist infiltration of Canadian institutions. The most prominent of these was Ronald Williams, whose stories for the Financial Post were syndicated in other papers and given wide distribution. The RCMP Security Service carefully reproduced each of Williams's articles in its monthly Intelligence Bulletin, circulated inside the service. Even the CCF national office was on friendly terms with the journalist, requesting (and getting) private information from him identifying alleged Communists in trade unions to assist the party in its anti-Communist purges. Reading Williams's reports decades later (with the undoubted advantage of hindsight) one is struck by two things. They contain a certain base of uncontested fact. But the factual base is undermined by a kind of systematic extremism in interpretation. Even the American Embassy, although pleased by the 'useful' series, judged the journalist to be a 'little extravagant in his theories.'31 If one or two Communists could be identified on the executive of a union, for instance, this fact was taken as evident proof that the union was a subversive threat. If a handful of Communist party members could be found in, say, Nova Scotia, this fact was taken as evident proof that Canadian democracy was under siege. The subtext of all such articles was that if the Communist 'line' on an issue was such-and-such, anyone or any group advancing this position must be part of the Communist conspiracy. As one cynic remarked at the time, it was as if an otherwise sane person would refuse to do anything about his house burning down if the alarm was first sounded by a Communist! Thus issues like the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Korean War were being redefined in the public mind as having two sides, the Communist side and the correct, patriotic side. With ideas defined as weapons in a war, all pretence of democratic debate was out the window. Further outside the media mainstream were a number of free-lance crusaders who published newsletters and operated news services dedicated to exposing the ubiquitous Reds under the bed. Gladstone Murray, a one-time general manager of the CBC who had been forced to resign in 1943 over financial irregularities, had done sterling service in the great anti-CCF 'pink scare' propaganda drive in the late war years.32 He continued to publish an anti-Communist newsletter through the 1950s. Marjorie Lamb (a 'redhead out to beat the reds' in one newspaper's felicitous phrase) ran the Alert Service, which published pamphlets and provided stories, financed by the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, the Catholic Women's League, and other such organizations. A future lieutenant-governor of Ontario, Pauline McGibbon, was involved in a venture to publish anti-Communist news for recent immigrants, funded by corporate donations.33 It is hard to know how much, if any, influence such services actually had, since the numbers and importance of their subscribers is unknown. Certainly, they had little influence relative to comparable groups in the United States at this time, where, for instance, a publication like the notorious Red

The Debate That Never Was 277 Channels could destroy an artist's or entertainer's media career simply by listing him or her as a Communist. Intellectual respectability was lent to extreme anti-Communism by a prominent scholar, humanities professor Watson Kirkconnell. This vivid, energetic, opiniated, hot-headed, and intolerant personality first appears on the scene as an anti-Communist Cassandra during the Second World War. Proficient in languages, Kirkconnell had appointed himself spokesman for various Eastern European immigrant groups in Canada, especially the Ukrainians. Employed by the Canadian government as part of its effort to ensure ethnic support for the war effort, he not only fought proNazi tendencies but also identified what he clearly saw as the far greater threat of Communism. In books and pamphlets he denounced pro-Communist ethnic organizations and the Communist foreign-language press.34 His unsubtle depiction of Communism as evil incarnate made for some official embarrassment during the period of the Grand Alliance against Hitler, and he was eased out of some of his duties. From this experience he seemed to have gained a certain sense of persecution, convinced that pro-Communist forces were actively but covertly blunting the efforts of patriots like himself to sound the alarms. Despite this resentment, which still infused his memoirs35 published in 1967, it is clear that by the late 1940s Kirkconnell's voice was not only being heard but had a certain privileged place. He was appointed to the relatively prestigious post of university president (Acadia University); he had a key role in the founding of the Humanities Research Council of Canada (HRCC); and his articles and books found ready publishers with relatively wide distribution. He was very much an establishment figure, as his rather self-aggrandizing memoirs indicate at great length. From such a position of respectability he could readily make himself heard on his favourite hobby-horse, the evils of Communism. In 1947 the Canadian Chamber of Commerce began distributing a forty-page pamphlet on the dangers of Communism to its tens of thousands of members across Canada. The strident tone caught the attention of the Ottawa Citizen, which condemned the 'acutely distorted' picture presented of a Canada about to fall under the Soviet heel through the treachery of a Communist fifth column. 'Professor Watson Kirkconnell on the rampage,' the Citizen suggested, 'could do no worse.'36 In fact, Kirkconnell was the author. He was proud of his capacity to reach a mass audience; he also wrote scripts for radio shows beamed at workers in northern-Ontario mining and lumbering towns and made many appearances as a speaker at service clubs and the like, for which he had an extensive slide show to supplement his spoken message.37 As an academic, Kirkconnell believed he had a special mission to clean Communism out of Canadian campuses. In 1949 he gained considerable publicity with an article in Saturday Night warning of Communist penetration of student organizations.38 Communists were active on six Canadian campuses, he claimed, and had successfully infiltrated student CCF clubs, the Student Christian Movement, and the National Federation of Canadian University Students. Student newspapers com-

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mented rather scornfully on this alarmism, but outside the campuses, readers may have been impressed by the image of student subversives. Kirkconnell also turned his hand to more elevated forms of anti-Communist agitation. As a founder and first president of the Humanities Research Council of Canada, he was a leading advocate of improved status for the teaching of the humanities and for support for scholarship. These laudable goals were tied directly to the antiCommunist imperative. In a jointly written book published in 1947 with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation, The Humanities in Canada, he placed the Cold War front and centre, arguing that Canadian scholars had a national duty to combat the ignorance and brutality of totalitarian doctrines. In a pamphlet published the following year, Liberal Education in the Canadian Democracy, he contrasted the 'slave society' of the Soviet Union and its totalitarian education with the 'intellectual and spiritual freedom associated with liberal education' that he believed lay at the 'very dynamic centre of our Western way of life.' As the official history of the Humanities Research Council of Canada later commented somewhat caustically: 'One can perhaps only speculate as to whether this mission to save Western civilization from the communist menace helped HRCC in acquiring financial assistance from American philanthropic foundations.'39 In one sense, Kirkconnell (who undoubtedly did much to improve the status of the humanities in Canadian society) could be seen to be employing the Cold War to benefit scholarship. On the other hand, there was also a distinct undertone of mobilizing the humanities and liberal education on behalf of the Cold War. The latter implication was not much appreciated, either by apolitical or politically aware scholars (the latter being more likely to be on the left). After Kirkconnell's tenure as president of the HRCC (1943-7), arguments about the national mission of the humanities and the universities to contest the Soviet menace were less often heard. Kirkconnell was an odd mixture. A genuine scholar and energetic activist on behalf of higher education, his credentials as a liberal educator and his faith in the value of free enquiry contrasted sharply with the strident, intolerant tones of the selfrighteous ideological zealot. His desire to reach a mass audience led the professor of humanities to abandon his high standards of scholarship for the demagogic style of the vulgar pamphleteer (as with his Chamber of Commerce text). When it came to the Cold War, Kirkconnell dropped all liberal notions of freedom of enquiry and debate as the basis of a healthy democracy. Those who chose the 'wrong' side on Cold War issues were not merely mistaken but enemies of the West. As such they ought to be silenced. When Elmore Philpott - a one-time CCFer who had long since defected to the Liberals and would later serve as Liberal MP from Vancouver South in the 1950s - criticized the Marshall Plan on a CBC radio commentary in 1948, Kirkconnell wrote to External Affairs Minister Louis St Laurent demanding that the government stop such 'flagrant dissemination of Communist propaganda' by the state broadcaster. Canadian taxpayers, he fulminated, do not want 'to finance Soviet agents in the poisoning of the wells of public opinion.'40

The Debate That Never Was 279 Given his quasi-establishment credentials and his acceptance by a wide variety of Canadian institutions from universities to the Chamber of Commerce, it is striking that Kirkconnell's anti-Communism could lead him to close association with groups and ideas that were on the fringe of Canadian society. In the late 1950s he lent his prestige to a bizarre far-right 'Freedom Foundation' which denounced fluoridation of municipal water as a Communist plot and floated a phoney gold-prospecting scheme in British Columbia (including a secret machine for extracting the precious metal), the proceeds of which were to finance radio broadcasts to the enslaved people of Communist China. When the foundation went bankrupt, it was investigated by two provincial governments. Kirkconnell was unrepentant. Cheered on by the anti-Semitic propagandist Ron Gostick, he maintained that 'fluoridation is a Communist plot to make Canadian brains susceptible to domination.' This was too much even for the right-wing columnist of the Toronto Telegram Frank Tumpane, who commented acidly that Kirkconnell 'has demonstrated that a person with very little common sense may still become president of a university.' The doughty (perhaps dotty) old crusader thought that it was all really quite simple: 'if we have to choose between sound teeth and healthy brains, I would vote for the brains.'41 THE P O L I T I C S OF F E A R

In the best of all possible democratic worlds, public opinion would emerge out of an informed, lively and free debate over the fundamental issues facing the community. Governments would then take their cue from a popular consensus shaped by this debate. Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s was not the best of all possible democratic worlds. The real world, as we have described it, was one in which ideas were overshadowed by emotional appeals, patriotic bombast, and urgent demands that everyone take sides, declare his or her loyalties, and snap to attention. In the words of the national song 'O Canada' (just beginning to compete with 'God Save the King'), Canadians were urged to 'stand on guard.' They were not encouraged to ask what exactly they were standing on guard for. It was enough to know what they should be on guard against. It was not the Cold War argument that won the 'debate' (although it might well have done so in a genuinely free discussion), but the loyaltyoath argument. The effect of the efforts of 'opinion leaders,' public and private, was to encourage a public opinion based above all upon/ear. How did the Canadian people respond to the politics of fear encouraged by the elites? THE (DISTANT) VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

The closest we can come to a picture of Canadian mass opinion is to examine the polls that were, by the late 1940s, being published regularly in the press. In the

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United States there were a number of commercial polling organizations publishing their results, but only the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (the Gallup organization) was active in this country. There are a number of problems in using these Gallup polls,42 but they are all that we have to work with. The greatest Cold War issue of all was war and peace - whether 'cold' war would turn into 'hot' war, and whether in the nuclear age such a hot war could be fought at all without global catastrophe. Canadians, as seen in Gallup polls from 1947 through 1956,43 feared war and thought that it was up to the leaders of the great powers to do something about it, while remaining dubious about the likelihood of any general peace settlement. They favoured the nuclear deterrent in the hands of the West so long as war remained a possibility, and thought that Canada still had a non-nuclear military role to play in the world. There was nothing here that diverged dramatically from the official Canadian government approach, nothing that could conceivably handcuff or constrain Canadian politicians, diplomats, or generals in their dealings with their allies abroad. The Canadian public, like its government, was neither pacifist nor bellicose. The only disquieting note might be a certain undertone of powerlessness in the face of the implacable forces of power and bigness at play in the question of war and peace. When we turn to what Canadians thought about the two leading Cold War antagonists, it is obvious that they were hardly impartial. If their government had lined Canada up in an anti-Soviet alliance, this in no way contradicted popular attitudes towards the USSR. Twice as many believed that power politics and misapprehension of each other's intentions rather than ideological differences (49 per cent to 25 per cent) between the superpowers were at the root of the Cold War.44 But there is no doubt that the Canadian people deeply distrusted and disliked the Soviet Union. The Gouzenko spy scare in 1946 triggered fears that had been only partially submerged while the USSR was a wartime ally. These were compounded with the onset of the Cold War. How much of this distrust was rooted in revulsion at the Soviet ideology and the image of a totalitarian society and how much in a perception of Soviet external aggression and expansionism is unclear. In the absence of alternative explanations of Soviet behaviour, Canadians perhaps thought it prudent to expect the worst, while hoping for something better. In the last instance, the image of the USSR in Canadian public opinion might best be described as that of an enigma. Canadians did not know a great deal about the Soviet Union, but fearful of what they did see, wanted it kept at a good arm's length. This was an attitude born more of ignorance than knowledge. As such, it was not invulnerable to change. When the USSR itself began to exhibit a changing face following the death of Stalin, Canadians cautiously began to reconsider. At the very outset of the Cold War, Canadians had been more mistrustful of the Soviets than were their American cousins. Yet once Americans had assumed the driver's seat in the Western alliance, they developed a steely resolve in regard to the Soviets that Canadians seemed unwilling to maintain. The Soviets might never win any beauty

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contests in the eyes of the Canadian people, but the latter were certainly unwilling to risk war in order to make the Soviets do what the West wanted. The other big Communist power after 1949 was China. Two political scientists who have studied the survey data conclude that 'on the policy matters of recognition and UN admission, Canadians tended to be far closer to opinion in Britain and France than that which prevailed south of the 49th parallel in the wake of the "loss of China." ' They add that both the Canadian public and the elites 'responded to the Cold War with China in a manner more diverse and, in the main, less hostile than our main alliance partner.'45 By and large, the Americans were the mirror-image of the Communist powers in Canadian eyes. Americans were largely a known quantity to Canadians, and generally they liked what they saw. So far as choosing sides in the Cold War, few Canadians had any doubts that they had chosen wisely by lining up with the Americans. Yet this did not mean unqualified approval for everything American, let alone unthinking loyalty to the actions of the U.S. government. In fact, Canadian mistrust of the Soviet Union did not translate into a uniformly positive attitude towards the United States. Canada could not, after all, escape the facts of geography and history. The USSR might be dominating Eastern Europe and Communism might be on the march in Asia, but the superpower that made its weight felt directly in Canada was undoubtedly the United States. In 1948,46 when asked whether Canada had become more dependent on the United States in the preceding decade, a strong plurality (42 per cent) of respondents answered that they felt that it was. When those who responded in the affirmative were asked in what way this dependence had increased, more than half gave economic examples. In response to the question of whether this continental integration was a good thing, six out of seven registered an opinion and were evenly divided on the issue. But this resentment seems almost entirely separated from any break with American Cold War foreign and defence policies. The great Cold War issues of the late 1940s were the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO. Despite the high priority given to NATO by the Canadian government, and despite the insistence with which support for NATO was advocated in what passed for public debate, ignorance and indifference were striking features of public opinion on the issue. In 1952, Gallup was disconcerted to find that 43 per cent had never even heard of NATO. Of the 56 per cent who professed to have heard of it, 16 per cent could not explain what it was and another 3 per cent described it in terms that Gallup called 'wrong completely.' Bizarrely, while Canadians were not sure what NATO was, three-quarters were sure that it was a good thing. A somewhat bemused Gallup organization editorialized: 'What happens to a government policy when only slightly more than half the population have ever heard of it; when practically no one can spell out the details of its meaning, but when it has the overwhelming support of the people?'47 But this is exactly the sort of public opinion one would expect following the kind of loyalty-oath 'debate' that heralded NATO.

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THE COLD WAR ON THE H O M E F R O N T

How did Canadians react to the Cold War in Canada? This is a very important question in determining to what extent the Canadian experience of these years differed from that of the Americans. It is generally accepted that there was not a great deal of McCarthy ism, as such, in Canada. There was no Senator McCarthy, no House Un-Canadian Activities Committee. There were would-be McCarthys, but they misfired. As we show in this book, there was a great deal of anti-Communism, but it was more likely to be official anti-Communism, sanctioned by the state and contained within the 'legitimate' boundaries of state-sponsored activity. A common Canadian reaction to the differences, then and now, is to conclude usually with some considerable degree of self-satisfaction - that Canada is a saner, more moderate, more reasonable, and freer country than a southern neighbour so given to periodic excesses and movements of extremism like McCarthyism. Others have been less sure. In 1954, the leading Canadian sociologist of his generation, S.D. Clark, suggested that Canadians had little reason for self-satisfaction. Accepting the then-current explanation among American liberals of McCarthyism as a revolt of the insecure, resentful, and authoritarian masses against more liberal and tolerant elites, Clark had a warning for Canadians too quick to judge: Critics outside the [United States] might well pause to consider not the intolerance which found expression in McCarthyism but the tolerance which made it possible for McCarthyism to develop. In Canada it would be hard to conceive of a state of political freedom great enough to permit the kind of attacks upon responsible leaders of the government which have been carried out in the United States ... [I]n spite of the witch hunts in that country, the people of the United States enjoy a much greater degree of freedom than do the people of Canada. We could scarcely have a witch hunt when we have no witches!48

Canada, Clark told his audience, was a much more elitist society than its neighbour. The absence of a Canadian McCarthyite movement in the early 1950s simply indicated to Clark a more closed political system and tighter elite control. It did not indicate that ordinary Canadians were any less authoritarian or intolerant of dissent than Americans. There is some evidence that Canadians were indeed no less authoritarian in their attitudes. When government moved to impose disabilities upon Communists, Canadians gave overwhelming approval. For instance, 79 per cent agreed with their government that foreign Communists should be barred from entering Canada; only 8 per cent disapproved.49 Despite the criticisms by civil libertarians of the detention and interrogation without counsel or habeas corpus of the suspects in the Gouzenko spy affair, 61 per cent of Canadians polled approved fully of the government's conduct; 16 per cent disapproved, although some of these actually thought the govern-

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ment was 'too lenient.'50 But opinion ran strongly towards restrictions on Communists that went far beyond what the Liberal government in Ottawa was willing to contemplate. Sixty-eight per cent were ready to outlaw organizations that were 'largely Communistic,' although only 56 per cent believed there were such organizations in Canada (38 per cent did not). Apart from the Communist party itself, certain trade unions were identified as 'largely Communistic' as was the bitterly anti-Communist CCF party by some respondents (4 per cent). Only 20 per cent opposed outlawing such organizations. Although enthusiasm for banning waned with greater education, it commanded a clear majority even of those with college degrees.51 Five years later, after the federal government had made clear it would not outlaw even the Communist party, let alone 'Communistic' associations, two-thirds of Canadians still approved of the idea, while just over one in five opposed it. Oddly enough, only one in three in 1954 still believed that such organizations existed, while 67 per cent either denied it or expressed no opinion.52 In other words, twothirds wanted organizations banned that they did not believe existed! Under the circumstances, 'witch-hunting' does not seem an inappropriate term. Seventy per cent in 1950 favoured a law 'requiring all Communists in this country to register with the Department of Justice in Ottawa.' Only 17 per cent were opposed. Slightly more Americans supported a similar bill when it was before Congress (77 per cent). The Canadian government, however, rejected any such concept. An even higher majority in 1951 (83 per cent) wanted a law barring Communists from holding public office; 58 per cent would approve making it a criminal offence to be a member of 'any Communist organization,' and 57 per cent would even prevent a Communist from voting in any election (36 per cent baulked at this, but only 12 per cent at barring Communists from holding office).53 None of these restrictions were favoured by the Liberal government. And in 1953, 62 per cent declared that freedom of speech should be denied to Communists and 'Communist sympathizers' who wanted to address the public. Twenty-six per cent thought that the right to free speech should include Communists, and 12 per cent could not make up their minds. Those who wished to suspend freedom of expression cited reasons such as that Communism was 'poison' and the public 'too gullible' to be allowed to hear Communist ideas.54 In late 1953 at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's public notoriety as a witch-hunter, 65 per cent of Canadian respondents claimed to have heard of him. Forty-three per cent could correctly identify him in relation to the anti-Communist issue. Among this informed minority, opinion was evenly split: 15 per cent disapproved, 14 per cent approved, and 14 per cent gave no or unclear opinions. Among Quebeckers, almost four times as many approved as disapproved.55 By this stage, public opinion was beginning to turn against McCarthy in the United States, yet Canadians could not be said to be anti-McCarthy. Like Americans, Canadians had a somewhat schizophrenic view of the magnitude of the Communist threat. When leading questions were asked, such as 'How serious a threat do you think Communism is to our form of government here in Canada?,'

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alarmist responses were received. In 1947, 67 per cent thought Communism to be a serious threat (34 per cent 'very serious,' 33 per cent 'fairly serious'); less than one in five thought it no threat at all. By 1954 apprehensions had cooled somewhat, with alarmists down to 56 per cent (of which only 16 per cent believed the threat to be 'very serious'), and one in four ready to dismiss the threat altogether, but a majority still claimed to be worried.56 Asked to choose between Communism and the 'breakdown of people's moral standards' as the 'greatest threat facing the world,' just under one-half chose Communism, and one in three moral laxity. Gallup reported that 'a considerable number say that they are both equally menacing: or that either one tends to bring on the other.'57 On the other hand, when not specifically prompted by pollsters, people rarely volunteered the threat of Communism as a problem that worried them. When asked open-ended questions about the greatest problem facing the country, 'Communism' was mentioned by only a small minority, which fluctuated from less than 1 per cent to a high of 5 per cent between 1947 and 1952. Inflation, unemployment, and, by 1951, the threat of war, far outstripped Communism. Other issues overshadowed Communism as well: 'Hood control' was more on people's minds in 1950 after the Winnipeg flood disaster, and taxation, housing, and moral laxity also contended for people's anxiety. Offered the opportunity in 1951 to tell the pollsters what problem they would most like to ask the prime minister about, people entirely overlooked the menace of Communism. One in four, interestingly, wanted to ask about war, conscription, and defence matters.58 Asked in 1950 if they could name anything 'undemocratic' that was currently happening in Canada, only 1 per cent thought of Communism or Communist ideas, considerably fewer than those who named religious or racial discrimination, and about the same number as those who considered the price of farm produce 'undemocratic.'59 Were there 'spillover' effects from the anti-Communist feelings of the era? One of the criticisms of McCarthyism, especially by American liberals, has always been that it was indiscriminate: non-Communists were tarred with the same brush as Communists. There is some evidence of this effect in Canadian public opinion, but it was both weak and mixed. In the United States, for instance, an anti-labour-union trend in public opinion in the postwar years has been attributed, in part, to the impact of Cold War anti-Communism on unions that were often tarred with the Red brush. There was a plethora of Gallup polls in the postwar years in Canada measuring public attitudes towards unions. There are few discernible effects. Canadian opinion began as predominantly friendly and supportive of unions and continued to be so well into the 1950s. Indeed, some indications suggest that unions became more popular as the Cold War set in. In one poll in 1946 (a year of very high strike activity), a five-to-one majority of people believed that unions should have more influence over the passage of legislation than big business.60 This was perhaps a high point for labour's prestige, but a similar poll in 1955 still showed labour far ahead of business in the public's sympathies.61 The public not surprisingly did not

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much like strikes, but this did not lead them to demand that strikes be outlawed or union rights curtailed. While there was some resentment about union bosses, on balance Canadians believed unions to be 'wisely led.'62 As for perceptions of unions as 'Red-led,' Canadians showed a keen sense of reality. When asked if labour leaders took orders from outside Canada, two out of five agreed. But almost twice as many identified these orders as coming from the United States as from Russia.63 If unions largely escaped the tarbrush, the same could not be said for the CCF. This is doubly ironic: not only had the CCF always been implacably anti-Communist, but its leadership adopted a strong Cold War orientation in the late 1940s. To much of the general public, however, social democracy, let alone socialism, could not be readily distinguished from Communism. When the latter became an object of public wrath, socialists of any stripe tended to get lumped in. A poll released on May Day 1946 demonstrated that three-quarters of the people thought that there was no difference between socialism and Communism, or were unable to define any difference.64 Nor could the CCF escape the dreaded 'C' word. It was voted the least liked political party in a 1950 poll. CCF-haters above all stressed that it was 'too socialistic' or 'tends to Communism.' 65 On the other hand, social-democratic policies and programs were not much affected by any right-wing Cold War backlash. This was possible because the public did not identify welfare-state programs with socialism. Even when asked if they approved of 'socialized medicine' (a rather ideologically loaded term for government medicare), a majority did so.66 Spin-off effects of the anti-Communist scare thus seem to have been fairly limited. Perhaps the only real victim was the CCF. UN-CANADIAN ACTIVITIES?

Canadian opinion does seem very little different on domestic Cold War issues from American opinion in this same era - although one must qualify this by granting that American data is much more sophisticated.67 When prompted by leading questions (questions that sometimes demanded a predetermined response by, for instance, identifying Communism as a 'threat' and then asking how seriously people took this threat), both Americans and Canadians obliged by rating Communism as a serious menace. Moreover, both Americans and Canadians, in roughly equal proportions, were willing, when asked specifically, to suspend civil liberties and freedom of speech and other aspects of liberal democracy to suppress Communism. On the other hand, both Americans and Canadians, unless nudged, were on the whole blissfully unaware that this was an era in which fears of the Red menace were rampant. Even at the height of his press and television notoriety, Senator Joseph McCarthy could not be identified by more than a minority of citizens with the Communist issue. And in a comprehensive voting study of the 1952 presidential election, less than 0.5 per cent of Republican voters volunteered the Communist issue as a

286 The Cold War in Canadian Society reason for voting against the Democrats, fewer than those who cited the fact that the Democratic candidate had been divorced!68 Recent American reinterpretations of McCarthyism69 have de-emphasized the mass basis that anxious liberals had discerned in the 1950s and have looked instead to explanations rooted in the behaviour of certain elites, especially traditionally isolationist Midwestern Republicans who used McCarthyism as an effective partisan weapon against the Democrats. When McCarthy's attacks on the 'establishment' were no longer against a Democratic administration but against the Eisenhower administration following the Republican victory in 1952, McCarthy quickly became isolated as too dangerous, and the same elites that had sustained his brand of extremist anti-Communism closed ranks in 1954 against him, politically destroying him and bringing the great Red scare to a halt. When the elites no longer had a vested interest in exploiting fears of Communism, the authoritarian attitudes of the public towards political dissent remained latent. In any event, surveys have shown that intolerance of dissent and a fragile attachment to liberal freedoms when it comes to unpopular minorities have been fairly constant over many decades. Only at certain times, such as the 'McCarthy era' of the early 1950s, are these latent attitudes triggered into real political movements. In short, McCarthyism was not a case of liberal and tolerant elites cornered by a spontaneous wave of mass populist authoritarianism, as earlier liberal analysts insisted, but rather of the exploitation of these latent attitudes by certain elites while it was politically useful. Indeed, to make the case for the liberals even more precarious, it was the Truman Democrats who had first instigated official anti-Communism for their own purposes, only to have the Republicans grab the issue and turn it against them. Where does this leave Canada? To return to S.D. Clark: there is some truth in his argument that the relative absence of McCarthyism in this country paradoxically bespeaks a lesser degree of freedom here than in the United States. In Canada, the elite structure dominating Canadian society was obviously tighter. In this era at least the Liberal elites governing from Ottawa were more centralized and exercised more effective control over the society than their counterparts in Washington. Through them the state could manage the transition to a Cold War and national-security footing with many fewer of the uncontrolled effects that took place in the United States. When the U.S. government set out to 'scare hell out of the American people,' all hell broke loose. In Canada, the governing elites showed that they could manage public opinion, using some elements already there, ignoring others that did not serve the state's purposes, and defining issues for an often-inattentive public in a way that smoothed the path of government policy. Whether this means that Canadians were more virtuous than Americans is a moot question.

13

The Cold War in the Provinces

Canada is a federal country. Foreign affairs and defence policy are normally considered the constitutional responsibility of the national government. Moreover, the protection of national security against external or internal threats has always been regarded as an Ottawa responsibility. The Cold War was thus very much associated with the federal government; consequently, much of our focus in this book has been on events and thinking in Ottawa. Yet the Cold War on the home front was not confined to Ottawa alone. The same preoccupations were often found in the provincial capitals and worked their way into the fabric of provincial and municipal as well as national politics. In Quebec, in particular, the Cold War was a leading presence in the first postwar decade; we shall examine this story in detail. Ontario and British Columbia were also sites of sometimes bitter Cold War controversies.1 BRITISH C O L U M B I A : ' T H E NO. 1 H O T B E D '

British Columbia was a site of much domestic Cold War agitation in the first postwar decade. It is not surprising that the Pacific province should have been especially subject to the political passions of this era. British Columbia had always been the scene of the most inflamed class conflict in the country. The gulf between capital and labour was at its widest in the frontier atmosphere of company mining and logging towns. Outside the industrial heartland of Ontario, British Columbia had been host to more Communist labour organizing than anywhere else. The Financial Post's anti-Communist specialist reported that the 'no. 1 hotbed' of Red union activity 'without question is British Columbia.' 2 Extensive purges of Communists in B.C. trade unions, described later in this book, raged in the late 1940s and early 1950s, watched closely by the employers. U.S. State Department consular correspondence with Vancouver indicates that the premier of British Columbia in the late 1940s, John Hart, and other leading conservative provincial politicians, worked closely with U.S. diplomats in planning anti-

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Communist moves.3 There were also free-lance anti-Communist organizations set up in British Columbia that sought to combat the red menace either without government cooperation or in loose alliance with government. In 1948, for instance, the American consulate reported to Washington that anti-Communism in British Columbia was gathering strength both in the press and among concerned citizens and lumber interests, who were forming networks to fight Communist influence. 4 Amid this atmosphere, an incident stands out as one of the worst examples of McCarthyite victimization to occur anywhere in Canada. A young man's career in the law was closed off to him forever solely because of hostility to his personal political beliefs. This act was carried out by the quasi-official authority of the benchers of the Law Society of British Columbia, who threatened to carry out the same sanction against others of offending political beliefs. And the benchers were in effect vindicated in their actions by the highest court of the province. Gordon Martin was a native Canadian who had served his country as a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force during the war. Married with two children, he took advantage of war veterans' educational benefits to attend the University of British Columbia (UBC) law school, from which he graduated in 1948. In the normal way he then applied to the benchers for the call to the bar and admission as a solicitor. Unusually, he was interviewed three times by the benchers. Three months after his original application he was rejected. The grounds for rejection were, as the benchers stated in writing, that Martin was a member of the Labour Progressive party. As such, his character was not of 'good repute,' a requirement for being called to the bar. Moreover, the Legal Professions Act of British Columbia required an oath by those called to the bar to defend the sovereign against 'traitorous conspiracies.' In the view of the benchers, Communism was precisely such a 'traitorous conspiracy.' To the argument that the Communist party was a legal party in British Columbia that could freely contest elections, the benchers replied that: 'The fact that the Government because of reasons of policy has not proceeded against Communists is not to give the so-called Labour Progressive Party any stamp of approval of legality. In the view of the Benchers the Labour Progressive Party is an association of those adhering to subversive Communist doctrines. It is not in the ordinary sense a political party at all, inasmuch as a Canadian political party must of its very nature owe allegiance to the Canadian democratic system ...' To the argument that the benchers were stifling freedom of expression in the absence of any proof of overtly disloyal acts, they responded forthrightly: 'while freedom of thought and freedom to express opinions give the subject the right to hold and express his views, this does not imply that the expression of such views is not be taken into account when reputation or character are under consideration.' Martin, they concluded, was 'not a fit person' to be called to the bar or admitted as a solicitor.5 The significance of this decision must be clearly understood. The benchers exercised quasi-administrative powers of access to the practice of law. Moreover, their decision was not subject to judicial review, since the courts declined to interfere in

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the administrative jurisdiction of a professional body like the benchers. Gordon Martin's years of study, the expenditure of his veterans' credits, and his successful completion of all the normal requirements for entry into the profession were suddenly of no significance in the face of the benchers' opinions. In short, Martin had been deprived of fundamental rights without recourse. The reasoning of the benchers demands some critical commentary as well. Martin was willing to take the oath of the Legal Professions Act that he would protect the sovereign against treasonous conspiracies. The benchers refused to accept his word, judging him, apparently, to be unable to say for himself whether or not he could honestly take such an oath. Martin was willing to swear that he opposed the violent overthrow of government; the benchers held that his political associations discredited anything he might say. The doctrine of guilt by association was alive and well among the benchers of British Columbia. There was much press comment on the case; views were mixed. One columnist declared that the benchers' decision ironically represented a 'resounding victory for Communism.' Saturday Night condemned the benchers' decision and reasoning. The Montreal Gazette demanded logic: the government 'ought either to declare that Communists are full Canadian citizens, and then defend their every right; or else it should declare that they cannot, by their own beliefs, become Canadian citizens and then control their activities by the orderly process of law.' On the other hand, a contributor to the Canadian Bar Review concluded that the 'members of the Law Society content themselves with the thought that membership in its brotherhood will not, on this occasion at least, be made use of to defeat its essential purposes, to bring it into disrepute in the community and to make possible under its cloak the sabotage of our public institutions.' 6 The public controversy surrounding the case and the apparent finality of the benchers' decision led the B.C. government to look for a means of judicial review. During the 1949 sitting of the legislature, an amendment was passed to the Legal Professions Act allowing Martin to appeal to the provincial Court of Appeal. When he indicated his willingness to do so, the attorney general of British Columbia agreed to pay his costs.7 The B.C. government at least wanted the air cleared. Martin found no solace in the court. In a unanimous judgment in 1950 the justices upheld the original decision of the benchers. Each judge gave his reasons separately, but most relied upon strong condemnation of Communism: it was an 'alien philosophy'; 'Marxism exercises a strange power over its adherents ... the strange but menacing potentialities present and future that the Marxist philosophy engenders ...' One judge put it that a Communist was engaged in revolution in Canada under the direction of the Communist leadership outside Canada 'whether he knows it or not.' The chief justice explicitly did not pass on the merits of Martin's argument that his constitutional rights had been violated or even on the merits of the benchers' decision, as such. Instead, he simply concluded that 'it is not for the Court to substitute its view for that of the Benchers.'8 Chitty's Law Journal interpreted the court decision with evident satisfaction: 'So

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ended one attempt by the enemies of society as we understand it to infiltrate the key profession in the struggle between the ideology of freedom under the rule of law and the ideology of the dictatorship of the proletariat ...'9 For Gordon Martin, the result was less happy. No further appeal was apparently contemplated - whether because no likely grounds for appeal could be foreseen (this was before the Bill of Rights and the Charter of Rights) or because Martin was unable to bear the costs of an appeal now that the provincial government's interest was at an end, is no longer clear. Martin set up shop as a radio and television repairman on Vancouver Island. The Martin case attracted nationwide attention. It was not the only attempt by the B.C. benchers to enforce their political standards upon applicants to the bar. Harry Rankin, later a colourful radical lawyer and for many years the perennial leader in the aldermanic polls in Vancouver civic politics, found himself in Martin's shoes, as did three more of Rankin's UBC law-faculty classmates. Rankin has described the inquisition he had to face before the benchers. He was interrogated about his politics, his religion, his views on the Korean War. Was he now or had he ever been a member of the Communist party? Would he fight for his country? To the latter question, Rankin had a quick and angry response: he had fought for his country, in the war in Europe. In a direct steal from the United States, where the loyalty oath had suddenly come into vogue, the benchers required Rankin to sign a statement: T, Harry Rankin, do solemnly swear that I am not a communist or a member of any association holding communist views, that if called to the Bar I can take the Barrister's Oath without reservations of any kind and that I have no intention of following any communist association in the future.' 10 Rankin complied with the demands and denied he was or ever had been a Communist. This was not perhaps the whole truth, but as Rankin explained simply: 'If I didn't do so I would not have been admitted to the Bar.' The others did likewise." McCarthyism was alive and well in the B.C. Law Society, and Gordon Martin in his TV repair shop was evidence of what could happen to anyone who did not bow to the power of the benchers to enforce their view of political cleanliness on B.C. lawyers. ONTARIO: SYMBOLIC STRUGGLE IN THE INDUSTRIAL

HEARTLAND

Ontario, the largest province and the industrial heartland of Canada, was no stranger to the politics of the Cold War. Anti-Communism had deep and tenacious roots in Ontario. In 1945 it was revealed that the Conservative government of George Drew had been maintaining a secret police operation, based on the old Red squad special branch of the Ontario Provincial Police, for surveillance of political opponents, especially the CCF, then the official opposition.12 In the Ontario legislature in the 1940s there were two Communist MLAs. One was the legendary Joe Salsberg, veteran labour organizer, prominent member of Toronto's Jewish community, and representative of the largely Jewish Spadina district of Toronto. Salsberg hung on to his seat through the darkest days of the Cold War, even winning re-election in 1951 dur-

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ing the Korean War. Along the way he had defeated a number of well-known Tories, including Nathan Phillips (later mayor of Toronto) and Eddie Goodman (later a leading fundraiser and backroom boy in the Tory party). In 1955 he finally succumbed to Tory Allan Grossman in a turbulent and sometimes violent campaign. 13 One factor that tipped the scales against Salsberg was that some of his core Jewish vote was moving north out of the constituency and was being replaced by Eastern European immigrants who loathed the very name of Communism. The other Communist MLA was Alex MacLeod, who represented Salsberg's neighbouring riding of Bellwoods from 1943 until 1951, when he lost to the Tories. Never a serious competitor to the CCF, the Communists were nevertheless a presence in Ontario politics. In the legislature they commanded a degree of grudging respect. Tory premier Leslie Frost, who succeeded George Drew as premier but did not share his Red-baiting ideology, once reportedly stated that 'those two honourable gentlemen opposite [Salsberg and MacLeod] have more brains than my entire backbench put together.'14 Following his defeat, MacLeod was actually taken on by Frost as an adviser, was a leading figure in the organization of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and later yet was an adviser on Quebec to premier John Robarts in the early 1960s.15 Despite the relatively genial attitude of the post-Drew Conservatives, Communism in Ontario did eventually fall victim to the Cold War - and to the anti-Stalinist reaction among formerly faithful comrades like Salsberg after the party crisis of 1956. By the late 1950s, Communists were gone not only from the legislature, but from Toronto's city council and board of education as well. Nor has the party ever recovered from the decline of those years. If the Ontario government passed from bullying anti-Communism under Drew to co-optive Tory democracy under Frost, at other levels Ontario was the site of continued Cold War hysteria during this period. In some municipalities, anti-Communist feelings were sometimes fanned into McCarthyite actions. In Windsor, egged on by a local newspaper's series of sensational exposes of the Red menace, a group of high school students smashed their way into the local Communist party offices and destroyed everything they could find - all under the watchful but benevolent eyes of the local police and media. This very un-Canadian outburst of vigilante violence by teenagers shocked even the more conservative Cold Warriors in the press.16 The Canadian Way was supposed to be more restrained, more law-abiding. One notorious case, far from the rowdyism of Windsor teenagers, took place among the genteel environs of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO). Six musicians in the orchestra were refused U.S. visitor's permits for a scheduled performance in Detroit in 1951, presumably as security risks. All six were then promptly fired by the TSO management. The director of the TSO (and revered father-figure in Canadian music), Sir Ernest MacMillan, expressed his agreement with this obsequious act of complicity with American McCarthyism. The president of the Toronto local of the American Federation of Musicians was active in enforcing the ban and in discouraging protests by other musicians. A public campaign of support for the

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'Symphony Six' was launched; it included the protest resignations of dissenting TSO board members and newspaper advertisements endorsed by such prominent Canadians as Group of Seven painter A.Y. Jackson and populist broadcaster Gordon Sinclair. It was to no avail; none of the six was rehired, and all found extreme difficulty in finding other work in Toronto. One of the musicians was Dirk Keetbaas, later a celebrated flautist with the Winnipeg Symphony and a well-known performer on the CBC. Another was Steven Staryk, 'regarded as the leading Canadian-born violinist of his generation.' The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada concludes that 'Sir Ernest MacMillan's stature and the prestige of the Orchestra both suffered.' 17 The Toronto Board of Education was the scene of many Cold War battles. This was not surprising because for most of this era the board, elected by city wards, included Communist or pro-Communist members along with some self-consciously anti-Communist conservatives. What is somewhat surprising is that the right-wing majority on the board had no compunction about proscribing Communists as teachers in Toronto schools or proscribing teaching materials they considered too left wing, even though some of their fellow board members were Communists elected by the people.18 Public life was apparently too important to be entrusted to the democratic process.19 One victim of local McCarthyism was a social worker with a long and distinguished career of public service stretching back to the 1920s. Mary Jennison was summarily fired as director of the Dale Community Centre in Hamilton by the centre's board, amid heated Red-baiting charges. Although Ms Jennison publicly declared, T am not a Communist,' and more than 400 parents of children using the centre backed her, her detractors were adamant that she had to go. Despite feeble protests from the Canadian Association of Social Workers, this action appears to have ended her career in the profession.20 Perhaps the Ontario story that best illustrates the forces at work in the Cold War era is that of Toronto's Day Nurseries and Day Care Parents Association, which spearheaded a broad-based public day-care movement from 1946 to 1951. During the war a network of day-care centres had been established with federal funding in cities in Ontario and Quebec to allow women to engage in war production. By the war's end, there were twenty-eight day-care nurseries operating under this program in Ontario (nineteen in Toronto), as well as forty-four units attached to schools.21 The Day Nurseries and Day Care Parents Association was designed to popularize the idea that this wartime system should be extended into peacetime as a social program to support the working family and to combat juvenile delinquency (children, it was argued, lacked proper supervision where economic necessity dictated that mothers work). This association did include the participation of some Communist women, as well as CCFers, but the relatively conservative arguments used by the group, combined with imaginative publicity methods, gained a broad-based community support its their demands and met with a certain amount of success at City Hall in the immediate postwar years. However, by the late 1940s there was a sharp

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increase in Red-baiting attacks on the association and the linking of the day-care issue with Communism. By late 1951 the day-care movement had been effectively demolished in an anti-Communist frenzy, and public support for day-care in Toronto was gutted. Fiscally conservative aldermen concerned with cost cutting and rightwingers determined to force women back into the home combined to reshape the debate into one that stressed the threat of Communism and the 'neglect' by working mothers of their children. Once redefined in the terms of the dominant Cold War discourse, the day-care movement's socially progressive goals (a forerunner of latterday feminist organizing) were crushed by the gathering forces of postwar conservatism.22 QUEBEC: 'A G I G A N T I C C O N S P I R A C Y T H R O U G H O U T THE WORLD'

Quebec offered the most striking example in this era of a province in which antiCommunism took on a life of its own. In fact, no story of the Cold War on the Canadian home front would be complete without an account of what transpired in Quebec, where the anti-Communist campaign paralleled Ottawa's. It was, however, a campaign with its own unique flavour and tone. Quebec was a 'distinct society,' a province pas commes les autres, especially in its attitudes to the menace of Soviet Communism, which Catholic Quebeckers tended to take far more seriously than their English-speaking compatriots. In Quebec, some of the atmosphere of American McCarthyism was replicated, but translated, as it were, into a French-speaking Catholic environment. Extreme and alarmist reports of the subversive power of Communism emanated from the organs of civil society: the press, the church, Catholic lay organizations, the classical colleges and universities, trade unions, and freelance anti-communist propagandists. The premier of the province and his ruling party hurled accusations of Communism and subversion at opponents and passed repressive legislation (of dubious constitutionality) striking at freedom of expression and freedom of association in the name of anti-Communism. Anti-Communism did not step onto the Quebec scene for the first time at the end of the war. Far from it. Quebec's unique position as a Catholic and francophone community within a predominantly Protestant and anglophone Canada, and its special history of struggling for national survival and identity, helped shape its response to Communism as an ideology. Revolution had originally appeared as a spectre in Quebec in the eighteenth century when the French Revolution attacked Catholicism and the conservative values of feudal France with which the conquered colony of New France was deeply identified. The secular and radical revolution in the vieux pays left Quebec, as it were, a political and cultural orphan. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the revolutionary challenge took on the trappings of Marxism, seen as a global challenge to Catholic civilization. When fascism emerged in Italy in the 1920s, its apparent rapprochement with the Vatican commended it to many French Canadians. During the Spanish Civil War of the late

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1930s, there was much pro-Franco sentiment in Quebec. In 1938, on the eve of the war against the fascist states, Cardinal Villeneuve of Quebec City publicly pointed his finger at Communism as the primary evil in the world: 'Communism is a gigantic conspiracy throughout the world to wage war against all human and Divine laws and destroy Christian civilization.' 23 During the wartime alliance with the USSR, it was pressure from Quebec politicians and clerics that kept the Canadian Communist party in a state of official illegality, a situation unique in the Western world.24 After the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940, the Vichy regime under Marshall Petain, with its professed emphasis on Catholicism, the family, and authoritarian order, had considerable appeal in some circles in Quebec. Jacques de Bernonville, a notorious Vichy collaborator with Nazi Klaus Barbie (the 'butcher of Lyons') was sheltered by Catholic Quebec in the late 1940s from being extradited to France to face trial for war crimes, as were several other, less infamous, Vichy collaborators. Calls for extradition (virtually all from English Canada) were denounced as Communist-inspired. 25 Despite the warnings, the Communists appear to have been a negligible force in the politics of Quebec, a tiny group largely isolated within a cultural and linguistic ghetto whose ideas and symbols were vehemently rejected by the vast majority of the population. The Communists had difficulties coping with the Quebec realities; in 1947 two leading French-Canadian party leaders were expelled for their 'narrow nationalism.' 26 The one major political success of the Communists was the famous 1943 by-election victory in Montreal-Carder of Communist Fred Rose, reconfirmed in the general election of 1945.27 Yet Rose - who was spectacularly discredited when he was convicted of espionage in the Gouzenko spy affair in 1946 - represented a predominantly Jewish working-class district that had little in common with the French Catholic majority of the Quebec electorate. If anything, Rose's brief tenure as MP probably contributed to the dominant impression of religious, ethnic, and cultural strangeness surrounding Communism in the eyes of most Quebecois. Yet the people of Quebec were genuinely frightened of the Communist spectre. In 1947 a Gallup poll found that 79 per cent of Quebeckers considered Communism either a 'very serious' or a 'fairly serious threat' to the Canadian form of government.28 The Financial Post's, indefatigable anti-Communist reporter Ronald Williams claimed in 1946 that 'Quebec has top priority on the Communist organizing list.' Williams correctly pointed to one appeal that Quebec held for the Communists namely, its traditional isolationism and thus its potential opposition to Canadian participation in an anti-Soviet military alliance. He neglected, however, to indicate the formidable barriers to the progress of Communism in a conservative Catholic province. Interestingly, Williams ended his report in a state of some apprehension that Quebec businessmen 'generally pooh-pooh the idea of an overall [Communist] plan with Quebec as the keystone. They think it's a pipe dream ... because it sounds so far-fetched.' Williams added: 'On the surface everything seems to be serene. Historically, that's when the communists are most dangerous.'29 With the benefit of

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hindsight, the serenity of Quebec capital was better justified than Williams's alarms. Like McCarthyism in the United States, demagogic anti-Communism in Quebec lacked a serious target but served certain partisan political ends at the expense of public rationality and common sense. The overestimation of the Communist potential in Quebec served many interests. To the church, fear of Communism reinforced its position and enhanced its social control. Of course, one need not question the sincerity of clerical anti-Communism. The Marxist ideology posed an atheistic and materialist challenge to Catholic teaching. In the suddenly expanded area of Soviet influence in the late 1940s, Communism threatened the institutional survival of the church. In societies such as Poland and Hungary where the Church of Rome had a wide and historic following, bitter struggles had broken out between church and state. Arrests and even executions of clergy were not unknown. In some traditionally Catholic countries of Western Europe, mass working-class support for Communist parties and Communist-led trade unions directly confronted clerical influence. This was particularly the case in Italy, the home of the Vatican itself. In later decades, elements of the worldwide Catholic church would move towards greater sympathy and even rapprochement with Marxist ideas and movements, but in the early postwar era such tendencies were not much in evidence. And they were most certainly absent from Quebec, where the church had always been on the conservative side of Vatican politics. This is not to say that the Quebec church never engaged in social criticism of the capitalist order. In 1949 the famous Asbestos Strike mobilized moral support for the workers from many walks of Quebec life. Important assistance was offered by the Catholic clergy, particularly by Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal, despite the ferocious opposition of the provincial government. Charbonneau later resigned his office for reasons of 'ill health,' although it was widely believed that it was actually pressure from the Vatican. Yet Charbonneau was succeeded by Bishop Desranleau of Sherbrooke, whose 1949 Labour Day speech to trade unionists denouncing the 'incorrigible' capitalist system as 'the cause of all our miseries' attracted the unfavourable attention of the American Embassy in Ottawa as well as of more conservative Catholics.30 But Catholic criticism of capitalism did not imply any sympathy with Communism. On the contrary, Catholic unions were being promoted as the only alternative to bloody revolution. Quebec was strongly influenced in these days by notions of corporatism and Catholic syndicalism that had nothing in common with Marxism. Moreover, there was a strain of Quebec nationalism running through church doctrines: capital spoke English while labour spoke French. The policies of economic nationalism that would effectively challenge the power of English-speaking capital in Quebec would, however, have to await the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and its aftermath. In the 1940s and 1950s, that power remained secure. The role of the Catholic clergy in promoting an extreme anti-Communism among the population played directly into the hands of those provincial politicians who wished to retain office in alliance with English-speaking capital.

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' F O R C E D TO EAT C O M M U N I S T E G G S ! ' LE CHEF AT THE B A R R I C A D E S

Foremost among politicians in grasping the opportunities of the time was Maurice Duplessis, founder and leader of the Union Nationale and premier of Quebec from 1936 to 1940 and again from 1944 until his death in 1959. Viewed within a wider North American context, Duplessis was one of the great demagogic populist regional politicians emerging from the Great Depression, like Huey ('the Kingfish') Long of Louisiana or 'Bible Bill' Aberhart of Alberta. He was also a unique product of Quebec, embodying both a fiercely conservative Catholic nationalism and a rough-and-ready autocratic political style. Quebec in the Duplessis era was a land of widespread patronage and political corruption, its people kept docile by the influence of the church (which controlled everything from education to hospitals). English-speaking capital extracted raw materials and exploited cheap French-speaking labour while working hand-in-glove with a provincial government that proclaimed nationalism and provincial autonomy but left business to les anglais. A later generation of Quebec intellectuals looking back on the 1940s and 1950s dubbed the era 'le grand noirceur' (the dark ages). Among the superstitions of Quebec's dark ages that Duplessis was eager to exploit to his advantage was anti-Communism. In the spring of 1948, on the eve of a provincial election, the new Duplessis Bridge spanning the St Maurice River at Trois-Rivieres, the premier's home town, was opened. Duplessis pronounced it 'solid as the Union Nationale.' A year and a half later, the Duplessis Bridge collapsed, killing eight people. Duplessis and his followers instantly declared that this was Communist sabotage. Attempts were made by a subsequent commission of enquiry into the disaster to keep the Red sabotage theory alive, but it was patently idiotic. As Conrad Black comments in his sympathetic biography of Duplessis, 'Trois-Rivieres was probably the most conservative city in Canada; it is doubtful that a single Communist had ever set foot there.'31 Structural faults in the design of the bridge were a more mundane, but politically embarrassing, reason for the collapse. Only in Duplessis's Quebec could such a demonological interpretation be kept alive - although in this case the credulity of the public was finally stretched past the breaking point. The Duplessis Bridge affair perhaps marked the outer limit of anti-Communism. Short of this, Duplessis left no stone unturned in his search for the political uses of the issue. In 1956, for instance, his Union Nationale placed an election ad in the press that referred to a trade agreement between Canada and Poland allowing for the importation of Polish eggs. The ad screamed: 'Les Quebecois forces de manger des oeufs communistes!' (Quebeckers forced to eat Communist eggs!).32 More seriously for the quality of civility in Quebec political life was Duplessis's cynical use of anti-Communism as a club with which to beat the hapless Liberal opposition. Only once, in the unusual wartime election of 1939, did Duplessis lose. In 1948, 1952, and 1956 Duplessis's awesome and unscrupulous political machine swept to landslide victories. Yet Duplessis was merciless in his pursuit of the Liberals.

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Especially useful to him was the public impression that a few Liberals had anticlerical tendencies. Duplessis, who always fed off his close relationship with the clergy, magnified the slightest evidence of distance between the church and the Liberals, to the point where the opposition party was depicted as a veritable cabal of undercover Communists conspiring to overthrow the church and lay waste the clergy. Proof of the Liberals' untrustworthiness was adduced from their tendency to downplay the seriousness of a Communist threat to Quebec (the Quebec Liberal leader Adelard Godbout had said in 1948 that 'our population is too close to its Church and too faithful to its traditions' to allow Communism any scope).33 Then Duplessis clinched his case by noting that the provincial Liberals were politically related to the federal Liberal party - with which Duplessis got along quite well in practice.34 The federal Liberals were, in Duplessis's rhetorical lexicon, 'centralists' and a centralist Canadian government was obviously what the Communists needed to impose their designs upon an unwilling Quebec. The logic may have been suspect, but the political effect of Duplessis's tactics was apparently very beneficial to his party's fortunes. Observers have universally credited these charges with playing a role in successive Union Nationale victories over the Liberals. In his smears of his Liberal opponents, Duplessis was very much a Quebec version of Senator Joseph McCarthy. His Red-baiting reached its peak in the 1948 provincial election, with wild Union Nationale charges of Communism. Duplessis claimed to have in his possession documents written by Liberal leaders to the Communists and warned voters that 'with communism, there will be the disappearance of the churches that are so dear to you.' Forced on the defensive, the Liberals never caught up with their accuser - even when Duplessis revealed the nature of the 'correspondence': the Liberals had acknowledged receipt of a letter and had sent the Communist party, on request, a copy of a speech by Godbout.35 From such slight stuff were 'treasonous conspiracies' manufactured. In 1956 Duplessis dusted off his McCarthyite campaign of 1948 and directed it once again at the Liberals and their leader, Georges-Emile Lapalme. Carefully nurtured rumours were spread that Lapalme was a secret Communist. Nuns and priests were mobilized by such rumours to support the Union Nationale. Two dissident clerics published a scathing denunciation of this campaign in the Montreal daily Le Devoir, the anti-Communist election propaganda was 'lies erected into a system ... Lies are used to foster ... the fears of the general public, to distort the ideas of the opposition, to destroy the reputation of people.' The writers stated bluntly that 'Communism, as presented to the masses in Quebec, is a myth ... the theme of antiCommunism has been used in almost identical terms by well-known clerics, despicable third-rate politicians and out-and-out hoodlums.' 36 'EXTERMINATED FOREVER FROM OUR SOCIAL M I L I E U '

Duplessis's McCarthyism did not stop with attacks on his opponents in the Quebec

298 The Cold War in Canadian Society assembly. Le chef and his followers swung their tar buckets more widely. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a number of Quebec intellectuals who dared to question either Duplessis or the conservative elements of the clergy or the coterie of reactionary writers and publicists allied to the ruling party were mercilessly attacked as subversives, atheists, and Communist agents. Some very prominent people fell under these assaults. The 'Communist' who was to prove the most prominent of all was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau was directly charged with Communist sympathies by a Quebec priest for visiting the USSR in 1952 and for writing (rather critically, in fact) about life in the Soviet Union in Le Devoir?1 (Trudeau's Soviet trip also got him barred for a time from travelling to the United States.) In 1954, Cardinal Leger, the grateful recipient of a gift of a $3,750 amethyst-and-diamond ring from Duplessis (paid for, of course, by the taxpayers), wrote to the Premier to thank him for his public intervention on the occasion of the 'Trudeau scandal.' Leger went on to express his hope that attitudes such as Trudeau's 'will be exterminated forever from our social milieu' and implored Duplessis 'to put the secular arm at the service of Christian morality, the sole efficient rampart against communism and the pernicious endeavours of Satan.'38 Among others who were similarly smeared were Gerard Filion of Le Devoir and Louis Hebert (later a senator), as well as lesser-known figures. In the small and relatively insular world of Quebec in this era, such charges, emanating from the powerful centres of church and state, could be quite devastating to a person's reputation and career. Trudeau was financially and intellectually independent enough to shrug off such attacks. Others were more vulnerable. Trudeau was a favourite target of Robert Rumilly, a historian and intellectual apologist for Duplessis who became a kind of one-man Committee on Un-Quebecois Activities in the 1950s. Rumilly was an immigrant to Quebec from Europe, where he had been a member of a fascist group before the war. A prolific historian who wrote for a large number of publications, Rumilly advanced conservative Catholic and nationalist views that were unabashedly anti-Semitic on occasion. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he launched a timely anti-Communist crusade.39 Rumilly's working premise in all that he wrote was that, as Communism was the enemy of Christian civilization, it was his Christian duty to expose and repress Communist ideas. In the course of his crusade he had no scruples about making McCarthyite allegations about anyone to his left (which accounted for most of the political terrain), and any number of Quebec figures were smeared as subversives among them Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The government broadcasting network, RadioCanada, was denounced by Rumilly as a nest of Communist infiltration. With Quebec life at this time dominated by conservative Catholic nationalism, and with figures as respectable and well-connected as Robert Rumilly swinging the red-paint bucket with such abandon, it is not surprising that very little serious debate about the Cold War took place in Quebec society. There can be no mistaking the power of a conservatism that seemingly pervaded

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all levels of society. Middle-class writers and academics challenged the prevailing orthodoxies at their peril, but so did people from humbler walks of life. Gerard Fortin was a working-class French Canadian who had become a Communist organizer. In the early 1950s he undertook the arduous task of organizing a Union de Bucherons (Bushworkers' Union) in the backwoods of Quebec. Against all odds - and assisted only by Pat Walsh, who later claimed to have been an undercover RCMP agent and went on to a career as a right-wing extremist - Fortin succeeded in laying the groundwork for the new union. Then the roof fell in: At first the bushworkers didn't believe that I could be a Communist. To them a Communist came from Moscow, never from St Charles de Bellechasse, and was more likely to be a sly, foreign-speaking chap than a ruddy, cheerful farmer's son from a Quebec village. But when the word began to sink in that we were a Communist-led organization, it certainly didn't help our cause. When the bushworkers got back to their rural villages after the winter in the forest they were exposed to the anti-Communist pressure brought by the priests; from that moment, except for a few dedicated or courageous ones, they simply forgot about the union. We received no further dues from them, and it soon became pretty clear that the UB would not long survive.

Smelling blood, Duplessis declared 'une lutte a morf (a fight to the death) against Communism in the logging camps. Opening a convent in a lumbering town, he declared that 'II faut les bouter dehors, en vous servant de la force si necessaire!' (We must kick them out, using force if necessary). Fortin was in fact the only Communist left in the bush, but company goons, taking the Premier at his word, came close to killing him.40 G U A R D I N G THE POLISH TREASURES

The most celebrated essay by Duplessis into anti-Communist demagoguery was the weird and wonderful tale of the hijacked Polish art treasures. This was the perfect vehicle for Duplessis: the issue had no substance, there was no price-tag attached, but the publicity value was incalculable. Even as sympathetic a biographer of Duplessis as Conrad Black characterizes the affair as 'bizarre.'41 The facts of the case are as follows. At the time of the fall of Poland to Hitler, the cultural and religious treasures of the royal castle of Cracow were spirited out of the country and ended up in Canada for safekeeping. The treasures included the crown jewels, a 'spectacular' coronation sword, letters of Chopin, and some gold bullion. The Canadian government lodged the treasures in Ottawa. At the end of the war Canada established diplomatic relations with the new (Communist) government in Poland. The former (anti-Communist) diplomatic representative of the so-called London Polish government-in-exile received asylum in Canada and took up a post at the Catholic University of Ottawa. Under mysterious circumstances, he arranged for

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the transfer of most of the Polish treasures to Quebec, although he no longer had any official authorization. The RCMP investigated and learned that the bulk of the treasures were now in the Hotel-Dieu convent in Quebec City. Accompanied by the Polish charge d'affaires, an RCMP inspector visited the convent in 1948 and politely questioned the Mother Superior. The Polish diplomat then wrote to the Mother Superior demanding that the treasures be handed over to the Polish government or he would ask the RCMP to remove them. The Mother Superior went to Duplessis for help. The premier was delighted. He had the perfect issue delivered to him on a platter. Under the supervision of the Premier's personal bodyguard, the Quebec provincial police transported the treasures to the vaults of the provincial museum. Duplessis exulted that the treasures were now in safe hands and would never be handed over to the 'contemptible Communist mountebanks,' invoked the property and civil-rights clause of the British North America (BNA) Act to legitimize provincial jurisdiction, and charged that Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent had used the Mounties as 'communist lackies' 'violating the cloister.' Duplessis even published a letter from the Mother Superior in which she spoke of the 'extreme embarrassment' of her order when the police had compelled entry.42 Federal police acting on behalf of Communists to violate a cloister of Quebec nuns! Could Duplessis have dreamed of a more delightful scenario? 'No centralizer in Ottawa, acting as the lackey of Moscow, will ever lay hands on them,' Duplessis fearlessly declared.43 Conrad Black shows how Duplessis used the treasures as an all-purpose, all-weather issue, especially when an embarrassed federal government was reluctantly pushed by its international obligations to take the side of the Polish Communist state in seeking recovery of what did, after all, belong to the recognized government of Poland: 'Whenever it was politically advantageous Duplessis, or events themselves, would stir the question up again and enable him to bellow defiantly that the treasures would never be surrendered to the communist imposters. Although the issue lost its novelty after 1948, the Polish treasures retained some partisan utility for Duplessis to the end of his life.'44 The federal Liberal government found itself in a no-win situation. Louis St Laurent was, of course, no less Catholic and anti-Communist than Duplessis. Yet as the minister of external affairs and, by 1949, the Prime Minister of Canada, he could hardly deny the legitimate claims of the government of Poland. But as the experience with the Mountie, the Communist, and the Mother Superior in 1948 had taught him, politics was entirely on Duplessis's side. The Liberals took refuge in the usual resort of Canadian politicians caught in a political dilemma: they invoked the BNA Act as an escape. Since the Quebec government had gained possession of the treasures, and since property and civil rights were provincial responsibilities, the matter was really one between the Poles and the provincial government. By the late 1950s, this excuse was beginning to wear rather thin. A Conservative government had been elected in Ottawa, and the Poles were threatening to take mat-

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ters to the United Nations and the International Court in the Hague. International embarrassment loomed as Canadian diplomats found it hard to explain to outsiders how the premier of a province could hold the national government to ransom over a matter of foreign relations. The external affairs minister, Sydney Smith, tried to explain matters to his somewhat bemused cabinet colleagues in 1958. Smith had gone to U.N. secretary general Dag Hammarskjold and laid out the Canadian constitutional situation: 'He had tried to explain to Mr. Hammarskjold what property and civil rights meant in Canada, but while the Secretary-General had been sympathetic, he had also said we would have difficulty in persuading others of the workings of this concept.'45 It turned out that a small part of the treasures were actually still held in the vault of the Bank of Montreal in Ottawa. Yet the bank was reluctant to give its holdings up to the Poles because it, too, feared the wrath of Duplessis.46 Although Smith recommended return of the Ottawa-based treasures to Poland, cabinet instead decided that the Polish request be turned down 'on legalistic grounds.' 47 The treasures were eventually returned, but only, as it were, over Maurice Duplessis's dead body. Le chef died in 1959. 'Several Catholic bishops and members of the clergy' were reported to the federal cabinet as suddenly finding themselves in favour of returning the treasures for Poland's 1,000th anniversary celebration.48 By 1960 the Liberals had taken over provincial office, the Quiet Revolution was getting under way, and the dark spell of Duplessis was suddenly lifted from Quebec society. As a by-product of these changes, the celebrated Polish treasures were finally returned to their rightful home. A TWENTY-YEAR PUBLICITY STUNT

Duplessis's anti-Communism went beyond the level of rhetoric and propaganda. He passed and enforced legislation that intruded directly into civil society in an arbitrary and illiberal manner. There was first of all the infamous 'Padlock Law' ('An Act to Protect the Province against Communistic Propaganda') that went back to his first term in office in 1937. This law stated that it was illegal to use or allow anyone to use any house in Quebec 'to propagate communism or bolshevism by any means whatsoever.' The attorney general might close ('padlock') such a house for up to a year as a penalty. The same act declared it 'unlawful to print, to publish, in any manner whatsoever or to distribute in the province any newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, circular, document or writing whatsoever propagating or tending to propagate communism or bolshevism.' Offenders were subject to imprisonment for three to twelve months. Moreover, any such publication or writing could be seized by any police officer and destroyed. There was no definition of communism or Bolshevism, or of the criteria that could be used to detect them. Such a provincial intrusion into criminal law (a federal responsibility under the BNA Act) might seem of dubious constitutionality, but the province defended the law by analogy to a 1920s anti-prostitution

302 The Cold War in Canadian Society statute against 'disorderly houses.' It was to take twenty years for the constitution to catch up with the padlock. In the first six months of operation, 124 raids under the Padlock Law netted 532 'communistic' books and 7,000 copies of 'communistic' newspapers.49 While there was some unfavourable comment in the press outside Quebec, within the province itself the mainstream media, whether French or English, steered clear of any criticism. Under its power of disallowance, the federal government could have quickly killed this legislation, but under severe pressure from its supporters in Quebec it chose not to do so. Interestingly, at the very same cabinet meeting where it was decided to avoid confronting Quebec it was also decided in principle to disallow the Alberta Press Act, passed by the Social Credit government of that province, an act that also (although less intrusively) intervened in freedom of expression and of the press. Mackenzie King was troubled in his conscience and thought the decision on Quebec lent little credit to Liberalism. Characteristically, he also supported it. Quebec was too important to the Liberal party to risk antagonizing.50 A legal challenge to the law was mounted, but got nowhere in the Quebec courts.51 Then the war intervened. One of the Communists rounded up and interned under the Defence of Canada Regulations discovered that among the 'charges' the federal government had against him was his participation in the 1939 court challenge to the law.52 After the Quebec Liberals won the 1939 provincial election, the Padlock Law fell into disuse (although the Liberals never dared to repeal it). With Duplessis back in power at the end of the war and the Cold War gaining momentum, it was inevitable that the Padlock Law would be dusted off and employed again. In early 1948 the provincial police swooped down on the offices of the Communist paper Combat and the adjoining offices of the French-language section of the Labour Progressive party. Files were seized, Combat was banned, and the premises, including a small printing plant, were padlocked. This was the signal for a series of raids under the Padlock Law that eventually targeted children's night classes and a Jewish cultural centre. Duplessis had carefully prepared the ground before reactivating the Padlock Law. Not only the church had been consulted in advance, but also the Catholic union leaders. Since the Catholic unions were already intent upon chasing the few existing Communists out of the labour movement, they gave tacit approval to Duplessis. Following the Combat raid, the American consul in Montreal reported back to Washington that the raid had raised virtually no adverse comment. The consul cited the gathering storms of the Cold War as reason for the very different response to the use of this law in 1948 from that of a decade earlier, and noted as well the fear of the opposition that any criticism would land them in the Communist camp in the eyes of the public. The consul also laconically suggested that for Duplessis the entire matter was part of the run-up to the coming provincial election.53 Provincial and municipal Red squads were mobilized to seize offending literature, padlock premises, and make arrests. These squads were unusually well-staffed and

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financed and amassed considerable information in the course of their operations.54 In effect they were mini-versions of the RCMP Security Service, an organization with which they actively cooperated.55 The head of the Quebec Provincial Police Red squad, Paul Benoit, became almost as well known hunting Reds in Quebec as J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI had become to Americans. Like the FBI, the Red squads had a sharp eye for headline-grabbing publicity. To take just one incident, in 1951 the Montreal Red squad swooped down and arrested nine members of the National Federation of Democratic Youth (a Communist front) who were standing in front of the Montreal Forum before a Saturday night National Hockey League game. Their crime? They were, Red squad second-in-command Lieutenant John Boyzcum eagerly told the press, actually attempting to sell their newspaper, Champion, which prominently featured a picture on the front page of Quebec hockey idol Maurice ('the Rocket') Richard! A scandalized Boyzcum declared that this 'cheap form of trickery' had actually 'baited' some gullible Montreal Canadiens fans into buying this piece of Communistic propaganda. Anxious hockey fans were assured that Richard had had nothing to do with the Communists and was 'plenty furious': 'it shows that the Communists will think of anything to fool the public into supporting their activities, whether intentionally or not.'56 Apart from the usual suspects (other Communist-front organizations) no one seems to have protested this attack on the freedom of the press. Although important sections of Quebec society were either silent or approving, such flagrantly authoritarian behaviour could not continue without attracting criticism. Quebec was becoming a scandal among Western states for its contempt for basic civil liberties.57 The Quebec press, both French- and English-speaking, remained largely quiescent, but opinion in English Canada, even among normally conservative sections of the press, did become aroused. The Globe and Mail referred to the law as 'possibly the most vicious ever passed by a community within the British Commonwealth, with the exception of the cruel segregation laws enacted in South Africa.' Saturday Night declared that for the two decades of its history, the Padlock Law had 'set aside the traditional rights of free citizens.'58 A court challenge to the constitutionality of the statute was imperative. An organization had been formed in Quebec under the title of the 'Trust Fund to Contest the Padlock Law,' with a number of respectable Quebec figures - lawyers, ministers, physicians, and even a member of the Quebec legislative assembly - on the masthead. An appeal went out to raise money to fund a legal challenge. When the offices of some Quebec unions received this appeal, they wrote to the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) in Ottawa enquiring about the group's bona fides. One such enquiry elicited a gruff response from TLC leader Claude Jodoin: 'In the past I have always considered this so-called organization a front for subversive organizations. On the other hand, I am surprised to see certain names listed as trustees ...' The TLC withheld its approval of the appeal.59 With or without the active support of the labour movement, a challenge was

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launched that ultimately proved successful. A Communist, John Switzman, whose apartment was padlocked, was sued by his landlady. Switzman claimed in his defence that the Padlock Law was unconstitutional. The case of Switzman v. Elbling and the Attorney General of Quebec went to the Quebec Court of Queen's Bench, where the law was upheld as within the power of the provincial legislature. In 1956 the case finally reached the highest court of the land, where famed McGill law professor, socialist, and poet Frank Scott argued the case against the law. In a landmark decision early in 1957 the Supreme Court ruled the Padlock Law ultra vires. Mr Justice Rand issued a particularly striking judgment, declaring that the aim of the legislation was60 'to prevent what is considered a poisoning of men's minds, to shield the individual from exposure to dangerous ideas, to protect him, in short, from his own thinking propensities ... It is to curtail or proscribe those freedoms which the majority so far consider to be the condition of social cohesion and its ultimate stabilizing force ... Liberty in this is little less vital to man's mind and spirit than breathing is to his physical existence. As such an inherence in the individual it is embodied in his status of citizenship.' A lone dissent was registered by Mr Justice Taschereau, who argued that freedom of speech and of the press should not protect individuals who wished to spread 'les doctrines malsaines' (unhealthy doctrines) or ideas destructive of the social order or of established authority. The decision was by no means a clear victory for civil liberties: many of the justices simply indicated that such legislation was beyond the constitutional powers of Quebec, but left open the possibility that the same thing might have been done constitutionally by the federal government within its sphere of criminal law. But by whatever reasoning, the Padlock Law had been nullified. One might have thought that Duplessis would have been furious at having an Ottawa court overturn a law so closely connected with his name. This would, however, discount the Premier's cynicism. As Conrad Black comments: 'Duplessis grumbled for a while about appeals to the Privy Council, but he was not particularly concerned at the judgment. It had been passed initially as a publicity stunt, had continued in that role, after the war, and now had even greater value as such. The Supreme Court judgment ... confirmed Duplessis in his autonomist position and lent credibility to his claim that Ottawa was meddling ignorantly and recklessly in Quebec's affairs.'61 Maurice Duplessis's twenty-year publicity stunt was a dark page in the history of Canadian civil liberties. The 1957 judgment turned that page. 'A COLD WINTER FOR THE REDS'

Duplessis always maintained that the Padlock Law was designed to target only Communists, and thereby gained at least silent assent to its operations from important sections of Quebec society, especially from many trade unionists. This was Duplessis's chosen mask: the aggressive defender of French Canada against outside

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threats. This mask slipped in some other areas of provincial jurisdiction, especially labour relations and labour legislation.62 Labour relations were an Achilles' heel of the Union Nationale regime. Although Duplessis always commanded considerable working-class voting support, his role as the defender of capital in the province brought him into confrontation from time to time with the unions. Whenever major trouble was brewing in the shape of strikes, Duplessis did not hesitate to employ his provincial police as active, and sometimes brutal, agents on behalf of management. The Asbestos Strike of 1949 was a celebrated event in the evolution of modern Quebec.63 But Duplessis did not limit his anti-labour activities to police interventions. The Commission des Relations Ouvrieres (CRO) or labour-relations board was the heart of the problem. It was seen by labour as irremediably biased towards management in its operations. Then in early 1949 the Union Nationale introduced a major overhaul of the province's labour legislation. The changes burst upon the labour movement with shock waves that went far beyond the unions themselves. Among many changes were clauses declaring that no one could be a union official 'if he is a member of a Communist or Marxist organization, or movement, or of a party recognized as such, whatever be its title or name,' if he supported or cooperated with such a group, if he were 'commonly known as a follower, preacher, or propagandist of the Communist or Marxist doctrine,' or if he 'approves of or advocates the subversion or change of established order, of government or of any governmental institution by means of force, violence, terrorism, sabotage, or other illegal or unconstitutional means.' This would give the attorney general of the province discretionary powers of breathtaking scope, especially in light of the recklessness with which Duplessis and his associates hurled accusations of Communism. But to the unions, the real kicker lay in a further clause empowering the province to decertify any union 'which has among its officers or representatives the persons described above,' or 'which is affiliated with an association which counts among its officials or representatives one or more such persons, or which is affiliated with a syndical organization which is commonly known to be under the influence or direction of the communist or marxist doctrine.' Bill 5, as it was known, was a somewhat broader version of the Taft-Hartley Act64 that had been passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in the United States. Surprisingly, Taft-Hartley did not translate easily into French. Bill 5 met perhaps the strongest resistance ever encountered by any Union Nationale legislation. There was widespread distaste among unionists for many of its provisions. The anti-Communist sections, despite the unpopularity of Communism, raised particular concerns. The legislation was not only grossly discretionary in its definitions (or lack thereof)* but the decertification clauses were clearly aimed at undermining the international unions, given the presence in 1949 of individuals in these organizations answering to Duplessis's broad-brush definition. 65 The CCF feared that its unionist members could fall under this definition (Duplessis liked to call the CCF the 'vestibule' of

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Communism). The Catholic unions, no friends of either Communists or international unions, sensed a threat to the very autonomy of the labour movement and joined with the two international federations in denouncing the bill. This solid front was given further impetus by the strong criticism that surprisingly emanated from the Catholic church. The latter found much to criticize in the bill's shrunken concept of social justice, even if the anti-Communist provisions did not especially interest it. It was widely recognized that Duplessis had blundered badly. Even the Financial Post's strongly anti-Communist labour reporter concluded that, like the Republicans with Taft-Hartley, the Union Nationale had gone 'too far.' Indeed, he reported, 'In one stroke, Duplessis appeared to have accomplished something labour itself hadn't been able to do: weld all sections of [the] Quebec labour movement into a single solid bloc ...'66 In the face of this kind of reaction, the government backed down and withdrew the offending bill.67 Duplessis grumbled that his government could have passed the bill if it had wanted. Four years later he introduced bills 19 and 20, which recovered much of the ground of the failed earlier legislation, including the anti-Communist provisions. These bills were both made retroactive to 1944 (when Duplessis had returned to office after a brief period in opposition), thus allowing him to strike back at union enemies he had made over a decade. In the political atmosphere of 1953-4, opposition was more difficult than earlier. Duplessis had won two more crushing electoral victories, and a series of defeats had been visited upon the labour movement. This time the united front of unionists, Catholic and international, backed by the church, was not forthcoming. The Quebec section of the TLC under the direction of the fiercely anti-Communist Claude Jodoin, president of the Montreal Trades and Labour Council (later president of the Canadian Labour Congress), refused to join the other unions in a united front. Indeed, the Quebec TLC unions actively voiced support for the two bills and pressed Duplessis to grant more discretion to the attorney general, which he, as attorney general, was happy to do.68 The bills passed into law. As if to show that anti-Communism was more pretence than substance, the CRO, wielding its new retroactive powers, promptly decertified the Catholic Teachers Alliance of Montreal for an illegal strike it had called five years earlier, an action that earlier had failed in the Supreme Court of Canada. The premier also bluntly refused to allow representatives of the union federations who had opposed his bills to serve on the CRO, although the TLC had its (very conservative) representative in place.69 The Financial Post's Peter Newman declaimed that 'in Quebec, it was beginning to look like a cold winter for the Reds.'70 Yet having demonstrated who was boss, Duplessis did not in practice use the anti-Communist clauses in a particularly extensive or aggressive manner. One attempt, launched by a cartel of employers, to decertify a local of the TLC-AFL affiliated plumbers union unexpectedly failed before the CRO.71 This brought the efficacy of the legal instrument into some doubt. But the issue was not much tested in fact. One target of the Premier's enmity had been locals

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of the Communist-led United Electrical Workers (UE). Prior to Bill 19, a number of these had been decertified, but the UE's habit of backing off from legal confrontations had the effect of avoiding a precedent-setting test. After one such retreat, Claude Jodoin had exulted: 'It's too bad the Commies started to run so fast ... the fight had just started'.72 With the passage of Bill 19, the complete decertification of all UE locals could be completed.73 In some other unions, identifiable Communist officials quietly stepped down to avoid decertification proceedings. For instance, one old Quebec Communist, Robert Haddow, resigned as president of the Fur and Leather Workers. In any event, by 1954 there were not a lot of Communists in key positions in the Quebec labour movement to be driven out or to step aside. Many Communist organizers had long since been purged by the unions themselves, or suspect unions had been crushed or severely reduced in influence. 74 Intensive witch-hunts into particular unions proved largely unnecessary. Of course, if left-wing unionists tempted fate by becoming too active for Duplessis's liking, the powers of the province could always be launched against them.

'JOE M C C A R T H Y OR C H A R L I E M C C A R T H Y ? ' A nagging question concerns Duplessis's credentials as an anti-Communist crusader. Notwithstanding his extravagant anti-Communist rhetoric and the political capital he made from it, was he sincere in his anti-Communism, or was it merely a cynical vote-getting device? Duplessis could sometimes shock even his close associates with private revelations of callousness and cynicism concerning matters that he appeared publicly to care greatly about.75 Did he really believe that the Communists posed a grave threat to Quebec society, that they might blow up bridges and city halls and threaten the cloisters of nuns? No doubt he had every reason to detest the ideas of Communism that were, after all, antithetical to his own conservative authoritarian nationalism. Yet whatever else Duplessis was, he was not a stupid man. His depictions of the magnitude of the Communist 'threat' were likely exaggerated in a deliberate and cynical fashion. One doubts that he really believed the Liberals were secret Reds bent on enslaving Quebec society. He himself could not have been so foolish and at the same time so politically astute. There were, however, many who were so foolish as to believe such nonsense. Duplessis was clever and unscrupulous enough to take advantage of their credulity. One piece of evidence to suggest that cynicism played as strong a role as ideology in Duplessis's public anti-Communism came to light during the research for this book. The Quebec premier had been quick to jump on the witch-hunting bandwagon against the National Film Board in the late 1940s. Duplessis and his friends blasted the board as a culturally alien and subversive incursion into Quebec. L'Action catholique, a paper always very close to Duplessis, warned in 1947 against the use

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by Quebec schools of educational films produced by the NFB, an organization 'influence par un noyautage communiste' (influenced by Communist infiltration). 76 Another Quebec journal, L'Evenement, on the same day repeated the Communist infiltration charges. The francophone secretary of the NFB fell under McCarthyite attack from Quebec around this same time; he was later dropped from the board after its Red purge.77 By 1950 Duplessis had 'banned' NFB films from the province. A provincial film-distribution agency would no longer handle NFB films and moreover refused to respond to requests to return NFB films already in the province. Duplessis personally issued orders that NFB films could not be shot on any sites controlled by his government. Montreal-Matin approvingly reported Watson Kirkconnell's denunciation of the NFB's 'constant Communist propaganda' to the Rotary Club of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, and judged Duplessis's ban an act of 'saine prudence.'78 The minister responsible for the NFB, Robert Winters, seemed curiously serene about these developments. He assured the prime minister that the Duplessis ban would be lifted in 'due course.'79 Indeed it was, and Winters knew more about the shallowness of Duplessis's anti-Communist commitment than he was letting on. It was at this very moment that the government was considering the announcement of plans to construct a new NFB headquarters. The decision to build had been made; the only question remaining was the location. St Laurent spoke to Duplessis on 29 September 1950. The following day it was officially announced that the new NFB headquarters would be built in Montreal. When the cabinet was asked to approve the Montreal site, no reference to Duplessis and his government was made.80 Yet within days, Duplessis's cold war against the NFB was officially called off, the ban was lifted, and the films were returned.81 No more was heard of the subversive threat of the NFB to Quebec life. One final irony: the architect of the new NFB building was Hazen Sise, scion of a prominent Canadian business family who had been educated at Royal Military College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sise had also been a close associate of Dr Norman Bethune during the Spanish Civil War, had been publicly accused by ex-Communist witness Elizabeth Bentley of having been a Soviet agent in Washington during the war, and had been confidentially identified by the U.S. consul in Montreal as a secret member of the Communist party who had been investigated during the Gouzenko spy affair.82 Duplessis, always so vigilant about Communist threats, breathed not a word of criticism of the Red architect at work in Quebec's leading metropolis. Either he was ignorant about Sise's alleged associations, which is highly doubtful, or his anti-Communism was placated by the promise of the new building and jobs that would come in its wake. This may be a fitting note on which to end this chapter on Quebec's Cold War against Communism. There were people hurt in this witch-hunt, and there was also a great deal of silliness. In the end, there was no real substance because there was no real enemy. Andre Laurendeau, the respected editor of Le Devoir (itself a target of

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Duplessis's smears), said it best when he wondered if Duplessis were imitating Joe McCarthy or Charlie McCarthy.83 Laurendeau dubbed Duplessis's strategy 'Operation Panic,' and suggested that it was based on a deep-seated/ear that ran through Quebec society. Duplessis could hurl charges that were filled with errors, yet find widespread belief in a population that at base lacked confidence in its own values. Heresy had to be rooted out, no matter how imaginary or insignificant. Thus, conformists applied the charge of Communism 'to men who did not merit it, imagined plots, conspiracies, and infiltrations, and multiplied their denunciations, condemnations, and maledictions, finally launching a crusade against the infamous person often an individual who was a good family man and church warden. It was in this fashion that we procured momentary peace of soul, with a minimum of social and intellectual activity, and the death of the imagined culprit. Operation panic became operation scapegoat. '84 With the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the threat of imagined heresies lifted and was replaced by a new secular confidence. But while this era of Quebec's 'dark ages' lasted, it gave off echoes that went far beyond the boundaries of Quebec itself. Placating the and-Communist sentiments of Catholic French Canada was high on Ottawa's domestic agenda during the formative years of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As expressed through the government of Quebec, the huge Quebec caucus of the ruling Liberal party in Parliament, or the offices of the Roman Catholic church, the message was clear: no compromise and no trafficking with the Communist Antichrist. This was a central reality in Canada in this era, a heavy anchor always dragging the ship of state to the right.

14

Labour's Cold War (I): Communists and Unions, 1945-1949

' T H E R E ' S NO H A M M E R AND SICKLE ON A DOLLAR BILL'

Militant unionism and Communism were two sides of a single coin for many of the best union organizers in the United States and Canada, especially from the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917 until the anti-Communist purges of the Cold War. During those three decades, Communist organizers were instrumental in the creation of powerful and lasting trade unions of miners, loggers, auto workers, fur and leather workers, fishermen, electrical workers, textile workers, chemical workers, and others. Through these unions, the workers won a greater share of the wealth they helped to produce. Through these workers, the Communists hoped to achieve an even more ambitious goal: the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a socialist state based on the Soviet model. But the revolution remained a glimmer on the horizon for organizers engrossed in the daily grind of organizing and running a union. Their preoccupation with administration was a source of complaint for Communist-party officials who felt that the union militants were neglecting their duties as Communists - to recruit workers into the party. But defending unions against hostile employers, rival unions, industrial spies, scab labour, goon squads hired to break picket lines, and anti-Communist Red squads of provincial and municipal police were priorities for the organizers. The sheer adversity of the job attracted idealistic young Communist organizers, some of them gifted tacticians and charismatic leaders, and they worked in the relief camps, in the bush, and in the mines to organize many of the first industrial unions in Canada. Perhaps these Communists ultimately disappointed the party leaders, but they created unions where others had not dared to, and they earned the hatred - and the respect - of employers and of the more conservative union leaders whose power they challenged. Even union members who voted Liberal in federal elections recognized these achievements and elected and maintained Communists in many of the top positions in the unions until the purges drove them out.

Labour's Cold War (I) 311 Anti-Communists who ignored this history often could not fathom this loyalty. How could they trust such dangerous subversives? An electrical worker, not a Communist himself, once answered the question by pulling a dollar bill out of his pocket. He held it up to the light, examined it with elaborate approval, and said, 'There's no hammer and sickle on it.' Organizing unions was a dangerous occupation, especially in the 1930s when employers and governments fought the spread of the unions with a vengeance. The Second World War brought a period of relative peace as new labour laws regulated strikes and made it easier for workers to form unions and negotiate contracts. After the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, Communists became leading advocates of no-strike pledges and stepped-up production in war industries. As the war ended, Communist leader Tim Buck made a plea for an extended alliance between Liberals and Communists to rebuild a war-torn world. But within months Buck's dream evaporated in the hostile atmosphere of the new Cold War. Cold War anti-Communism combined readily with anti-unionism to produce a new kind of threat to the unions. The Republican-dominated U.S. Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which banned Communists from holding union office and at the same time limited the right of unions to organize and strike. All unions were required to file affidavits certifying that their officers were not Communists. Unions that failed to comply were denied the protection of the federal labour board; this meant that the board would turn a blind eye to unfair labour practices by employers and raids by rival unions. Conservative union leaders used the law to purge the radicals in their local districts. Left-wing unions that tried to defend their right to elect Communists to union office found themselves purged en masse from the trade-union congresses in both the United States and Canada. Once purged, the unions were frequently subjected to devastating raids by new anti-Communist unions chartered and supported by the congresses. One of the strongest weapons used against Communists in Canada was Taft-Hartley, an American law. International unions based in the United States could be required to certify that the leaders of all their union locals, Canadian branches included, were 'non-Communist.' While the Canadian Parliament refrained from passing Taft-Hartley-type laws against Communist unionists, the government endorsed purges carried out by the unions themselves. The purges were also encouraged by employers and rival unions, and especially by CCFers in the union movement who were anxious to demonstrate their freedom from any Red taint. The combination offerees - local and national governments, employers, and rival unions - put an end to the Communists' dream of becoming the party of labour in both countries. This was a disaster for the party; an organized, class-conscious, and militant union movement was supposed to be the first and most essential stage in the evolution of a classless, Communist society. Working men and women, politicized by the economic conditions that oppressed them, educated by trade-union radicals, and unified by class interests, were ultimately supposed to realize their political

312 The Cold War in Canadian Society goals in the Communist party. Without a vital role to play in the unions, the Communists were little more than a sect. The purges, once begun, were extensive. The best-known Communist leaders were the first purged, followed in sequence by those who advocated Communism, or voted for Communists, or participated in groups said to be supportive of Communism, and finally by some who did little more than show interest in issues supported by Communists. The purges were carried out at every level of the union movement: from the international congresses to the local union halls, from aircraft plants in Montreal to the logging towns of Vancouver Island. By the early 1950s, the Communists and their supporters had all but vanished from the union congresses, banished to independent unions and a few scattered locals. The Communists were not the only casualties of the purges, which continued for nearly ten years. The Cold War in the unions destroyed many of the nationalist ambitions that had been growing in the Canadian congresses as well. Under the leadership of presidents Pat Conroy of the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) and Percy Bengough of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC), Canadian workers had been agitating for more authority over trade-union affairs in Canada and a greater share of the dues paid by Canadian members to international unions. These demands put the CCL on a collision course with its American parent, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and between the TLC and its parent, the American Federation of Labour (AFL). The congresses had argued before the war, but now the demands were louder and stronger. The Canadian labour movement had nearly doubled in size during the war, a new generation of leaders occupied leading positions in the congress, and the labour movement, like many other Canadian political institutions, was manifesting a stronger sense of national identity. New labour legislation made organizing easier, and many of the new union locals had been organized with help from the international labour congresses. These new unions gave the Canadians a fresh infusion of cash, which paid for more organizers, who sought out workers in areas neglected by the internationals. The international unions, meanwhile, wanted the Canadian congress to turn over any new locals to established international unions. The officers of the international unions used the anti-Communist purges - and this was often their primary goal - to purge many of the nationalist leaders in the Canadian labour movement and to maintain control of the locals, the membership, and the flow of union dues. The Canadian purges were thus motivated by an alliance of anti-Communist and anti-nationalist interests. This interwoven history of the anti-Communist purges and the attack on the national union movement, tacitly supported by the Liberal government, is the subject of this chapter. Two distinct campaigns were carried out, one in the CCL-CIO and one in the TLC-AFL, and it was only after the Communists and the nationalists were purged that the two congresses, like their parents, merged in a common congress, the Canadian Labour Congress, in 1956. The purging of the CCL-CIO is the subject of Irving Abella's Nationalism,

Labour's Cold War (I) 313 Communism and Canadian Labour. This chapter examines parallel events in the Trades and Labour Congress.1 CANADIAN UNIONS, AMERICAN HEADQUARTERS

The historical ties between the American and Canadian labour movements guaranteed that the struggles, achievements, and divisions that affected unions in the United States would also affect those in Canada. Until fairly recently, the majority of Canadian workers belonged to international unions and paid their dues to head offices in the United States. The relationship was a source of strength, especially in the beginning, when Canadian workers drew on the resources and the experience of the American movement to create unions in Canada. Few Canadian workers had qualms about this; nationalism, in the early days, was a weak force. Up until the 1930s, the American Federation of Labour was the dominant labour congress in North America, along with its Canadian affiliate, the TLC. The AFL was originally organized along the lines of the craft guilds. In a steel industry, for example, the small percentage of craftsmen who ran the machines and did the skilled work were unionized, while the mass of unskilled workers who stoked the furnaces and hauled the steel were not. By the 1930s this pattern had changed, as union organizers, many of them Communists, created new industry-wide unions open to skilled and unskilled alike. Feuds erupted between the new industrial unions and the old craft unions. The tensions within the AFL finally erupted in the wholesale expulsion of the industrial unions, which formed their own Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1936. When the CIO broke away from the AFL, most of the Communists in the American labour movement went with it. The Communists then played a key role in the CIO, organizing industrial unions among the rubber workers, auto workers, electrical workers, fur and leather workers, miners, loggers, sawmill workers, and others. It was in this way - through organizing and not through 'infiltration,' as their enemies would later claim - that the Communists came to occupy prominent positions in these unions at the end of the Second World War. When the AFL expelled the industrial unions, it expected all its local chapters and affiliates to do the same, and the Canadian branch, the TLC, was no exception. The AFL's filing system, which placed Canada in between California and Colorado, suggests the level of sovereignty allowed. Percy Bengough, president of the TLC, had greater ambitions. The leaders of the Canadian congress saw no advantage in splitting the relatively small Canadian membership into competing camps; for two years they resisted the increasingly adamant demands from AFL president William Green to throw out the industrial unions. Finally, in November 1938, Green gave the Canadians an ultimatum: if the CIO unions were not expelled, every AFL union in Canada would be ordered to walk out of the TLC, thereby splitting the congress by default. The Canadians had no choice; the industrial unions were duly expelled and

314 The Cold War in Canadian Society formed their own congress, the Canadian Congress of Labour, affiliated with the CIO. There was also a third, smaller, Canadian labour congress that played a role in the Cold War purges. In Quebec, under the influence of the church, the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (CCCL) was founded in 1921 as a kind of bulwark against all foreign unions, whether conservative or Communist. As described in an earlier chapter, Quebec was the only province to enact a Taft-Hartley-style law.2 Across Canada, more than two-thirds of all union members belonged to international unions in the late 1940s. The split between the AFL and the CIO was divisive and irritating to Bengough. Joint endeavours with CCL-CIO unions, for example, even joint sponsorship of marches and rallies, were forbidden. By the 1940s the leaders of both Canadian congresses were demanding more reasonable treatment. Presidents Conroy and Bengough, supported by moderate and left-wing union leaders, wanted the undisputed authority to organize workers, charter unions, collect dues, hire staff, and settle disputes between the unions without interference from the AFL and the CIO. The constant drain of dues collected by the individual international unions was one of the most galling issues. The dues were supposed to repay the international head office for staff and organizing expenses in Canada, with a fraction funnelled back to the Canadian congress to pay for its services. But each year most international unions made a substantial profit by spending less on their Canadian members than they collected. By pinching the money supply, the internationals also kept the Canadian congresses on a tight budget that hampered their organizing efforts. This penny-pinching made a small number of independent national unions a valuable asset for the TLC. The arithmetic was simple: a lumberjack in northern Ontario who belonged to an international union sent all his dues directly to the head office in the United States. The head office then forwarded a per-capita payment of sixteen cents per year to the TLC. However, a merchant seamen who belonged to the Canadian Seamen's Union, a national union that was chartered directly by the TLC, paid the congress two dollars a year, nearly thirteen times as much as the lumberjack. Thus the 7,000 members of the Canadian Seaman's Union brought the congress as much income as 91,000 members of international unions. In practice, the actual ratio was closer to twenty to one, because the international unions also systematically underreported their Canadian membership. Starving the Canadian congresses was profitable, but it also helped to recruit moderates to the nationalist point of view.3 In 1945 the Canadian Seamen's Union (CSU) was the largest national union in the TLC, and even its existence was a kind of fluke. When the TLC had reluctantly expelled the industrial unions, it managed to hang onto several relatively small national unions, including the CSU. In the eyes of the AFL, however, the CSU was an illegitimate union. The AFL had granted sole jurisdiction over all shipworkers to the Seafarers' International Union (SIU). The SIU had done little to organize Canadian workers, but it jealously eyed the success of the CSU and initiated intrigues to

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take over the Canadian locals by fiat if not by force, with the help of the AFL. In this way the CSU, organized and led by Communists, became the focal point for a sustained conflict between the AFL and the TLC that only ended in 1949, with the destruction of the CSU and the collapse of the nationalist program in the TLC. The connection between these two failures is the focus of this discussion. Of all the purges in the TLC, only the campaign against the Communist-led Canadian Seamen's Union (CSU) has received close scrutiny, and that because of the gangster tactics used by Hal Banks, an American who led a rival union's attack on the CSU. The story of Hal Banks is a dramatic story of violent and bloody strikes and backroom deals, but many of the accounts of the strike have treated the CSU in isolation, apart from the simmering battle between the AFL and the upstart nationalist leaders of the TLC, and have missed the larger issue. Seen in a broader context, the purges were driven by conflict over the nationalism of the Canadian congress and its demands for greater autonomy from the American unions. 4 COMMUNISTS IN THE TLC

Even at the height of their influence in the unions, the Communists were a small minority. The total membership of the unions led by Communists (however broadly defined) numbered no more than 10 to 20 per cent of the union movement. Even these figures give an inflated idea of the Communist strength because only a tiny fraction of the members of Communist-led unions were themselves Communists. By 1945, Communist trade unionists were scattered throughout the Canadian labour movement. Many of the Communists were in national unions, but a few were among the Canadian locals of international unions. The presence of Communists and left-wingers sharply differentiated the Canadian district of the international unions from their U.S. head offices, which were staffed by conservatives. In unions such as the International Association of Machinists, the Lumber and Sawmill Workers, the Plumbers, the Textile Workers, and the Chemical Workers there were latent tensions between the left-wing Canadian organizers and the right-wingers who ran the unions. Conflicts were diminished by geography. Great distances separated most head offices and their Canadian locals. The Canadians, who rarely numbered more than 10 per cent of an international union, were usually far from the minds of union officials in Washington, Miami, or Cleveland. And unless a crisis developed, these officials had good reason to be circumspect about interfering with their Canadian offices: local organizers, Communists included, were usually popular with their local members. Attacking local leaders could cause the entire local to bolt to a rival union or form an independent national union of its own. Consequently, while some internationals zealously purged their Canadian locals, others were content to receive the dues and ignored the politics of their Canadian officers. Communist labour leaders, if few in number, were hard to ignore. They seemed to

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use every available platform to press the program of the party. Endless resolutions were debated at labour meetings. Some of the Communists were also effective orators who stirred up labour conventions with vitriolic attacks on conservative union leaders. The labour movement was, in a sense, their workers' parliament, and they behaved like an opposition party. In the labour movements, as nowhere else in Canadian life, the Communists were visible agitators, calling for radical changes in Canadian society and attracting the enmity of business leaders, conservative politicians, and union rivals. The Communists were safe in their 'parliament' as long as the coalition of moderate and nationalist interests that shielded them survived. In the TLC, the Communists were allied with the moderate administration of Percy Bengough, a liberal nationalist who defended the rights of union members to elect their own delegates and officers, and defended the rights of officers to belong to political parties, as long as their political work did not intrude excessively into union business. Bengough actively encouraged the participation of the Communists in his labour congress; he recognized them as able union leaders, and he used them as political allies in factional fights with the international unions and the right wing. During the early years of the Cold War, however, Bengough underwent a conversion from a defender of the rights of the Communists to a leader of the anti-Communist purges. His transformation is particularly interesting because it mirrored the change in Canadian society as a whole; like Bengough, Canadians at first seemed able to rise above the exaggerated fears of Communism that fuelled the purges in the United States. Later Bengough, like other Canadians, was persuaded that Communists were such a danger that some repression was justified. Percy Bengough was well suited to represent the moderate, liberal-democratic centre of the TLC during this period. By reputation he was an amiable man, sometimes fatherly in his relationship with young radical organizers like Kent Rowley, whose spirit and dedication he admired. Bengough was born in London, England, and came to Canada in 1905. On the west coast he worked as a miner, a logger, and then a machinist with the International Association of Machinists (IAMAFL). At the age of sixteen he was the secretary of the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, a local chapter of the TLC. At twenty-six he was a vice-president of the TLC. Twelve years later, in 1943, he was elected president. His work in British Columbia gave him experience in coalition politics because the B.C. unions included a higher-than-average proportion of militant Communist leaders. Bengough's ascent to the presidency of the TLC in 1943 was made possible by a wartime left-liberal alliance. At the same time as Bengough was elected, Pat Sullivan, the head of the CSU, became secretary-treasurer of the TLC, representing the left-wing caucus. Bengough rarely seemed to speak with the blunt hyperbole that was typical of trade unionists. His greatest loyalty was to 'the Movement'; he was a trade-union democrat who believed in an open, participatory style of government that enhanced

Labour's Cold War (I) 317 the authority of the union locals and kept the bureaucratic tendencies of the larger unions in check. Bengough was also a moderate nationalist who hoped to combine the power of a unified international movement with a degree of autonomy for the Canadian congress and the Canadian branches of the international unions. He maintained good working relations with the Liberal government in Ottawa, and was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1946. His greatest wrath was reserved for the Toronto 'Bay Street' employers and lawyers who attacked the union movement. He could be equally scathing in his criticism of the selfish activities of the big international unions when they engaged in membership raids on other unions, sometimes within the TLC. Bengough was usually a peacemaker who tried to keep the congress from engaging in blatantly partisan politics, but at the same lime he was not especially concerned if the union delegates were conservatives or Communists, so long as they were working for the best interests of the labour movement. That Communists were elected to union office out of proportion to their absolute numbers in the movement was of no concern to Bengough, so long as they were democratically elected. Consistent with these views, Bengough and the congress moderates usually avoided endorsing federal political parties and resisted the introduction of political issues at congress meetings. At the same time, Bengough maintained good relations with the federal Department of Labour, which included moderate nationalists, among them a deputy minister, who were sympathetic to Bengough, who could help him in labour disputes, and who could take his side with senior officials. The TLC, while left-liberal in practice, was officially apolitical and neutral. The radicals in the congress chafed at these limitations, and did what they could to politicize the conventions with resolutions taking positions on public housing, the Marshall Plan, German rearmament, employment, trade with China, and the price of bread. But even when such motions reached the floor, the votes were lopsided rejections of the radicals, unless the motion was tailored to attract moderates. The voting scheme used by the Trades and Labour Congress favoured the moderate centre. Each delegate had a single vote, and unions were allotted delegates to the annual convention at a ratio of approximately 1 delegate per 100 union members in each local. This formula allowed even the smallest locals to send at least one delegate. If all unions had sent the maximum number of delegates, attendance at the postwar conventions would have exceeded 4,000. In practice, however, many of the international unions had little interest in the conventions and sent token delegations to the annual sessions, and consequently they were chronically under-represented. The conservative influence that these large unions might have exercised was further eroded by some of their own locals, which sent moderate or left-wing delegates to the conventions. The militant unions, meanwhile, sent their full delegations, which gave them a disproportionately strong voice. The international unions had long opposed this system of delegate selection and voting and favoured instead a proxyvoting scheme, like the one they enjoyed at the AFL where a handful of vice-presi-

318 The Cold War in Canadian Society dents could cast enough votes among them to decide nearly every issue in the convention. The list of potential conflicts between the AFL and the TLC was long: the arbitrary power of the AFL, the selfish actions of some international unions, the growth of the national unions, the presence of Communists in the TLC, the presence of radical locals in conservative unions, and a voting scheme that favoured activist unions. Bengough tried to keep a lid on these problems by cultivating a left-moderate voting bloc that would support shared liberal-democratic values, and he was generally successful. He proved to be an able liberal politician in his own right, and his elevenyear tenure as the head of the TLC demonstrated his ability to locate and harness the broad centre of the trade-union movement. When Bengough eventually abandoned his defence of the rights of Communists and the value of dissent, this reflected a similar change in Canadian society. ON THE W A T E R F R O N T

The CSU needed all the support it could muster from Bengough and the TLC because the seamen had a dangerous rival in the Seafarers' International Union (SIU) and its president, Harry Lundeberg. Lundeberg was the tough leader of a notoriously violent union, and from the day that the SIU was formed he was determined to force Canadian seamen to abandon the CSU and join his San Francisco-based union. Confrontations between rival unions on the waterfront frequently turned into bloody battles between stick-wielding sailors. The brutality of the fights mirrored the working conditions on many of the freighters on the Great Lakes in the 1930s and 1940s where seamen worked long days, frequently on split shifts, for low wages and no security. Merchant seamen were often young, poorly educated, and transient. The owners of the steamship lines that employed them, including the Crown-owned Canadian National Steamships, fought against the introduction of any unions for as long as possible, and they resented the success of the Communist organizers of the CSU who managed to expand the union under the protection of the wartime labour code. Strikes, when they took place, tended to be quick and violent, in part because they were so difficult to enforce. A picket line was a poor defence against an employer willing to hire violent scab labourers or a rival union to run the ships. Confrontations were often decided in the space of a few minutes as the owners fought to get a strikebreaking crew through the dockside picket lines and onto the ship. Once the 'crew' was on board, the ship could sail and the strikers were all but defeated, unless they could convince sympathetic unionists at the next port to picket the ship when it arrived. The easiest way for Lundeberg to capture the Canadian membership was to have his SIU declared the sole legitimate union for seamen in Canada as well as in the United States. As the Canadians would never agree to this voluntarily, he sought help from the AFL. A motion was proposed at the 1944 AFL convention accusing

Labour's Cold War (I) 319 the CSU of aiding the CIO and the Communists. It was a bald proposition, transparently self-interested, and it passed easily. Bengough was unaware of the resolution until the AFL moved to enforce it the next year.5 The AFL ordered Bengough to expel the CSU from the Trades and Labour Congress in July 1945. The SIU was to be installed in its place. Bengough was livid, and he immediately wrote an angry memo to all the TLC affiliates explicitly telling them to disregard the AFL ultimatum. This is not a serious jurisdictional dispute,' Bengough told them. His rebuttal to President Green was lengthy and sarcastic. Was he expected to turn over the Seamen, the Fishermen and three other small maritime unions to the 'corporal's guard' of 300 SIU members who had a tiny beachhead in British Columbia? 'Members of unions cannot be just taken out of one union and put into another like cattle taken out of one stall and moved into the next,' Bengough wrote. He advised the SIU to be more realistic. The order was not enforced. The issue of Communism was not sufficiently inflammatory at a time when the Soviet Union was still an American ally.6 The CSU was a particularly sore point for the AFL. In the eyes of that organization, the Seamen represented all the worst tendencies of the autonomy-minded leadership of the TLC. The CSU was an independent, purely national, Communist-led, illegitimate collection of workers that ought to be turned over to the SIU, and Bengough's support for the CSU was entirely reprehensible. Everything about this union seemed to divide the labour movement into supporters and critics. As a national union, the CSU drew the anger of the international unions who were pressing the TLC to give up thousands of union members in locals directly chartered by the congress. The presence of Communists in the CSU galled both the anti-Communist officers of international unions and the domestic social democrats. The election of a Communist, Pat Sullivan, to the TLC executive was a further reminder that the left wing was able to muster a vote and press its agenda while the more conservative craft unions, representing well over half of the TLC membership, were stymied. The CSU, rapidly emerging as the focus of this dispute between the American and Canadian labour congresses, was spectacularly unsuited for the role. The union was about to enter into a series of crucial strikes on both the Great Lakes and the deepsea shipping fleets and was barely able to maintain communications with its own members. Seamen, like bush workers and hard-rock miners were an itinerant and highly disparate group of labourers. While a seaman on the Great Lakes might find his way to a CSU hiring hall every week or two, a fireman on a deep-sea freighter might have little contact with the union hall for months at a time. Communication was expensive and difficult once the sailors left port, and many of the sailors were young, tough, and independent; not the kind to attend frequent meetings. Many of the union staffers were former seamen, experienced in the rough union politics on the waterfront. The organizing drives to date had been difficult, and strikes, when they were called, were almost routinely violent, with armed clashes

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between scabs and strikers on the docks, on picket lines, in taverns, and in back alleys. In this environment, the union staff was, by turns, volatile, aggressive, defiant, and defensive. None of these qualities was well suited to diplomacy. Such moderation as there was in the union often came from outside, from the cautious advisers of the Communist party, from other left-wing unions, and from Bengough and the TLC. The CSU called a strike against the shipping companies on the Great Lakes early in 1946, during a hiatus between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. Charges by the companies that the union was dominated by Communists did not have much impact during this successful strike. The union's greatest gain, awarded by the Canadian Labour Relations Board, was an eight hour day. This was a tremendous improvement over the old system of split shifts and 84-hour weeks. The union also won job security, a 20 per cent pay increase, overtime, and paid holidays.7 Against a backdrop of the gathering clouds of the Cold War, a major purge of Communists in the Canadian labour movement began in the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL-CIO). The position of the Communists in the CCL was initially stronger than in the TLC, because the Communists led several of the largest industrial unions including the Canadian district of the International Woodworkers, the United Electrical Workers, the Mine-Mill and Smelter Workers, the Fur and Leather Workers, and sections of the Auto Workers. The prominence of these Communists and their efforts to keep the CCL from affiliating with the CCF were deeply resented by CCF loyalists in the unions. Disputes between CCF and Communist leaders carried over into CCL executive meetings, and were finally capped by the wholesale expulsion of Communist-led unions from the congress. The same campaign was carried out on a larger scale at the annual conventions of the CIO in the United States, culminating in the outright expulsion of ten Communist-led unions from the congress in 1949. The more conservative Trades and Labour Congress, meanwhile, was slow to act against the Communists in its unions. In this newly anti-Communist environment, the TLC, like the Liberals in Ottawa, tried to maintain an officially neutral stance, rejecting proposals from the most conservative elements that would place political restrictions on union membership. But the external pressures were building. The Marshall Plan was a major Cold War issue for trade unions in Europe and North America, and one that sharply divided left-wing from centrist and conservative unions. As described earlier in this book, the Marshall Plan became a kind of loyalty-test issue in Canada, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the labour movement. The protest against the transfer of income from wages to profits in the first two years of the Marshall Plan in Europe that might have been expected from the North American labour movement never materialized, largely because support for the plan was deemed a loyalty test by labour's anti-Communist leadership. There were other reasons: some American unions, the SIU, for example, profited from

Labour's Cold War (I) 321 requirements that 50 per cent of the Marshall Plan aid must be carried on American ships; moreover, the American unions were anxious to demonstrate their patriotism in order to avoid further attacks on their powers by a Republican Congress. Canadian unions had their own special reasons: guarantees of Canadian participation in Marshall dollars. By this time the geographical fault line of the Cold War dividing Europe was clearly defined. This was not, however, the only front; a second, invisible front was simultaneously identified. This was the division between 'loyalty' and 'subversion' within domestic institutions, including the labour movement. The unions were a major battlefield of the domestic Cold War. ' W E A R E H E R E T O O R G A N I Z E E V E R Y T H I N G THAT FLOATS I N CANADA'

The alliance between Bengough and the Left was strained by the rapid polarization caused by the Cold War. The first link to burst in the congress came three days after the announcement of the Marshall Plan, when TLC secretary-treasurer Pat Sullivan dramatically resigned from the CSU, and from the congress, and denounced the Communists. The resignation was a shock to Bengough; Sullivan was regarded as a hard-core party loyalist. He had started with the Seamen ten years before as a marine cook and steward in Montreal. Sullivan had been one of the original organizers of the union, and during the war he was considered such a radical that the government had interned him. His key position as the secretary-treasurer of the TLC made him a valuable member of the party's trade-union commission. Why had he turned away from his radical past? Neither Bengough, nor the newspapers, nor the American Embassy, which went into the affair in some detail, was able to decide just what had prompted the defection. One of Sullivan's own explanations was that he was inspired to defect from the party after watching a ceremony in Ottawa where immigrants were sworn in as new Canadians: 'As I sat and watched those people, so eager to become Canadians and to accept the freedom this new land of theirs offered them, and how proud they were to assume the obligations this citizenship laid upon them, I reflected that I had lived in this same land for over 20 years and had spent more than half of that time consciously and unconsciously trying to shackle people like them with the chains of communist slavery and sell them out to a totalitarian system. When I left the courthouse my mind was made up firmly that the break had to be immediately.8 Other explanations for Sullivan's behaviour were less generous. Percy Bengough took a sceptical view, which he passed on to an enquiring official from the American Embassy, that Sullivan had probably been paid off by the shipping companies. Sullivan's retreat to a newly purchased farm in Quebec gave the theory some credibility. Party members, on the other hand, blamed a drinking problem. There was no question that the Communists were deeply involved in the CSU,

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and this was generously documented by Pat Sullivan after his defection. In his account, he criticized the party for sending the union inexperienced organizers who had never been to sea and for spending union funds on party business and the defence of party supporters in the courts. But other than his revelation that CSU workers served as couriers between American and Canadian Communists while the party was outlawed during the early war years, there was little evidence of seditious activities or any actions that would distinguish the CSU from other militant unions. Sullivan's descriptions made it clear that the union was not so much infiltrated by the party as it was built by Communist organizers and run, at the top at least, by members of the party's trade-union commission. What was common knowledge in the trade-union movement was sensational news to a public newly alerted to the Communist menace. Sullivan's charges made headlines in papers across the country. Sullivan called on the officers of the CSU to break their ties to the Communists. His plea was not well received: the first time he ventured outside his Montreal hotel without a bodyguard he was attacked and beaten. Radicals and moderates alike denounced Sullivan, and the breakaway union that he founded made little progress during the summer of 1947. The seamen remained loyal to the CSU, which had proved itself in the successful strikes of the previous year. With the help of the labour code, additional certifications were won at several shipping companies.9 Tempers were hot as the companies, who were used to having undisputed control over the seamen, were forced to the table by the CSU with the tacit support of the Department of Labour. The shipowners were outraged at having to negotiate with the Communist leaders of the union, and they were anxious for Parliament to pass a law banning Communists from union office. Captain Scott Misener, the president of the Colonial and Sarnia Steamships Limited, defied the Department of Labour and refused even to negotiate with 'any group whose leaders are the tools of the evil disruptive ideologies of Moscow.' Misener and other shipowners fought the unions by repudiating signed contracts and withholding the information needed for organizing. The behaviour of the companies served to unite both Canadian labour congresses behind the CSU and spurred the government to initiate an enquiry. The enquiry, chaired by barrister Leonard Brockington, was sharply critical of the companies and rejected Misener's claim that the political affiliations of the CSU leaders were grounds for violating contracts.10 The annual convention of the TLC in the fall of 1947 put the year's events into perspective. The congress remained united behind the CSU, and the delegates approved a resolution sponsored by the left-wingers declaring that the political affiliations of the members were the members' own business. Alex Gordon, a leader of the United Fishermen, was elected to the executive, replacing Sullivan as the representative of the left-wing caucus. Gordon's election was not a sure bet, however, as he barely defeated right-winger Birt Showier by 278 votes to 260. The left-liberal coalition, if weaker, was still holding in the TLC.11

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323

'98 PER C E N T C O M M U N I S T S AND A B O U T 2 PER CENT FELLOW TRAVELLERS'

The 1948 shipping season opened with a stand-off. The shipping companies refused to deal with the CSU despite an order from the Labour Relations Board. This defiance of the labour code both challenged and embarrassed the government because the leader of the rebellion by the companies was the Crown-owned Canadian National Steamships. The CSU set up legal picket lines and TLC president Percy Bengough put the full weight of the labour congress behind the strikers. 'There has been a lot of talk,' Bengough told Toronto reporters, 'regarding trade unions that are irresponsible and subversive.' But as far he was concerned, it was the companies who were subverting the law 'under the guise of combatting Communism.' 12 The companies escalated the fight by inviting Pat Sullivan's new union to man the ships. The simmering dispute turned violent as the company crews tried to break through the picket lines. While the violence escalated and the companies remained in defiance of the labour code, government officials at the Department of Labour became strangely passive, and seemed to do little more than write inconclusive and dissembling memos. Observing this inaction, the Globe and Mail reminded the labour minister, Humphrey Mitchell, that the dispute had little to do with the political views of the union leaders; Mitchell's failure to enforce the law only assisted the Communists in their role as martyrs, and for this, the Globe wrote, the government was to blame: 'Nothing could be more subversive of sound democratic rule under the law than the situation which has now arisen and for which the Government is solely responsible.' The government was not entirely passive. At about the same time the Department of Immigration prevented left-wing officials from the CIO Mine-Mill union from entering Canada and closed the border to anyone judged to be intent on spreading subversive propaganda. The government later backed away from introducing a bill to ban the Communist party, but for the first time it did allow debate on a private member's bill to that effect, sponsored by independent MP Wilfrid LaCroix.13 When the strike on the Great Lakes escalated, the CSU called on the government to enforce the labour code. Labour Minister Mitchell evaded the request and shifted the focus from the company's violation of the law to the politics of the union's officers: 'I point out that the charges made by the Companies that the Canadian Seamen's Union is officered by Communists can by remedied, if true, by the Union itself and certainly action to clear up these charges would have public approval and would make the situation less difficult.' 14 What Mitchell was requesting was no less than voluntary compliance with an unwritten Taft-Hartley Act in Canada, whereby union leaders suspected of Communist beliefs could be forced to resign in order for their union to receive the protection of the law. It was a deal they would refuse at their peril. Meanwhile, Bengough's friends in the Department of Labour warned him that the

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companies might bring the Seafarers' International Union into the dispute. The deputy minister of labour, Arthur MacNamara, forwarded a letter from George Wilkinson, an officer of the Victoria Trades and Labour Council and an ally of the SIU on the west coast. Wilkinson wrote that he had been appealing to the SIU and 'off the record' to AFL president Green to open up an anti-Communist offensive in Canada. Bengough replied that the idea of importing the SIU was 'presumptuous and ridiculous' and told MacNamara that Canada needed a merchant marine that was free of interference from both the USSR and the United States.15 The government continued to stand idly by, doing nothing that could be seen as public support for a Communist union. Behind the scenes, the RCMP was carrying out a massive surveillance of the CSU as a subversive organization. 16 Inside the Department of Labour, a plan was proposed to break the impasse. If the Communists would not resign voluntarily, then Bengough should have them removed. Once that was done, the government could order the companies to negotiate. Then if the companies refused, government lawyers would support the union in court. The problem for Bengough was that he lacked the authority to remove the leaders of an affiliated union. The TLC was not yet prepared to invade the traditional rights of its member unions. 17 In August 1948, the Liberals held their leadership convention in Ottawa. The Seamen, smouldering at their failure to win any concessions from the shipowners, planned a march on the Liberal convention in an effort to pressure the government into action. Bengough got wind of the plan and was aghast. His strategy required good relations with the government and strong support from the mandarins in the Department of Labour. If the angry sailors wound up in a violent demonstration at the leadership convention, they would lose what little goodwill he had been able to maintain. Bengough managed to transform the protest against the government into a support rally for the CSU, and he called on other unions to join in. The rally mushroomed in size, as hundreds of supporters turned up, including a large delegation of United Electrical Workers, and staged a rally with loudspeakers and music. Bengough also tried to arrange for a delegation of union leaders to meet with the federal cabinet, but a group of senior officers of the most conservative international unions boycotted the session. The leader of this right-wing caucus was Frank Hall, Canadian vice-president for the International Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks. Hall denounced the rally as made up of '98 per cent Communists and about 2 per cent fellow travellers.'18 The international vice-presidents formed what they called an 'integrity committee' to fight Bengough, the nationalists, and the CSU. Hall and AFL organizer Russel Harvey coordinated a secret meeting among the shipowners, Pat Sullivan, and the SIU, now represented by Hal Banks. Sullivan's role in the discussion was minimal. Despite the support from the companies, his new union failed to win more than three contracts, and it lacked an affiliation with any labour congress. Sullivan's union was nothing more than a stalking horse for the SIU. Hall announced that Sul-

Labour's Cold War (I) 325 livan was jettisoned and that the SIU would take over his union with the support of the owners. This fiat was a flagrant violation of the TLC's support for the CSU and a declaration of war on the congress executive. In public, Hall justified undermining the Canadian union as a necessary anti-Communist measure. Behind the scenes the story was different. Hall's committee had a plan that went far beyond the issue of Communism in the CSU. As reported by one of the dozen officers of the international unions who participated in the right-wing caucus, the reasons Hall submerged Sullivan's breakaway with the SIU were threefold: Bengough was organizing too many workers into directly chartered locals of the TLC and transferring too few of them into AFL unions; the CSU was a 'headache' for Hall's union of steamship clerks, who also had a contract with Canada Steamship Lines ('Every time the CSU went on strike they have given him plenty of trouble trying to get the clerks to support them'); and finally, 'he also did what he did because he is absolutely opposed to Communism '19

Bengough and the TLC executive retaliated by suspending Hall and his entire international union from the congress. Undaunted, Hall met with his committee of international vice-presidents - known as roadmen - to lay plans for a confrontation with the congress executive at the fall convention in Victoria. As the winter ice closed the shipping season on the Great Lakes, the CSU still retained the tenacious support of the congress executive, but it was stymied in its efforts to negotiate with the shipping companies. Early in 1949 the union faced additional problems on the deep-sea fleets, where its contracts had expired and new agreements were needed. More strikes were inevitable. ' I M P O S S I B L E LEFTS A N D R E A C T I O N A R Y R I G H T S '

The fight at the Victoria convention was a critical test of Bengough's leadership, and of the independence of the TLC. Hall and his supporters planned to capture the executive positions by polarizing the congress over the presence of the CSU. Then they would consolidate their position by changing the voting system to allow the international unions to cast a weighted vote that would give the vice-presidents effective control of the congress.20 Just as the delegates were gathering in Victoria, the British Columbia labour scene was torn by a successful anti-Communist purge of the Canadian section of the CIO Woodworkers by a right-wing 'White Bloc.'21 Hall observed the purge closely as a model of what he hoped to do to the Seamen. The goal, beyond the purge of the CSU, was an end to the demands for greater autonomy by the TLC. Nine hundred and twenty-one delegates checked into the 1948 convention at the Sirocco Club, a Victoria night spot large enough to hold the fractious meeting. The CSU and other left wing unions mustered every possible vote, but the Communistled unions alone could manage no more than 15 per cent of the total. And as

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Bengough reminded Hall's right-wing caucus, many of those left-wingers came from locals of the international union. If the vice-presidents wanted a change, they should start at the grass roots and persuade their own locals not to elect Communists. Bengough, in any event, had his own plans. As the delegates gathered over drinks at the Empress Hotel, Bengough forged an alliance of the moderates and the nationalists, while offering some token concessions to the right. This is not a question of Communism,' Bengough told the delegates. 'The question is: does this congress agree that workers should be free to organize and insist on the protection of that right?' Employers were refusing to negotiate with elected union leaders who were Communists. In the United States the employers gained this ability under the Taft-Hartley Act. Conceding the right to the employers in the CSU negotiations 'would be a direct invitation to the replacement of free trade unions by company-controlled unions.' The TLC opposed the concession and the Taft-Hartley Act on trade-union grounds, not out of sympathy for Communism. To mollify the right, a resolution was passed condemning Communism in vague terms, but suggesting no action.22 Outmanoeuvred, Hall lost the initiative and the SIU's threat to the CSU was deflected. Hall was censured by a vote of two to one, and the international vice-presidents could not even count on the votes from their own union locals. At the same time Hall's union was readmitted to the congress, and the left wing did not place a candidate for election to the new executive. Instead, the executive was dominated by Bengough's hand-picked slate, which excluded, he said, 'the impossible lefts and the reactionary rights.' He told reporters that the vote demonstrated that the Hall group was deluding itself: 'It's a case of them getting together and self-mesmerizing themselves. The longer they meet them the more they increase their importance, but only in their own imaginations.' 23 Hall was determined to fight back; he sent an angry petition to the AFL executive demanding action, and he launched a recruitment drive among the officers of the international unions. When the right-wing caucus met again in Montreal the roadmen renamed themselves the 'anti-Communist bloc'; and they now included international officers from thirty-two unions representing a reported 75 per cent of the congress's approximately 450,000 members. As the membership increased and the new members added their own grievances and demands in a petition to the AFL executive, the sense of purpose that united the international offices behind Hall became clear. Nationalism was the number-one complaint of the international unions. The congress executive, under Bengough's leadership, was notably reluctant to turn over national and federal unions when the internationals laid claim to the jurisdiction. This was an issue guaranteed to attract the attention of the AFL officers. The petition painted a vivid picture of a Communist-infiltrated anti-American TLC executive with a 'complex' about self-rule, bent on achieving 'an exclusive national movement.' In order to further nationalism, Green was told, 'President Bengough

Labour's Cold War (I) 327 has accepted assistance from Communist elements and organizations. For this, of course, he has to pay a price.' Two examples were offered of statements made by Bengough and one of his vice-presidents to demonstrate that the TLC was a 'front' for the Communists. One of the 'Communist comforting statements' was Bengough's defence of the Communist union officers, as reported in a Montreal newspaper: 'Communists will not be barred from the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada as long as Communism is a legal political movement in the dominion and as long as Communists don't let their political beliefs hinder their trade union work.'24 This demonstrated Bengough's ignorance, the brief argued, because 'who ever heard of Communists being interested in "trade union work" for itself alone.' The brief also quoted from a story in the Globe and Mail in which TLC secretary Buckley explained that the congress would not take a stand for or against Communism: 'We can't take such a stand,' he explained. 'We have no authority to. All our affiliates are completely autonomous bodies in which it is up to the membership to decide who their officers will be ... but I will say that I think it takes more intelligence and certainly a lot more courage to be a member of the Communist party, than it does to be a member of the Liberal or Conservative parties. Communists at least can't expect to eat from the political trough.' The petition rejected with contempt the idea that the Canadians might have any grounds for complaint at the way they had been treated by the AFL: There are those who seek to make it appear that the American Federation of Labour desires to dominate and dictate the character and policy of the Congress - [to] eliminate it as an expression of the aims and aspirations of Canadian workers. Unfortunately, and this is a fact well known to all demagogues, such a charge appeals readily to a certain kind of mentality and [to] the inferiority complex.' The brief ended with a patriotic appeal to the AFL executive to help the international cause by fighting Communism in Canada as it would at home. 'We are well aware,' the international officers told President Green, 'of the part being played by the American Federation of Labour in helping responsible elements in other countries to resist the infiltration and onslaught of Communism. We are equally well aware that the Federation cannot ignore the encroachment of totalitarian philosophy on, as it were, its own doorstep.' The report asked for the AFL's support in a confrontation with Bengough and the TLC executive. The TLC should be offered a choice: expel the CSU or lose the AFL unions. 25 The grievances and demands of the international officers were reported in friendly publications outside the labour movement. The Intelligence Bulletin, circulated secretly within the RCMP Special Branch, included favourable reports on Hall's group, and the Montreal Star quoted railway union official Robert Hewitt in a story headlined 'Reds Seeking Union Control across Canada.' Bengough was incensed by the actions of the international unions, and he wrote a blistering letter to Hewitt accusing him of supporting 'the disruptive tactics as carried on by the influential enemies of organized labour ... Communism was not the

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issue at Victoria,' Bengough wrote, 'the delegates readily saw through the attempt to use anti-Communism as a cloak to cover up the acts of sabotaging a union on strike.' Hewitt agreed by return mail that for him, at least, Communism was not the issue. The real issue was nationalism. T am not so much concerned with Communists as I am with the apparent trend away from internationalism and toward nationalism in trade unionism ... I have long been an enthusiastic supporter of the Congress as the legislative mouthpiece for the Canadian section of our A.F. of L. unions, and for many years it has been a valuable and necessary instrument to that end.' But the TLC, Hewitt said, 'in its present form [is] practically useless as the mouthpiece of A.F. of L. unions.' Two weeks before Christmas, Bengough received a summons from President Green to come to Miami. 'The Executive Council wishes to discuss with you,' Green wrote 'the relationship of the American Federation of Labor with the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada which is of transcendent importance to both.'26 Early in the new year, the roadmen tightened the screws on the TLC as the Boilermakers, the Railway and Steamship Clerks, and several other unions shut off their per-capita dues payments to the congress. THIRTY MINUTES IN M I A M I

Bengough and three officers of the Trades and Labour Congress left Ottawa in early February 1949 for Miami, fully expecting a long and difficult discussion with the AFL executive. Bengough took some comfort from the fact that he had anticipated problems of this kind several years earlier and had worked hard to create a special 'Co-operation Committee,' which was intended to arbitrate in the case of conflicts between international unions and the TLC. The committee, though untested, had been ratified by the TLC and the AFL conventions in 1946. In 1949 there was a pressing need for it. The committee never met. The four Canadians checked into their Miami hotel room and were left to cool their heels for a week. Finally they were called before an AFL executive tribunal chaired by President Green. The Canadians were shown the forty-page list of charges and complaints brought down by Frank Hall. They were allowed just thirty minutes to respond to of the charges, then they were excused. 27 The judgment was delivered by President Green. He concluded that Hall and his associates had painted 'a shocking picture of the influence wielded by the Communists in Canada in the affairs of the Trades and Labour Congress.' For Bengough's benefit, Green reviewed the AFL's 'long history of consistent and vigorous opposition to Communism ... We have refused to become associated with any organization impregnated with Communists and have zealously guarded our structure against Communist infiltration into our ranks while giving vital assistance to free trade unions all over the world in their struggles against this vicious inhuman ideology.'28 Green also concluded that Frank Hall and his union had been wrongfully suspended

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by the TLC: 'We denounce without reservation the undemocratic action of the officers of the Trades and Labour Congress in suspending the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks without trial or hearing for their activities in support of an AFL anti-Communist affiliate which is engaged in a struggle with a Communist dominated union affiliated with the Trades and Labour Congress.'29 The AFL verdict was a complete repudiation of the TLC's authority to grant recognition to the Canadian Seamen's Union, and to protect that affiliation by traditional trade-union means. Green told Bengough to expunge the record of any evidence that Frank Hall had ever been suspended, and suggested that they adopt an explicit anti-Communist policy, in line with the AFL. Behind the suggestion lay a threat: if the Canadians refused, the AFL would disaffiliate the TLC. If that happened, three quarters of the Canadian workers would receive orders from their American union headquarters to leave the Canadian congress. Green gave the Canadians three months to act, before the next AFL executive meeting in Cleveland. The TLC had until then, Hall said, to choose between the 'Communist elements' and the AFL unions: 'it cannot have both.' The issue of nationalism, which figured prominently in the complaints of the international unions, was dealt with obliquely. Bengough was advised to abandon the system of one delegate, one vote used at their conventions and instead adopt the weighted voting system as requested by the international vice-presidents. This, in turn, would end the TLC's campaign for greater autonomy. The vice-presidents knew that Bengough's nationalism was now linked to his defence of a Communistled union. As anti-communism increased, so Bengough's hold over the congress moderates would weaken. 100 D A Y S OF C R I S I S : ' C O - O P E R A T I O N YES, D O M I N A T I O N N O ! '

The leaders of the CSU were in a desperate position in early February 1949. First, their three largest contracts on the Great Lakes had been handed over to Pat Sullivan's new union by the employers while the federal government stood by. Then Sullivan's union was swallowed up by the SIU, an event that in turn set off the confrontation between Hall's group and Bengough. Now Bengough, the CSU's chief ally in the labour movement, was on his way home from Miami with orders from the AFL to expel the Seamen from the TLC - a move that would destroy the union. And finally, the negotiations with the deep-sea shipping companies on the east coast were going badly. On the verge of collapse, the CSU was just beginning a period of crisis that lasted for 100 days, from the time of the AFL's ultimatum in Miami until the union was expelled from the Canadian congress in early May. During that time the union was the centre of attention for the Liberal government, the AFL, and the entire Canadian labour movement of nearly a million workers. The forces arrayed for and against the small CSU guaranteed that any strike started by the union would escalate into a fight between left and right, between nationalists and

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internationalists. In the middle of that 100-day period the conflict spread around the world when the CSU ordered its merchant seamen to strike their ships in foreign ports. Those strikes caused some foreign governments to call out the police and the armed forces when sympathetic unions boycotted Canadian ships and tied up their home ports with support strikes. Throughout the three-month period the pressure was constantly mounting for the Canadian government and the TLC to abandon the embattled, and embarrassing, CSU. Percy Bengough found himself exactly in the middle of this dispute. In spite of the AFL's ultimatum he had decided to support the CSU, and for most of the 100 days he ran in maddening circles trying to secure the cooperation of the Liberal government, to rally support for the seamen among the unions, to finesse the demands of the AFL, to defend the autonomy of the TLC, and to persuade the militant seamen to settle the strike. At the same time Bengough had to contend with accusations that he was defending a union dominated by Communists whose real aim was to tie up international shipping as part of a worldwide Communist conspiracy. Earlier, Bengough had been able to brush off such charges, but this time it was more difficult, and his problem with the Communist issue was the key to the collapse of his defence of the CSU, the final destruction of the union, and the decline of the autonomy movement in the Trades and Labour Congress. Contract negotiations between the CSU and the deep-sea shipping companies had moved into conciliation while Bengough was in Miami. Ten days after his return to Ottawa, the conciliator handed in his report. The full report was endorsed by employers, but the union had reservations. The least-controversial proposal, acceptable to both sides, was for wage cuts in some areas. More controversial was the suggestion that the union should share control of the hiring hall with a national employment agency. This proposal went to the heart of the union's activities: without control of the hiring hall, the union leaders lost much of their ability to communicate with their members, to maintain discipline, and to reward loyalty. Maintaining discipline in a union of merchant seamen was hard enough, they told Bengough; if they gave up control of the hiring lists they might lose control entirely. Another contentious issue was a proposed security-screening system designed to eliminate 'all subversive elements.' How such screening would be carried out and what criteria would be used for identifying subversives were not spelled out. The procedure, however, reflected the trend within the government towards increased screening in government and defence-related industries. Canada's participation in the Marshall Plan and the promise of increased defence spending by the Americans meant that the merchant marine might soon be carrying strategic materials to Europe. It was desirable, therefore, to demonstrate to the Americans that Communists did not occupy key positions in the industry. The problem, of course, was that they did.30 The screening proposal, like the proposed participation of the national employment agency in the hiring hall, threatened the hard-won authority of the union exec-

Labour's Cold War (I) 331 utive. Still, the conciliation report could not be rejected out of hand because neither the union executive nor the leadership of the Labour Progressive party was anxious for a strike. What they wanted was a set of reasonable contracts on the deep sea that would give them a firm base for a new campaign on the Great Lakes. A strike would put the future of the union at risk. February passed into March without a firm decision. As a hedge, however, union president Harry Davis went abroad to solicit help in case of a strike. He returned with promises of support. While the CSU dithered, Bengough and his officers used the lull to fire off a seven-page response to the demands of the AFL. The fighting tone of the document made it clear that Bengough was rallying the congress moderates under the banner of Canadian autonomy. His slogan, aimed at the AFL, was 'Co-operation Yes, Domination No!' The central issue, Bengough argued, was that the AFL was trying to reduce the Canadian congress to 'a stifled appendage' of the American body. He recited a list of injustices and injuries going back to the first contact between the congresses in 1898. William Green's most recent demand for a bloc voting system that would radically alter the balance of power in the TLC was attacked as 'an audacious attempt to disenfranchise Canadian members.' Canadian union members, Bengough told the Department of Labour, 'will accept domination no more readily from Washington than they will from Moscow.' If the AFL tried to make good its threat to order the international unions out of the TLC, Bengough warned that the TLC 'will have no other choice than to take over the jurisdiction of the International Unions and to issue National or Federal charters to cover those that remain loyal to our Congress.'31 It appears that Bengough made some preliminary plans to carry out this organizing campaign if the AFL unions walked out. In search of experienced organizers he turned to the Labour Progressive party and its labour specialist, J.B. Salsberg. Just as American presidential candidate Henry Wallace turned to the American Communist party for organizers for his Progressive party during the U.S. presidential campaign in 1948, so Bengough appealed to the LPP for help. 'Joe,' Bengough was reported as saying to Salsberg, 'get your boys together.'32 Bengough did not consider Communism to be a threat, but at the same time he advised all unions to elect non-Communists as their officers in order to deflect the attacks of the anti-Communists. This was, in his mind, a practical step that the unions should embrace in defence of their independence. But in a caustic aside to the Department of Labour, he warned that even this would not end the attack by the international unions and the AFL executive: 'I am satisfied we will be successful in removing the taint of Communism even though an entire revamping of the CSU would not satisfy the AFL. There is a lot more here than appears on the surface.'33 Frank Hall and the international vice-presidents continued to beat the drum on the Communist issue and got a sympathetic response from the Financial Post, which described the conflict as 'the TLC Cold War' that was turning hot: 'In Montreal,

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Ottawa and Vancouver, the TLC Communist lovers sent up the same cry ... to resist ... the attempt by the AFL to dominate the TLC. No one shouted it louder than the Communists. For them it was a natural, fitting neatly into their anti-US line.'34 Labour reporter Ronald Williams added a McCarthyesque touch to the story with his suggestion that TLC vice-president Birt Showier (a conservative) owed his position on the executive to the Communists, who supported him because he had echoed the anti-American cry. Bengough's own part in the dispute was dismissed as a personal grudge against the AFL because of the expulsion of Bengough's Machinists' union from the federation several years earlier.35 As the quality of the dialogue deteriorated, eleventh-hour meetings were called. Bengough organized a delegation of heads of the international unions to Ottawa to attend a meeting with Labour Minister Mitchell and the cabinet. Both sides agreed to keep the meeting secret. For four days the union leaders met with the government and among themselves in an effort to settle the CSU-SIU dispute, avoid a split in the labour congress, and prevent a strike in the shipping industry. Mitchell kept the pressure on all parties, advising them to negotiate like gentlemen. 'If you are in dispute with anyone,' Mitchell suggested, 'try and settle it without getting the newspapers full of it.'36 The CSU officers, meanwhile, cloistered themselves with LPP leader Tim Buck and labour expert J.B. Salsberg. As CSU officer T.G. McManus later reported, most of the officers of the union were wary of a strike, with the exception of Harry Davis. Davis had promises of support in foreign ports, and he believed that support strikes by the dockworkers in Britain would help the union and strengthen the British Communist party, which was languishing under the Labour government. These arguments were rejected, however, in favour of further negotiations with the Department of Labour. As a concession to the militants in the union, a sit-in strike was arranged for two Canadian National steamships, the Lady Rodney and the Lady Nelson, which were due to arrive in Halifax shortly. Harry Davis was sent to Ottawa with McManus to negotiate on the contentious issue of the sharing of the hiring halls. While these negotiations were making some substantial progress, and just as Bengough was meeting with the cabinet, the sit-in strike on the CN steamships backfired badly. The moment that the CSU struck the Lady Rodney, the company got an injunction and called in Hal Banks. Banks was newly arrived in Montreal as the head of the SIU, and the strike was his first opportunity to demonstrate his leadership. Banks had no qualms about using rough tactics to win strikes. He was a notorious bully with a criminal record who was brought into Canada to run a violent campaign against the CSU. Back in California, Banks had already served four years in San Quentin penitentiary for forgery and had also once been arrested for kicking a man to death on the San Diego waterfront. Those charges were dropped when the only witness, the man's girlfriend, disappeared. His entrance into Canada was simplified when Immigration officials conveniently neglected to ask him whether he had previ-

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ous criminal convictions. In his case, the question was omitted from the standard questionnaire. Banks ran a one-man show. When he arrived in Montreal he called together the officers of the SIU and told them that there would be no further need for meetings, and that all future decisions would be his alone. Before leaving for Halifax, 200 men were recruited off the streets in Montreal to man the ships as SIU crews. Banks boasted that he could run a ship with one bosun and three firemen and the rest could be farmers, and his recruiting methods in Montreal demonstrated that he was more interested in bulk than in skills; no evidence of maritime experience was required. The new recruits, including a seaman named Robert McEwen who was a friend of the CSU, were sent to Nova Scotia on a special CNR train that pulled into Halifax at 3:30 in the morning of 8 April. McEwen and the others were issued chains and axe handles - some of which were stamped 'CNR.' During the night, 350 strikebreakers were taken through the picket lines and put on board the ships. McEwen's group was put on the Lady Rodney without incident, but once on board several of Banks's men pulled out sawed-off shotguns and fired on the picket line - McEwen counted fifteen shots - injuring several strikers. McEwen found himself transferred to another ship, and at this point he decided he wanted to get back on shore. When the harbourmaster came on board with a contingent of RCMP, McEwen approached first the harbour-master, then the RCMP, and finally the captain of the ship asking to be taken off the ship. After he did this the bosun took him aside and gave him a choice: either he could sign on for the trip to Nassau or he could go ashore on a stretcher. Later, in Nassau, McEwen wrote a detailed letter to the CSU describing these events. When he finally got back to Montreal he was called in by Banks, who knew about the letter. McEwen was blacklisted.37 There was worse news coming for the CSU. Even as McManus and Davis met with the Department of Labour, all hopes for a settlement were destroyed by a backdoor agreement between the SIU and the shipping companies, led by the Crown-owned Canadian National Steamships. In the middle of a session with Bengough, McManus, and Davis, Deputy Minister MacNamara interrupted the meeting to tell them, 'It's too late boys, the owners have just signed with the SIU.' This was illegal: the CSU was the certified bargaining agent for the seamen.38 In Baltimore, triumphant SIU president Harry Lundeberg read out a telegram from Hal Banks announcing the signing of contracts with twenty Canadian companies covering 90 per cent of Canadian deep-water shipping. The SIU took over these contracts, Lundeberg told the delegates to the SIU convention, 'to protect the Canadian Seamen from exploitation of the Communist Party up in that particular world.' 39 Up to this point, a strike by the CSU had been opposed by the TLC, the Department of Labour, and the LPP; even the union itself had been reluctant to act. Now, pre-empted by the deal between the companies and the SIU, the Seamen had little choice but to strike. Failure to act would have left the union with only a few tiny

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contracts and little hope of regaining its influence. CSU crews around the world were advised by telegraph and radio to stage sit-in strikes on their ships as soon as they reached port. This time the strike was legal. In mid-April, the government revealed its position on the strike when the minister of labour described the SIU's actions as part of a 'jurisdictional' contest between the unions. The minister's statements, if unsympathetic to the CSU, still made it clear that the strike was legal under federal labour law. Privately, Deputy Minister MacNamara deplored the way in which the government-owned Canadian National Steamships line 'had become the spearhead for the action of the owners.' A special cabinet committee concluded that the strike, while it failed to tie up the shipping companies completely, could well be prolonged, especially in foreign ports. During the first month the CSU tied up at least twenty-four Canadian ships in ports in New Zealand, Britain, Australia, France, Cuba, British Guiana, Ireland, Norway, Holland, and South Africa, often with support from local unions.40 The individual cases documented by the cabinet committee presented a picture of a strike that was a diplomat's nightmare. In France, the Sun Valley sailed for Trinidad, leaving seventeen strikers behind, but the Westminster County remained in port, occupied by its crew. The strikers were summoned before the French courts but refused to appear. The cabinet was told that the French were 'reluctant to use force unless the Canadian government... signals its approval.' The Canadian ambassador in France advised that any move to clear the ship would be provocative because the local trade unions were already aroused. An occupied ship in Oslo, meanwhile, was dragging anchor and threatened to go aground. In Cuba, the Canadian crews on board the Federal Pioneer and the Canadian Victor were removed at gunpoint by a boarding party of the Cuban Navy requested by the ship's captain; forty-two seamen were detained in a Cuban immigration camp. In South Africa, twenty-eight seamen from the Cambrey were put on trial for neglect and wilful disobedience. By the end of the first month, the CSU controlled only fifteen of the ninety ships sailing out of Canada's east coast ports, but the idling of even those few was creating significant problems for the government. Making trouble was about the only weapon left to the CSU, and the union leaders clung to the hope that international pressure might force the government to lean on the shipowners for a settlement. To the horror of the Ottawa mandarins, Hal Banks had his own ideas about diplomacy. When British dockworkers declared Canadian ships with SIU crews to be 'hot' and refused to service them, Banks threatened to tie up every British ship in every port in North America. He repeated the threat three times. The British, alarmed, applied pressure on Ottawa, and the cabinet committee moved swiftly to silence Banks. J.V. Clyne, the head of the Canadian Maritime Commission, was asked to approach the shipowners. The owners were induced to tell Banks that 'failure on his part to meet their wishes in this matter will materially affect their relationship with the Seafarer's International Union.' This counter-blackmail worked and Banks dropped his threat.41

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The shipowners, however, had their own demands. Many of these businessmen had only recently purchased their ships from the government when it sold off its entire fleet of merchant marine freighters and tankers at the end of the Second World War. Now they asked Clyne and St Laurent for permission to transfer their ships to other flags, a move that would relieve them of the cost and the bother of dealing with either the CSU or the SIU. Perhaps to underline their request, a number of owners fell behind in their mortgage payments on the fleet. At the month's end, owners of thirty-three ships were in default. With the future of the merchant marine already in some doubt because of surplus tonnage and stiff competition, it appeared that the companies had less to lose than the CSU would have wished. By mid-May, in the second month of the strike, the focus of the conflict was in Britain where eight ships were tied up. The CSU had the support of the British dockworkers, as Harry Davis had predicted, but their support triggered additional conflicts. At Avonmouth, 150 dockworkers who refused to unload a Canadian ship were suspended; 1,000 more struck to support them. Troops were brought in. While the British soldiers unloaded crates of bananas, the strikes spread. In Bristol 1,800 workers walked out. In Liverpool, 7,000 workers struck to isolate a Canadian ship, which was then loaded by a non-union crew. When that ship reached Dublin, the dockers there refused to touch it. In the midst of this, the SIU representative in London renewed the threat to strike against British ships in American ports.42 Finally the cabinet had had enough. The minister of labour announced that the government was invoking the Shipping Act. This made the strike, at least in foreign ports, illegal. CSU crews were advised to complete their voyages and then strike their ships when they reached Canadian ports. Consular officers were sent to the ships to inform the striking crews that local police would be called to clear the ships if they did not comply. By outlawing the strike, the government undercut the Trades and Labour Congress. An angry Percy Bengough sent messages to trade-union centres in the Commonwealth assuring them that the strike was still legal and legitimate and should be supported. Bengough was under intense pressure; he was scheduled to meet with the executive of the AFL again in Cleveland on 19 May, and he had little to show for his efforts to settle the strike or save the CSU. As the AFL's deadline approached, the right-wing international officers redoubled their charges that Communists were influencing the TLC. The officers of the AFL Paper Makers accused Bengough of making the TLC 'a refuge for a few radicals on the Politburo pay-roll' and attacked him for giving comfort to those who carry out 'leftist policies of disruption and nationalism.' Quebec's La Nouvelliste said Bengough was 'ready to sacrifice the workers of Canada to a regime in Moscow in order to conserve his title and office.' AFL Boilermakers president Charles McGowan charged Bengough with supporting the Communists with union dues. He said the AFL had had no quarrel with the congress 'until the TLC started to use the money paid into its treasury by International Unions to foster Communism.' Bengough prepared a libel suit and demanded a

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retraction, but before he had a chance to act on it he was called to Cleveland to explain himself to the AFL executive. Time was running out on the CSU strike.43 On 19 May 1949, Deputy Minister MacNamara made a special request to CSU vice-president Conrad Saurus to wire the CSU crew in British Guiana and tell them not to get into any fights with the local authorities. Saurus obliged and sent a telegram that concluded 'situation at present in our favour.' It could hardly have been less so. That very day Percy Bengough was on his way to Cleveland. The deadline issued by President Green three months earlier had arrived and Bengough, far from gaining control of events, was in the lame position of defending an unpopular union enmeshed in a self-destructive strike that was completely out of control. THE S I N K I N G OF THE CSU

The AFL ultimatum required the Canadian congress to disaffiliate the CSU, adopt an anti-Communist policy, and grant the international unions a weighted vote. Otherwise the international unions would withdraw. None of this had been done in the time allotted, and fourteen of the international unions led by Frank Hall's Railway and Steamship Clerks were ready to pull out of the TLC and form their own congress in Canada. A split would cause chaos in the labour movement. Any union that remained loyal to the TLC would be subjected to raids by the internationals. Other rival unions from the CIO and the CCL would join the raids, and Bengough would be left in charge of a dwindling group of national and federal unions. The continued existence of these unions might also be in jeopardy. The battle over the CSU demonstrated that employers, with the help of willing AFL unions, could effectively use antiCommunism as a weapon to undermine support for a national union whose leadership they disliked. National unions like the United Fishermen and the Vancouver Civic Employees had prominent Communists among their organizers and officers, and they would be vulnerable to Red-baiting. The prospect of a bitter and destructive fight in the labour movement was, for Percy Bengough, a grotesque turn of events. He knew that the responsibility for the crisis lay with the selfish interests of the SIU and the international unions. But even if he were personally free of blame, did the democratically elected congress executive have the right to make a decision that would result in the destruction of the congress? The pressure was on to find a compromise. The meetings in Cleveland were carried on in secret, and when AFL president Green emerged, his comments about the CSU were extremely mild. Rumours circulated immediately that Bengough had capitulated to the AFL demand to purge the union. A member of the right-wing bloc reported that Bengough had agreed to 'disestablish the CSU as an affiliate,' and the Financial Post concluded that Bengough had capitulated entirely to the international unions and agreed to give them the bloc voting system that would allow them to control the Canadian congress.44

Labour's Cold War (I) 337 In fact, Bengough had found a little room to manoeuvre. He returned to Canada and called a meeting with Harry Davis, T.G. McManus, and five other leaders of the CSU. During the morning of 31 May Bengough laid down the law: the union must call off the strike, and the union must replace its leadership with non-Communists. Bengough's position was supported by the Labour Progressive party. The CSU was on the spot.45 For the rest of the morning they discussed the mechanics of ending the strike. Before lunch, Bengough made it clear that the union would be expelled if the talks failed. After lunch the CSU leaders unanimously agreed to his plan. Relieved, Bengough contacted the Department of Labour and the cabinet to make arrangements. A number of issues had to be resolved, including the repatriation of the stranded strikers, the cancellation of criminal charges against strikers, and the rehiring of strikers. The strike was over. But the next day, inexplicably, the CSU leaders reversed their decision and refused to end the strike. Two days later, Bengough issued a terse statement suspending the union with the declaration that 'the name of the Congress shall no longer be associated with that of the Canadian Seamen's union while the Union has its present leadership.'46 The consequences, predictably, were disastrous for the CSU. Deprived of the support of the Canadian congress, the CSU lost the support of international labour, and the strike was reduced to a protest by small bands of seamen in foreign ports. Britain's minister of labour immediately made a national radio broadcast announcing the suspension and referring to the 'Communist nature' of the leadership in his appeal for British dockers to return to work.47 Norman Robertson's report to the cabinet pictured a slowly crumbling strike and predicted labour peace, except possibly in New Zealand and Australia 'where dock workers unions are notoriously Communist led.'48 The Liberals were relieved to have the strike largely out of the way in time for the 27 June federal election. Once Bengough made peace with the AFL, Liberal party candidates made a public show of unity with Frank Hall and the right-wing anti-Communist faction of the AFL in Canada. Defence Minister Brooke Claxton shared the stage with Hall in Montreal, where Hall called the minister 'a friend of labour.' Labour Minister Humphrey Mitchell, speaking at a Boilermakers' convention in Montreal, thundered against the Communists for the benefit of the Catholic workers: 'As long as I have the honour to hold the post of Minister of Labour for the Dominion of Canada, there will be no compromise with Communist tactics in the ranks of labour. I regard Communism as a menace to organized labour; to our own people generally and to our way of life ...'49 The strike, although lost, dragged on. At the end of June the shipowners required all seamen to join the SIU, according to the agreement they had made with Hal Banks. Banks used his control over the hiring lists the same way the CSU had, to ensure loyalty, and ruthlessly weeded out left-wingers, dissidents, and Communists. Former CSU crews were broken up and scattered; Banks dictated that only 10 per

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cent of the new crews could be former CSU members. CSU members who were permitted to join the SIU were kept on extended probation, and even a trivial infraction of union regulations was punished by expulsion and blacklisting. The CSU was ruined. Banks had won control of nearly all the shipping contracts on the Great Lakes and 85 per cent of the contracts for the deep-sea fleet.50 The Canadian merchant marine outlived the CSU by less than six months. At the time of the strike the Canadian fleet, built by the government during the war, included 6 tankers, 19 warships of 4,700 tons, and 104 ships of 10,000 tons. When the merchant ships were sold to private interests the agreement required the ships to remain under Canadian registration, with Canadian crews. But in the wake of the strike business remained poor, and the owners continued to press the government to release them from the agreement. In December, Prime Minister Louis St Laurent agreed, telling the House that the transfers would be allowed because 'it has been demonstrated that Canadian vessels with their present high costs cannot be operated ...' With that proclamation the Canadian merchant marine vanished. Even if the CSU had won it would have lost a few months later. The war of the unions on the deep sea was over, and the victors manned a phantom fleet.51 Speculation has persisted about why the CSU spurned Bengough's final offer, ignored the advice of the LPP, and continued the strike. The cabinet committee, which had access to information from External Affairs, the RCMP, and the Department of Labour, came to the somewhat pedestrian conclusion that the strike, in Norman Robertson's description, was 'attributable to faulty and irresponsible CSU leadership.' John Stanton, a lawyer for the CSU's western division, has proposed that the strike was extended because the CSU officers were concerned about the repatriation of the sailors stranded in foreign countries. A comment by Bengough, however, contradicts Stanton. At the 1949 convention of the TLC Bengough told the delegates that the issue of repatriation had been raised and settled.52 CSU secretary T.G. McManus later suggested another reason for the self-destructive decision to continue the strike: the strike was continued in order to help out the Communist party in Britain. Exactly how the strike could revive the fortunes of the British Communists McManus did not say. Further doubt is cast on McManus's theory by recollections of party insiders, especially of J.B. Salsberg, that the LPP was opposed to continuing the strike at the end of May.53 Another theory was suggested by the British government. While McManus said the CSU was sacrificed for the British Communist party, a British government White Paper concluded the opposite: that British Communists were sacrificed for the CSU. When in doubt, it seems, blame it on foreign agitators. The idea of a foreign conspiracy was also popular with the Financial Post, which suggested that the strike was part of a worldwide plot to destroy the Canadian shipping industry. This conspiracy theory evidently carried weight with the Canadian Labour Relations Board when it decertified the CSU in 1950. The board concluded that the CSU was not a bona fide union but was instead something else, an organization taken over and

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controlled by the Communists for other than trade-union purposes, and it cited the British White Paper in support of its judgment.54 Yet another conspiracy theory was advanced some time after the end of the strike. According to this often-repeated theory, the CSU strike was called by the Communists in an effort to disrupt shipment of Mutual Defense Assistance Program (Marshall Plan) supplies to Europe and the Far East. As early as the fall of 1949, Deputy Minister of Labour MacNamara described the strike as an 'ambitious project' undertaken by 250 Communists in the CSU who were trying to hamper the Marshall Plan. In later years, Bengough, as well, made repeated references to attempts by the Communists to sabotage Canadian shipping or the Marshall Plan by fomenting a strike.55 These conspiracy theories are usually offered without any documentation, so it was interesting to locate a secret intelligence report prepared for the U.S. State Department that examined just this question.56 This report, written in 1951, concluded that there was indeed a worldwide campaign of anti-Marshall Plan propaganda and disruption. The report identified the International Federation of Seamen and Dockers Unions (IFSDU) as the coordinator of a plan to disrupt shipments of Marshall Plan goods. The IFSDU was the creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions, an international labour organization considered to be dominated by the Soviet Union. However, the link between the IFSDU plan and the CSU strike is weak because, as the intelligence report notes, the IFSDU was not even formed until July 1949, after the CSU strike had already collapsed. The intelligence report also examined the CSU strike in some detail and concluded that it was not part of the anti-Marshall Plan conspiracy, but rather arose out of a legitimate contract dispute. Even if it was not part of a global conspiracy, the CSU strike was of special interest to intelligence experts (American and Soviet) because it revealed a great deal about what might happen if the Communists actually did try to use sympathetic maritime unions to disrupt shipping. What the State Department analysts concluded was good news for Washington. The principal lesson of the strike, the report found, was that it demonstrated how vulnerable and impotent Communist-led unions were during a strike. The CSU strike, like others that followed, exposed the union to 'vigilance' groups of rival unions and brought them into conflict with the police and the laws of their own country. Therefore, the report concluded, 'Communist strength for undertaking any future large scale politically motivated strike and disruptive action is severely limited and certainly far less formidable than is commonly assumed.' Looking past the CSU strike, the report did find evidence of a later attempt to disrupt Marshall Plan supplies, but this campaign was judged a complete failure. If such efforts were doomed to failure, why was there such widespread belief that the Communists were ready and able to sabotage world shipping, as suggested in the statements of McManus, MacNamara, Bengough, and many others in Canada and elsewhere? For that matter why have many contemporary historians, like William Kaplan, continued to rely on the conspiracy theory to explain the facts of the strike and to demonstrate the 'domination' of the CSU by Communists? One possible

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explanation for the resilience of the conspiracy theory was offered by the State Department researchers in the same U.S. intelligence report. The report came to the somewhat ironic conclusion that this belief in the capabilities of the Communists came from 'the common error of identifying the propaganda output of Communist spokesmen with their actual intentions and of accepting Communist claims as a valid indication of their real capabilities ... A purely political strike of this nature is quite out of the question in the present period or in the foreseeable future.' 57 A final possible explanation for CSU's decision to prolong a losing strike is that there was no rational explanation, no logical reason. Perhaps the CSU officers saw the end of their union no matter which direction they turned and, like the tough guys they had to be to run a waterfront union, they simply wanted to go down fighting. But if the facts point so clearly to the nationalist issue as the root of the conflict, why has the conspiracy theory gained such currency? Belief in a conspiracy served a purpose: it retroactively placed the blame for the fight between the AFL and the TLC on the Soviet Union. The suppression of the CSU was then justified as a national-security measure, carried out in concert by Canadian and American patriots. This explanation recast the events in Cold War terms and neatly papered over the suppression of the nationalist ambitions of the Canadian unionists. Not only did the AFL unions win the fight, they managed, with the help of Cold War mythology, to impose their own explanation of the events after the fact. Unfortunately many contemporary accounts, including those written by Canadian historians, have continued to focus on the Communist associations of the CSU officers as the key to understanding the strike and the fight between the TLC and the AFL. The Communist connections of Pat Sullivan, Harry Davis, and the other leaders certainly contributed to the conflict between the labour congresses, just as they affected the handling of the strike, especially in Britain where the CSU had supporters among the Communist leaders of British waterfront unions. But allowing that the Communism of the leaders contributed to the conflict is not to allow that Communism or a Communist conspiracy was a fundamental cause of the conflict or the strike. That strike, and the showdown between the TLC and the AFL, was set in motion by normal trade-union activities, by the national and institutional conflicts between the two trade-union congresses, and in particular by the expansionist ambitions of the SIU, which was supported by the AFL and the international unions in Canada for their own purposes. This was the fundamental conflict that prompted Bengough to rally the moderates in defence of the CSU. Later, when nationalism was on the decline and the TLC had become decidedly anti-Communist, Bengough was as ready to attack Communists as any other Canadian trade union or political leader. But as Bengough wrote when he censured Frank Hall for raiding the CSU, 'Communism was not the issue.'58 In the later purges, after the destruction of the CSU, Communism was occasionally the main cause of a purge; some union leaders were selected for purging simply because they were Communists - because they were presumed to be part of a con-

Labour's Cold War (I) 341 spiracy, like the conspiracy that was presumed to be the cause of the CSU strike. The purges were self-perpetuating. The more the unions were purged, the weaker the opposition to the purges, and the easier subsequent purges became. But many of the purges that followed were not so purely anti-Communist. The international unions recognized the effectiveness of anti-Communist charges, and used the rhetoric of the Cold War to justify purging Canadian union leaders who could not, or would not, toe the international line.

15 Labour's Cold War (II): Purging the Trades and Labour Congress, 1949-1955

1949: ' W E A L L K N O W W H O T H E Y A R E '

After the collapse of the Canadian Seamen's Union the struggle for control of the Trades and Labour Congress shifted to the annual convention and the leadership elections. The death of the CSU was a triumph for Frank Hall and the right-wing international unions in Canada, and it sharpened their resolve to dominate the congress. The weeks leading up to the Calgary convention in September 1949 were spent planning strategy and lining up votes to expel the CSU and win seats on the executive council. Out of these meetings came a slate of candidates for the Congress executive, several resolutions supporting the Marshall Plan and condemning Communism, a plan to force a roll call vote on the expulsion of the CSU, and a demand for a bloc voting system. The AFL demonstrated its support for the right-wingers by scheduling an executive meeting at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto where they could meet and be seen with Hall. Expelling the CSU would be a sweet victory for the internationals, but the key to their ultimate control of the TLC was a revised voting system. The voting scheme that Hall and the AFL had in mind would replace the existing rule of one vote per delegate with weighted votes cast by union officials, according to the size of their unions. The clout that would accompany such a system was enormous: 77 per cent of the 460,000 members of the TLC belonged to international unions, and the fourteen unions in Hall's group made up the majority of those. Given a weighted vote, a handful of international vice-presidents could determine congress policy. This was anathema to the small national unions and the congress moderates who feared domination by the AFL. But this time Hall expected to capture that power, and his hopes were buoyed by the Financial Post, which firmly predicted he would win. Hall, Russel Harvey, and their AFL supporters planned to emerge from the convention in full control of the congress, with new titles, a new voting system, an entrenched anti-Communist policy, and a blacklist of Communists and Communist sympathizers.

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Voting in these drastic changes required a majority vote by the 977 delegates at the Calgary convention, so each international union in Hall's camp promoted attendance by its locals and agreed to lay down the law with the delegates before the convention. Hall assembled the representatives of his own union, the Railway and Steamship Clerks, at Calgary's Palliser Hotel on the night before the vote to expel the CSU, and he gave the 71 delegates an ultimatum: all delegates would attend the vote, all delegates would vote for the expulsion of the CSU. Abstentions were not permitted. Those who did not vote as ordered would be expelled from the union. The performance of each delegate would be recorded in a roll-call vote. The lobbying and the arm twisting before the vote was so heavy handed that word leaked out to the press. 'Veteran delegates could not recall when there had been so much back room manoeuvring,' Ronald Williams wrote in the Financial Post; 'the AFL, led by Frank Hall, unquestionably played it the hardest. Their campaign to line up delegates made ordinary back room politicking look like a tea party.'1 The motion to expel the CSU was a formality; the real damage had been done to the union months earlier when the executive suspended it and denied it the support of the labour movement during the strike. Nor was the vote expected to be close. The bungled strike and the union's repudiation of Percy Bengough's offer had extinguished what credit the CSU had had with the congress moderates. But even if the vote was going to be lopsided, the Right was still anxious to call it and have it recorded. Winning the vote would be a symbolic victory; recording the vote would serve a more practical function by flushing out the dissidents, the sympathizers, and the Communists in the congress and in individual unions. As the vice-president of one international union put it: 'The delegates with me are very desirous of having a roll call vote. We want this for many reasons.'2 The Labour Progressive party was prepared for the showdown. After considering its options it gave up the union as a lost cause. Party policy was represented at the convention by Bruce Magnuson of the Sawmill Workers and William Edmiston of the Chemical Workers. These two skilled trade-union organizers were likely speaking for the LPP's trade-union commission when they asked delegates to vote for the expulsion of the CSU and to move on to new issues. Before the convention opened, the CSU itself sent Percy Bengough a carefully worded note withdrawing from the congress and calling for labour unity. The LPP's appraisal was cool and realistic; there was little reason to send the party's supporters into a losing battle to preserve a defeated union. This careful strategy disintegrated, however, on contact with an overheated labour movement. The convention opened in a tense atmosphere. At the podium, Bengough and his officers were well aware of Hall's plans. The future of the congress would be decided by a series of votes on the election of officers and the proposed bloc vote. The vote on the CSU was not an issue for Bengough; he had no further interest in the union. On the convention floor, however, the tension mounted as the vote approached. A handful of delegates were determined to speak out in favour of the

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CSU, or at least against the strong-arm tactics of the international officers. Other delegates were eyeing the door, preparing to slip out before the vote. At the back of the hall, Wass Turple, a delegate from a Vancouver local of Frank Hall's own union, was anxiously trying to decide how to vote. His Vancouver local was outraged at the treatment of the CSU, and he was instructed to register a protest vote. But the night before, at the Palliser Hotel, Hall had made it clear that Turple would pay a steep price for his protest. The pressure was getting to him, and he was angry. Long before the motion came to a vote, the convention floor was in chaos. Members of the CSU, after calmly withdrawing the union from the congress to avoid a divisive vote, suddenly appeared in the visitors' gallery and showered the delegates with pamphlets defending the union's handling of the strike. Rebellious delegates made speeches condemning the AFL for meddling in Canadian affairs. The vice-president of the AFL Fur and Leather Workers fought back with a thinly veiled threat on behalf of the Hall group that the conservatives were 'tired of delegates who are pretty well marked - we all know who they are - and who believe in totalitarianism getting up on this floor and expounding democracy and trying to poison the minds of the delegates against the International unions.' By the time the vote arrived, nationalists were shouting at internationalists, the right-wingers at the leftwingers, and the centrists at the rank-and-file democrats; the moderates were scattered in all directions.3 The motion to expel the CSU was submitted by the Montreal lodges of Bengough's own union, the Machinists. The preamble to the motion argued for the expulsion of the CSU in terms that were unmistakably those of the Cold War: The CSU's connections in foreign lands are part of a totalitarian plan of intrigue meant to completely destroy Western democracy through the control of the shipping lanes of the world ...' In a convention now thoroughly polarized, it was time to vote.4 The heat of the debate destroyed the LPP's cool plan to expel the CSU and avoid a roll call vote. Bruce Magnuson acted according to plan and voted to expel the union. He was the only one in his delegation of fifteen workers from the Ontario sawmills who did so. Two others supported the CSU, and the other twelve chose to abstain. William Edmiston was more successful with his delegation of Chemical Workers from Toronto: eight out of nine followed Edmiston and voted to expel the CSU. The left-wing B.C. Fishermen and the Vancouver Civic Employees went the other way and between them produced almost half of the votes supporting the CSU; but here, too, many of the delegates abstained. Every delegate from Kent Rowley and Madeleine Parent's AFL textile union abstained. The unions that were considered the hard core of the left wing were completely undisciplined. The issue was too volatile and too seething with antagonisms to obtain a consensus on the left. Frank Hall likewise was unable to maintain complete discipline over the delegates from the international unions; three members of his own union broke ranks, among them the Vancouver clerk Wass Turple, who said his union buddies would throw him off the nearest pier if he voted to expel the Seamen.

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When the dust and the leaflets settled, the roll call vote revealed that the CSU had been expelled from the congress by a lopsided vote of 702 to 77. In spite of the pressure from the right wing and the LPP to vote for an expulsion, nearly 200 delegates abstained. Frank Hall was well pleased; the vote was recorded and the accounting would come later. If the remainder of the convention went as well, the right wing would emerge in complete control. The expulsion of the seamen reflected the anti-Communist tone of the convention. Additional motions were passed in support of the Marshall Plan and NATO. Resolutions that did not conform to the new orthodoxy of the Cold War were killed in committee. When the Toronto local of the International Chemical Workers submitted a motion supporting trade with China and Eastern Europe, it was taken as evidence of Communist activities in the union. Chemical Workers' president H.A. Bradley was confronted with this evidence of Communist propaganda emanating from William Edmiston and the Toronto local. In his speech, Bradley promised the convention that the union would purge itself. 'I want you to know,' Bradley told the delegates, 'that of the ten thousand Chemical Workers in Canada, nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety of them are the finest, loyal citizens that your country can claim. The other ten we will take care of ourselves. We will take care of them good.'5 Labour Minister Humphrey Mitchell congratulated the congress on its anti-Communist initiatives and promised that as long as he was minister there would never be a Taft-Hartley Act in Canada. What Mitchell was promoting was a quid pro quo: the labour movement expelled the Communists and kept the pressure off the government to do the same, and the government held off the employers and the conservatives who wanted the provisions of a Taft-Hartley Act, which would make it more difficult for unions to win and keep contracts. Concluding that 'chaos rules in many lands,' Mitchell praised the delegates for their defence of freedom. The official Labour Gazette cited the congress for its 'forthright determination' to rid itself of Communist domination. In preparation for the purges that would follow, the Gazette contributed a list of unions that labour officials considered Communist-led.6 Percy Bengough made no effort to stem the tide of anti-Communist measures at the convention. He had abandoned his earlier principled defence of Communists as legitimate trade-union leaders, and he now offered no resistance to the censure and expulsion of Communists from the union movement. He had moved with the times, and his attempts to save the CSU were behind him. Frank Hall recognized this and realized that Bengough was still in control of the convention. Hall cancelled his plan to run against Bengough, and the elections turned out badly for the right wing. The single victory for the slate came with the election of the strongly anti-Communist Claude Jodoin from the Montreal council of the TLC. Jodoin's two-vote margin over the moderate Elphege Beaudoin in the campaign for the executive council gave him his first seat on the national executive, and was the first step in his progress to the presidency of the TLC and later the Canadian Labour Congress. The left wing was completely routed during the elections. Its only opportunity to muster its vote

346 The Cold War in Canadian Society came when fisherman Alex Gordon polled 189 votes while losing to Birt Showier. Two years later, Gordon could not even get into the congress, as the TLC tightened its rules against the participation of suspected Communists. Hall's last trump card - the proposal for a bloc voting system - was neatly finessed by Bengough. Instead of a bloc voting system, Bengough suggested a compromise that would increase the power of the larger unions and decrease the participation of the smaller, more activist unions. Where the old policy entitled union locals to one delegate per 100 members, Bengough supported a new formula that allowed up to three delegates for the first 600 members, and one delegate per 500 members thereafter. The new formula reduced the number of delegates that each union could send, but its impact was greatest on the activist left-wing unions, which had previously sent the maximum number of delegates to the conventions. In 1948, for example, the combined delegations of the B.C. Fishermen, Vancouver Civic Employees, and Canadian Seamen approached their allowed maximum of 135 delegates. Under the revised formula, they would have been limited to 31 delegates. The larger international unions that rarely used their full quota could still send about the same number of delegates as they had in the past, but at future conventions they could count on less opposition. The new formula also worked in Bengough's favour by limiting the total number of delegates that the AFL unions could send. If Hall's group had used its full quota in 1949 it could have flooded the convention with several thousand of its own delegates and passed a proxy-voting system by force of numbers. In the future it would be more difficult for anyone to organize such a campaign. The delegates agreed, and the reapportionment was passed. The effect was evident the next year when attendance dropped to 665 delegates. Many of those who were missing because of reapportionment, purges, and increased screening of delegates were the noisiest, most obstreperous, left-wing gadflies. At the best of times they had never been able to muster more than about a quarter of the votes on any issue; now there were fewer of them. Debates at the conventions were less contentious as a result, and the kind of political resolutions on trade with Communist countries or criticisms of NATO and the Marshall Plan that the left used to introduce, were also missing. Some of the moderate delegates allowed that the meetings were less interesting as a result, which may explain in part why the following year, without any further reapportionment, only 406 delegates came to the convention. Trade unionists identified with the left were not only barred from conventions; many of them were expelled from their own unions, often on flimsy charges. Wass Turple, one of fourteen clerks who defied Frank Hall, was expelled from the union for 'giving aid and comfort to the Communist dominated CSU' and making 'false and derogatory statements' in which he implied that he had been 'coerced, intimidated and threatened by the Brotherhood through certain of its officers.' Turple, expelled from his union, retired from his trade and opened up a small shop on Vancouver's Granville Street, selling sea shells and small trinkets to tourists. The fate of the thirteen other clerks is not recorded, but none of them turned up as delegates at

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the next convention.7 Several of Hall's allies also conducted purges of the dissenters in their unions. Chemical Workers' president H.A. Bradley purged Edmiston and nine others and placed seven more union members on probation. The result was a newly pacified Canadian local and a satisfied audience of anti-Communist international officers.8 Union members who were expelled faced potentially harsh consequences. Many of the unionists worked under 'closed shop' agreements that required employees to be members of the union, and so their expulsion led to a loss of a job, a pension and possibly a vocation if there were no sympathetic rival unions or non-union jobs available. Some of the skilled organizers who had good connections with the LPP were somewhat better off, as many of them found work in surviving left-wing unions like the independent United Electrical Workers, which hired a number of talented organizers purged from other unions. But for many, the purge meant a loss of a career. Those who appealed their expulsions found that the process was usually fruitless because the unions held a great deal of arbitrary authority over the activities of their members. Where appeals were allowed by the union constitution, they were often heard by senior officers in the union who supported the purges. An appeal to the courts was equally barren because judges were loath to interfere in the internal workings of the unions. The courts, in these cases, found nothing amiss in the expulsion of trade unionists for expressing unpopular opinions, for associating themselves with unpopular political causes, and for belonging to a political party that was legal in Canada. In most cases, the courts sanctioned the purges in the unions as they did in other professional organizations like the British Columbia Bar Association. Professional associations, through simple amendments to their constitutions, were able to restrict the civil liberties of their members severely in the name of the common good of the organization. The threat posed by Communists was usually taken as self-evident by the unions and then by the courts.9 The argument presented in favour of these repressive amendments was often no more than the assertion that Communists were necessarily subversives because Communism was intent on the destruction of capitalism, a goal that necessarily meant the destruction of the union movement. Those who questioned this logic risked expulsion as Communist sympathizers. When unions actually laid charges against Communists and their supporters, however, they usually added on miscellaneous charges of insubordination, unethical behaviour, and financial mismanagement. This practice satisfied the union lawyers, who were mindful of court challenges, and cast such a web of vague accusations that the dissidents had little chance of escaping the purge. 1950: ' W E ARE D O I N G TO T H E M WHAT T H E Y W O U L D DO TO US IN MOSCOW'

At this time the actual size of the Communist party in Canada, and the kind of

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threat it posed, was the subject of debate. Newspaper articles estimated membership in the party at 10,000 to 20,000 'card-carrying' Communists. Some reports offered even higher estimates. Financial Post reporter Ronald Williams developed a 'red union roster' that included 50,000 members of the TLC unions and 62,000 members of the CCL unions. The newspaper editors referred to these workers as Stalin's North American troops occupying key positions in vital industries, and called for a ban on the LPP. The highest estimate was offered by former CSU member T.G. McManus, who claimed that the party and its supporters numbered half a million; but more reliable estimates placed the total at between 5,000 and 10,000. Twice that number may well have belonged to the party at some time, but as the LPP itself conceded, there was a high turnover during the war years and after. Under the mounting pressures of the Cold War, the numbers were declining even more sharply. Even as the number of active Communists dwindled, the skill, cunning and single-minded devotion attributed by anti-Communists to those remaining seemed to climb. By the time of the Korean War, the focus of the anti-Communist campaign had shifted from the ideological threat posed by Communism to the threat of industrial sabotage by individual Communists. Chamber of Commerce speakers and business magazines conjured up threatening scenarios of the damage that could be caused by a single saboteur. If a war started, they warned, Communists were poised to sabotage factories, airstrips, and such municipal services as the Vancouver power supply or the Toronto water system. Since anyone might be a secret Communist, and every saboteur could cause untold damage, the only way to guarantee national security, it was implied, was through a relentless campaign against Communism. In such an atmosphere there was little doubt that additional anti-Communist measures would be supported by the delegates to the annual convention of the Trades and Labour Congress in Montreal in 1950.10 Even before the convention opened, eighteen left-wing delegates were barred from the floor by the credentials committee, seven on explicitly political grounds. This pre-emptive move made it clear that delegate selection was no longer the prerogative of the locals. Now the congress could determine the political suitability of the elected delegates. President Bengough admitted that this was an illiberal direction for the congress to be moving, but he was no longer disposed to defend the rights of union members to elect their own representatives. Bengough said he preferred to err on the side of anti-Communism. This ban, the Financial Post estimated, cut the pro-Communist vote to 25 of the 665 delegates.11 The surviving left-wing unions prepared for the convention by submitting a variety of political resolutions. Petitions and resolutions were offered supporting the Stockholm peace plan and opposing nuclear proliferation. Additional resolutions called for trade with mainland China and the withdrawal of troops from Korea. These resolutions, and many of their supporters, never made it to the floor of the convention. Instead, the congress executive framed a statement on foreign policy,

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1,300 words in length, that was easily adopted on a voice vote. In reference to Communism, the policy statement warned of: the insincere efforts of Communists and Communist sympathizers seeking to weaken our own defenses and solidarity against the spread of Communism and the imperialist aims of world domination and enslavement by the dictatorship of Soviet Russia ... The activities of Communists and Communist sympathizers in our unions have never been sincere efforts to improve the position of working people. They have been designed in the past solely to further the interests of the Communist party. Today, these willing dupes are sowing confusion in our unions to assist only the Stalinist dictatorship ... Communists and persons of like minds in our own country are asking our members and others to sign the phoney Stockholm Peace Pledge and to pass 'ban the A-bomb' resolutions, hoping to keep us disarmed and leave Soviet Russia free to move in on any country whenever it suits their purpose.1 2

The convention also passed a constitutional amendment that gave the executive tremendous discretionary power over the activities of the members of individual unions. The amendment banned members of the Labour Progressive party from holding union office in unions or labour councils affiliated with the TLC: 'No organization officered or controlled by Communists or members of the LPP or any person espousing Communism or advocating the violent overthrow of our institutions shall be allowed recognition in this congress.'13 This new regulation, voluntarily adopted by the delegates with little dissent, was similar to part of the American Taft-Hartley Act imposed on American unions by the U.S. Congress. Unions and labour councils were required to demonstrate that they were 'free' from Communists to the satisfaction of the regulating body. If a union would not or could not do this, it would be denied all the services of the regulating body. In the United States, a union failing the Taft-Hartley requirements would be denied the protection of the state in enforcing regulations covering industrial disputes, conciliation, and certification for bargaining. In Canada, the executive of the Trades and Labour Congress intended to enforce a similar kind of control over its affiliates. Any union could be suspended from the congress for electing an officer who could be called 'a person espousing Communism.' What exactly constituted 'espousing Communism' was not well defined; the judgement was made at the discretion of a committee. The consequences of expulsion from the congress were potentially disastrous: once suspended, as the CSU example demonstrated, a union was vulnerable to raiding and strikebreaking. The congress further invaded the rights of the unions by banning attendance at the convention by Communists, members of the LPP, anyone belonging to 'named subversive organizations,' or indeed anyone belonging to any organization 'known to participate in and advance the aims and policies of Communism.' These new restrictions mirrored the rules of the CCL and the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) and were patterned after a clause in the AFL constitution. The fact that Canada

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lacked an Attorney General's List of 'named' subversive organizations was not an obstacle for the zealous credentials committee. 'Naming' would be left to the executive council, which would draw up its own list. 'This is arbitrary, yes,' committee chairman Marcel Francq agreed, 'but we want to be arbitrary just as they would be arbitrary with us if they took away our rights ...'14 Proof that a delegate belonged to a 'named organization' would be assumed unless the accused could prove otherwise. This extraordinary presumption was defended by the chairman of the Constitution and Law Committee, who reasoned that the accused should be allowed 'the same opportunity as would be given any of the delegates if they were in Russia, to defend [himself] ... he will have to prove to the Executive Council that he is not a Communist. That is our attitude. We are fighting fire with fire ... We are doing to them just what they would do to us in Moscow. We are liquidating them.'15 The international unions lost another bid for a bloc vote, but they made gains in their campaign against the independence and the nationalism of the TLC. During 1950 an impressive number of local unions organized by the congress were turned over to the AFL unions without further protest. In twelve months, 23,312 members of independent national and federal unions were transferred to the international unions that claimed them. The concession slashed the TLC's working budget and undermined its ability to employ its own staff and organize. The transfers raised the proportion of workers belonging to the American-based unions from 77 to 83 per cent. The transfers received little comment at the time, but they consolidated the power and influence that had been sought by the international officers and won under the anti-Communist banner. The repression of the Communists within the labour movement, by the unionists themselves, was a matter of continuing satisfaction to the Liberal government. Labour Minister Milton Gregg brought the government's blessing to the purges in his address to the convention: 'I wish to commend the labour movement of this country,' Gregg said, 'for its forthright action in exposing and ousting the termites in their midst. It was done with neatness and dispatch. And only you could have done it with such thoroughness.' 16 The anti-Communist provisions written into the TLC constitution in 1950 were designed with a specific campaign in mind. The congress now had the power to seek out and suspend left-wing union officials anywhere in Canada. In the months that followed the convention, purges were carried out in the Port Arthur Trades and Labour Council, the Toronto Trades and Labour Council, the International Chemical Workers, the International Carpenters, and the Vancouver Civic Employees, a national union. The congress demonstrated that it was willing to interfere with the internal affairs of the unions, to regulate their voting powers, to nullify elections, and to silence dissent in the name of anti-Communism. The attack by the congress on one of its own national unions, the Vancouver Civic Employees Local 28 demonstrated just how far from Bengough's earlier vision the congress had strayed. Lacking an international union to carry out a purge, the con-

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gress executive sent its own vice-president to order the union president, Jack Phillips, and his associates to resign. The leaders of the Labour Progressive party appeared to accept the purge as inevitable and offered Phillips a job in another union. But Phillips, backed by the rank and file, fought the purge and took the entire local out of the congress. The congress retaliated by creating another union for 'loyal' members to join, but the membership remained firmly behind Phillips. The congress then attacked the union, declaring that it was 'no longer a labour organization' because it was led by a Communist, but the B.C. Labour Relations Board rejected the argument and the purge was defeated. By the mid-1950s restrictions on the political activities of union members were widespread. A U.S. Department of Labour study examined the constitutions of 100 of the largest unions, with a total membership of 15 million workers, and found antiCommunist restrictions in the majority of them. The kinds of restrictions varied slightly. Ten million workers belonged to unions that forbade Communists from holding union office; 6 million workers belonged to unions that barred Communists or supporters of Communism from union membership. The criteria and procedures used to determine who should be considered a Communist or a sympathizer were usually vague and arbitrary. Typically, the determination was made by a union tribunal, at its own discretion, and the accused were denied the right to confront their accusers, to call or cross-examine witnesses, or to appeal judgments. Most of these restrictions surveyed by the Department of Labour applied to individuals. Only 2 of the 100 union constitutions gave the union officers the power to suspend the charters of entire locals that failed to enforce anti-Communist regulations. The power to punish entire locals or unions for harbouring alleged subversives was uncommon, but this was exactly the kind of control adopted by the TLC, in effect placing the Canadian congress among the most repressive labour organizations in North America at the height of the purges.17 'THE RED THREAT TO OUR PACIFIC GATEWAY'

An intelligence report circulated in the U.S. Department of State early in August 1953 concluded that Communism in Canada threatened neither the stability and security of Canada nor Canada-U.S. relations. The Canadian labour congresses had effective bans on Communists, the report found, and since 1950 the campaign to expose and isolate Communist leaders and supporters in the unions 'has paralleled that in the U.S.' While the number of Canadian workers under 'direct Communist control' was found to be slight, the potential for industrial sabotage and 'mischief making' was considerable. In particular, Communists held 'commanding posts' in the electrical trades, in the mines and smelters, and in the fishermen's union. The continuing presence of these Communists was attributed in part to public indifference and a lack of sustained attention by the media. Even though 'Communism in Canada has made fairly good copy' since the time of the spy trials, the report found

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that English language newspapers carried only the occasional expose of Communism in the unions. Yet the authors concluded that there was no real threat to the security of the state because, 'In times of war, that menace could be effectively contained by the Canadian authorities.'18 The Financial Post, in particular, found that Communism was 'good copy' even after the influence of the Communists had been reduced to nil in both labour congresses. Once the principal labour leaders were purged or banned from the congresses the newspaper found new cause for concern in the presence of Communists ('pockets of Communists') in scattered union locals. In 1953 the newspaper's attention was focused on British Columbia, an area where the Communists had once been a prominent force in the trade unions. Typical of these stories was a full-page article by a retired naval officer titled 'The Red Threat to Our Pacific Gateway.' The article revealed the presence of sixty-one branches of the LPP, forty-five branches of the Russian Canadian Federation, thirty-one locals of the fishing union, ten peace councils, nine labour youth groups, seven shipyard locals, and several Ukrainian-Canadian clubs. Concerning the Russian Canadian Federation branches, for example, the report warned that the clubs had 'sprung up ominously ... near defense installations.' Furthermore, the members of such organizations, particularly the United Jewish People's Order, frequently held 'cultural get-togethers,' which were taken to be a kind of 'preparation for a political change of status.'19 Western Business and Industry surpassed these stories and won the 1953 award for outstanding business journalism with its articles on the activities of 'Moscow inspired traitors' in British Columbia. For seven months the magazine ran a series of stories accompanied by a graphic design that showed a giant hammer and sickle floating above a map of the province, casting an ominous shadow over the land. Convinced that 18,000 workers in British Columbia laboured 'under Kremlin domination,' the writer, Lawrence Eckroyd, pictured a Canadian party entirely controlled by Moscow and a Communist conspiracy 'envisioning the overthrow of the Canadian democratic way of life by force, if necessary.' The conspiracy was widespread, including, by Eckroyd's reasoning, many labour leaders who were not members of the LPP. The magazine felt obliged to denounce these subversives out of patriotic duty, and offered a list of union leaders who were current or past members of the Communist party or the LPP, or were associated with the party or its policies. The articles concluded with a plea for the abolition of the closed shop, decertification of unions with Communist leaders, the banning of the Labour Progressive party, and the arrest of its leaders. Legislation, that is, that surpassed the American Taft-Hartley Act.20 One of Eckroyd's targets was the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union (UFAWU), a left-wing union with a number of prominent Communists on its executive. The pressure was mounting for the Trades and Labour Congress to apply its anti-Communist provisions to the fishermen, but as President Bengough knew, purging the leaders of the fishermen would not be easy. Bengough may have had some

Labour's Cold War (II) 353 personal regrets as well, because at one time the union had been a model of the kind of union that he had hoped to develop in Canada. Before the war, Bengough himself had helped to organize the individual fishing and cannery locals that were joined together as the fishermen's union during the Second World War. In 1948, the fishermen had been part of the vanguard of autonomous Canadian unions whose independent votes (and dues) helped to promote the autonomy of the TLC as a whole. Five years later that dream of an autonomous TLC was in ruins; purging the fishermen's union would complete a sorry chapter in the history of the TLC. In August 1953, the congress executive met to debate the expulsion of the UFAWU. Before it reached a decision, Hal Banks and the SIU launched a raid on the UFAWU. Banks had always claimed that he would organize 'everything that floats' in Canada, and he picked this moment to stake a claim on the fish boats on the west coast. Five years before, Bengough would have censured the SIU for raiding a member of the congress. Instead, one week after the raids began, he announced the suspension of the UFAWU from the TLC because of 'an accumulation of incidents tending to show a very definite leaning towards Communism and its front organizations.' No precise charges were given but the union officers were told that if they resigned and were replaced by a clean slate and if the union incorporated the congress ban on Communists into its own constitution, then the suspension would be lifted.21 The raid by the SIU and the ultimatum from the TLC both failed. If anything, the fishermen seemed to rally around their leaders in the face of the threats. The fishermen demonstrated their defiance of the congress by sending a prominent Communist delegate, Homer Stevens, to the 1954 convention to protest the expulsion of the union from the congress. Stevens gave a lengthy speech; the union was thrown out regardless. There was little support from a left-wing caucus small enough to meet in a closet. The delegates seemed more upset that a Communist had been allowed to speak to them at all. They passed a gag rule that prohibited anyone who could not qualify as a delegate from appealing decisions by the executive; this foreclosed any future appeals by alleged Communists. The purge was complete, but it failed to break the union. The UFAWU survived intact outside the congress.22 At the 1955 convention there were few left-wing delegates in attendance and there was no further discussion of Communism. The focus of the convention turned inward as the TLC prepared to merge with the Canadian Congress of Labour to form the Canadian Labour Congress. Percy Bengough, defeated in his campaign for autonomy but rewarded in his efforts to help bring the labour movement back together under one roof, retired. T H E STATE A N D T H E L A B O U R M O V E M E N T : P R I V A T I Z I N G A N T I COMMUNISM

Despite frequent appeals from employers and some right-wing trade unionists, the

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Liberal government steadfastly refused Taft-Hartley-type legislation banning Communists from union office. The Liberals were ardent Cold Warriors, but they were still mindful of the controversy that surrounded the internment of the Communists during the war. They were also wary of the anti-Communist witch-hunts in the United States that were fuelled by federal and state laws banning Communists from union office and government employment. The Liberals chose instead to 'privatize' the control of Communists in the unions by encouraging the labour movement to 'clean its own house.' Labour ministers gave vocal support for the purges at the labour conventions, but otherwise the government projected an image of judicious distance. The government did not want to be drawn into legislation that would invade civil liberties and intrude on self-governing groups like the trade unions - if such action could be avoided. The Liberals believed the unions would purge themselves, if only because the international unions were forcing their own anti-Communist standards on their Canadian locals. Their faith was repaid, year after year. By the time of the Korean War, the Canadian labour congresses were in step with their American counterparts. Radicals were purged from the conventions or reduced, as one left-winger recalled, to a caucus that could meet in an elevator. Moreover, the unions established political tests for membership in the labour congresses, based on delegates' support for the pillars of the Cold War. NATO, the Marshall Plan, the rearmament of Germany, and non-recognition of Communist China were among the credos. Belief in a Communist conspiracy was required and unquestionable; the unions thus became part of the culture of the Cold War, and an effective means of disseminating it. The Liberals also knew that they could count on the CCF to promote anti-Communism in the trade-union movement, if only to undermine the LPP and consolidate its own position in the unions. The CCF was zealous, to the point of betraying its own principles at times. CCF research director Lome Ingle, for example, compiled a list of Communists in the labour movement with the help of Ronald Williams, the anti-Communist business journalist from the arch-conservative Financial Post. Williams, using the RCMP, employers, and American blacklists as sources, supplied Ingle with a three-page list of officers and unions that he judged to be Communist or Communist-led. Ingle accepted this speculative blacklist, and Williams in return suggested that 'if you can lay your hands on similar dope which might be of value to me, I would appreciate it.' 23 While the Liberals avoided passing laws, the state could still assist in the purges. Allowing Hal Banks into Canada to lead the attack on the CSU and overlooking the thuggery of the SIU during the campaign are notorious examples of federal assistance. More pervasive was the use of informers and spies who reported to the RCMP Security Service. Surveillance of the unions was justified on the grounds of national security; the RCMP identified Communism as the primary threat to the state and the unions as a primary target for infiltration and subversion. It is evident from files on trade unions released under the Access to Information Act that detailed information

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that could only come from inside sources - sometimes highly placed - was routinely available.24 The Mounties also served as a kind of conduit for information; they collected it from their sources and funnelled it back to union officials who were attacking Communists. Thus the state acted as a friendly facilitator of private purges, while maintaining an arms-length relationship in public.25 This approach also allowed the government some flexibility in dealing with the Communists and the employers. Many employers used the rhetoric of the anti-Communist crusade to dress up a campaign against militant and effective unionists. Other employers, however, had developed mutually satisfying relationships with unions led by acknowledged Communists, and did not need any intervention by the state. The relationship between the Communist-led United Electrical Workers and General Electric was an example that showed the kind of sophisticated accommodation that capitalist and Communist could manage, even in the midst of the Cold War. The cooperation between the parties even allowed GE to take on defence contracts at its plants after the union agreed to allow the workers in specific projects to be screened for security clearance with the understanding that those who failed - and it was certain that some would - would be transferred to other work, not fired. This kind of accommodation demonstrated that the alarms about the dangers posed by Communist saboteurs was for public consumption alone and was not taken very seriously at the upper levels of corporate management and government. In 1952 the TLC executive proposed an official national ban on the Communist party, the LPP, 'or any other organization which aims to undermine or destroy our democratic way of life.' By this time, Percy Bengough had become a public Cold Warrior with no tolerance for the Communists, and he denounced them as revolutionaries intent on destroying trade unions. With Canadian soldiers fighting Communism in Korea, he suggested, it was 'neither reasonable nor wise to smugly countenance and nurse those agents and their undermining policies here at home.' But the executive misjudged the mood of the delegates, who lined up at the microphones to say that it would not work, they did not like it, and they were amazed that the suggestion had been made. The resolution was defeated on a voice vote; even so, with anti-Communist sentiment institutionalized in the leadership of the trade union movement, the federal government had little need for legislation.26 While Quebec enacted - not without controversy - its own variant of Taft-Hartley,27 no other province attempted to bring in explicitly anti-Communist labour legislation. But in two notable cases the federal and provincial labour boards interpreted existing laws in a way that would have led to widespread decertification of Communist-led unions if their precedents had been followed. In the first case, the Canadian Labour Relations Board (CLRB) used its discretionary power to decertify the CSU, a year after the union lost the strike and was ejected from the labour congress. The findings of the board were remarkable. The board first determined that the CSU had violated Canadian law during the strike and had enlisted the support of 'reputed Communist groups' in foreign countries. The purpose of the strike, accord-

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ing to the board, was not the promotion of the interests of the seamen in a way envisaged by the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigations Act; instead the board believed that the CSU was promoting 'international Communist policies,' and therefore the union was not in fact a union at all but rather something else, a conspiratorial organization devoted to fulfilling the goals of a foreign organization. The board then ruled that the CSU was 'not a trade union within the meaning of the Act' and was therefore not entitled to certification as a bargaining agent. Certification was revoked and the CSU, or what was left of it, was no longer qualified to bargain on behalf of Canadian workers. When the union appealed, it was denied the right to appear before the courts. Only those unions eligible for certification could receive the legal status (as a 'person') to appear. The board's decision had placed the CSU beyond the protection of the law. At this point the union expired utterly, and the ruling went unchallenged. 28 A similar ruling by the Nova Scotia Labour Relations Board (NSLRB) was appealed all the way to the supreme court and resulted in a judgment written by Mr Justice Ivan Rand that finally put firm limits on such attempts by government boards to institute anti-Communist purges without explicit authority from the legislature. This case arose when a Halifax-based union, the Maritime Workers Federation, applied for certification at the shipbuilding firm of Smith and Rhulands Ltd. The board refused to certify the union because its president, J.K. Bell, was a Communist. As such, the board concluded, Bell was necessarily committed to the Communist program, which the board described in its decision: 'The Communist party differs essentially from genuine Canadian political parties in that it uses positions of Trade Union leadership and influence as a means of furthering policies and aims dictated by a foreign government. Statements and actions of Communists show that their policy is designed to weaken the economic and political structure of Canada as a means of ultimately destroying the established form of Government.' 29 The union appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, arguing that the board had exceeded its authority. Justice Rand, speaking for the majority, ordered the NSLRB to certify the union in spite of what they might think about J.K. Bell's Communist beliefs. No one can doubt the consequences of a successful propagation of such doctrines and the problem presented between toleration of those who hold them and restrictions that are repugnant to our political traditions is of a difficult nature. But there are certain facts which must be faced. There is no law in this country against holding such views nor of being a member of a group or party supporting them. This man is eligible for election or appointment to the highest political offices in the Province: on what grounds can it be said that the Legislature of which he might be a member has empowered the Board in effect to exclude him from a Labour Union? Or to exclude a Labour Union from the benefits of the statute because it avails itself, in legitimate activities, of his abilities? Regardless of the strength and character of the influence of such a person, there must be some evidence that, with the acquiescence of the members, it has been directed to ends destructive of the legitimate purposes of the Union, before

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that association can justify the exclusion of employees from the rights and privileges of a statute designed primarily for their benefit.

It was one thing, Rand seemed to suggest, to condemn the evils of Communism as many were ready to do, and quite another to conclude that an individual was dangerous to society because he was a Communist, especially in the absence of legislation to that effect.31 Thus the Supreme Court placed firm limits on the degree of intervention allowable by the state in regulating the political affiliations of trade unionists - in the absence of any laws passed by Parliament. WHY WERE THEY PURGED?

The purge of the Communists and the left from the TLC and its affiliated unions proceeded uninterrupted from the 1949 expulsion of the Canadian Seamen's Union through a final purge of the Vancouver building trades in 1955. Each year the delegates to the convention were screened according to increasingly repressive rules to eliminate Communists and their alleged supporters, the sympathizers and fellow travellers. Each year the delegates who passed through the screening procedure passed new rules further restricting the political activities of union members and narrowing the topics that could be raised at conventions. Initially there had been great resistance to self- censorship and internal purges, but this was overcome after the collapse of the CSU. What opposition remained was further weakened by the polarizing influence of the Cold War and by the progressive purges of internal dissent in the union movement. These purges were made possible by the support of ordinary delegates who approved constitutional limitations on the political activities of their fellow unionists. Some of the purges were no more than vendettas by senior union leaders against their Canadian districts. Other purges were carried out by the leaders of the international unions to undermine the coalition of nationalist and autonomy-minded delegates who attempted to defy the wishes of the AFL. But the purges also had the support of the rank-and-file delegates, who voted annually to support anti-Communist resolutions, who gave their leaders the power to purge, and who basked in the praise heaped on them by successive ministers of labour. Once the purges began, the approval of further anti-Communist resolutions was never in doubt; the moderate delegates became so persuaded of the need to fight Communism that they hardly needed further prompting. As one delegate said after voting for the expulsion of the CSU: 'We know what we are here for, and we will do it without those who call themselves the "right wing" telling us ,..'32 A picture of how many purges were carried out emerges quite clearly from the available documentation and the recollections of participants. But the deeper questions - of why the purges took place, and why increasingly repressive purges were supported by politically moderate delegates - remain a matter of speculation.

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The delegates to the labour congresses, as much as or more than the security agencies or the government, saw Communism as a manifest threat to the national security and ultimately to the union movement itself. Of course, the majority of unionists rejected the Soviet model as antithetical to the very idea of free trade unions. But labour's Cold War implied more than this. Unionists agreed, through their votes, with the claim of the anti-Communists (and the central message contained in Cold War rhetoric as a whole), that Communism was an international conspiracy, and that all Communists were necessarily conspirators bent on the violent overthrow of capitalism in general and the Canadian state in particular. The Canadian public, trade unionists included, heard this repeatedly from the state, from national and local politicians, from trade union leaders, and from church and business leaders, in the press and on the radio. It was, in short, a popular belief. But more than most, the trade unionists acted on their beliefs. The purges of the Communists from their labour stronghold suppressed the political activities of the Communists and the left in Canada more than any federal or provincial law. And because they were carried out in public, with much publicity and comment, they contributed greatly to the repressive atmosphere of the time. It was here, more than anywhere else, that Canada came closest to McCarthyism - where anti-Communism spread out of the control of the state and into the associations of civil society. The purges, for the most part, were fuelled by the mythology of the Cold War, by the special definition of 'Communism' adopted in the West, and by the common belief in the threat of international Communism. They were not, however, fuelled by evidence that a Communist conspiracy actually existed in Canada. The purges were largely an exercise in political theory. In fact, where the unionists had the opportunity to test the rhetoric of the Cold War against the facts of the activities of the Communists and the Left in Canada, they chose not to. Sadly, this made the union movement in part the witting agent of its own suppression on behalf of others. When the rhetorical arguments for the suppression of Communism in Canada were questioned, as they were, for example, by Mr Justice Ivan Rand in the case of Communist labour leader J.K. Bell, the arguments did not hold up. What was missing from the calls for repression and criminalization of Communist beliefs and activities was any evidence that the Communists in the labour movement were committing any crimes, or posing an actual threat to life, or property, or the institutions of organized labour or the state. Where was the evidence that the Communist labour leaders were themselves criminal conspirators and saboteurs against national security and public safety? Apart from the theoretical writings of foreign revolutionaries, little or nothing was offered in evidence. Mr Justice Rand was not the only one to question the threat posed by Communists. When the U.S. State Department commissioned an intelligence report on the threat of Communists in the maritime occupations, 33 the evidence revealed that the Communists in the unions were powerless to sabotage shipping and could easily be discredited and controlled if they attempted to do so. The policies of the Liberal

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government likewise reflected its understanding that the Communists never, at any point, posed a real threat to the state. Had such a threat developed, the government retained a wide range of repressive options, from charges of criminal conspiracies where the facts warranted it, to the imposition of the War Measures Act to deal with apprehended insurrections. None of this, however, was remotely necessary. The RCMP believed that Communism was a threat to national security and targeted the unions for special surveillance. But the Mounties, like other anti-Communists, were preoccupied with the question of the political beliefs and associations of the individual unionists to the exclusion of the more fundamental question raised by Mr Justice Rand: If a union leader is a Communist, so what? The RCMP did not have an answer. The force, in spite of its network of labour spies and intelligence officers, lacked evidence that the Communists in the unions had any measurable effect on the unions. Their files were dominated by lists of names, of associates of named individuals, of the groups they belonged to, and of what they said. Other, essential questions went unresearched and unanswered. The RCMP could not say, for example, whether Communist-led unions acted in significantly different ways from other unions when it came to the number or duration of strikes, or the size of the wage demands, or the settlements reached. Did they run longer strikes? Did they resist reasonable settlements? For all their stern warnings about the dangers posed by Communists in the unions, the RCMP lacked evidence that the Communists had any real effect on them; throughout the first ten years of the Cold War the Mounties simply did not bother to collect any factual evidence that the Communist-led unions behaved differently from other unions. This extraordinary conclusion was reached in the mid-1950s by Mark McClung, a civilian who was working for the RCMP Security Service. McClung, who was in charge of the files on the Communist party, found that the Mounties had never prepared any systematic research on the impact of the Communists in the unions. After decades of surveillance of unions, and with information provided by generations of officers schooled in anti-Communist lore, the RCMP had no substantial information on these basic questions. The RCMP, like the right-wing trade unionists, was apparently content to extrapolate from the most extreme writings of the Communists to the most innocuous activities of a Communist union officer. When McClung suggested a study of selected Communist-led unions to assess their influence (and test the theory), the proposal was turned down because, he later recalled, the Mounties did not want to share their files with a researcher from the Department of Labour. The reason that the officer in charge gave McClung for withholding the files was that the researcher had once preached a sermon in the United Church, evidence, apparently, of some leftist tendencies. By this time, in any case, the purges were largely complete.34 Ignorance on this question was not limited to the RCMP. The Communists themselves were no farther ahead when it came to figuring out what effect their trade union leaders had on the unions. Certainly the Communist union leaders were good

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and proven leaders. And certainly they espoused Communism. But beyond that? The answer was not evident, even to the Labour Progressive party's inner circle of organizers and Communist politicians, known as the Trade Union Commission. One of these organizers, Bill Walsh, puzzled over this question for years, and several times he tried to initiate a discussion within the LPP about the relationship between the party and the trade-union leaders, always without success. Walsh, who organized for the United Electrical Workers, believed, as other organizers did, that the party's influence in the unions was based more on his successes as a trade-union leader than the members' belief in the intrinsic values of Communism. This was a heretical idea, but the evidence supported it. The leaders were personally respected and were maintained in leadership roles by democratic vote. Their beliefs were shared, respected, or just tolerated, depending on the individual union member. In general, Walsh found, the attitude of most union members towards his political beliefs resembled Percy Bengough's stated opinion that as long as the Communists had the best interests of the union movement in mind, their beliefs were their own business. In practice this meant that in a country with nearly a million union members, perhaps a few thousand belonged to the party, even at its peak of popularity. The workers were enthusiastic about their leaders, Walsh among them, but they remained ambivalent about the party itself. When Communists ran for office in the unions on their union credentials, they often received substantial majorities, but when they ran for public office, as Communists, they often polled no more than a few hundred votes, even from their own union members. This gulf between the party and its trade-union leaders, between theory and practice, was lost on most anti-Communists, who maintained that the Communist conspiracy was monolithic, and Canadian Communists were active and influential conspirators. The attribution of such discipline and obedience to Communists like Walsh was a compliment, perhaps, to the persuasive rhetoric of the party, which advertised its success with baroque rhetoric in the party newspapers that were so carefully scoured by the anti-Communists. The belief in the monolithic threat of Communism, as the State Department intelligence report noted, was sometimes a case of the anti-Communists' taking the propaganda of the Communists too literally. The anti-Communist campaigns in the labour movement were built on a shaky foundation of propaganda, vague theory, and political mythology. The rhetoric was easy to manipulate because there was no evidence required to support it, beyond superficial references to events in Europe and Asia. The security of the state was not increased by the purges. There were, however, benefits to other parties. Employers were, of course, potential beneficiaries of all the purges. Employers who supported anti-Communist labour laws in the form of a Canadian Taft-Hartley Act were interested in reducing the power of the unions and their capacity to organize, bargain, and strike. These demands made little headway with the federal government because the Liberals, who managed to keep the anti-Communist movement divided, were in a position to spurn their requests. The employers had more support

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in Quebec, where they made common cause with the Duplessis government and the churches in an effort to defeat the powerful and militant international unions; but the results of the campaign were mixed, at best. The CCF also sought advantage from the purges. Cold War social democracy intended to demonstrate to the public that it was a world apart from Communism. The purges also eliminated the Communists as a rival to the CCF within organized labour. The CCF's anti-Communism was clear enough, yet it did little to help the party at election time, as its popularity declined steadily from 1945 on, throughout the period of the purges. The international unions that complained about the nationalism of the labour movement after 1945 were better served by the purges. The isolation and expulsion of the militant Communists gave the international unions the opening they sought to reorganize the labour congress more to their liking. The expulsion of the left wing in the TLC upset the left-centre alliance forged by Percy Bengough and fatally undermined his drive for greater financial and administrative independence for the Canadian congress. The capitulation of the Canadian nationalists also led to the transfer of more than 20,000 workers from Canadian locals to international unions. This was a financial windfall for the international unions, which, then as now, drew more money out of the Canadian members than they returned. The purge of the radicals in Canada also eliminated some of the leading reformers within the international unions and eased the transition of these organizations into the more conservative world of business unionism. Those who preferred to keep radical politics and controversy out of the union conventions were also well served. The exclusion of Communists like Harold Pritchett of the International Woodworkers and C.S. Jackson of the United Electrical Workers from the CCL, and Homer Stevens, Bruce Magnuson, Jack Phillips, and many others from the TLC, had a noticeable effect on the annual labour conventions: they were quieter. The older Communist organizers, had been among the best and most fiery orators, and their pungent attacks on the congress conservatives were missed by many of the moderates. The purges also affected the quality of the debates at the labour conventions. Many of the contentious issues that the Left had previously introduced were stigmatized as Communist issues and kept off the floor, and those who were tempted to raise them risked condemnation and expulsion. An obvious example of ideological regimentation was the use of the Marshal! Plan as a kind of mousetrap for the Left, in Canada as well as the United States. The labour congresses in both countries made support of the plan official policy, and those who opposed it were labelled Communists, accused of acting on orders from Moscow, and purged. No doubt the accusation was partially correct; opposition to the plan was certainly orchestrated by the Soviet Union. But the Marshall Plan deserved scrutiny from a trade-union point of view, not mindless 'loyalty.' Those who raised questions were labelled agents of the Cold War enemy. In this manner, the anti-Communist purges served to silence dissent in the labour movement and to

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assure Canadian labour's acceptance of American Cold War foreign policy. It was not until the late 1960s, when union criticism of America's conduct of the war in Vietnam was voiced publicly, that the Canadian union movement was able to reestablish an autonomous position in relation to the wider world. It is worth noting that in the TLC, in particular, the suppression of dissent was promoted by the international unions of the AFL, an organization known for its active support of American foreign policy. The AFL was deeply involved in promoting U.S. interests in Europe after the war; American policy, as evident in the Marshall Plan, called for the development of a trade union movement free of Communist and other left-wing influences. To this end, AFL labour officials worked closely with the government and the CIA to undermine the European Communists. AFL president George Meany later boasted that the AFL had 'financed a split in the Communist-controlled union in France' and 'played a major part in keeping the Communists from taking over' in France and Italy. 'LOYALTY WAS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ABILITY'

The purges were supposed to protect Canadian trade unions, industry, and the country as a whole against Communist subversion. In practice, the purges themselves were damaging to the very fabric of working-class organization. The trials, expulsions, and accompanying turmoil were at best a waste of time for the union movement as a whole, and much effort was expended on removing officers, expelling and raiding unions and reorganizing workers who had already been organized, while the exposed rivalries between unions only gave employers fresh leverage in opposing union demands. At worst, the purges bitterly divided trade unionists and drove some of the most dedicated and effective organizers and militants out of the movement, or to its margins. As labour historian Bryan Palmer has written, despite the shifting Communist line, the Communists had 'won the support of many workers for one simple reason: at the local level they were capable of sensing the moods and needs of their membership.' The purges were effective through 'tactics of intimidation and new forms of domination that far exceeded those of many of the communist-led unions'. The result was that 'the labour movement in the post-1950 years would operate on the principle that "Loyalty was more important than ability." '35 The purges also led to a major shift in the political balance within the Canadian labour movement. Diminishing the strength of the left wing undermined the leftcentre alliance that Bengough had built to promote the interests of the national union movement and to control the ambitions of the internationals. The TLC lost what little control it had gained over its own destiny; more Canadian workers joined international unions, not necessarily because they wanted to - as they had in previous days when the strength of the international movement gave them muscle - but simply because the international unions coveted their dues. There was also an untold cost to the level of democratic participation. Through

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the purges the TLC lost its place as a key forum for debate on the future of the labour movement, and this newly subdued atmosphere was part of the reason for the sharp drop in attendance at TLC conventions, from nearly 1,000 at the time of the expulsion of the CSU to just over 400 three years later. There seemed little to do at the conventions except to pass increasingly strict anti-Communist policies and wait for 1956 when the TLC and the CCL would finally be reunited as the Canadian Labour Congress. Then a new generation of union leaders could start agitating for more autonomy and more financial independence all over again.

16

Ban the Bomb! The War on the Peace Movement

The era of the Cold War was the age of 'the Bomb.' It is entirely probable that the maintenance of a state of Cold War was only possible because of the existence of nuclear weapons. In earlier eras, the kind of international hostility that existed after 1945 between West and East would no doubt have led inevitably to a shooting war. Yet the Cold War, with its division of the world into military blocs and its feverish arms race, always threatened to escalate into the apocalyptic denouement of a nuclear holocaust. Not surprisingly, a major point of dissent from the Cold War was always the peace issue, which most often took the form of demands to 'Ban the Bomb.' The first wave of anti-nuclear protest rose at the end of the 1940s and peaked during the early 1950s. This was a movement contemporaneous with the launching and consolidation of the Cold War in Canada; as such, it was subjected to the full force of the intolerance meted out to dissent from the orthodoxy that was being enforced in this era. Indeed, the peace movement was a leading target of the Cold War in Canada. The Canadian state intervened actively against it, and within certain sectors of Canadian society there were clear signs of a quasi-McCarthyite mentality that did not shrink from using extreme methods, including threats and occasional acts of violence, to intimidate dissenters. If Canadians in the 1950s could not quite bring themselves to love the bomb, the majority apparently trusted it to maintain the peace.1 They came to this conclusion in the absence of any real consideration of the alternatives. Whether they would have changed their minds, given a fair and open debate, remains a moot point. What is clear, however, is that Canadian liberal democracy in the early Cold War era did not allow a free choice of alternatives. Those who challenged it ran real risks. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the risk takers were assembled largely under the umbrella of the Canadian Peace Congress, affiliated to the World Peace Council, which had branches in some seventy countries. At the heart of the Peace Congress was the extraordinary and charismatic figure of James Endicott, a former missionary

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in China who had espoused the cause of the Communists while Chiang Kai-shek was still in power. When Endicott returned to Canada to plunge into the peace movement, he became one of the most reviled men in the country.2 In this era it was the fate of those who espoused peace to be vilified as the enemies of freedom. Yet the cause of peace was an attractive one to many Canadians. Endicott and the Peace Congress symbolized this dilemma. PEACE VERSUS FREEDOM

E.P. Thompson has written of the Cold War at its point of origin that 'the cause of freedom and the cause of peace seemed to break apart. The 'West' claimed freedom; the 'East' claimed the cause of peace.'3 There were reasons, rooted in power politics, for this dichotomy. For almost five years the Americans held a nuclear monopoly, and throughout the 1950s they held a huge lead in both bombs and delivery systems. Their superior killing power was matched by a greater willingness to threaten to use nuclear weapons. The Soviets, in an inferior strategic position, tended to emphasize the importance of avoiding war. On the other hand, the Soviet Union had discredited itself in terms of human rights and freedom by its police-state methods over its own people and over those nations that fell within its orbit. Freedom was a value closely tied to anti-Communism. Of course, there was much within the West that scarcely tallied with freedom, and the USSR was hardly as peaceful as its rhetoric claimed. But, on the whole, Thompson argues, 'after every allowance is made for hypocrisy, both claims have a little colour.' As the world lined up in two camps under the competing banners of peace and freedom, the first nuclear disarmament movements in the West were seen by many as supporters of the enemy camp. After all, those who spoke about 'peace' were usually either Communists or fellow travellers of Moscow. On the other hand, those who spoke of 'freedom' often spoke of war as the means to liberate the world from the slavery of Communism. The Cold War had the world firmly in its icy grip, even in the words people chose to describe their ideas. To the American leadership, the peace movement was purely and simply an arm of Soviet policy abroad. American intelligence documents identified the peace movement as the number one instrument for Soviet penetration and subversion throughout the West. American diplomatic personnel in Canada, ever alert to the warning signs of potential discontent on America's borders, were by the late 1940s sending back dispatches to Washington concerning the potential for a Canadian branch of the Moscow peace offensive. In 1948, the American consul in Hamilton informed Washington that 'a serious effort is being made by the Communists in Canada through the creation of "Peace Congresses" to obtain support from the Canadian people to a peace movement cloaked by religious and women's organizations as primarily a counter-measure to American and Canadian rearmament programs.' The consul ended his detailed report on a cautionary note: 'the importance

366 The Cold War in Canadian Society of this "peace" movement should not be underestimated because of its natural appeal to a great body of citizens and its potential threat to popular support for the rearmament program.'4 Some left-wing historians have echoed the judgment on the peace movement's lack of autonomy from Communist control.5 Thus the view held by those on the right has been confirmed by writers on the left: the 'peace issue' was a tool of Soviet national interests. Those in the West anxious enough about the threat of a nuclear war to bring pressure on their own governments found themselves in a tacit alliance of convenience with the Soviets and their Communist parties in the West. There was the shared concern for peace to link them together, but Moscow and Communism were, objectively, an albatross around the necks of Western peace activists. It is less well known that the peace issue was sometimes an albatross around the necks of Western Communists. In Western countries with relatively large Communist movements, the peace priority was unpopular with Communist militants, who preferred to emphasize the traditional class struggle. The emphasis on peace may even have undercut the party's core working-class support.6 Moscow insisted, however, on the priority of the peace issue, even when it may not have been advancing the interests of Communism. Ambiguous as the peace issue might be for the rank-and-file militants of the party, no Communist-backed movement in the West ever generated so much broad support from the middle classes as the peace movement. The paradox is that the Communists did much for the peace movement, by providing a core of experienced activists, while the peace movement did very little for the Communists. One observer suggests that only about a third of the Communist membership in Canada 'really believed in the peace movement,' a third supported it simply because it was the party line, and the other third was opposed. At the same time, Endicott remembered that about 'eighty per cent' of the active workers for the Canadian Peace Congress were Communists. 7 Yet the high point of the peace movement coincided with a downward turn in the electoral fortunes of Communist parties in many Western countries. Perhaps American Intelligence had it wrong: the peace issue assisted the Communists less than the Communists assisted the peace issue. This was true in Canada as well. THE C A N A D I A N PEACE CONGRESS

The origins of the Canadian Peace Congress appear to derive mainly from Communists and those who were known in the parlance of the time as 'fellow travellers.' Indeed, the specific impetus came from two men who were perhaps the most celebrated fellow travellers in the English-speaking world. The Reverend Harry F. Ward was an American admirer of things Soviet who asked Dr Endicott to consider leading a Canadian peace movement. The Right Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the 'Red' dean of Canterbury, was a tireless apologist for the USSR whose cross-country speaking tour of Canada in 1948 attracted large 'respectable' audiences and inspired

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the formation of groups that became local branches of the Peace Congress. Dr Endicott himself had gained public notoriety upon his return to Canada in 1947 by his wholehearted support for the Chinese Communist revolutionaries and his vehement condemnation of Chiang Kai-shek's regime. Communist-party militants hastened forward to volunteer their services as workers in the new movement.8 Endicott recalled that when he took on the leadership of the Peace Congress, he had a private meeting with Tim Buck and other Communist leaders at which he insisted that all decisions would be made by the executive, which did not have a Communist majority, and that the party members would have to abide by those decisions. The party leaders agreed. Endicott remembered only a single instance when a Communist attempted to use his position to interfere with Peace Congress policy.9 It was apparent from the beginning of the peace campaign, however, that the authorities would treat it as a Communist front. This was first made clear in Quebec. A local peace council that emerged in Montreal was identified by the RCMP as a Communist-inspired operation, and a meeting was prevented by police intervention. A street demonstration in protest was smashed by what a Montreal newspaper called 'club-swinging, blackjack-toting police.' The American consul in Montreal, working closely with the RCMP, sought to have the reporter who described the police riot 'called to account' for 'hurting the common cause.' Dr Endicott addressed a Montreal meeting a month later, and the American consul glumly reported that he was a 'personable, forceful and neat-appearing speaker ... he is providing the party with the exact type of support they need in the current peace drive.' At a speech in Ottawa, Dr Endicott was reported by an American observer to have remarked that the 'United States operates a large Fifth Column in Canada, with agents throughout the country.' The agents were kept busy reporting on Dr Endicott.10 Even his worst enemies had to admit that Endicott was an extraordinarily skilled and charismatic speaker, mixing passion, wit, and some uncomfortable common sense and reason in his addresses. It is a tribute to these qualities, as well as a reflection of the deep concern about the question of war in the nuclear age, that he was able to draw surprisingly large and appreciative crowds wherever he went. One must use the word 'surprisingly' because the Peace Congress faced a barrage of hostility from all sides. Meeting halls were denied, police harassment and press disapproval threw barriers in the way, and on occasion even physical intimidation was used. Yet at times crowds at rallies reached as high as 8,000 to 10,000. A small army of volunteers across the country went door to door collecting signatures for mass petitions urging nuclear disarmament - a tactic actually begun in Canada and later merged into the world-wide 'Stockholm Appeal' of the World Peace Council. About 300,000 signatures were collected at one point, no mean achievement in a country as vast and thinly populated as Canada. Besides public meetings and the distribution door-to-door of pamphlets, Dr Endicott and others occasionally had radio broadcast opportunities, at least in the early years of the Peace Congress before 'Communists' were in effect banished from the air waves. Activities were financed by much volun-

368 The Cold War in Canadian Society teer labour, passing the hat, and an annual budget that reached a high of about $22,000 in the early fifties. If there was any 'Moscow gold' floating around Canada, it went into activities other than the Peace Congress.11 KOREA, GERMS, AND TREASON

The peace movement would have had difficulties enough in reaching the mainstream of Canadian life in this era, but the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 definitively ensured its 'fringe' status. The Canadian Peace Congress intervened boldly, if perhaps rashly, with an all-out anti-American, pro-North Korean and proChinese position. Dr Endicott chose to question the authenticity of the reports that North Korea was the initial aggressor. This was an unfortunate position to take, since it focused attention on the minutiae of events on the day of the war's outbreak, and left the peace movement vulnerable to the charge of condoning aggression. On other issues - the corrupt, reactionary, and unpopular nature of the Syngman Rhee regime in the South; the role of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist exiles in stirring the pot; the provocative conduct of the war by the U.S. military leadership - they stood on somewhat more solid ground. The breaking point in the state's tolerance of the Peace Congress came with Dr Endicott's charges, first aired from China during a visit to that country, that the Americans were engaged in 'germ warfare' against North Korea and northern China. There was an immediate problem with such a charge. The claim that biological weapons were being used against civilian populations was a centrepiece of Soviet bloc propaganda. Western public opinion overwhelmingly viewed such charges as enemy propaganda, not worth the paper they were printed on. Endicott echoed Communist claims, he did so from a country with whose soldiers Canada was at war, and he suggested that Canadian research might be involved. All this was enough for most Canadians to conclude that he was at best a dupe, at worst an agent of Soviet aggression. Although he claimed eyewitness evidence, why would anyone believe a notorious pro-Chinese sympathizer on a guided tour who lacked any specialized training in biology? Scientific experts were quickly called in by the Canadian government to denounce the charges publicly as baseless. At this point it was concluded by most Canadians that the case was closed - a judgment echoed by historians down to the present.12 An unofficial international commission of scientists undertook a study of the question and concluded that bacteriological warfare was being practised in Asia by the Americans. The group was made up of prominent left-wing scientists and 'fellow travellers'; its finding thus carried no weight in the West. There is, however, much more reason today to suspect that the charges did have some foundation. Interviewed in 1983, Dr Endicott stated that he was 'more certain' than ever that his charges were justified. There has been as yet no smoking gun found in the American records, and perhaps definitive proof will never be forthcoming - at least from the

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still closely guarded U.S. archives. At the very least, however, the circumstantial evidence seems stronger today.13 In the atmosphere of the early 1950s it took considerable courage to make such charges. Upon Endicott's return to Canada, the Peace Congress held a rally at Maple Leaf Gardens, and 10,000 people filed in past screaming right-wing protesters to hear Dr Endicott repeat his claims - amid fights in the audience and attempts to disrupt the meeting. The crowd also heard Dr Endicott's eighty-seven-year-old father, a prominent churchman and a former moderator of the United Church, deliver a moving tribute to his son: 'They've been after Jim for years because he dared to see what was there to be seen and to tell what he had seen ... In spite of them all, I'm as proud of Jim as though they had sent out a ticker-tape welcome for him when he came back to Toronto.'14 More meetings around the country followed. The RCMP had been busy for years attempting to prove that Dr Endicott was, in the parlance of the time, a 'card-carrying member of the Communist party.' A large file had accumulated in the department of External Affairs, apparently on the assumption that if membership could be proved, action could be taken against him even though the Communist party was a legal association in Canada. Unfortunately for the witch-hunters, there was no such evidence. Dr Endicott was not, and never had been, a Communist, however much he sympathized with the Communists in China. Several members of his immediate family were Communists, and there was no doubt that the majority of active workers in the Peace Congress were party members as well. Yet the best efforts of the police could not pin the label on Endicott himself. 15 With the germ-warfare charges came the first real opportunity to take action against Endicott, and the government gave the matter considerable attention. According to one memorandum, the RCMP considered it 'important from the point of view of our relations with the United States' for the government to prosecute Dr Endicott. But the prospect of a public trial in which Dr Endicott could enter evidence supporting his version of events did not, interestingly enough, arouse any enthusiasm in the American government. On the contrary. The Canadian ambassador in Washington had been asked to sound out the United States about a public prosecution of Endicott. The reply, 'after an unexpected delay,' was rather puzzling, at least to those who unquestioningly accepted the public American response to the Communists' germ-warfare claims. As the ambassador explained:16 'Since no orders prohibiting the use of bacteriological or chemical warfare have been issued, it would be necessary for individual officers to testify from their own knowledge that these agents have never been used in Korea ... on grounds of security they would not be prepared to answer detailed questions on specific operations while under crossexamination ... The military witnesses would be expected to plead security precautions in order to avoid being led into divulging classified information.' Cabinet debated the Endicott issue on 15 May 1952. The minister of justice came armed with a long memorandum from his deputy minister in which four possible

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avenues of prosecution open to the state were indicated: three of these - spreading false news, public mischief, and sedition - were non-starters for various reasons. The fourth, which did offer the government some likelihood of proof, was treason. This charge, favoured by the RCMP, carried only one penalty - death. 'Because of that,' Justice Minister Stuart Garson told his colleagues, 'there would probably be the greatest difficulty in getting any jury to convict. Moreover the penalty was so extreme that prosecution would probably be undesirable on grounds of public policy.' Lester Pearson conceded that under the circumstances, 'a charge of treason seemed out of the question.' He added that 'worse' statements had been made by individuals in Britain, France, and even the United States without drawing such a charge; if this were done in Canada, it would 'probably draw a great deal of unwelcome attention.' Prime Minister Louis St Laurent closed the discussion by declaring that 'a charge of treason in the circumstances was quite impossible.' Apparently unstated in the cabinet discussion, although alluded to uneasily from time to time in the various background documents from the civil servants, was the most peculiar aspect of all: Endicott would have been charged with treason for statements made against the American, rather than the Canadian, state. To compound the oddity, the Americans wanted no public forum to be opened for the charges to be tested. No wonder the Canadian cabinet stepped back from the brink. 17 The aborted treason trial was by no means the only type of attack contemplated against Dr Endicott. At a meeting of a House of Commons committee on 24 April 1952, John Diefenbaker demanded that the government revoke Dr Endicott's passport. Another Tory MP chimed in that the government should 'quarantine these people.' Pearson stated that no such action was possible, 'much as we might like to do so.' In fact the Liberals had already seriously considered revoking Endicott's passport. Cooler heads prevailed, particularly that of Escott Reid in External Affairs who questioned any action concerning citizenship as being against 'our national tradition' to 'impose a penalty on a citizen for opinions expressed by him' without any due process in the judicial system. Taking a liberal stand, Reid wrote to Pearson: We are all agreed that in the free world, in spite of the cold war and even because of it, we want to maintain as much freedom of speech and freedom of movement as possible. The leader of the free world, the United States, is peculiarly subject to temptations to limit freedom of speech and freedom of movement. It would be unfortunate if Canada were to encourage these tendencies in the United States. Would it not be better for Canada to continue by its example to lend support to the liberal forces in the Western European countries who have so far been able to resist fairly successfully demands within their own countries for taking measures against local communists which are not in accordance with the traditions of Western democracy.

Reid pointed out that in countries such as France and Italy there were Endicotts by

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the thousands: 'I suggest that we bear our Endicott with patience as part of the price we have to pay to maintain our democratic traditions.' l8 Reid did not, of course, have the last word. Endicott and his followers were not always borne with patience by the Canadian state. The RCMP tried to discourage potential supporters of the Peace Congress by implying in personal interviews that damage to their careers and other difficulties might result if they persisted in associating themselves with the movement. Undercover police agents infiltrated the congress. Pat ('I was a Commie for the RCMP') Walsh later publicly boasted of how he had disrupted the movement. There were even instances of 'dirty tricks' - including fraudulent pamphlets designed to discredit the congress. Yet, the RCMP aside, Reid was in a sense right: to the Liberal elite, Dr Endicott was a cross to be borne, albeit with ill temper. There was some ambivalence among the mandarins, if not with regard to the peace issue, then at least with regard to the person of Dr Endicott himself. When the latter told the Maple Leaf Gardens audience in 1952 that reports he had sent to External Affairs on China from 1944 to 1947 were 'accepted as useful and reasonably accurate,' the department was forced to admit privately that it had 'greatly appreciated the reports it had received from Dr. Endicott' whose knowledge of China was 'most valuable.' He had, Escott Reid granted, 'an almost painful appreciation of what the poor people, as distinct from officialdom, were feeling.' Reid feared that if the 'friendly and cordial' correspondence of the past were to be made public, it might give rise to an attack on External Affairs similar to the McCarthyite attack on the China hands in the U.S. State Department. Even the Canadian representative in China in the late 1940s, with whom Endicott had quarrelled over Canadian support for Chiang Kai-shek, refused to condemn him personally. 'He has a basically fine character,' wrote General Odium in 1949, 'and would not conscientiously and intentionally stoop to prevarication ... [N]othing, I feel sure, will ever cause me to lose my personal liking for Dr. Endicott.' Earlier he had written that 'I may disagree with Dr. Endicott's logic but I cannot deny the warmth of his heart. What he is doing he is doing for love of mankind and I must respect him for it. I think, however, that he is serving a bad cause.'19 Although Endicott himself was not deprived of his passport, he was for a time subjected upon return to Canada to humiliating body searches and had all printed material and papers in his possession routinely seized for examination. Liberalism kept the state from direct repression, but it had its ways of making life unpleasant. Nor did the state have any scruples when it came to intervening against nonCanadians in the international peace movement. Immigration officials prevented the entry into Canada of speakers from the United States, Britain, and other Western countries who were judged 'undesirable' on political grounds. Under this rubric, the black American singer Paul Robeson was harassed, and the black scholar W.E.B. Dubois was blocked from entry, as were British peace activist Monica Felton and a member of the Belgian parliament. The controls on the U.S. border nicely dovetailed with American bans on Canadian Peace Congress members, in some cases

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even for purposes of transit across the United States to a third country. The Canadian government had 'look-out' lists of persons to be blocked at the border on political grounds. It is interesting to note that one such list in the early 1950s was for all intents and purposes a list of the executive of the World Peace Council. It thus included such 'undesirables' as Pablo Picasso, Jean-Paul Sartre, Salvador Allende, Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda, leading Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, Bertolt Brecht, scientist Linus Pauling, and French writer Louis Aragon. Even here there were certain outer limits to repressiveness: the Canadian government could never quite bring itself to ban the dean of Canterbury, however 'Red' he might be.20 TWO SONS OF THE M A N S E AT WAR O V E R P E A C E

In a sense, Endicott was an unwelcome alter ego to the liberal consciences of the policy makers in Ottawa as they were drawn deeper into the military side of the Cold War. As such, he and the Peace Congress were subject to overcompensating verbal assaults from Ottawa officials, attacks that seemed to grow in vehemence as the Liberals' private doubts about the wisdom of American policy increased. Nowhere was this ambivalent reaction more acute than in the person of Lester Pearson, who took it upon himself to become a kind of one-man scourge of the Peace Congress. Pearson and Endicott were both sons of Methodist ministers, born within a year of one another at the end of the nineteenth century. To make matters rather more complex, Mary Austin, Endicott's first wife, had been a youthful sweetheart of Pearson. Pearson had even used his official position to assist her in securing passage to China to join her husband in 1946 when transportation to that country was hard to come by.21 Between these two men there was much in common - and much ground for division. Pearson had devoted his life to the difficult and sometimes ambiguous task of shaping Canadian foreign policy. While Endicott evangelized for peace and for understanding the Cold War enemy, Pearson was the international diplomat and mediator who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time he had to play another role: what he himself once ruefully called 'Corporal Pearson' in 'General' Dean Acheson's Cold War.22 Though he harboured private doubts about the wisdom of American leadership, his public rhetoric stressed his support for U.S. policy. Dr Endicott and the Peace Congress became his favourite targets for abuse in an uncharacteristic obsession. Even before the outbreak of the Korean War, Pearson had lashed out at the Peace Congress. In a speech to a civil service union in Ottawa, he began by telling his audience how lucky they were to have escaped the excesses of McCarthy!sm that had ravaged the ranks of the American civil service. Canadians should continue to resist 'loose and irresponsible talk about Communists infesting government departments,' he declared in ringing tones of liberalism. Having said that, he immediately went on to warn 'against the more immediate menace of the individual who ... wear-

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ing the mantle of the Peace Congress, has knowingly or unknowingly sold his soul to Moscow.' The idea that followers of the Peace Congress had 'unknowingly sold their souls to Moscow' (whatever that could mean!) seemed to obsess Pearson. There could be no cooperation with Communists, he scolded Endicott in a letter: they only use their positions 'to prepare for a situation in which they could seize power.' Hence the non-Communists in the Peace Congress were nothing more than stooges or dupes. When Pearson met with representatives of the Peace Congress in early 1950, he opened by bitterly denouncing a Peace Congress statement that Canada, by voting against a ban on nuclear weapons at the United Nations, had voted to 'continue the threat of mass murder.' He never met with congress members again. When his old friend Mary Austin Endicott wrote to him, saying, 'can you say Jim and I are dupes or agents? Don't allow anti-Communism to cloud your judgment,' he assured her that 'I do not doubt your sincerity.' But he pleaded that he was in the 'uncomfortable middle' between pro- and anti-Soviets. A further letter replying to her points in detail was prepared for Pearson by someone in Defence Liaison under his signature, but he never sent it: 'I feel that it will only provoke another ... long reply from her.' When Mary Endicott was at a Peace Congress meeting in Montreal that was raided by Duplessis's Red squad under the notorious 'Padlock Law,' she called Pearson in Ottawa. Pearson refused to take the call.23 Pearson's campaign against the Peace Congress took him to such small and unimportant places as a young persons' current events club in Toronto, where he delivered a dire warning that the peace issue was a 'Communist-inspired campaign,' and the Peace Congress 'the trap so cunningly baited by the Communists and their sympathizers.' They should not be regarded as idealists searching for peace, but 'as the instruments, even indeed the completely willing and skilful instruments, of a ruthless conspiracy which is intent on destroying the free world and imposing its powerful system of abominable repression everywhere.' After quoting the Stockholm Appeal, which called for the total ban on all nuclear weapons and branded any nation making first use of nuclear weapons 'criminal,' Pearson tore the mask off this seemingly innocuous statement. 'It is surely significant that this Communist-sponsored petition seeks to eliminate the only decisive weapon possessed by the West at a time when the Soviet Union and its friends and satellites possess a great superiority in all other types of military power.' He expressed dismay that the Peace Congress 'may have succeeded in confusing the issues and in blunting the keen resolution which all of us must have if we are to contribute to the strength and the cause of freedom.'24 ' E V E R Y SIGNATURE A NEW WEAPON AGAINST FREEDOM'

As we listen to the minister of external affairs explaining to this audience of young people the official position on the Peace Congress, we might remark upon an ambiguity inherent in his position. The Stockholm Appeal that Peace Congress support-

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ers were asking Canadians to sign did not name the United States as aggressor or the Soviet Union as peaceful victim; it simply called for the banning of nuclear weapons as instruments of war.25 Yet admonitions against signing the appeal showered down upon Canadians from on high. Anyone who signed was a 'dupe' who was being 'used' by Canada's enemies. But, as Dr Endicott wrote to the editor of the extremely hostile Financial Post, 'the views of the Canadian Peace Congress are contained in the exact wording of the Stockholm Appeal with nothing implied or written between the lines.' What, he asked, are the motives of those 'who are not in agreement with this simple expression of the human need to live, who twist and turn it, looking for hidden and sinister meanings'? In 1953 the Globe and Mail gave space to a statement by an extreme right-wing crusader that a national peace referendum sponsored by the congress was 'completely spurious and dishonest ... every signature on this ballot by a Canadian provides a new weapon against freedom.' The United, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic churches soon joined in the chorus of condemnation. What was this 'weapon against freedom?' It was a question: 'Do you favour a meeting of the leading powers with a view of solving, through negotiation, questions which threaten the peace of the world?' That was it. In fact a four-power conference was being discussed at the time, and a Gallup poll showed that three out of four Canadians believed such a meeting would decrease rather than increase tensions. What was so offensive about asking people their opinion? 26 In response to similar charges from his own church in 1950, Dr Endicott was finally forced to wonder if the 'real objection' to the Peace Congress was 'not its source but its substance.' Could it be, he asked, quoting the U.S. State Department, that the opponents of the congress did not want 'to nullify the defensive value of U.S. superiority in atomic weapons?' Unilateral nuclear disarmament was never the program of the Peace Congress, but rather negotiated disarmament. Western states believed instead that their security lay in overwhelming American superiority in the number and the delivery power of weapons of mass destruction. This was in fact exactly what Winston Churchill told the Canadian cabinet when he travelled to Ottawa following his return to office in 1951. And so the circle closed on any organization like the Peace Congress that sought to struggle against the nuclear nightmare. If Dr Endicott and the Peace Congress were prisoners of the Cold War, so were Lester Pearson and his government and the Canadian establishment. 27 There was more to Pearson's campaign against Endicott than a defence of the American strategic doctrine of nuclear superiority. Pearson saw in Endicott's activities a disloyal anti-Canadian and anti-Western bias. From a news conference held in Moscow in 1950, Dr Endicott had been (mis)quoted in the press for remarks critical of aspects of Canadian and American life. Pearson quickly seized upon this: 'a man who, professing honest motives and high ideals, goes among strangers and maligns his country with this kind of falsehood is beneath contempt. In a Communist society he would be beneath the ground.' It is scarcely surprising, then, that the germ-war-

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fare charges, made first in China, caused Pearson's rage to burst all previous bounds. Speaking to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, the minister called Dr Endicott an 'agent of a foreign government... an agent of Russian imperialism.' Part of the 'big lie' spread by the Peace Congress was the 'insidious Communist appeal' that Russia did not want a war. When such charges came from so eminent an official as the minister of external affairs, they carried an immense resonance in the land. When the Port Arthur Board of Education refused to allow the Peace Congress to use its schools to hold public meetings, the decision was justified, in the words of a local newspaper, by the fact that the Peace Congress had 'failed to pass the loyalty test... [of] the highest court in the land, the Department of External Affairs.' Pearson even incited Canadians to attack the Peace Congress directly, praising the action of fifty engineering students who had swamped the membership of the University of Toronto peace council for the purpose of destroying the organization: 'if more Canadians were to show something of this high-spirited crusading zeal, we would very soon hear little of the Canadian Peace Congress and its works. We would simply take it over.'28 ' M O S C O W ' S BOOTS A R E L I C K E D A N D C A N A D A ' S B A C K I S S T A B B E D '

The Liberal hostility was widely shared among the parties in Parliament. MPs simply refused to meet with delegations from the Peace Congress and vied with each other to denounce anyone associated with the movement. Tory leader George Drew said the Peace Congress was giving 'aid and sympathy' to the enemies of Canada, while another backbencher inelegantly referred to the dean of Canterbury as a 'hairy old goat.' The Commons External Affairs Committee voted to refuse to hear representations from the congress in 1953; as the Tory sponsor of the motion put it, 'I think we should take a stand on this once and for all and not allow people ... to use this committee for their purposes, rather than ours', thus adding a new dimension to the notion of public representation.29 More distressing to the Peace Congress than the predictable response of Tory and Liberal politicians was the hostility of social democrats. Since the CCF had been locked for years in a struggle with the Communists, it was not particularly surprising that it would show instinctive suspicion towards a movement that welcomed Communist participation. Yet the depth and intensity of the reaction went well beyond the predictable competitiveness of rival parties of the Left. M.J. Coldwell, the CCF leader, stood second to none in his abominations of the 'Communist' peace issue. One meeting between Endicott and Coldwell in Ottawa ended quickly in a flurry of denunciations by the CCF leader of 'unmitigated falsehood' and 'spreading Communist propaganda.' Endicott's more moderate response made no impact. A CCF newspaper engaged the congress in quasi-McCarthyite tones. The Trades and Labour Congress, recently having passed through a series of anti-Communist purges, blasted the 'treachery' of 'Communist fronts'; membership of trade union-

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ists.in the Peace Congress was grounds for expulsion. Even the Canadian Forum, while uneasily admitting that 'about forty per cent' of what the congress said was true, and that 'no organized group of people in Canada are preaching peace with the same earnestness as the Communists,' nevertheless concluded that the congress was advocating 'the peace of a world-wide Communist dictatorship.' There were, however, a few social democrats who refused to hew the Cold War line. Chief among these was Tommy Douglas, then CCF premier of Saskatchewan. Douglas maintained a polite and sincere dialogue with Dr Endicott, chiding him from time to time for failing to emphasize that the Soviet Union 'must accept some share of the responsibility for the present international debacle,' but warmly encouraging him for his courage in keeping the peace issue before the public.30 The media willingly joined in a McCarthyite campaign that was sanctioned by the highest authorities in the land. The Toronto Telegram, which Endicott sued for libel in 1948, went beyond reportage to actual attempts to organize disruptions at Peace Congress meetings. It attempted, for instance, to place six anti-Communist Catholic clerics at a rally in Maple Leaf Gardens to interrupt the proceedings. When the priests were refused entry, the Telegram had to content itself with featuring their views on Endicott as the Antichrist on page one. The Telegram believed it had a patriotic duty to intervene actively. As one of its staffers reported: 'National security officials call the peace movement "the most insidious thing" the Communists have yet launched.' Right-wing columnists in Canada sounded like branch-plant versions of the George Sokolskys and Westbrook Peglers of the American gutter press. Globe and Mail columnist Frank Tumpane, who called the World Peace Council a 'monster stooge rally,' wanted the police to stop all public meetings of the Canadian Congress: 'the Communists are our enemies ... they are killing and wounding young Canadians in Korea ... Meetings at which Moscow's boots are licked and Canada's back is stabbed ought to be halted.' When Dr Endicott wrote to the editor of the Globe that he was not a Communist, the editor replied that the Peace Congress was 'a Communist instrument,' and then declared that 'this correspondence is now closed.'31 Perhaps the most damaging, and the most wounding, of all the press attacks came in 1952, when Maclean's magazine featured an article by Blair Fraser entitled 'How Dr. Endicott Fronts for the Reds.' This was a piece by the most respected political journalist in Canada, in a magazine with the country's largest circulation. It opened with a depiction of Dr Endicott, a former minister and missionary, now opposing God and country on behalf of the slave empire of the East. Yet Fraser was too honest a journalist not to report some facts that contradicted his own sensational lead. For the first time in print, Dr Endicott was quoted as criticizing the Soviet Union. He condemned unequivocally the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940 (which the USSR continued to defend) and, bringing matters right up to date, stated flatly, T would not defend the Soviet record on civil liberties.' In fact, Endicott had criticized the Soviet Union on other occasions; these criticisms were simply not reported, since

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they conflicted with the 'Communist stooge' image so carefully cultivated by the state and its free press. By 1952, even their reporting made no difference, since the stereotyping had been perfected in the public mind. In any event, the government was convinced that Communists were devilishly clever. An External Affairs document speculated that 'he may be encouraged by the Party to indulge in minor modifications of the Party line in order to preserve some appearance of independence of judgment'.32 When Endicott was on a speaking tour of western Canada in which he focused on the germ-warfare charges, his arrival in Winnipeg was greeted by a front-page editorial in the Winnipeg Tribune, which declared to Endicott that his name would never besmirch the pages of the paper again until 'we may happily announce that you have departed the world you betrayed to join the Prince of Lies.' This seemed to have overstepped all bounds. Several Tribune staffers resigned in protest; the editor was fired, and the assistant editor, who led the resignations, was appointed in his place. This was perhaps the exception that proved the rule.33 Radio proved equally unfriendly to the peace movement. After some early use of the air waves by the congress, its access to radio dried up. The CBC reflected the government view of the Peace Congress. In 1952 the president of the CBC, Davidson Dunton, grudgingly acknowledged to an irate correspondent that despite the regulatory authority the CBC exercised in those days, it could not prevent a private station in Toronto from allowing Dr Endicott air time. 'His writings and occasional speeches over the air are perhaps one of the prices we have to pay for maintaining freedom in a democratic society.' Rather invidiously, Dunton added: The trouble with suppressing this type of talk ... is that some honest independent expressions of opinion might get suppressed in the process.' The following year, Dunton defended the use of the term 'Communist-sponsored' by CBC news in a reference to the Peace Congress, inasmuch as CBC reporters were 'describing activities in which people who may be accused of Communist sympathies take a leading part.' A Peace Congress member tried to point out to the head of public broadcasting that he was retreating from 'reason to labels': 'The accusation [of Communist sympathies] has no meaning except in the world of Senator McCarthy where it can be used to mean anything at all.'34 In the climate of general intolerance thus associated with the Peace Congress, extreme right-wing groups had what amounted to a hunting licence. Concerted attempts were made to disrupt public meetings, and on a few occasions direct physical attacks were made on Dr Endicott or on guest speakers such as the 'Red' dean of Canterbury, who was forced to flee one meeting in London, Ontario. Dr Endicott's Toronto home was firebombed, while a large meeting of Peace Congress women was in progress; no one was injured, although there could easily have been deaths if the fire had not been quickly extinguished. A group calling itself the Association for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Canada threatened violence repeatedly, once hanging effigies of Endicott and the Red dean on a gallows that was then carried through

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Toronto on the back of a truck. In a pamphlet, this organization declared that 'words are lost' on the likes of Endicott: 'the only remaining alternative is uncompromising fight till their complete liquidation.' Endicott himself recalled a personal threat from members of this group to slit his throat. Mary Endicott reported that one meeting was broken up by leather-jacketed young thugs singing the Nazi Horst Wessel song.35 Disapproval was voiced from more polite and respectable quarters of Canadian society. The churches, including Endicott's own United Church, voiced official condemnation of the Peace Congress and its works. It became difficult for the Peace Congress to find halls that would allow it to hold meetings. Boards of education banned them from using school premises, the president of the University of Alberta forbade them the use of the Alberta campus, and Duplessis used his 'Padlock Law' to intimidate potential peace meetings in Quebec. One celebrated incident involved Bathurst Street United Church in Toronto, whose pastor, the Reverend Gordon Domm, was not unsympathetic to the Peace Congress and had allowed it the use of the church hall. Conservative parishioners of Bathurst Street forced the closing of the church hall to the congress, and instigated a high-level church commission of enquiry into the minister's activities. The Reverend Domm kept his post by a vote of the congregation, but only after he had preached a sermon on the theme 'Why I am not a Communist.' The chairman of the commission of enquiry complained that 'we are not living in a rational age or in a rational moment.'36 'I H A V E S E E N S O C I A L I S T R U S S I A - IT IS A S U C C E S S ! '

The government, the media, and the political spectrum from the far Right to the social-democratic Left all seemed determined to view the Peace Congress and the nuclear-disarmament issue as Communist propaganda. Until the late 1950s the only organized peace campaign in Canada was under the auspices of the Peace Congress. To what extent was it true that the Peace Congress was merely an instrument of Soviet policy? If the view is accepted that Soviet policy was to conquer the world and that the peace issue was merely a means of disarming the West in the face of Soviet aggression, then the Peace Congress was a subversive organization. The implication of this view was more alarming than its proponents publicly admitted: peace through disarmament was impossible and war in some sense inevitable. On the other hand, if the Soviet Union was seen as a great power whose admittedly brutal takeovers in Eastern Europe were based on an essentially non-expansionary desire to secure its borders from another invasion like that of 1941, and whose strategic position was much weaker than that of the United States, then the peace issue as posed by the congress, as an expression of the desire for peace by people in the West as well as in the East, was not at all unreasonable. Seen from this perspective, the question of whether the Peace Congress was an instrument of Soviet policy is by

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no means clear-cut. But the characteristic answer of Western governments, in this case faithfully echoed by Ottawa, was to use every means at hand to define the latter view as pro-Communist and thus treasonous. To be sure, the peace movement of this era sometimes seemed to be doing its best to fulfil the stereotype of a Communist front. Retrospectively, one might say that its biggest single mistake was to accept a certain Cold War logic. Western Cold Warriors argued, by direct analogy to Nazi Germany, that the Soviet Union was totalitarian and expansionary and that these two characteristics were organically linked. The peace movement in effect accepted the equation of totalitarianism with expansionism and chose to take its stand on the ground of defending the Soviet system and praising Soviet 'democracy' - often denigrating Western freedom in the same breath. This was disastrous, not only from the point of view of public relations, but more seriously because it implicated the peace movement in the denial of the crimes of the Stalinist state and in apologetics for a totalitarian system. It might have pointed instead to what later peace movements have insisted upon: that the armaments race and the nuclear nightmare of our age are the most extreme manifestations of the irrationality of the militarized, bureaucratized superstate, regardless of the official ideology it professes. But the first postwar peace movement opposed the belligerence of the American superstate by springing to the defence of its rival superstate, thus only confirming the apparently unbridgeable chasm between the camp of peace and the camp of freedom. With hindsight it is easy, but not sufficient, to dismiss the Peace Congress, which must be understood in the context of its own, intractable era. The question of who was to blame for starting the Cold War was a crucial one at its historical point of origin. The people associated with the Peace Congress took the view that the United States bore the major share of the blame; from this perspective, it was altogether appropriate for the movement to direct its major thrust against American rather than Soviet policy. Furthermore, since the main popular support of American militarism rested on the unceasing barrage of anti-Soviet propaganda unleashed by Western states and the media, the Peace Congress believed that it had an educational role to play in counteracting the negative image of Soviet life and Soviet intentions, as a means of encouraging greater international understanding. This was a brave and - under the circumstances - perhaps foolhardy mission conducted in a mine-infested field. Dr Endicott, with his many years in China, had another perspective on the campof-peace - camp-of-freedom dichotomy. 'Christians,' he advised a churchman, 'are wasting their time preaching anti-Communism ... if they do not preach justice and immediate reform in the colonial areas.' To another friend he sent a reproduction of the stamp issued by Canada in 1898 ('the Christmas I was born'), which depicted the map of the world with the British Empire splashed in red, bearing the caption 'We hold a vaster Empire than has been.' This was, he wrote, a perfect symbol of the arrogant Western pride that had made revolutions in the Third World inevitable. The

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camp of 'freedom' did indeed look very different when seen from the perspective of the impoverished and repressed peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The record of Western interventions in the Third World since the Second World War confirms that the camp of freedom has also been the camp of war, on a scale that the Soviet Union, with its handful of direct interventions in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, never came close to matching.37 It was true that Dr Endicott and the other non-Communist leaders of the Peace Congress sometimes went down the road of Soviet apologetics. On his first trip to Moscow in 1950, Endicott wrote back to his wife in Lincoln Steffens-like terms: T should begin this and all subsequent letters with "I have seen Socialist Russia - it is a success." ' Everything pleased him. Was there a shortage of consumer goods? 'there is no great crowding of the shelves' such as confuses consumers in the capitalist West. Warsaw was the 'miracle of the post-war world,' while Paris was like Shanghai in 1946: 'degenerating into poverty, police and oppression.' When Tito declared Yugoslav independence from Stalin's iron grip, the Yugoslav Peace Congress was expelled from the World Peace Council. Dr Endicott refused an invitation of the Yugoslav government to visit the country: 'the invitation was for political purposes', he explained, 'and designed to be used against the defenders of peace in Yugoslavia and Canada.'38 Dr Endicott was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953 - an event that drove the Canadian media to apoplexy - and later, after de-Stalinization in the USSR led the Soviets to 'recall' the Stalin prizes and replace them with Lenin prizes, Endicott refused to turn his in, preferring to retain it, Stalin's head and all.39 Khrushchev's speech to the Soviets' 20th Party Congress in 1956 about the crimes of Stalin sent shock waves not only through the Canadian Communist party but through the Peace Congress as well. Members who had accepted a rosy picture of life in the USSR became cynical, and many withdrew from active participation. Meetings grew smaller. Then in October the Hungarian revolt was crushed by Soviet tanks amid scenes of bloodshed and heroism. At the same moment the British and French had invaded Suez. In the face of this double crisis, the Canadian Peace Congress reacted with courage and an even-handedness that belied the image created by the press. Although divided, the National Council of the Peace Congress passed a statement condemning the intervention of 'foreign troops' in both Egypt and Hungary. No state, they declared, can claim to have a 'right to thrust its military forces into other countries ... no matter what reasons may be put forward to justify such action.' Bruce Mickleburgh, the Canadian representative on the World Peace Council executive, travelled to a meeting in Helsinki in late October. He found a group badly divided on the Hungarian issue. Mickleburgh delivered a strong and eloquent plea that the council not abandon the principles of peace to apologize for military oppression in either bloc. The executive was forced to admit that 'there exist serious differences both in the World Council and in the national peace movements and that

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opposing points of view have made it impossible to formulate an agreed evaluation of the events.' 'Unanimous in regretting the tragic bloodshed,' the executive passed a compromise statement calling for withdrawal of troops according to a HungarianSoviet agreement. Canada had asked for more than this and left unsatisfied.40 The Canadian press treated the Peace Congress position on Hungary as a nonevent: they simply did not report it, with the sole exception of a brief article in the Calgary Herald. Having declared the Congress a Soviet tool, the media were not about to let facts get in the way of ideology. Dr Endicott, who never stopped believing that the Franco-British invasion of Egypt was much worse in its implications than the Soviet invasion of Hungary, nevertheless freely condemned the Soviet action. And in 1957, he went on a fact-finding mission to Hungary on behalf of the World Peace Council and issued a statement that was notable for expressing misgivings about the official version of the events. In a private letter to a friend, he went much farther. The Soviets, he wrote, should get all their troops out of Eastern Europe. Both military blocs reserved the right to intervene against 'internal subversion' - 'which simply means ... an attempt to set up the kind of government that the authorities on either side do not like.' To another correspondent he poured out revelations of the 'ruthlessness of uncontrolled bureaucracy and the mess that has been uncovered in Hungary.' Even China gave cause for worry. A visit the same year brought disquieting evidence to the Endicotts of censorship and persecution, with 'typical bureaucratic explanations.'41 'I A M W E A R Y '

Ironically, it was just at the moment when the congress was demonstrating its independence from both military blocs that it was passing through a sharp decline from which it never recovered. This could be only partially attributed to the defection of Communist supporters. The decline was already under way before Hungary. The annual budget had fallen from more than $22,000 in 1953 to $10,000 in 1956, and membership had dwindled. Worst of all, the enthusiasm and activism of the remaining members had lessened, and there was a lack of new blood. Complaints that the congress literature was 'sloganeering and boring' were heard with increasing frequency, as were assertions that the National Council had failed to reflect the various shadings of opinion among the affiliated peace councils, particularly the strong CCF group in the Saskatchewan council. Even the usually indefatigable Dr Endicott admitted privately, that T am weary.' The Peace Congress was facing the typical crisis of a radical movement cut off from the mainstream of society, subjected to a relentless barrage of invective and persecution, and unable to sustain enthusiasm in the face of its apparent failure to influence the course of events. There was a deeper reason for the decline as well, one noted by Dr Endicott in an address made in mid-1956: the crisis in the congress, he suggested, was caused by the advance of the issue closer to the mainstream of Canadian life, an advance that

382 The Cold War in Canadian Society was happening outside the congress's immediate influence. The superpowers now negotiated directly with one another, something they had not done in the depths of the early Cold War. More importantly, there was a broad-based demand for reducing the arms race and the threat of nuclear holocaust, particularly symbolized in the rising tide of protest over the deadly fallout from H-bomb testing. Dr Endicott saw this as cause for rejoicing even if the Peace Congress, as such, was being pushed from centre stage. It had carried the issue almost alone through the darkest days of the early Cold War. Perhaps the torch was now passing to other hands.42 Despite the decline and despite the further shocks administered by the HungarySuez crises and their aftermath, Dr Endicott and the Peace Congress soldiered on through the 1950s. Endicott believed that some sort of organizational nucleus was an important element amid the rise and fall of popular concern over the threat of atomic war. But by the late 1950s, it was evident that the congress's day had passed. The Peace Congress was never able to separate itself from its relationship to Communism. This was perhaps inevitable, given its origins in the world of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Yet Endicott had a telling answer to those who could only see Red in the peace issue. When Percy Bengough, head of the Trades and Labour Congress, taxed Endicott with the charge that the Peace Congress was 'infiltrated' with Communists, the latter replied with one of his Christian parables: a starving old woman was overheard by an atheist while she prayed to God for food. The atheist, as a joke, bought food and left it for her. When she thanked God, the atheist jeered at her: he, not God, had brought the food. 'Young man,' she replied with dignity, 'it may have been the devil who brought it but it was the Lord who sent it.'43 ' I ' V E O U T L i y E D THEM ALL'

Endicott fought the good fight against tremendous odds and at great cost in terms of insults and vilification. And he fought it not only with determination, but with extraordinary good humour and faith in the justice of the cause. The years have vindicated that faith. In the 1980s he was the recipient of many honours from a country that had repudiated him in the 1950s. At a 1982 ceremony in which he received a special award of merit from the City of Toronto, Endicott admitted, T am deeply moved to be given this award, and I must tell you frankly that it moves me partly because I've come rather a long way from being Public Enemy Number One.' In the same year, the United Church of Canada passed a resolution apologizing for the 'much personal hurt and anxiety' that the church had caused him. 'Whereas events in the past thirty years have borne out many of his predictions and prophetic actions on the issue of World Peace,' the resolution went on, and 'whereas the present generation of peacemakers owe a great debt to the leadership and vision of James G. Endicott... [the church] affirms the faithful and courageous contribution he has made to the cause of Peace and Global Justice.' It was a moving tribute. Endicott's response was typically to tell a little parable: T am reminded of the story

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of an old man whose preacher called on him and he said: "Preacher, you know I haven't an enemy in the world." "Well," said the preacher, "isn't that a lovely thought." "Yep," he says, "I've outlived them all.'"44 Still a sprightly and lively fighter in his eighties when interviewed for this book, Dr Endicott admitted that the Peace Congress had failed. But then, he added, 'the only person who can look back at the end of their life and say that they have not failed, is the person who did not reach high enough.' 45 James Endicott passed away in November 1993 at the age of ninety-four. More than 600 people filled a Toronto church for his memorial service.

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PART SIX: THE END OF THE FIRST COLD WAR ERA

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17

The Korean War: Second Thoughts about American Leadership

In the spring of 1951, Lester Pearson, the secretary of state for external affairs, presented the Empire and Canadian clubs in Toronto with a typically understated Pearsonian word of warning: 'the days of relatively easy and automatic political relations with our neighbour are, I think, over ... Our preoccupation is no longer whether the United States will discharge her international responsibilities, but how she will do it, and whether the rest of us will be involved.' 1 What had intervened between the high tide of enthusiasm on the part of the External Affairs establishment in the late 1940s for bringing the Americans out of isolation and 'onside' for the Cold War and these studied words of caution and anxiety? One major world event, the Korean War, acted as a punctuation mark between two phases of Canadian policy and attitudes towards the United States and American leadership. 'HOW SHE W I L L DO IT'

On 25 June 1950, heavy fighting broke out along the thirty-eighth parallel dividing North and South Korea. Within days the invading armies of Communist North Korea had overrun the South Korean capital of Seoul. American military intervention under the United Nations on behalf of the South failed to stop the advance, and by September the Communists held all of Korea save a small perimeter around Pusan in the southeast corner of the peninsula. Then the Americans counter-attacked with a daring and successful landing under General Douglas MacArthur at Inchon, midway up the west coast near Seoul. A multinational U.N. force under American command drove the North Koreans back during the fall of 1950. Despite warnings from America's allies about not provoking Chinese intervention, MacArthur pushed relentlessly towards the Yalu River in the north, which served as the border with Communist China. In late November the Chinese entered the war in force, and soon the tide was turned. By early 1951, fighting was back around the contested middle

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of the peninsula, where it went on for two and a half more years. In the summer of 1953 an armistice was signed, more or less re-establishing the territorial status quo ante helium along the thirty-eighth parallel. Korea was the last war in which Canadian troops participated under fire until the Gulf War in 1991. The Korean participation was in theory under the flag of the United Nations, and thus consonant with Canada's professed stance of liberal internationalism. At the same time it seemed a vindication of that other pillar of Canadian foreign policy, the principle of collective security. Just as NATO had been designed to ensure a collective Western response to aggression from the Soviet bloc, so the U.N. military intervention in Korea to stop North Korean aggression against the South was an apparent embodiment of a collective Western will to maintain international order, with teeth. To be sure, Canada's participation in Korea gave the public appearance of solidarity with the Western alliance. But the public rhetoric hid a more complex reality behind the scenes. Canada tried to do two things simultaneously in its Korean policy: to support militarily the U.N. campaign to defeat Communist aggression, and to encourage an early resolution of the conflict through diplomacy. The Americans did not translate appreciation of the military contribution into appreciation of Canada's diplomatic efforts. The latter, necessarily taken independently, instead annoyed the Americans no end. For their part, the Canadians, only recently having campaigned to woo the Americans out of isolationism, were taken aback at the evangelical and self-righteous drive of the Americans, once the spirit had entered them. The Korean War, and Canada's two-track campaign both to support it militarily and to bring it to a close diplomatically, chastened the first fine careless rapture of the liberal-internationalists for collective security. With Korea came a realization that the price to be paid for enlisting American leadership might be stiffer than anticipated. And with Korea came a test under fire for the utility of quiet diplomacy. It is the view of most scholars that the Canadians demonstrated the scope for 'mediatory middlepowersmanship' or, in Denis Stairs's phrase, 'the diplomacy of constraint' in playing this dual role, even if their judgments are not made without ambiguity. 2 We need not quarrel with these characterizations of Canadian intentions, which did seem to hew closely to the model of liberal internationalism. But the Korean experience in retrospect points in a different direction. The capacity of Canadians to modify or constrain American behaviour actually seems rather slight, however many diplomatic resources they may have spent in the effort. 'A VERY DIFFICULT NEGOTIATION BETWEEN CORPORAL PEARSON AND GENERAL ACHESON'

So long as Canadian officials confined themselves to passing criticism about American policy in confidence to U.S. officials, the American response was usually toler-

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ant but indifferent. When the Canadians tried to act upon their differing views, by cooperating in independent diplomatic moves with other countries at the United Nations, for instance, or by giving public voice to any doubts about U.S. policy, the response was one of irritation at such unseemly insubordination. Dean Acheson's memoirs betray exactly this reflex when the former secretary of state sourly and dismissively recalled Pearson's forlorn attempt to combine with Krishna Menon of India behind an independent peace initiative at the United Nations in 1952. This same experience led Pearson in his memoirs to refer ironically, perhaps with Freudian overtones, to 'a very difficult negotiation between Corporal Pearson and General Acheson.'3 Even the gnomic warning quoted at the outset of this chapter roused a storm against Pearson and Canada in the United States, taking the form both of hate mail from Americans and concern expressed by U.S. officials. Pearson confided to Hume Wrong in Washington that he had been 'surprised at the extent of the reaction. This, however, confirms my thesis that we never get much attention down there unless we say something critical, and then the attention becomes surprised, pained and irritated.'4 It is, I think, important that our friends in Washington, and elsewhere in the United States, understand the anxiety and hesitation with which the majority of people in Canada watch the development of United States policy, especially in regard to the Far East. There is no use deceiving ourselves about this or deceiving them. The deep-seated, though often unconsciously felt, origin of this is, I suppose, our feeling of dependence on the United States and frustration over the fact that we can't escape this no matter how hard we might try. The immediate cause, however, is found in recent United States attitudes and policies, which seem to many Canadians to be based on the acceptance of inevitable war; not so much against an aggressor as against communism itself.

A question raised by the Korean experience that Pearson and his colleagues avoided confronting was whether 'our friends in Washington' actually cared deeply or at all about what the majority of people in Canada thought of them or their policies, so long as they kept their thoughts to themselves and stayed in the ranks. Quiet diplomacy brought its own self-imposed burdens. As Pearson admitted, 'there will be times when, in the interests of the unity which is so necessary, we may have to abandon our own views in favour of those held by the United States.' Still, Pearson was sufficiently disturbed that he warned Wrong, 'there will be times in the future when we will have to do what we avoided doing in recent months, namely, to take our own line even at the risk of weakening that unity, which it is our first objective to preserve.' The dilemma of quiet diplomacy was that its capital resource was 'unity' with the Americans; if the attempt to use that unity to constrain American excesses led inevitably to its weakening, as the Korean experience seemed to suggest, the quiet diplomats seemed to be faced with a classic no-win conundrum.

390 The End of the First Cold War Era 'THE VIETNAM BEFORE V I E T N A M '

The problem with discussing the Korean War, even four decades later, is the existence of an 'authorized' version of a fairly simplistic good guys-bad guys type. That the war had resulted from an act of 'naked Communist aggression' initiated by Moscow, and that it was a simple defence of freedom under the flag of the United Nations, were facts not disputed in the Western press or by Western leaders at the time.5 It now appears highly doubtful that the North Korean attack on the South was in fact ordered by Moscow. The North Koreans appear to have acted on their own initiative, an idea that at the time was, in the words of a recent analyst of American foreign policy, 'beyond the grasp of U.S. officials.' 6 Yet with or without Moscow, the Communist regime of Kim II Sung was, and has remained, a brutally repressive police state. A 'Vietnamese' solution to a divided Korea could certainly not have been construed as a victory for freedom. But the exclusive focus on the repressive nature of the Communist state hid wilful blindness to the corruption and brutality of the Syngman Rhee dictatorship in the South. Nor can it account for the evident popularity at the time of the Communists among the poor of the South. The authorized version leaves out the savage conduct of the war by the 'U.N.' (i.e., American) command - massive destruction of all targets, military and civilian alike, from the air, the burning of villages, the massacres of civilians, and so on. There were heavy handed controls exercised over reporting, and any news unfavourable to the official Western version of the war was suppressed. These observations are characteristic of what would later be called the 'Vietnam syndrome' after the Asian conflict of the 1960s. But Korea was a Vietnam before Vietnam; in Korea the authorized version carried the day, and it only began to be seriously challenged in the 1980s.7 Some Canadians at the time did have inklings that the reality was rather different than the propaganda image. Defence Minister Brooke Claxton visited Canadian troops in 1953 and later described privately to a journalist friend the classic symptoms of the Vietnam syndrome. He had been received by the staff of the U.S. military command at Seoul which 'had all got into the habit of receiving and lying to Congressmen and they put on a similar show for us.' Reports on operations were presented: Tn the greatest detail and with the utmost seriousness they reported the number of Chinese killed, wounded and missing, the number of bridges, engines and trucks destroyed.' Claxton confided flatly that 'there wasn't a word of truth in it.' While Claxton was present, the Canadian commander reported on an operation in which six Chinese soldiers were killed. Headquarters amended the report to read that 'as per men involved, rounds fired, etc. etc., for each of which a factor was given ... he had consequently killed something like 264 1/2 Chinamen.' U.S. general Van Fleet admitted to Claxton that he habitually lied to his superiors 'in order to maintain morale.' Claxton's apprehensions about Korea began early. In late 1950,

The Korean War 391 after the Chinese intervention, he confided to a close friend that the war was unwinnable, and that U.S. direction 'now begins to terrify me.'8 Yet even these critical views did not come to terms with the monstrous effects on Korean civilians of the methods of warfare adopted by the United Nations - the blanket fire-bombing of North Korean cities, the destruction of dams and the resulting devastation of the food supply, an unremitting aerial bombardment more intensive than anything experienced during the Second World War. At one point the Americans gave up bombing targets in the North when their intelligence reported that there were no more buildings over one storey high left standing in the entire country! General Ridgeway had wanted to use chemical weapons, and Mac Arthur later revealed that he had advised dropping between thirty and fifty atomic bombs and spreading a belt of radioactive cobalt (with an active life of 60 to 120 years) across the middle of Korea.9 This never happened, of course, but the effects of 'conventional' bombing were dreadful enough. The overall death toll was staggering: possibly as many as four million people. About three million were civilians (one out of every ten Koreans). Even to a world that had just begun to recover from the vast devastation of the Second World War, Korea was a man-made hell with a place among the most violent excesses of the twentieth century. ' N O R M A N , YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE PRESSURE IS LIKE HERE'

Canadian concern about American Korean policy was deep, even if it rarely touched on these latter issues. Canadian officials, especially Lester Pearson as minister of external affairs, did not like the way the Americans attempted to bully them into Korea, feared correctly that aggressive military behaviour would threaten the Chinese and bring them into the war, and felt that the Americans were prolonging the war and preventing reasonable attempts to bring it to a negotiated close. And behind all their concerns, there loomed the terrifying prospect, not at all allayed by bellicose American rhetoric, that nuclear weapons might be used and that Korea might become the trip-wire for the Third World War. On all these counts, Canadian diplomacy conformed to the tenets of liberal internationalism. Yet Canada was complicit in the American conduct of the war through its military participation, its close diplomatic ties with the United States, and its imprisonment in the methods of quiet diplomacy, which discouraged open, public criticism. Consequently, its capacity to perform a mediatory middle-power role was suspect - and correctly so, in the eyes of the Chinese and the Soviets - while its capacity to limit or constrain the Americans was questionable, to say the least, as is evident from a close examination of points of difference that arose between the two countries over the war. First, there was the question of Canadian military participation. Less than a month after the war had begun, the Americans were pressing for Canadian forces with hints from on high that the Canadians were 'dragging their feet,' accompanied by what Pearson called 'feverish press editorials.' Direct methods of pressure were crude: a

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'strictly confidential' note from the State Department claimed falsely that Pakistan was about to send a contingent, as well as Argentina. Pearson was irritated at such clumsily mendacious attempts to 'stampede' Canada into action; 'the suggestion that we should follow Colonel Peron's lead in fighting for justice and peace is pretty ridiculous,' he snorted. Canada was already worried about official U.S. statements linking the defence of South Korea with the Nationalist regime in Taiwan that 'might result in the extension of the conflict to Communist China.' He recognized the influence of the China lobby in Washington, but as he confided to Hume Wrong, 'that merely underlines my point that U.S. domestic considerations may get the rest of us into trouble which otherwise could be avoided.' 10 In fact, domestic considerations were playing a major part in America's war in Korea. Dean Acheson was frank about this when Pearson arrived suddenly in Washington at the end of July 1950 to seek clarification of U.S. aims. Korea was of no military significance, Acheson freely admitted;" the decision to fight had been 'a purely political one' that 'had made it politically possible for the United States to secure congressional and public support for a quick and great increase in defence expenditures; for further assistance to those of its friends who are willing to make a similar increased effort; for the imposition of needed controls, higher taxes, the diversion of manpower to the armed forces and defence industries, etc.' The scare induced by early American losses in Korea 'had roused the American people to the point that not only would the battle in Korea be won, but they would organize themselves for the real struggle ahead against Russian communism, in a way that would not have previously been possible.' In short, Korea had made it possible to strengthen the machinery of the national security state to prosecute the Cold War on all fronts, even if Korea itself was of no strategic significance. 12 Acheson and Truman were anxious that the coming struggle would not be carried by the United States alone, but would be 'of the free world versus the communist world.' Hence Acheson's 'eloquent plea' for Canadian participation. Prior to NATO and Korea, the fear motivating Canadian policy was of an American return to isolationism; this was given a new twist by Acheson who now implied that the alternative to Allied cooperation was a kind of interventionist isolationism - an aggressive but unilateral American global confrontation of Communism, with all the dangers of war that that implied. Corporal Pearson was impressed.13 The general impression I got of the evening's discussion was that Mr Acheson - and the Administration - are resolved that the United States will give firm leadership to the move to organize the United Nations for defence against Russian Communism. He is deeply conscious of the menace of communist aggression and is willing to stand or fall on his policy for defence against it. There is no doubt he himself is inspired by the highest motives. There is no trace of warlike excitement or boastful imperialism in his attitude, but a sober and realistic determination to press along the path which he thinks is the only one that can lead to peace.

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Needless to say, General Acheson got his troops. This decision was also facilitated by strong pressures from the press and opposition parties at home to contribute to the cause. The anti-Communist campaigns waged by the Liberals over the Marshall Plan and NATO had helped create their own constituency: even Quebec seemed acquiescent.14 A military intervention under the flag of the United Nations was relatively easy for the liberal-internationalists in Ottawa to sell to the public. Canada's commitment to the international organization in the first postwar decade must realistically be seen in the context of the pro-Western and anti-Soviet U.N. stance in this era. The role of the secretary general, Trygve Lie, was important in this regard. Lie, who found no contradiction to his theoretically impartial international role in stressing his anti-Communism (in his memoirs he indicated that he 'had fought the Communists all my life in the Norwegian trade unions and labour movement and fought them successfully') had already cooperated with the American witch hunters in subjecting the U.S. members of the U.N. permanent staff (two-thirds of the total) to the same reign of terror that had been brought down on American civil servants, even allowing the FBI to set up shop right in the U.N. building. Scores of employees were purged, and a leading American employee committed suicide. 15 When Pearson visited Lie in the summer of 1950, following his public call for military participation by member states in the war that had embarrassed the Canadian government, he found the Secretary General in what could only be called a crusading mood. 'He talked about the problem of preserving peace,' Pearson wrote, 'in terms that might have been expected from a signatory of the North Atlantic Pact rather than from the Secretary General of the United Nations. He felt that Soviet aggression could only be contained by adequate forces in the hands of the free nations, and repeatedly spoke of the necessity of them all building up their armed forces as a matter of the highest urgency. "Otherwise, in 10 or 15 years we would all be slaves." ' Lie readily admitted to Pearson that his public call for participation had been at the direct demand of the American delegation, and that at their further request he had agreed to make the appeal more effective by pretending that it had come from him alone, and not at U.S. urging. Lie also took the opportunity to intensify the anti-Communist internal purge of the administrative apparatus of the United Nations. Soviet and 'satellite' officers in the Secretariat were to be kept away from confidential military and political information. Lie also raised suspicions about the 'American Communists or fellow travellers in the lower grades of the Secretariat. In this category he mentioned one nominally [?] Canadian member of the Information Section whose activities had been brought to our notice before.'16 In short, the argument sometimes made by the Canadians that NATO was in no contradiction to the Charter of the United Nations could have been stood on its head: the United Nations in practice was in no contradiction to NATO. On the surface, Canada was foursquare with the U.N./U.S. position. Publicly, there was only mild and circumspect criticism offered, and that rarely enough. Even

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before his cabinet colleagues at the moment of approving the sending of a Canadian contingent, Pearson had stated unequivocally that 'Canada had every interest in strengthening the U.S. position as leader in the struggle against Communism.' 17 It is most interesting, then, to see that in the secret confines of External Affairs communications, he was beset by doubts about the wisdom of U.S. leadership. Sometimes these doubts were even expressed in private correspondence with trusted friends outside government. Historian Arthur Lower, for instance, wrote to Pearson questioning the ethics of 'fighting in defence of reactionary regimes' like that of South Korea, and of letting 'American notions of "free enterprise" do duty for our notions of liberalism.'' Pearson agreed that 'restoring Korea to Western capitalism or free enterprise' was not a very noble aim, in the Asian context. He also sheepishly admitted that no Western leaders, himself included, were willing to speak publicly about the consequences of victory on behalf of Syngman Rhee for Asia, or to give voice to criticism of the American 'currents of immaturity, indecision, roughness and lack of comprehension of the problems of other peoples which perplex and frighten us.' But Pearson was th6 prisoner of quiet diplomacy: 18 You ask some very pertinent questions about Korea, and the answers which I might suggest to you, if we were discussing the matter personally, might not be exactly the same as those which I would give in public here at the United Nations General Assembly. That is not, I hope, because I say one thing in public and believe something else in private, but merely because it is not, I think, wise, with the international situation what it is today, to wash our democratic dirty linen in public in a way which would give aid and comfort to an 'enemy' which is trying to make it even dirtier. That is a rather involved way of saying that a good many of the worries and hesitations which I feel, as a Canadian, about certain aspects of United States policy can be expressed in private to my American friends (and this is done), but not always or so frankly in public ... We are constantly faced with the problem of trying to influence United States policy in a manner which will protect both our own interests and our conception of what is good for the world, but which will not involve us in public quarrels with a great and friendly neighbour.

The Canadians did broach their concerns about the danger that the war might widen to include China. Moreover, Pearson followed up his talks with Acheson in the summer of 1950 with a letter in which he raised the question of recognition of the Peking regime. This was brushed off by Acheson.19 After MacArthur's dramatic landing at Inchon in mid-September and the retreat northwards by the Communist forces, the concerns about China reached a new peak in Ottawa. MacArthur's drive northward set off alarm bells in External Affairs, since they had known from the beginning that he had never intended to stop at the old frontier between North and South, but had been merely casting about for an excuse to push on further.20 In the first week of October the United States successfully pressured the General Assembly of the United Nations to pass a resolution that could be interpreted as

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authorizing U.N. forces to advance beyond the thirty-eighth parallel. This was a real turning point in the war.21 If the U.N. forces had simply stopped at the frontier, a ceasefire might have been concluded, the invasion of the South would have been reversed, and the United Nations could have declared its mission to halt aggression a success. In point of fact - admittedly with the benefit of hindsight - this was what finally happened almost three years later. But between the missed opportunity of the fall of 1950 and the final resolution there were rivers of blood and suffering, and moments of great danger to the world, all of which might have been avoided. When Escott Reid, then acting under-secretary of state for external affairs, got wind of the U.S.-sponsored resolution, he was appalled. Enlisting the aid of Norman Robertson, secretary to the cabinet, Reid 'bombarded' Pearson at the United Nations with telegrams and memoranda pointing out the folly of crossing the thirty-eighth parallel. Pearson threw up his hands, telling Robertson by telephone: 'Norman, you have no idea what the pressure is like here. I can't possibly oppose the resolution.' Reid points out the irony that unbeknown to the Canadians and other U.N. members at the time, both the State Department policy planning staff and the CIA also opposed the idea of crossing the parallel, because of the dangers of drawing the Chinese into the conflict and possibly precipitating a wider world conflict.22 It was to no avail: Truman and Acheson, not to speak of Mac Arthur, had worked up a full head of steam to 'roll back' Communism and inflict a mighty defeat on the Cold War enemy. The resolution, with heavy U.S. pressure, easily passed the Assembly. MacArthur drove on towards the North, and the Yalu River. Suspicions ran deeper yet, since Canadians were not unaware that MacArthur's expansive strategic design might well involve carrying the war on offensively into China itself. Canada attempted at the United Nations to seek a delay in military operations during the fall while negotiations with North Korea might be pursued. As an External Affairs memo indicated, Canada 'attached importance to our proposal that a civilian channel of communicating with the North Koreans, rather than the military one through General MacArthur, who had been dropping demands for capitulation from the air on the North Koreans, should now be used.' The State Department objected 'in the most categorical terms' to any delay in the military timetable. American pressure tactics at the United Nations ensured that, in the words of the internal External Affairs memorandum: 'Our effort on this occasion to restrain, even to the very limited extent involved in our proposal, the development of the military campaign in North Korea was arbitrarily set aside without either consultation or subsequent explanation.' Pearson indicated to Washington that he was disheartened at American behaviour, and concerned that the United States was alienating Asian, especially Indian, opinion. The latter point it would seem carried no weight whatever with the Americans, who had virtually written off the Indians as weak-kneed fellow travellers. As MacArthur drove on northward, Pearson further communicated to Washington his warnings of 'the extremely serious risks of a war with China.' Moreover, Canada subsequently discovered that 'no effort was being undertaken by

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anyone ... to approach the Communist Chinese directly or to negotiate with them concerning Chinese interests in Northern Korea.' All warnings to MacArthur of impending Chinese intervention were waved aside with imperial disdain. Finally, on 25 November, with MacArthur's forces within sight of the Yalu, and with American bombs doubtless falling to the north, the Chinese poured into North Korea. Within weeks the U.N. forces had been driven back below the thirty-eighth parallel. All Canada's efforts to limit the conflict had been in vain; the Americans had paid no attention, and now the multinational U.N. force, not to speak of the people of the two Koreas, would have to pay the price.23 Any possible intimations of 'I told you so' sentiments following the Chinese entry and its immediate military consequences were overshadowed by what External correctly perceived to be the deepening danger of an even more frightening American response. Threats of atomic bombing of Chinese cities brought British prime minister Clement Attlee rushing to Washington, and brought forth a remarkable memorandum from Lester Pearson. 'Korea and the Atomic Bomb' made the case against the tactical use of nuclear weapons succinctly and forcefully, and pointed to the 'immense and awful consequence' for the West and the world.24 But with or without nuclear weapons, a war extended to the Chinese mainland was definitely an option on the American agenda. Opinion within External appeared divided.25 Hard-liners did not have the ear of the minister, although he was severely constrained in his ability to act upon his more peaceful instincts by the insistent pressures from the U.S. government. At the end of 1950 the United States embarked on a new diplomatic offensive at the United Nations to pressure that body to declare the People's Republic of China an aggressor. This was in plain contradiction to the facts; China had entered the war only after giving many warnings (all ignored by the truculent MacArthur) that the occupation of all of North Korea and incursions over China's own border by U.S. forces would be interpreted as a threat to Chinese security. Worse, branding the Chinese as aggressors shut the door on negotiations and confirmed the United States in its intransigent refusal to recognize the Communist regime. These points were made to Pearson by a top-level External team of Escott Reid, Charles Ritchie, and Douglas LePan.26 Yet when the resolution came before the Assembly in February 1951, Pearson declared that it was 'premature and unwise' - and then voted for it. Just over two months later, Truman was compelled to fire MacArthur, whose selfaggrandizement was blossoming into outright Caesarism. Yet Canadian concerns survived the dismissal of the General, for the fear lingered in Ottawa that the MacArthur strategy could outlast MacArthur, particularly if the Republicans, backed by the well-financed right-wing 'China lobby' (the bloc of die-hard Chiang Kai-shek backers in the United States), became ascendant. If Canada Were to make its voice heard on Korea, it would have to be well informed about North Korean, Chinese, and Soviet actions, capabilities, and intentions. But Canada, an independent nation without its own external intelligence

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agency, was at a distinct disadvantage in relation to the American riches in intelligence sources. The intelligence problem for Canada in dealing with the United States can be shown in two incidents. The first had to do with a briefing given by Dean Rusk of the State Department to Hume Wrong, Canadian ambassador to the United States in early 1951. Lester Pearson, as we have seen, was very concerned about America's objectives in relation to the Chinese. Wrong was asked to interview State Department officials. Rusk put on an elaborate show for Wrong, revealing, in strictest confidence, material gathered from 'very secret intelligence' that the State Department had been unwilling to share even with the British. This turned out to be a set of elliptical hints that if only a hard line were maintained against the Chinese Communists, an upheaval was likely to occur in Peking that would bring anti-Moscow forces to the fore. Wrong was flattered at receiving these confidences, although he had to admit to Pearson that 'we are inevitably at a disadvantage ... since this could only be determined by access to the secret intelligence which is determining U.S. thinking or by the availability of good intelligence sources inside China.' Perhaps unconsciously admitting the double bind into which allies were put by American control over intelligence sources, he added that 'furthermore, we are not in a position to give even the slightest public indication of what the present aim of the United States in Peking is.'27 The second incident took place the following year, when concerns over possible extension of the war onto Chinese territory were again being aired in policy circles in Ottawa. It had come to Ottawa's attention, from Canadian military intelligence, that 'organized flights by fighter aircraft' may have been taking place across the Yalu, perhaps as far as Mukden, 200 kilometres inside the Chinese border. If this were true, it was an obvious provocation on the part of the United States. British military sources independently confirmed Canadian suspicions, while Australian sources rejected them. Pearson asked Wrong to lake up this 'disturbing development' with the U.S. government, which might, Pearson hoped, be unaware of the 'excessive zeal on the part of local commanders' and could, if notified, put a stop to it. Wrong was cautioned to take great care to protect the Canadian sources in conveying this information. Wrong diffidently approached his usual contact in the State Department. The Americans decided to play hardball: no action would be taken to bring the matter to the attention of the secretary of state unless the Canadians formally put the reports in writing and revealed their sources so that their seriousness could be assessed. The Canadians, predictably, backed down. Pearson, worried about putting 'ourselves too firmly or officially behind this information,' felt that it would be 'unwise' to pursue the question any further with Washington, although desultory investigations continued, apparently with inconclusive results.28 The contrast between Wrong's two encounters with the world of intelligence are illuminating. It is hard to play your own game in international politics when you are being dealt cards from a marked deck.

398 The End of the First Cold War Era 'SUCH UNHAPPY CONSEQUENCES': THE PRISONER-OF-WAR IMBROGLIO

By early 1952, with the military situation at stalemate, efforts were under way to bring about an armistice. 'The only obstacle,' concluded a detailed External Affairs memorandum in February, 'is the difference of opinion on the disposal of prisoners of war held by the United Nations Command.' The claim that tens of thousands of North Korean and Chinese POWs wanted to remain in the South out of rejection of Communism was a prize propaganda ploy on the part of the United States. Given the ruthless use of information control by the U.N. forces, there is little doubt that this claim was highly inaccurate; coercion, moreover, was certainly employed to help score this propaganda victory.29Canadian observers had their doubts about numbers, and External was particularly critical of what was clearly a violation of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners, which called for the unconditional release and repatriation of prisoners upon the cessation of hostilities. In any event, the issue was certainly used to avoid a ceasefire, and Canadian officials were concerned that the war would drag on into the American election campaign and possibly bring on a hard-line Republican administration. Canadian pressure proved as ineffectual as ever.30 Then in the spring came disturbing news that the POW situation was quite different from what the United States had been maintaining, and at the same time that Canadian soldiers were being used, without official consent, by the Americans in the prison camps. A revolt broke out in the camps on Koje Island among pro-Communist POWs. Canadian troops were dispatched without the consent of the Canadian government to take part in the repression of the uprising. Pearson became aware that he had been misled by the Americans on the numbers reputedly refusing repatriation; indeed, he had made a statement earlier in the House that, he told Hume Wrong, he 'would not have made if the full information had been made available.' The more immediate issue concerned the use made of Canadian troops, about which the government protested to Washington. Pearson did this however on formal or technical grounds regarding command structure. As he informed Wrong, there was a good deal more to it than that: The Canadian Government has no responsibility for the administration of Koje which has had such unhappy consequences. The insertion of a Canadian company into the situation at Koje ... is hard to understand and no effort has been made to explain it to us.' Yet, notwithstanding their opposition to the 'political' decision to implicate Canadians in the Koje operation, the Canadian government yielded to the U.S. command, which insisted on keeping the company at Koje as long as it was needed for 'military' purposes - which turned out to be more than a month. The Canadian cabinet approved the decision with irritation and a proviso that it should not happen again. The Americans once again had got their way, although some disagreement had been made public, reportedly to Dean Acheson's lasting wrath.31 Acheson's wrath carried over into the next major confrontation between the two

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governments over Korea - in the autumn of 1952 at the United Nations, where the Canadian delegation made common cause with the Indians in attempting to hasten an armistice and oppose the American tactics of threatening China with further extensions of the conflict. This story is well known - from Pearson's account in his memoirs, based on the extensive diary he kept during this period; from Denis Stairs's account in his Diplomacy of Constraint, and from Dean Acheson's acerbic, ill-tempered, and unreliable recollections (entitled, with typical modesty, Present at the Creation}?2 The dreary details need not be recounted here again, especially as the ultimate issue was failure once again to bring about an armistice. A resolution did pass the General Assembly, but the Americans did not approve of it. Their response was to ignore it. When American negotiators seemingly repudiated unilaterally the thrust of this resolution during peace talks in the spring of 1953, Pearson was 'only "with difficulty" dissuaded from publicly condemning the U.N. terms.' He was 'particularly bitter' because of his role in bringing about this resolution, which the Communists now accepted, as the basis for negotiation.33 '[ W I L L GO TO K O R E A '

The Korean impasse helped discredit the Truman administration. In January 1953, the Republicans under General Eisenhower came to office. Despite the concerns expressed over the years by External Affairs people, especially Hume Wrong, that Canada should do what it could to avoid undermining the Truman Democrats out of fear that the Republicans would be more dangerously aggressive, quite the opposite proved to be the case in Korea. The pointless blood-letting had dragged on too long, and a new administration was free from its predecessor's entanglements. Eisenhower had made a dramatic pledge during the campaign: T will go to Korea.' He was as good as his word, and an armistice was signed in July. The brutal war was finally over. What role in the end did Canada play in bringing about this result? Canadian diplomat Chester Ronning later wrote that 'the President of the United States finally accepted the Canadian view and ordered the American representatives at Panmunjom to offer armistice terms as endorsed by the U.N.' As flattering as this might be to Canadian pride, it is a rather self-serving statement for which there is little evidence in the historical record. Stairs notes the absence of any mention of Canadian efforts; more recent American and British literature on the period makes no reference to any significant Canadian presence in the process that brought the war to a close.34 Korea had revealed major differences between Canada and the United States over the central Cold War issue of the early 1950s, although these differences were revealed more in private than in public. Canadian officials had gone a long way down the road of ideological anti-Communism during the Marshall Plan and NATO campaigns, for what no doubt seemed good practical grounds of guarding the

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national interest vis-a-vis the United States, managing domestic opinion, and securing the infrastructure for collective security. These motives obviously coincided with genuinely held anti-Communist views and revulsion against Soviet behaviour among the foreign-policy makers. Korea revealed the contradictions between the liberal-internationalist desire for the peaceful resolution of differences and the limitlessly aggressive logic of the anti-Communist Cold War crusade undertaken in Washington. In the crunch it was the liberal-internationalist motives that came to the fore in Ottawa, but the constraints of quiet diplomacy when facing the determined and powerful Cold Warriors in America were severe indeed. The views of the protagonists of quiet diplomacy notwithstanding, it is hard to see just what was achieved by all of Canada's diplomatic efforts, however well motivated in the interests of peace.35 On all the major differences - the original question of troop commitment; the warnings about crossing the thirty-eighth parallel and approaching the Yalu; Koje Island; the tactics at the armistice negotiations - Canadian views were either ignored, brushed aside or brought into line, albeit reluctantly, with those of the United States. To be sure, nuclear weapons were not used in Korea; but there is no reason to believe that this had anything to do with Canadian representations.36 What remained in the end was that Canada had participated in a bloody and savage war in Asia under a U.N. flag but American command, against a dubious regime but on behalf of another dubious regime, and for a result that after three years of death and destruction pretty well recreated the status quo ante helium. For this, more than 300 Canadian servicemen died in action.37 T H E M O R N I N G AFTER

Korea was a harsh morning after for Canadians who had tried so hard, and so successfully, to cajole the Americans into world leadership. The aftermath of Korea continued to sour Canadian perceptions of American behaviour abroad. As long as Lester Pearson continued as external affairs minister (until the Liberal defeat in 1957), he never again gave the Americans the kind of genial benefit of the doubt that he had habitually extended before Korea. Of course, Canada continued in its public role as loyal junior partner. Privately, in the confines of External Affairs and the cabinet room, enthusiasm had waned. The armistice in Korea had by no means eliminated American confrontations with Communism in Asia. When such confrontations flared, there was a distressing tendency among American military strategists, as well as some politicians, to rattle rockets. During the mid-1950s there were a number of occasions when the use of nuclear weapons was seriously contemplated by Washington. In Indochina, the collapse of French power before the Communist Viet Minh offensive in 1954 raised plans for American intervention, including, we now know, potential nuclear strikes. 'Deliberately cultivated rumours' in April 1954 suggested possible American air strikes to relieve the French at their military catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu. Gabriel

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Kolko concludes that neither President Eisenhower, nor his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, 'ever supported the use of American air or sea power, much less that of atomic weapons. What they did explicitly favour was the raising of doubts and fears about a possible U.S. adventure. For even if it found itself militarily and politically incapable of acting, the administration could still serve its goals if it looked as dangerous as possible.'38 If this were the strategy, it seems to have worked with Pearson. The latter told his cabinet colleagues that U.S. air strikes in Indochina would be 'unwise' and 'deplorable.' This was not, he insisted, like Korea, and Canada should stay well out of it.39 In 1955 another Asian crisis blew up around the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu. These strategically and economically insignificant islands close to the shore of mainland China had remained under Nationalist rule following the retreat of Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan in 1949. The Communists began making threatening noises towards the Nationalist garrisons stationed on the islands, and Chiang came running to Washington for help. Dulles admitted to Canada that he hoped eventually to persuade the Nationalists to withdraw and to 'convince them there was no possibility of getting back to the mainland by force.' But if the islands were attacked, the Americans would intervene. Canada made it very clear to Dulles that he could expect no help from Canada in such a venture, nor would he likely get any support from other Commonwealth countries. Dulles acknowledged that the United States could expect little in this situation from its friends, but would go it alone if necessary.40 Going it alone meant publicly threatening and privately contemplating the use of nuclear weapons.41 Pearson communicated his alarm to his cabinet colleagues and suggested that these threats were actually having 'unfortunate' effects on the Chinese, stiffening their resolve rather than causing them to back down.42 Indeed, they may have steeled Mao Tse-tung in his determination to develop atomic weapons for China.43 In the event, the crisis subsided, only to flare up in 1958 and again in 1960. The Cold War in Asia continued well past the 1950s. But after Korea, the United States could no longer count upon Canadian support in its ventures. When the United States became bogged down in the prolonged agony of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, it acted on its own, in its own name. Canada kept prudently out of any direct involvement (although some Canadian companies made money out of the conflict). The Americans apparently had not learned a great deal from Korea. Vietnam was the trauma that finally snapped America out of its dreams of global leadership. Canadians, on the other hand, did learn something from Korea. It was after Korea that Canada began its tradition of participation in peacekeeping under U.N. auspices, thus giving some substance to professions of liberal-internationalism. Never really a public trauma, Korea was a private trauma to Canadian policy makers. There would be no more Koreas, so far as Canada was concerned.

18

The Black Madness of the Witch Hunt' The Herbert Norman Affair

GAZING INTO THE ABYSS

In the summer of 1949, Lester Pearson addressed the Couchiching Conference. It was the year of NATO's birth and of the victory of the Communists in China. As he was speaking, the Soviets were about to test their first atomic bomb. Pearson and his listeners had the Cold War very much in mind that summer. Pearson, as he was apt to do in those days when evangelizing among his fellow Canadians on foreign policy, spoke not only of Communist expansion abroad but of the threat of Communist subversion within. Sounding not entirely unlike J. Edgar Hoover, Pearson warned about the menace of the 'masters of deception' who would corrupt the judgment of free people on Stalin's behalf. Amid the clear and present danger, it was no time to stand on the niceties of a weak and bloodless liberalism: 'Let us by all means remove the traitors from positions of trust and, if necessary, strengthen our criminal code to deal with the enemies of the State.' But then, just as he seemed on the verge of advocating a Committee on Un-Canadian Activities, Pearson suddenly stopped short and changed direction. 'But in doing so,' he added in a characteristic Liberal corollary, 'I hope we may never succumb to the black madness of the witch hunt.' 1 Were the Liberals schizophrenic when it came to such matters? Liberals like Pearson and St Laurent relentlessly beat the anti-Communist drums, no doubt because they genuinely abhorred Communism and feared the spread of Soviet domination. They also knew that they could achieve certain things that they would have found much more difficult to attain without the insistent drumbeat. Yet Pearson had already, by the summer of 1949, glimpsed the dame macabre of the anti-Communists of Washington as they began to trample upon the liberties of Americans. Pearson already had a sense of the lunacy let loose upon the land: 'the black madness of the witch hunt.' These were not the mild, polite words of the diplomat. It was as if he had looked into an abyss. Nietzsche wrote that 'whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not

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turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.' 2 It was not long before the abyss gazed back at Lester Pearson and at his generation. One of that generation, a friend and colleague of Pearson, Herbert Norman, would shortly be caught up in the Washington witch-hunt, and would perish. Pearson himself was a suspect in the eyes of the new inquisition. Two years after he had alluded to the witch-hunt at Couchiching, the first entries appeared in an FBI file on Pearson as a possible Soviet agent. T have here in my hand a list,' declared Senator Joseph McCarthy in a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, 'of 205 ... names that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.'3 This reckless charge set off a national furore that convulsed America for four mad years. During that period, McCarthy himself was overshadowed by the 'ism' he spawned. McCarthy's initial target and the vehicle on which he rode into national notoriety was the State Department. The early 1950s were a dark period for many of the brightest of American diplomats - especially those who were associated with America's China policy. The fall of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime in 1949 was widely perceived as a crushing defeat for America in Asia and a huge geopolitical gain for the Communists. The largest nation on earth had fallen to America's mortal enemies: who, American conservatives demanded, was responsible for the 'loss' of China? The cry of betrayal from within avoided the hard questions about some mistaken assumptions of American policy. In the hunt for scapegoats, those policy advisers who had spoken uncomfortable truths about America's corrupt and failing Nationalist ally were the first in line. A number of distinguished sinologists in the State Department were tarred by accusations of disloyalty and then thrown to the wolves by a government that lacked the will to defend them. The experience of the State Department was regarded with some anxiety by the External Affairs people of Pearson's generation. They watched diplomats dragged before official investigations where private associations of decades past were raked over for evidence of 'Communist influence.' They saw ancient policy papers and diplomatic dispatches perused by ignorant witch-hunting politicians for proof of subversive thoughts. Their blood must have run cold. Of course America, many Canadians smugly asserted, was an immoderate, unstable place given to periodic excesses. Such things could not happen here in Canada. But they did happen in Canada. True, they did not happen on purely Canadian initiative. They happened in part because the American mania knew no boundaries and the reach of the Washington witch-hunters extended over the forty-ninth parallel. But there was some Canadian complicity in the process. Ultimately, the diplomat with Asian expertise who suffered the greatest persecution and reacted with the most tragic personal consequences was a Canadian, Herbert Norman. The State Department China experts were persecuted and driven out of government, but they were all able, in their own ways, to survive the ordeal. Norman was not. And behind Norman

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stood the more imposing target of Lester Pearson, leading diplomat, minister of external affairs, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and later prime minister of Canada. Pearson, unlike Norman, survived and prospered. But the very existence of persistent allegations and rumours, not to speak of a hefty FBI file (coded 'Espionage /?[ussian]),' on a man of Pearson's stature, is a sign of the passage of the witch-hunting atmosphere into Canada, as well as its persistence in America. Thirty years after Norman's suicide, the controversy over Norman boiled over once again, with the publication of two books and an official report commissioned by the government of Canada in the late 1980s. E. HERBERT NORMAN, 'WITCH'

Who was Herbert Norman and why were they saying such terrible things about him? The first part of the question can be answered readily, if superficially. Egerton Herbert Norman was a Canadian born of missionary parents in Japan. Educated in the 1930s at the universities of Toronto, Cambridge, and Harvard, Norman became a rare combination of scholar and diplomat. Four scholarly monographs and ten articles, published between 1937 and 1949, established him as a leading Japanologist.4 He joined the Department of External Affairs in the late 1930s and was attached to the Canadian legation in Tokyo when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Repatriated to Canada, he spent the war years in Ottawa, largely in intelligence work. Following Japan's surrender, he returned to a diplomatic posting in Japan, where his academic and practical knowledge of Japanese society and history proved a valued resource for General Douglas MacArthur, the American proconsul presiding over the reconstruction of the conquered nation. In 1950 Norman returned to Ottawa once more, but this time under a cloud of suspicion about past left-wing associations. The FBI already had a file on Norman, begun during the war, and General MacArthur's head of intelligence in Tokyo had been pursuing Norman as a security risk. Norman had published some of his research with the Institute of Pacific Relations, a prime target of McCarthy and company. There was also a tenuous but potential link between Norman and the wartime Soviet spy ring in Ottawa revealed by Igor Gouzenko that the FBI were following up. Norman's name had even been publicly, if indeterminately, raised by a McCarthy associate in the U.S. Senate in early 1950. There were 'questions' Norman was required to answer. He was subjected to a full RCMP security enquiry in Ottawa that dragged on over a number of months. At the end of it he was exonerated. No evidence existed, External declared, that Norman was a security risk. Unfortunately for Norman, the nightmare had not come to an end but was only beginning. An RCMP report was passed to the FBI, which did not accept Norman's clearance. FBI material routinely fell into the hands of witch-hunting senators and congressmen. This was no exception. Norman's name came up in testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SSIS) by Karl Wittfogel, an ex-Commu-

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nist academic turned star witness for the prosecution. Further investigations followed. In 1952 Norman was cleared again, and Lester Pearson as minister of external affairs publicly affirmed Norman's loyalty. Following this trauma, Norman's career went into a hiatus, with a posting in faraway New Zealand. But by 1956 he had once again become an important actor in Canada's diplomatic service. As ambassador to Egypt during the Suez crisis, he played a key role in mediating between Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and the West. Then in March 1957, the same Senate committee that had dragged his name through the mud in the early 1950s publicly revived the Norman 'case' once more. On 4 April Norman deliberately plunged to his death from atop a Cairo building. Fabricated 'suicide notes' (almost certainly the handiwork of the CIA in Cairo) were leaked to the press suggesting that Norman had killed himself to avoid exposure as a spy. Herbert Norman the man - humanist, scholar, diplomat - had come to a tragic end. Herbert Norman the 'witch' - Communist, spy, traitor - had only passed into another phase. ' T H O R O U G H L Y B A D ' : C A N A D A , T H E U N I T E D STATES, A N D T H E D E A T H OF N O R M A N

Norman's act of self-destruction is one of those events that continue to reverberate down through the decades. Both at that time and since, its symbolic significance seemed to overshadow the personal tragedy of a distinguished Canadian, to all except perhaps those closest to him. It was the context of the time that charged this death with so much meaning. Coming at the tag end of the so-called McCarthy era, Norman's suicide was redolent of the brittle, crazed atmosphere of the early Cold War; yet at the same time it seemed somehow a sad punctuation marking a new phase, for Norman was the last major public victim of McCarthyism (using the term generically). In 1957, the Canadian response was overwhelmingly one of revulsion. Newspaper editorials on the Norman affair, as well as the flood of angry letters from ordinary Canadians that reached Ottawa, reflected a near-unanimity: Norman was an innocent victim and the Americans were to blame.5 The anger was directed at the U.S. witch-hunters whose allegations had driven Norman to his desperate act. In Washington, Canadian ambassador Arnold Heeney noted in his diary that 'the state of Canadian-U.S. relations has been thoroughly bad. The publicity given by the Senate subcommittee on Internal Security to the old '51 charges against Norman infuriated Canadians and produced a wave of anti-Americanism which Mike says exceeded anything in his experience.'6 Yet this was not the only interpretation, then or later. First there was the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that had publicly revived the charges against Norman. Behind it stood the FBI, possibly the RCMP, even Britain's MI5, as well as the whole Cold War alliance of military-security-intelligence interests and their support-

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ers in the media. To this panoply of professional mistrust, Norman was a 'security risk' at best, an agent of Soviet espionage and subversion at worst. Statements of outrage emanating from Canada were simply examples of bleeding-heart liberal weakness in the face of the Soviet menace. But why, from among potential targets, was Herbert Norman singled out for the public abuse that eventually drove him to his death? ' U N N E C E S S A R Y A N D U N W O R T H Y ' : T H E F I N A L ATTACK O N N O R M A N

In 1986, two full-length books on Norman appeared. Together they represented the summation of the two streams of interpretation of the Norman affair.7 Roger Bowen's Innocence Is Not Enough is a scholarly documentation of Norman's life and a meditation on the meaning of his death. Bowen has no brief for the Normanas-spy thesis. Innocence Is Not Enough is also a vindication of Norman's integrity and a defence of his self-inflicted death as a rational, perhaps the only rational, response to the slanders brought down upon him and that left him, in Bowen's phrase, 'no refuge but suicide.' The late James Barros in his No Sense of Evil showed no more doubts about Norman's guilt than Bowen about his innocence. The two books could thus not be more opposed in intention and execution. One could scarcely guess that the subject was the same person. Superficially, events and circumstances seem to present a certain similarity. Yet the figures at the centre of each account have nothing in common. Bowen's Norman is an intellectual; a leading scholar on Japan; a liberal humanist; a seeker after truth in perilous times; a man who had pondered the great issues of the twentieth century and offered a personal commitment (first to the forces of revolution and anti-fascism and later to the diplomatic service of his own liberal-democratic, and capitalist, country); a confidant of General Douglas MacArthur; a diplomat moving ably in the world of international crisis; a lover of the good life and then a man buffeted by forces beyond his control, forced to confront distorted ghosts from his youthful past, interrogated by Red-hunting cops, humiliated, slandered in headlines, and finally driven to that terrible moment on the roof of the Cairo building, master at least of his own fate at the very end. Above all, we find in Bowen's Norman a human being, flawed as we all are but extraordinary in a way that few are, not a symbol but a person, whose death is the more tragic because his humanity and personality transcended the symbol that was impersonally, almost accidentally, created by the ideological forces at play in the Cold War. Barros's Norman is not a human being at all. This 'Norman' is the residuum of a process of ideological abstraction and dehumanization. He is, in the words of the subtitle, a 'case.' As Bowen writes, in words directed against Norman's tormentors of the 1950s but that also serve to describe Barros's No Sense of Evil: after the first accusations in 1950, 'who Norman actually was - his behaviour, his personality, his writings ... - or his thoughts, his beliefs, his being - had no relevance in the investi-

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gations carried out... He ceases to exist except in terms of the other, of the suspect. He becomes a "case", a political abstraction, a non-being.'8 The publication of these two diametrically opposed views of Norman in the same year not surprisingly set off some considerable debate about Norman. Not content to let his book speak for itself, Barros opened a major campaign to force the government to reopen the Norman 'case.' Charging a governmental cover-up of allegedly incriminating evidence, Barros managed to acquire two Alberta Tory MPs as spokespersons. The minister of external affairs, Joe Clark, first dismissed the call for an investigation as 'unnecessary and unworthy.' 9 Finally, however, the pressures generated by Barros and his MPs became sufficiently strong that the Department of External Affairs did initiate an enquiry, by a former diplomat and retired academic expert on Canadian foreign policy, Peyton Lyon. Given access to all pertinent documentation, including security files, Lyon wrote a report in the spring of 1990 that was scathing in its dismissal of Barros and adamant in its conviction that Norman had, after all, been a loyal Canadian public servant.10 Although Barros refused to back down from his allegations, most observers, including one of the MPs who had called for the enquiry, declared that the Lyon Report closed the Norman case once and for all. Perhaps the coincidence of Lyon's report with the dramatic end of the Cold War will indeed finally allow Herbert Norman to rest in peace. But even if Norman is allowed to rest, the significance of the 'Norman affair' must still be assessed for the meaning of the Cold War to Canadians. ' A M A N W H O M I G H T HAVE E X I S T E D ' : C O N S T R U C T I N G A S E C U R I T Y RISK

Espionage was the charge with which Norman's persecutors pursued him during his lifetime. Espionage is the word dangled by Barros in the subtitle of No Sense of Evil. Treason and disloyalty are the themes applied to Herbert Norman's life. This 'Norman' was an agent of the Soviet state's offensive intelligence apparatus, planted in the Canadian diplomatic service to spy upon the West and surreptitiously to influence Western policy in the Soviet interest. These charges constitute the gravamen of the case against Norman. Given this thrust, the astounding fact is that none of his investigators, from the 1950s to the 1980s, has been able to adduce a single plausible or substantive piece of evidence regarding a single act of espionage, disloyalty, or treason on the part of Norman. The mountain has laboured and laboured, and brought forth only a tiny, stillborn mouse. In this sense, one is quite justified in speaking of witch-hunts: witches were after all constructs of the imagination of the witch-hunters. But perhaps this is to mistake the nature of the enterprise. As one of McCarthy's victims, Asian scholar Owen Lattimore (who, be it noted, was a friend of Herbert Norman), put it in his book Ordeal by Slander, in the eyes of the investigators he had become a 'man who might have existed.' 11 This describes the method of secu-

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rity investigators, then and now. Such a method obviously leaves the subject in a peculiar position when defending himself: how does one respond to an image of a self that might have existed! It also describes the scholarly object of Barros in No Sense of Evil: the deployment of evidence to construct a picture of a man who might have been. Norman's prosecutors deployed evidence essentially to two ends. First, there was the time-dishonoured McCarthyite tactic of assuming guilt by association. Second, there was the assiduous attempt to adduce evidence of heresy or, to use Orwell's term, 'thoughtcrime.' The latter method is pursued in a superficially historical manner, that is, evidence is gathered from long-ago letters and the memories of acquaintances, but in fact the method is profoundly ahistorical, since words (and implied thoughts) are ripped from their historical context: Norman's ideas of the 1930s are simply condemned as heretical by the standards of later decades; words once uttered, thoughts once (allegedly) thought, are uttered and thought once and for all, are transformed into entries on the timeless, one-dimensional file, the cumulative dossier in the hands of the Inquisitor. THE PAST: T H R O U G H A GLASS D A R K L Y

The historical investigations of Norman's inquisitors yielded the intelligence that he had believed in Communism and had Communist associates in the 1930s, dating from his period of study at Cambridge. This is true: Norman was a Communist in the 1930s, a fact that he himself readily granted under RCMP interrogation in the early 1950s. The question of whether he was a formal party member is somewhat cloudy; but, as Bowen suggests, it is hardly a matter of much significance, since it is incontrovertible that he thought of himself as a Communist for a time, at least while he was at Cambridge, perhaps even for a time longer after his return to North America. In the mental universe of his investigators, however, this information is the lodestone that rearranged all other facts about Norman's subsequent life within its magnetic field. It is almost as if there were no more to be said, or at least that there remained only exegesis of an immutable text. What is altogether missing from the witch-hunters' dossiers is the dimmest awareness of the context of the 1930s: world depression; the apparent failure of capitalism; the rise of fascism; the drift to war and militarism; and, especially pertinent to Norman, the Spanish Civil War and the cowardly behaviour of the Western democracies in the face of Hitler's backing of Franco. 'Like many,' Barros sneers, 'he was impressed by Moscow's material assistance to the hard-pressed Loyalists, as though Stalin had been moved by mere altruism. Of course, this was not the case ,..' 12 'Mere altruism' was scarcely the point, but there is no arguing with Barros, since all he is interested in is showing that Norman was on the 'wrong' side in the 1930s. The obverse of this proposition is that those on the side of fascism were on the 'right' side.

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This reconstitution of history, post-1945, to label 'premature anti-fascism' in the 1930s as a form of original ideological sin, became a staple of the American Right. Timing here is everything. Once America was at war with the Axis, it was of course quite acceptable, even commendable to have been anti-fascist. But woe betide any who took this stand too soon, for such a stance was suspiciously akin to the Communist party line of the era. To Norman's generation, the generation that came of age during the 1930s, political choices were more complex and difficult than the post1945 Cold Warriors would later admit. The so-called Cambridge Communists made a choice between fascist barbarism and what they believed to be a progressive movement to build a better world. Some, like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, retained this commitment for the rest of their lives, by betraying their country from within as secret servants of the Soviet Union. We can now see that this choice was in the end as morally corrupt as the choice of fascism would have been - because Soviet Communism was itself an ugly and destructive totalitarian system, and because systematic betrayal of one's country on behalf of a foreign state is a morally compromising act no matter how it is rationalized. But this can hardly mean that everyone who made the same choice in the 1930s followed through with the remorseless dedication shown by Philby and friends, or that the choice itself should be taken as a sign of original sin for which expiation must be eternally sought. The inquisitors were willing to settle for public repentance of the sort that admitted that the penitent had been wrong at the time. But for those, like Herbert Norman, who were unwilling to look back at the 1930s and make a mockery of their difficult and courageous thinking during that terrible time, there would be no forgiveness. What the inquisitors' blinkers shut out was the possibility that people make and remake themselves in the course of their own and the world's history. With the Nazi-Soviet pact, the war, and the emergence of the postwar world, someone like Norman could make new choices that redefined his position in relation to Communism and the West, but without repudiating or parodying the choices he had made in an earlier era. This did not fit the inquisitors' agenda. If Norman did not admit guilt for his past, he must have been another Philby. INTO J. EDGAR HOOVERLAND

Central to the case against Norman by the Senate subcommittee was the Tsuru incident. During the war Norman made an attempt to recover a library of Japanese books for their owner, a Japanese Marxist by the name of Shigeto Tsuru. Norman had known Tsuru at Harvard in the late 1930s, and pursued the matter of the books at Tsuru's request following his repatriation to Japan. This incident, punctuated by FBI intervention, was supposed to be pregnant with sinister connotations. Barros cites FBI reports of the incident, but neglects to quote a rather key point: that Norman had actually suggested to Tsuru's landlord, in whose house the books were stored, that the police be contacted, given the somewhat unusual nature of the

410 The End of the First Cold War Era request for taking possession of the library.13 As it turned out, one of the FBI agents was abusive and ignorant (he was not even aware that Canada had been an ally of the United States in the war). Words were exchanged, and the library was confiscated by the U.S. government. It was the considered judgment of the FBI that the library included papers described as 'Communist literature and propaganda,' written in five languages, including Russian. Norman was obviously interested in the library because it contained numerous Japanese books otherwise impossible to obtain in wartime North America. Since Norman was a practising Japanologist, this is a perfectly reasonable explanation - although Barros terms this an 'almost absurd interpretation.'14 Tsuru later confessed to involvement in Communist activities, and passed on Norman's name. Thus Norman's innocuous attempt to recover Tsuru's library pointed suspicious minds in only one direction. The real significance of the Tsuru incident in the story of Herbert Norman is that it began his FBI file. As many Americans were to find, stumbling into J. Edgar Hooverland would turn out to be a season in Hell.15 GUILT BY ASSOCIATION, GUILT BY NON-ASSOCIATION

At some point beginning in the late 1930s and culminating in the war years, Norman, according to his own later recollections, drifted away from Communism. Later yet, his writings on Japan diverge to a degree from a Marxist method of analysis, which he obviously began to find somewhat wanting. He did not experience one of those sudden born-again public conversions to capitalism and the American Way that were to prove so useful to the ex-Communists who by the late 1940s were making professional careers, and in some cases good money, out of their recantations. Indeed, he retained a certain amount of Marxist method in his work. Moreover, he refused to believe that he had been wrong in opposing fascism in the 1930s or that all progressive forces in the postwar world were to be shunned or suppressed because they might be tainted with Communism. In short, Norman was not at all the sort of ex-Communist that the American witch-hunters wanted (or that some of them in fact were). To them there was only one way for a sinner to purge himself of Communism: public renunciation of past sins and enlistment in the ranks of the Inquisition, accompanied by the naming of names. Norman had no intention of turning in his past friends to the secret police (although some of his former friends - including the aforementioned Tsuru - had no such scruples about offering his name). If Norman did not conform to the acceptable standard of exCommunist, to the witch-hunters there could be only one explanation: the leopard never changed its spots. As they pursued Norman's past through the war years and the immediate postwar period, this idee fixe drove the inquisitors into murkier and murkier waters. Let us look to the methods of James Barros. The latter provides 'evidence' for his declaration of guilt in the most extraordinary fashion. Among these is what we might call guilt by non-association. Having established that Nor-

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man associated with known Communists and even liberal progressives in the 1930s, Barros then proceeds to treat the incontrovertible evidence that Norman began quietly (not publicly) cutting himself off from some of his more vociferously party-line acquaintances as 'proof that Norman, cunning conspirator that he was, was deliberately covering his Communist tracks. Thus, he allegedly snubbed Alex MacLeod (later a Communist MLA in Ontario) and Philip Jaffe (a Communist journalist in New York who was later to be a secret source for the SISS's accusations).16 Barros interprets this as evidence that Norman was concealing his deepening involvement in the Communist conspiracy. Apart from the rather obvious observation that dedicated 'moles' like Kim Philby do not set about their secret penetration by publishing books that employ Marxist analysis, sponsored by the Institute of Pacific Relations (a prime target of McCarthyism), consider the logic of the Barros method. Norman publicly associated with known Communists in the 1930s: guilty! Norman privately dissociated himself from known Communists in the 1940s: guilty again! Certainly a most serviceable method of argument for the prosecution. N O R M A N AND THE TWO GENERALS

The FBI and Senate documents make clear that the real root of Norman's troubles lay in the period of the late 1940s when he acted as an adviser and confidant to General Douglas MacArthur, the American proconsul presiding over the postwar reconstruction of conquered Japan. These were very exciting years for Norman, when his considerable knowledge of Japanese society was put to use on behalf of what, at first, was an attack on the militarism and authoritarianism of prewar Japan and an attempt on a large scale to democratize and liberalize its social, political, and economic structures. MacArthur, it is clear, deeply valued Norman's expertise and spoke of his services in the highest terms. Despite this commendation from a man who was to become the most exalted symbol of the American Right, Norman attracted the attention of one powerful enemy in the U.S. Occupation force - so powerful that this attention was eventually to destroy him. Within the Occupation force there were contending factions of rightists and moderates. MacArthur, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, stuck for a time with the democratic moderates until the emergent logic of the Cold War at home and in Asia led to a triumph of the rightists, and the conversion of Japan into an anti-Communist bulwark off the Chinese Communist coast. Norman was a more-than-willing instrument of the democratic reconstruction. This is all to his credit. But it marked him as the enemy in the eyes of MacArthur's chief of intelligence, General Charles Willoughby, a leading figure in the right wing of the Occupation. Willoughby snooped and probed and tried to build a 'case' against Norman as a Communist. All of this went into the FBI files, from there to the SISS, and hence into the headlines. In fact, the Willoughby dossier is a farrago of McCarthyite nonsense, including a

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grotesque attempt to link Norman with the wartime Sorge spy ring in Japan.* For example, it was charged that Norman, in the company of John K. Emmerson, a State Department official later to fall under suspicion during the McCarthy-era attack on the China hands, effected the release of some political prisoners incarcerated by the wartime Japanese government, including some leaders of the Communist party. This act, of which so much was later made by the SISS,17 was in fact done under orders and was a perfectly legitimate and appropriate act of the Occupation. Not even the indefatigable Barros can quite maintain that this was a disloyal act, as such, but he notes that Norman's 'enthusiasm ... cannot go entirely unnoticed.' 18 Indeed not. Other equally nonsensical pieces of 'evidence' fall flat on the page. Undeterred, Barros then comes to the hard core of his argument: 'The important point is how General Willoughby perceived these different incidents' (all of which, it should be noted, even Barros has had to admit are insignificant). 'Collectively, they led him to believe that Norman "was very active and unduly concerned with Communist affairs". This perception was later heightened by reports ... connecting him with "Communist leanings". His previous ideological strolls [?] and associations were now slowly coming home to roost.'19 Here we can see the full asininity of the McCarthyite method. An accumulation of individual charges, each of them phoney, becomes 'collectively' a case upon which a person can be destroyed. All this nonsense then mutually reinforces itself, as cross-references are made among equally flimsy pieces of 'evidence.' A superstructure without a base might be beyond the capacities of architects and engineers, but not of Norman's inquisitors, whose method of building their case closely resembles that of the bird who accumulates objects for its nest on the sole criterion of their colour. So long as a report is anti-Norman, no matter how ersatz, in it goes. Eventually they stand back and say : 'There, you see, individually they may not be much, but collectively they are all the same colour!' The credibility of General Willoughby as a witness against Norman requires some comment. MacArthur's definitive biographer terms Willoughby an 'arrogant, opiniated sycophant.' 20 In Korea, where he followed MacArthur, Willoughby poohpoohed the possibility that the Chinese might enter the war in response to MacArthur's drive northwards. Worse, once they had entered, he persistently and systematically underestimated their numbers, by up to 75 per cent.21 There was both more and less to General Willoughby than met the eye. Willoughby was an ardent admirer of Franco and once publicly toasted fascist Spain as a 'cradle of supermen.' It is one of the so-called charges against Norman that he was pro-Loyalist at the time of the Spanish Civil War.22 That Norman's antagonist should have been a fervent admirer of Franco's fascists was apparently unworthy of notice. According to the retrospective logic of the Cold War, the fascists represented the 'right' side of the *Richard Sorge, a highly successful Soviet spy operating out of the German Embassy in Tokyo, was executed by the Japanese when uncovered in 1944.

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Spanish conflict. An attachment to fascism in no way diminished the credibility of an anti-Communist witness like Willoughby. GUILT BY A D D R E S S BOOK

One of the charges against Norman that emerged from the Willoughby/FBI file was that his name was found in the address books of two 'Communists.' First, Norman's number and address appeared in the address book of Israel Halperin. As we have earlier indicated, Halperin was one of the people detained at the time of the Gouzenko affair and named by the Taschereau-Kellock Commission as a Soviet agent.23 In the course of Halperin's arrest, the RCMP had seized an address book of his as an exhibit. The appearance of the names of other suspects in the book was used as evidence against them in the immediate proceedings (a kind of guilt-byassociation merry-go-round), but this famous address book has continued to play a strange role over the years. From the RCMP it passed for a time into the hands of the FBI, who fell upon the name of Herbert Norman. Israel Halperin was named as a Soviet agent, but was acquitted in the courts. It is supposed to be the essence of our British system of justice that a person is considered innocent until proven guilty. To the RCMP, the FBI, and to Professor Barros, it is exactly the other way around, and thus Israel Halperin was, by virtue of being named a Soviet agent, a Soviet agent. And the appearance of Herbert Norman's name in Halperin's address book is tantamount to proof that Norman must have been a Soviet agent too. But as we have made clear in an earlier chapter, there can be little doubt that Halperin was innocent - not just technically innocent, as many have assumed, but genuinely innocent of any connection with Soviet espionage. Yet in a bizarre twist, Halperin's innocence turns out to have been of no account, for his address book was pronounced guilty: anyone whose name was found in the offending book was thus guilty by association. During the research for this book, we were not allowed to see the infamous Halperin address book, it being excluded from our Access to Information request for the Gouzenko documents on the grounds of protection of the privacy of the individual (considering the use made of the address book by the RCMP and the FBI there is considerable irony in this). We have, however, been told by a source within the Ottawa security apparatus who has examined it that it is in fact no more than an address book (it includes among its entries such things as the number of Halperin's local laundry). 24 Israel Halperin was an old school friend of Norman's. With both of them residing in wartime Ottawa and working for the government, it is not surprising that Norman's telephone number should have been in Halperin's address book. Yet when Lester Pearson referred to the Halperin book as 'an example of the names of innocent people cited in a book of addresses and social engagements,' Barros professes to be scandalized: 'What was jotted in his address book was basically a police matter [?], and Pearson's way of handling it was odd to say the least.'25 Pearson's

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statement in turn became a seed of suspicion against him that later germinated in the minds of the investigators of the Senate subcommittee and the FBI. It is as if Halperin's address book was a carrier of a virus, infecting all who came in contact with it.26 So it was with the other case of guilt by address book: Frank Park's desk pad or telephone finder. This is even more curious. During the war Frank Park was an employee of the Wartime Information Board (WIB). Norman's office phone number was on his desk pad, which fell into the hands of the police when it was seized as evidence in the Gouzenko affair. It had formerly been in the possession of Gordon Lunan, Park's predecessor in his WIB job and the man upon whose evidence Halperin had been wrongly implicated in the affair. As early as 1957, just after Norman's suicide, this document came to public attention in a Time magazine story, which stated that Park was national director of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Council.27 Park had left the WIB position early in 1946 to take up the directorship of the council, a body that, before the Gouzenko affair and the Cold War, had attracted considerable 'respectable' support. Apart from this association, and apart from being termed 'a rabid and very dangerous Communist' by an RCMP interrogator of Norman,28 no evidence has ever been given of any espionage activity on Park's part. Both he and Norman were civil servants in wartime Ottawa who sometimes met socially. The number finder in question, in any event, came from Lunan's office and contained entries by Lunan and possibly others, as well as by Park.29 The sensible answer to 'evidence' of the quality of the Halperin and Park connections should have been 'so what?' But to Norman's inquisitors, the address book entries were sufficient evidence to justify hounding a distinguished Canadian diplomat to his death - and then assiduously besmirching his reputation years later. AN AGENT OF I N F L U E N C E ?

If no evidence has ever been advanced to indicate an act of espionage on Norman's part, there is a convenient fallback position, that Norman was an 'agent of influence' or 'agent of disinformation.' This is convenient because this category is carefully drawn up in such a way as to resist any attempt to verify or to disprove it. Having failed to come up with even a fingerprint, let alone a smoking gun on espionage, Barros asserts that 'although acquiring secret and privy information is important, equally important if not more so, is ... an agent of influence and/or his or her role as a conduit for disinformation.' 30 Agents of influence or disinformation in Barros's own borrowed definition are those who use their 'position, influence, power, and credibility to promote the objectives of a foreign power in ways unattributable to that power.' The operative part of Barros's definition is 'in ways unattributable to that power.' Any attempt to prove that Norman was such an agent is doomed: 'the feasibility of such a difficult and complicated task would be virtually nil.' 31 This of course merely adds weight to the charge. The less that can be pinned on Norman, the

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greater the likelihood that he must have been a devilishly clever agent. Thus, Barros dismisses an internal study by the Department of External Affairs of Norman's dispatches and reports from Cairo that concluded there was no evidence of sympathy with Communism and that Norman had indeed warned Ottawa of the dangers of Soviet penetration in the Middle East. To Barros, this is 'somewhat naive': 'No agent of influence would have been foolish enough to reveal anything in a telegram or dispatch. Of value to his true masters would have been the type of advice he might have tendered to his government.' 32 Just how a diplomat in faraway Cairo could have tendered advice except through diplomatic communication is an unanswered question. This is merely a preface to explaining Barros's most significant silence: his failure, or refusal, to examine the advice Norman tendered to the department over the years. If he had done so, he would have found little, if anything, to bolster even a right-wing fantasy of a Communist sympathizer. We have read a good many documents penned by Norman from the files of External Affairs. His advice was usually intelligent (which would not have commended it to the Cold Warriors), judicious, and not in any way characteristic of someone attempting to edge his government's policies closer to the interests of the USSR.33 OF WHITEWASHES AND RED SMEARS

Central to James Barros's argument is the claim that the External Affairs Department 'whitewashed' Norman when public accusations against him were first aired by the SISS in 1950-1. Barros seems to think that it was illegitimate for the civilians in External and the minister, Lester Pearson, to overrule the police in a security-risk case. On the contrary, the internal security system of the Canadian government, in operation for about five years at the time of the first Norman investigation, came under the authority of the minister and his deputy.34 The RCMP advised, on the basis of its files and field investigations, whether an employee constituted a risk, according to criteria set out in a cabinet directive. The department made the final decision, as in any personnel matter. On occasion, when they believed there was sound reason to do so, senior public servants (with the concurrence of the minister) overruled an adverse police report. It rarely happened, but it was not unknown. This is as it should be in a liberal democracy. Barros is indignant at the notion that Pearson, Norman Robertson, Arnold Heeney and other senior officials should have interviewed Norman about the accusations instead of handing him over exclusively to the police. When Arnold Heeney (who had been the civil servant responsible for overseeing the establishment of the government's security-screening system and for drawing up the draft of the first cabinet directive on security) commented unfavourably on some of the accusations, Barros is scornful: 'Heeney, trained in the law, had strayed into the arcane and murky world of subversion, espionage, and counter intelligence. He was no more fit to comment

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... than the RCMP was able to comment on the dispatch of diplomatic notes to the Russian embassy in Ottawa.'35 This judgment flies in the face of the basic structure of authority in the Canadian state. Barros makes very heavy weather of the notion that the first investigation was not merely a whitewash, but was virtually non-existent, really no more than a chat or two with the Old Boys of External ('a discussion among gentlemen of breeding' in Barros's phrase).36 Norman himself, according to his own later recollection and that of his wife and friends, and according to Bowen's account, felt that he had been put through an embarrassing and humiliating ordeal - so trying that the possibility of having to go through it once more in 1957 may have helped decide him to take his own life. In fact Norman offered to resign his position in the interests of the department - certainly not the act of a Soviet mole, although it suggests that the enquiry was serious enough to disturb him deeply. There was, however, worse to come. Shortly after this initial enquiry, much more serious and widely reported charges of Communist associations were made against Norman under the auspices of the Senate subcommittee by Karl Wittfogel, ex-Communist turned namer-of-names. These accusations had to do with Norman's alleged participation in Marxist study groups in the 1930s, with no shred of evidence regarding espionage or disloyalty: the 'charge' was straight ideological heresy by an apostate from the heresy. But in any event, Wittfogel had facts and dates wrong. Except to the undiscriminating and over-excited eyes of heresy hunters, the Wittfogel testimony was just another example of the kind of hearsay mud-slinging and character assassination that was all too common in the Washington of 1951. Yet in the face of this, Norman was recalled for yet another round of questioning in Ottawa, or as Barros would have it, the 'whitewash: second phase.' A transcript of an interrogation of Norman from early 1952 has been released in censored form.37 Barros claims that this was the only time Norman was ever interrogated by the RCMP, but abundant internal evidence demonstrates the falsity of this claim.38 It is the only record of interrogation that survives (or that has been released), although other such meetings did take place. Norman faced two RCMP officers, Superintendent George McClellan (head of the Security Service) and Inspector Terry Guernsey (a Security Service specialist in Communism), and George Glazebrook, a conservative External official with special duties in intelligence. Norman was bullied to name names and disclose information about former associates and friends. He was pressed to explain how he was known by Israel Halperin, Frank Park, Lorie Tarshis (a non-Communist economist of whom the RCMP seemed inordinately suspicious), and others. He was probed about his days at Cambridge. Guernsey was unimpressed with Norman's attempts to explain the context of the time: 'You talk about anti-Fascists and anti-Nazis and so on,' Guernsey probed. 'Wasn't it a nice name for a Communist?' The main point Barros has to make about this interview is that Norman lied: 'the enormity of his falsehood leaps at you from the text.' 39 What was this enormous

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lie? That he denied having been a member of the Communist party at Cambridge. Now this 'enormous falsehood' must be examined closely, especially since Barros later extends culpability to Pearson for lying about Norman's Communism in an official cover-up. Norman denied having been, in the parlance of the 1950s, a cardcarrying member of the Communist party. He said to his interrogators: 'I'm quite frank in admitting my political sympathies in those years,' and that he had considered himself 'very close' to the party. He agreed with a questioner that 'it would not have been unreasonable for a contemporary of yours at Cambridge to have said that you were a Communist.' Or again, in answer to the question 'could you have been so close in your own mind for people to say to all intents and purposes that you were a member of the Party?' Norman answered: 'They might, because people make conclusions by one's conversation.' And finally, in what triggers Barros's 'enormity of the falsehood' phrase, Norman indicated that 'in my Cambridge time I came close to [membership] and if I had stayed there another year I might have.' The memoirs and the secondary literature on the Cambridge Communist generation in fact make clear that, in the early 1930s, party membership as such was not the norm in any event, even among those who were clearly committed to the cause. Peyton Lyon, in his official report, agrees with Norman's denial of membership: 'Police records bear him out; they had penetrated the party to such an extent that they are confident they know precisely who was in, and Norman wasn't - in Britain, Canada, or the United States.'40 Norman had indeed been frank about his sympathies. Perhaps, however, he had not been completely frank in a larger sense. There is evidence that while at Cambridge he had been involved in organizing Indian students on behalf of Communist policies for Indian independence from British colonial rule. The fact that the Communists advocated independence for India of course meant that anyone espousing this view (which after all later became official British policy) could be retroactively termed a 'Communist', but Norman did not deny his Communist sympathies at the time. Why then did he downplay or deny the role he had apparently played? The explanation in a way does implicate Norman in an untruth, but one with extenuating circumstances. Activity among the Indian students could be considered classic Communist undercover subversion, by the standards of the 1950s. The Communists 'took over' the Indian Student Assembly: this could be seen as Leninist style infiltration, and Norman's role as that of a party operative. The fact that the issue was in tune with the movement of history away from Western colonial rule in the Third World counts as nothing in the eyes of those making this argument. If Norman had admitted this student activity of two decades earlier to be judged by the standards of the 1950s, his career could have been destroyed and the reputation of External Affairs besmirched along with it. This does not excuse Norman's lie, but if we place it in the context of the time, and consider that he had long since moved away from his student associations and moreover had a clear conscience concerning his behaviour as

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a Canadian diplomat and public servant, we can appreciate that he found himself hemmed in by morally ambiguous choices on all sides: the whole truth about the past might have led to a greater untruth, his being branded disloyal in the present. So he lied to a degree, and thus caught himself in the mesh of future difficulty. It was not an easy choice. The same can be said for the larger question of membership in the party. There is indeed no proof that Norman lied about this, no evidence, in effect, of a party membership card. And he made no secret of his pro-Communist sympathies and his closeness to the party. Yet perhaps in denying membership, he was at least guilty of de facto obfuscation. And did not Lester Pearson, in Barros's words, 'fracture the truth' and show himself to be 'deceitful'41 in Norman's defence, both when he indicated that Norman received a 'clean bill of health' in 1951-2 and when he concealed Norman's 1930s Communist affiliations following his suicide? There was something Jesuitical and hairsplitting in the argument that Norman had not been a Communist, although he had had Communist sympathies. There was also good reason for this. To the witch-hunters there was a kind of black magic in a party membership card. Even the Canadian government's own stated policy on security screening in the public service, as enunciated in a cabinet directive of 1952, was that 'there is always serious doubt as to the loyalty of a person who was previously a member of the Communist Party ... Where a reasonable doubt remains, and where national security is involved, that doubt must not be resolved in favour of the individual.' 42 Even past associations created such doubts, but party membership at any time would certainly constitute grounds for denial of security clearance, which in External Affairs was tantamount to dismissal. The government was caught on the horns of a dilemma partially at least of its own making. If there were no compelling reasons to believe that Norman had been disloyal, which there were not, literal application of their own criteria would constitute a major injustice. If Norman, and Pearson on his behalf, settled for something that was less than the literal truth, to fend off an unfair and slanderous attack, who are we to judge? Politics can be a dirty business, especially in times like those of the early 1950s. As Norman himself put it, in a phrase that Bowen makes the title of his biography: 'innocence is not enough.' But there is yet another question left by the Barros interpretation, one that can now be answered, though certainly not to Barros's satisfaction. Barros made it more than clear in his book that he believed that Pearson and the other civilians (the Old Boys) in External had overridden the better judgment of the RCMP. He has no doubt that the RCMP, along with the FBI, thought Norman a suspicious character and security risk at best, and a Soviet spy at worst. John Sawatsky reports that when the news of Norman's suicide in Cairo reached Ottawa, 'RCMP headquarters openly and unapologetically rejoiced at his death. When a civilian member rebuked them, a Mountie shot back: "Whose side are you on?" '43 As we have already made clear, it was the responsibility of the RCMP not to make decisions on security clearances,

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but to offer advice. But was it in fact the case that External had overruled the RCMP? Peyton Lyon in his 1990 report was, unlike Barros (as well as Bowen and other researchers like ourselves), given full access to all documents, including those of the RCMP. Lyon's conclusion differs sharply from Barros's. [T]he RCMP did nothing to resist External's decision, and the files suggest a high degree of mutual respect, at least at that time and at the top level. Inspector Guernsey, who led the 1950-52 interrogations, has confirmed this in a telephone interview. Had the RCMP felt coerced or cheated, they could have turned to their own Minister, Hon. Stuart Garson, for support. Instead they expressed their satisfaction to External in writing and then co-operated in the restoration of Norman's Top Secret clearance; two weeks later, the Commissioner wrote External 'Kindly regard this correspondence as SA clearance for E.H. Norman.' SA is a higher level of clearance. The Solicitor-General and External now speak as one, in public and in the files, about Herbert Norman. Differences in nuance remain, ones arising out of differences in role. Neither, however, has found anything to prove Norman was ever disloyal, and they both deny that he was ever a member of the Communist Party.44 HELPFUL MOUNTIES, LEAKY G-MEN

Even if the Mounties had not actively contested the civilians' interpretation of their information on Norman, the uncomfortable fact was that part of the case made against him by the Senate subcommittee was based on RCMP files. The Mounties shared such information routinely with their intelligence allies, in this case the FBI. Canada was a very junior partner in the American-led international intelligence network, where the common currency is exchange of information. Lacking its own external intelligence agency, Canada had little to exchange except information on Canadians. RCMP reports from the 1950 interrogation went down to the FBI in Washington. One of these contained incomplete, if not inaccurate, information. Unfortunately, the witch hunters in Congress were routinely fed material by J. Edgar Hoover to keep their mills turning. Lester Pearson made a belated, and vain, attempt to stall the transmission of the Norman file. Despite this, and despite a clear injunction to the FBI that the information should be kept in strict confidence, highly misleading information from the RCMP quickly showed up in the Senate subcommittee and was used against Norman.45 To put it mildly, the FBI maintained a double standard when it came to protecting secret information. After Norman's suicide, Canadian anger was tempered with the concern that nothing similar be allowed to happen again. A bitter Lester Pearson decided to deliver a 'sharp note to the U.S. government containing a threat to withdraw provision of security information on Canadian citizens unless the United States guaranteed no passage of information beyond Executive control.' Apprised of Pearson's resolve, and appalled at the prospect of a breakdown in intelligence exchange, the

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commissioner of the RCMP sought to enlist officials of External Affairs and Justice to dissuade the minister by pointing out that the Senate subcommittee had 'access to security information derived from RCMP files about other extremely recognizable high Canadian government officials which could be most damaging if the Sub-committee decided to retaliate with further disclosures.'* The commissioner was no doubt shocked to hear from External officials that Canada might in retaliation 'publicize damaging evidence against well-known Americans' passed in confidence to the RCMP from the FBI.46 The same day that Pearson's note went to Washington, Commissioner L.H. Nicholson communicated to Hoover his 'continued complete confidence in FBI integrity and a hope for continued cooperation to mutual benefit.' After the Norman tragedy, it is difficult to see how complete confidence in FBI 'integrity' could possibly be vowed with a straight face, but not for the first time the RCMP was demonstrating that its own loyalties in the context of the Cold War were not unambiguous. The storm eventually died down without any retaliatory publicity launched against the other government's citizens.47 The Canadians were apparently placated by assurances from Washington that despite the constitutional inability of the executive in the United States 'absolutely' to control the legislative branch, 'in practice no further breaches of confidence would occur.'48 More to the point than a constitutional primer on the division of powers would have been an assurance from the White House that the FBI, not Congress, would be placed under executive control. Eisenhower was not the only president who lacked the will and the means to curb J. Edgar Hoover.49 SMALLER FRY AND BIGGER FISH

By standing relatively firm in the face of the Norman accusations, the External mandarins may well have prevented a far worse situation from developing. In the face of the McCarthyite attack on the State Department, the response of both the Tinman and the Eisenhower administrations was one of appeasement. But each body thrown to the wolves only increased the feeding frenzy of the attackers, who had sharp noses for the smell of blood. Many able diplomats and Asian experts were purged as a result, and the capacity of the State Department to pursue an intelligent Asian policy was grievously impaired. The attack on Herbert Norman - a man who had published 'Marxist' writings with the dreaded Institute of Pacific Relations - was an offshoot of this campaign. Officials in Ottawa's External Affairs Department had watched the slaughter among their U.S. counterparts. Their refusal to offer up Norman was a rejection of the kind of character assassination represented by the inquisition in Washington. But it also showed a healthy sense of institutional self*One of these was senior civil servant Robert Bryce (see chapter 7), and another was Lester Pearson himself (see below).

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preservation against the corrosion of an American-style campaign of bureaucratic self-destruction. The refusal of senior officials to discuss the Norman evidence in public - taken by Barros as evidence of a cover-up - was, as Pearson explained to Prime Minister St Laurent, 'our way of dealing with security cases, a way which has been effective in protecting national interests and is just to individuals.' Keeping silent protects 'our officials from slanderous implications.' In this case, the Canadian way failed to protect Herbert Norman, but that was because security forces and legislators in another country failed to respect Canadian sovereignty. To be sure, as John English comments, the Canadian way was liberal, but not democratic.50 The American way, represented at this time by the SISS, may have been more 'democratic' (in the sense of making security matters a populist issue), but it was distinctly illiberal. It was a matter of painful historical irony to Canadians that one of the most celebrated victims of American illiberality should have been a Canadian. When Pearson and the other mandarins gave Norman a 'clean bill of health', they were acting with decency, reason and justice, as well as in the interests of their organization and their country. For once, Canada was standing up to the bullying of such 'ugly Americans' as J. Edgar Hoover and the witch-hunters in Congress. They recognized that in doing this they were running a risk - not of Soviet penetration through the instrument of Norman, but of American retaliation, or at least of further 'revelations' strategically dropped. In fact they said as much to each other, and worried (prophetically) about further problems. But they did not base their decision about Norman's career on fear of what the Americans might do. We now know what was perhaps imperfectly perceived at the time of the Norman accusations. The Norman case was intended by the SISS and the FBI as a stalking horse for a far bigger and more important case: the minister of external affairs and future prime minister of Canada, Lester Pearson. If Canada had caved in over Norman in 1950-2, Pearson would have been the next to be dragged to the public scaffold. William Rusher, special counsel to the SISS, exulted at having driven Norman to the Cairo rooftop and spoke warningly a decade after Norman's death of 'the cool, moon-faced opportunist who had quarterbacked Herbert Norman through the Canadian Foreign Service, bullied into silence the Canadian security officials who knew the truth concerning him, and had all but succeeded in concealing from the world forever the facts about his protege's [sic] long Communist record.'51 Professor Barros, ever forthright, if not egregious, spells out what Rusher in 1968 was content to leave at the level of innuendo: 'One might even dare to think the unthinkable - that Pearson was Moscow's ultimate mole.'52 There is very considerable irony in this. As an evangelist for NATO, for the Marshall Plan, and for American leadership of the Free World, Pearson had been tireless in the late 1940s. As an anti-Communist crusader, excoriating fellow travellers and peaceniks, rousing Western civilization against the barbarians at the gates (and within them), Pearson was second to none in the Canadian government. Later, as

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leader of the Liberal party, he would ride into office as prime minister in 1963 on a pledge to arm American missiles on Canadian soil with nuclear warheads - in an election in which direct and indirect American intervention helped topple the Conservatives. Yet as we have described Pearson's thoughts and behaviour during the Korean War, he understood only too well the limits of the Cold War mentality, and the limitations of American leadership, however crucial he thought it for collective security. His private doubts led him, uncharacteristically perhaps, to raise public concerns. He thus committed the cardinal sin - in American eyes - of pursuing mildly independent attempts to bring about a negotiated halt to the bloodshed. It was precisely at this time that Pearson himself fell under suspicion in the eyes of some American witch-hunters. Then in 1953 Pearson refused to allow Igor Gouzenko to testify in Washington before the SISS. This decision he made on the advice of the commissioner of the RCMP who feared that the committee would air unproven allegations by Gouzenko against individuals 'without regard for the[ir] rights or privacy.'53 But Pearson drew fire from the American Right. Colonel McCormick, the notoriously Anglophobe publisher of the Chicago Tribune, publicly denounced 'Communist infestation ... in Canada where Lester Pearson is the most dangerous man in the English speaking world.' 54 Pearson too had become a 'case.' The first step in the 'Pearson case' came when Elizabeth Bentley, nonpareil exCommunist witness, happened to have seen comments by Pearson in the press in 1951 condemning the fact that Norman's name had been dragged into the public spotlight by the SISS. Bentley had never apparently mentioned the name of Pearson to anyone in any connection before, despite having poured forth all sorts of names to the FBI and to the congressional committees, but as Barros delicately puts it, 'her memory was triggered when she saw his comments defending Norman in the press.'55 Bentley claimed that during the war one of her contacts for purposes of espionage had been Hazen Sise, a Canadian attached to the Washington Embassy as a representative of the National Film Board. The FBI had compiled a file on Sise56 that had been closed by the time Bentley had her sudden accession of memory. Sise had been an associate of Dr Norman Bethune in the late 1930s and had Communist party connections, but apart from Bentley's testimony there was nothing concrete against him. But now Bentley recalled that Sise's alleged source within the embassy had been none other than Pearson, the deputy chief of the Canadian mission in Washington during the later war years. This third-hand hearsay, recalled a decade later, was to the witch-hunters a Rosetta Stone from which they were able to read an entire vast conspiracy in which Norman was protected by a far bigger suspect, Pearson himself. 57 Before this trail is followed any further, the reliability of Ms Bentley requires scrutiny. She had named many civil servants as disloyal; some were convicted of various charges, usually perjury for having denied her charges; others, however, were not.58 Barros, of course, has no doubt she was telling the truth about Sise and

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Pearson. 'What motive would [she] have to lie?' he asks. He then notes in passing that she dealt with Sise in her memoirs, 'published several weeks later' (after her SISS testimony).59 Barros does not note that in the FBI file on Sise there are memoranda to Hoover in 1953-4 that note discrepancies between her testimony on Sise and the treatment in her memoirs. She was interviewed about this by an FBI agent and admitted that Sise 'was a Canadian whom she knows very little about.' She was not even sure about what his status had been in relation to the Canadian Embassy (nor could she spell his name correctly). The agent then adds: 'She did state, however, that this was another instance where the material in her book was dramatical and more human interest and reader appeal were added.'60 In earlier sessions with the FBI she had admitted that 'she could not recall details' of any information allegedly passed to her from Pearson through Sise. She did have the 'impression,' again through Sise, that Pearson was a 'left-winger' who had been 'in sympathy with the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War' and moreover was a friend of John Grierson!61 This does not, on the face of it, represent much of a case against Lester Pearson, even by the elastic evidentiary standards favoured by the Washington witch-hunters. Yet this, along with the undoubted fact that Pearson had publicly stood up on behalf of Herbert Norman, appears to represent the sum total of the case against him. In the hundreds of pages of the FBI file on Pearson, one searches in vain for anything more than this, told and retold again and again over the years by FBI agents to each other. Barros identifies Pearson as an agent of influence, and even suggests that the United States may have fed him disinformation that he dutifully passed on to the Soviets: 'Regrettably [not to say conveniently] ... this theory cannot be tested at present.'62 Seen from a 'magnanimous [!] point of view,' Pearson might have been an 'unconscious ideological sympathizer' of Communism (whatever that could possibly mean) 'Less generously,' he was a 'conscious ideological sympathizer.'63 From there it is, for Barros, but a short step to his outrageous description of Pearson as 'Moscow's ultimate mole.' The threat to name Pearson was raised by the SISS prior to Norman's suicide. On 20 March 1957, six days after Norman had been publicly named, a confidential meeting was held between Robert Morris and William Rusher of the SISS and three State Department officials. The latter's mission was to block the SISS's threat to disclose the Bentley 'evidence' on Pearson, an act that, as Roderick O'Connor of the State Department put it, according to Morris's handwritten notes, would 'blow whatever water was left in the boiler and would cause a tempest in a certain foreign country.' The State Department people pleaded in vain that Pearson is 'co-operating to the fullest extent with our government in defence contracts.' 'That,' said Morris, 'is just what I mean. Look at the situation ... There are a good many Canadians at the U.N. who are pro-Communist.' Christian Herter of the State Department then formally wrote to Senator Eastland, the chairman of the SISS, to regret the disclosure of the Norman information and to 'hope' that the committee would not 'under these

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circumstances ... feel it necessary to release that part of the testimony which refers to a high official of a friendly government.'64 Canada was aware of this possibility. Pearson himself dared the State Department to publish the Bentley nonsense, but they demurred. When parts were leaked to the press, Pearson forthrightly denounced the reports as false to the point of absurdity. SISS counsel Robert Morris thought discretion the better part of valour and refused press comment. In the 1960s, John Diefenbaker, who had somewhat mysteriously come into possession of the Bentley material on Pearson, tried to blackmail the then prime minister into silence over a Tory security scandal by threatening to make the accusations public.65 Pearson repeated what he had said to the SISS in the 1950s: he dared Diefenbaker to go ahead. Diefenbaker backed down, just as the SISS and the FBI had done in the previous decade. THE END OF THE R O A D

Pearson prevailed over his shadowy adversaries because he refused to fear them. Fear was the very currency of the witch-hunters. They were like the Wizard of Oz: projecting a terrifying image of power and menace, they were, behind the elaborately contrived fa£ade, just blustering, pretentious, unprepossessing little men. They got away with a lot so long as their victims cowered and otherwise decent persons gave public credence to their posturing. Pearson, scathingly described by the arrogant Dean Acheson as an 'empty glass of water,'66 proved to have more substance than Acheson himself, who had allowed the first deadly inroads of the McCarthyites into the State Department (despite later misgivings, aired well after the fact in his self-serving memoirs). Pearson, unlike his American colleagues, had not after all succumbed to the 'black madness of the witch hunt.' Sadly, the relative courage of Pearson and the other mandarins of External could not save Herbert Norman. On his suicide, Lyon concludes that The motive, overwhelmingly, was to escape the prospect of seemingly endless interrogation and humiliation for himself, and embarrassment for his Minister and colleagues. Canadians were not wrong to assign the primary blame to a group of foreign politicians and officials who had demonstrated their determination to pursue him to the end. The wave of anger that swept Parliament and their nation was not just another instance of 'American bashing'. It was rage over a crude, cruel violation of Canada's sovereignty, and shock at the loss of one of our brightest and best.67

His death was a tragic finale to the era begun with the defection of Igor Gouzenko. It was a low note on which to end an era, but not an inappropriate one. Escott Reid called his memoir on the creation of NATO, Time of Fear and Hope. The era between Gouzenko's defection and Norman's death was one of much fear, certainly. As for hope, perhaps there was some, for a better time than the present, for

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a time when the betrayals, great and small, would come to an end. But to many Canadians, then and now, the most powerful image of that era is that of Herbert Norman - scholar, diplomat, humanist - a life of great promise stifled, dreams of a better world dashed, standing in his last despairing moments at the edge of that roof in Cairo.

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Notes

Abbreviations used in the notes to refer to frequently cited collections are explained in the list of primary sources following the notes.

C H A P T E R 1 Never Again!: From World War to Cold War 1 Reg Whitaker, 'What Is the Cold War about and Why Is It Still with Us?' Studies in Political Economy 19 (Spring 1986): 7-30. 2 See Reg Whitaker, 'Fighting the Cold War on the Home Front: America, Britain, Australia and Canada,' in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, eds, The Uses of Anti-Communism (London 1984), 23-67. 3 RCMP Intelligence Bulletin, War Series No. 20, 4 Mar. 1940, in Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey, eds, RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, 1939-1941, Committee on Canadian Labour History (St John's 1989). 4 Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during World War II,' Labour/Le Travail 17 (Spring 1986): 135-66. See also Ramsay Cook, 'Canadian Freedom in Wartime,' in W.H. Heick and Roger Graham, eds, His Own Man: Essays in Honour of A.R.M. Lower (Montreal 1974), 37-53. 5 Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda (Toronto 1984), 215-20. 6 On 8 Aug. 1945 an American poll found that 85 per cent approved of the use of the bomb on the Japanese, while only 10 percent disapproved. Reported in Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels against War (Philadelphia 1984), 128-9. No such question seems to have been asked of the Canadian public, but editorial opinion in Canadian newspapers was strongly favourable to the use of the weapon. 7 Aid to Russia Rally, 25 Nov. 1942; Canadian-Soviet Friendship Congress 1943. Quotations from CBC recordings, CBC Program Archives. 8 Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism'; William and Kathleen Repka, Dangerous Patriots: Canada's Unknown Prisoners of War (Vancouver 1982).

428 Notes to pages 12-38 9 Whitaker,'Official Repression of Communism,' 164—5. 10 See Ruth Roach Pierson, 'There's Still Women after All': The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto 1986). 11 Although there has been no systematic study of the effect of the Cold War on Canadian women and the Canadian family, a recent American study offers fascinating insights: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York 1988). 12 Robert Both well, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (Toronto 1981), 120. 13 S.D. Clark, The Suburban Society (Toronto 1966), 109-10; and Clark, Urbanism and the Changing Canadian Society (Toronto 1961), 32. 14 Quoted in Wittner, Rebels against War, 98.

C H A P T E R 2 Gouzenko Concealed: Spies and Atomic Politics 1 Reg Whitaker, 'Spy Story: Lifting Gouzenko's Cloak,' Globe and Mail, 6 Nov. 1984. 2 Winnipeg Free Press; Globe and Mail, 17 Feb. 1946; NAC, NFTSA Cl 914(429A), Matthew Hal ton broadcast, 18 Feb. 1946. 3 John Sawatsky, Gouzenko: The Untold Story (Toronto 1984), 22. 4 NAC, WLMK, Diary (hereafter MKD), 6 Sept. 1945. 5 Ibid. 6 See David Stafford, Camp X: Canada's School for Secret Agents, 1941-45 (Toronto 1986), 265-9. 7 See ch. 1, above. 8 One other MP, Dorise Nielson from Saskatchewan, was actually a Communist, but had been elected in 1940 under a different label. 9 Charles Ritchie, interviewed for Donald Brittain's 1981 CBC/NFB co-production 'On Guard for Thee,' NFB production number 106C 0181 067-069, deposited in NAC, NFTSA. 10 Montgomery Hyde, The Atom Bomb Spies (London 1980), 70; Royal Commission Appointed under Order in Council PC 411 of 5 Feb. 1946, The Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and Circumstances Surrounding the Communication by Public Officials and Others in Positions of Trust of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power (hereafter RRC) (Ottawa 1946), 19-29. 11 A 'dummy' file indicating an all-points bulletin for the police to locate a missing Soviet cipher clerk remains in the External Affairs records. 12 C.W. Harvison, The Horsemen (Toronto 1967), 155. 13 NAC, WLMK, v. 272, 187002, N.A. Robertson to Mackenzie King, 3 Nov. 1943. 14 NAC, WLMK, v. 272, 187010, T.A. Stone, 22 Jan. 1944. 15 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 23 Sept. 1945. 16 See, for example, Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon (New York 1982), 32. 17 Ibid., 49.

Notes to pages 38-52 429 18 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 1 Oct. 1945; WLMK, Memoranda and Notes series (hereafter M&N), v. 234, C157721-2, 30 Sept. 1945. 19 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 7 Oct. 1945. 20 NAC, DBA, v. 2620, f. 'Temporary N-l,' 'Note,' 9 Oct. 1945. The reference to 'C' was to Sir Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6, who had originally been contacted on the matter by Peter Dwyer, an MI6 man in Washington. The apparent enthusiasm of both M15 and MI6 for immediate arrests undermines the latter-day conspiracy theories that high-level Soviet moles in British Intelligence were seeking to cover up the Gouzenko affair: viz., Chapman Pincher, Too Secret Too Long (London 1984). 21 NAC, DBA, ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary 1945-1951 (London 1983), 187. 24 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 11 Oct. 1945. 25 Herken, Winning Weapon, 36. 26 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 17 Oct. 1945; J.W. Pickersgill and D.F. Forster, eds, The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 3, 1945-1946 (hereafter MKR) (Toronto 1970), 88. 27 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 31 Oct. 1945. 28 On the background to Canadian nuclear research, see Robert Bothwell, Nucleus: The History of Atomic Energy of Canada (Toronto 1988), and his Eldorado (Toronto 1984), as well as the earlier study by Wilfrid Eggleston, Canada's Nuclear Story (Toronto 1965). 29 Herken, Winning Weapon, 62. 30 NAC, WLMK/M&N, v. 234, C15769/72, press release, 6 Aug. 1945. 31 Washington Times-Herald, 8 Aug. 1945; NAC, WLMK/M&N, v. 234, C157717/9, Hume Wrong to Mackenzie King, 18 Aug. 1945. 32 RKC, 617. 33 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 10-23 Sept. 1945, 1100-8. 34 NAC, DBA, v. 2620, f. 'Temporary N-l,' U.K. High Commission to Robertson, 9 Oct. 1945. 35 William A. Reuben, The Atom Spy Hoax (New York 1955), 98-9. 36 Arthur Compton, Atomic Quest (New York 1956), 117. 37 Herken, Winning Weapon, 107. 38 L.B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson. Volume I: 1897-1948 (Toronto 1972), 263. 39 MKR, 98. 40 Herken, Winning Weapon, 65-6. 41 NAC, DBA, v. 2620, f. 50242-40(1), Wood to St Laurent, 3 Dec. 1945. 42 NAC, WLMK, v. 272, f. 2740, 187018-25. 43 NAC, LBP, v. 389, 350035-40, Pearson to Wrong, 12 Dec. 1945. 44 Ibid., 349988, Pearson to Wrong, 30 Nov. 1945. 45 NAC, DBA, v. 2620, f. 'Temporary N-l,' Wrong to Norman Robertson, 2 Oct. 1945. 46 Ibid., Wood to St Laurent, 3 Dec. 1945. 47 Ibid., H. Wrong, memorandum, 3 Dec. 1945.

430 Notes to pages 5 3-61 48 NA, USDS, American Embassy, Ottawa, v. 129 Correspondence Chancery, 25 Mar. 1947. RCMP commissioner Wood in conversation with U.S. military attache R.E.S. Williamson. 49 NAC, Dept of Justice, v. 2121, f. 150202, E.K. Williams, The Corby Case,' 7 Dec. 1945. 50 The creation of the UNAEC was endorsed at the Moscow meetings of the Conference of Foreign Ministers in December and approved by the U.N. General Assembly on 24 Jan. 1946. Canada was given a permanent seat on the commission, but the UNAEC never achieved more than a minor role in the discussions about the control of nuclear weapons. See James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, vol. 3, Peacemaking and Deterrence (Toronto 1972), 283-95. 51 Pearson, Mike, I: 61.

CHAPTER 3 Gouzenko Revealed: Spy Chases and Witch-hunts 1 J.W. Pickersgill and D.F. Forster, eds, The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 3, 1945-1946 (hereafter MKK) (Toronto 1970), 133. 2 NAC, WLMK, C238172, contains the text of the broadcast as reported by Pearson. 3 NAC, WLMK, Diary (hereafter MKD), 4-5 Feb. 1946; MKR, 135. 4 Speech and plans originally planned for Nov. 1945, NAC, WLMK, v. 272 f. 2740 C187018-22; NAC, Dept of Justice, v. 2121 f. 150202. This important decision was based on E.K. Williams's suggestion that 'As the matter is of such great importance I would suggest that the commission consist of three judges, so that the responsibility would be shared amongst them. Upon further reflection I think a Commission of two judges would be more satisfactory.' Williams also recommended against allowing the suspects access to counsel: The Corby Case,' 7 Dec. 1945. The extended title of the commission indicates its broad mandate: 'Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and Circumstances Surrounding the Communication by Public Officials and Others in Positions of Trust of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power.' Report (Ottawa 1946), hereafter cited as RRC. 5 MKR, 135-6. 6 Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon (New York 1982), 130-3. 7 NAC, DBA v. 2620 f. Temporary N-l.' The journalist was Bob Elson of the New York Times. Tommy Stone to Norman Robertson, 19 Feb. 1946; Stephenson quoted from John Sawatsky, Gouzenko: The Untold Story (Toronto 1984), 75. Sawatsky in a personal interview said he found Stephenson's account dubious because it was completely unsubstantiated. 8 F.H. Hinsley and C.A.G. Simkins, British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 4, Security and Counter-intelligence (London 1990), 147, 186-7. 9 William Stevenson, Intrepid's Last Case (New York 1984). 10 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 25 Mar. 1946, 280; NAC, DBA v. 2629 f. Temporary N-l.' The use of 'an inspired but unofficial leakage' had been considered earlier by External Affairs as one technique that could be used to get an enquiry moving at the appropriate

Notes to pages 61-7 431

11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

time. Memo, nd. [Sept. 1946?]. Pearson's stories and other news items documenting international reaction to the spy affair are in NAC, WLMK, v. 391. 'List of 1700 Agents Reported Given to Police,' Winnipeg Free Press, 16 Feb. 1945; William Reuben, The Atom Spy Hoax (New York 1955), 113-19. A Colonel Nickolai Redin was accused of buying military secrets from a shipyard worker in the Seattle area. Redin, it turned out, had been under FBI surveillance for months before he paid an FBI informer $250 for some information. He was given a jury trial, but the case against him fizzled in court as the purported 'secrets' turned out to be general information readily available from the Seattle public library. Despite the prosecutor's assertion that Colonel Redin posed a threat 'greater than that of the Russian hordes that swept to the palaces of Berlin,' he was acquitted. Herken, Winning Weapon, 139; Reuben, Atom Spy Hoax, 18. NAC, WLMK, v. 391, 274318. Soviet observers were included on a wintertime war exercise in Alberta, but they played the role of allies, not invaders. 'U.S. Envoy Defends Soviet Right to Obtain Secrets by Espionage,' Ottawa Citizen, 19 Feb. 1946. This charge was probably true, but Osborne-Dempster was hardly an objective commentator, fresh as he was from the notorious 1945 'Gestapo' affair in which his Red squad had spied on the CCF and the trade unions at the request of Premier Drew: David Lewis, The Good Fight (Toronto 1981), 261-87. 'Protest Incommunicado,' Winnipeg Free Press, 26 Feb. 1946. Winnipeg Free Press, 19 Feb. 1946. NAC, DEA, v. 2619 f. 8531-40C. L.A.D. Stephens to DBA, 'Reaction Outside Canada to the Investigation ...,' 1 June 1946. 'Spy Hunt,' Winnipeg Free Press, 26 Feb. 1946. Taped interview with J. Sedgwick by G. Marcuse, Nov. 1978, NAC, NFTSA; NAC, FLP, v. 9, f. 153, 'Report of a Fact-Finding Committee,' Emergency Committee on Civil Rights, nd, 6. C.W. Harvison, The Horsemen (Toronto 1967), 155. June Callwood, Emma: Canada's Unlikely Spy (Toronto 1984), 118. NAC, Transcripts of evidence given to the Royal Commission (hereafter RCE), 3152-59, 3700-05. This was remedied by the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 13 now provides such protection. NA, USDS, 861.20242/2-2846. Lewis Clark to Dept of State, No. 3660, The Canadian Espionage Investigation.' NAC, Dept of Justice, v. 2121 f. 150202, E.K. Williams, 'The Corby Case,' 7 Dec. 1945. Winnipeg Free Press, editorial, 16 Mar. 1946. NAC, WLMK, MKD, 22 Feb. 1946. Ibid., 12 Mar. 1946; 27 Feb. 1946. Ibid., 27 Feb. 1946. The commission released three interim reports that were tabled in the House of Commons and later incorporated into a final report. First Interim Report, 2 Mar.

432 Notes to pages 68-73

31

32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40

1946, Sessional Paper 132-1946; Second Report, 15 Mar. 1946, Sessional Paper 132a, 1325-1946; Third Report, 29 Mar. 1946, Sessional Paper 132d-1946; Final Report, 27 June 1946, Sessional Paper 132f-1946. NAC, DBA v. 2620 f. 'Temporary N-l,' Pearson to Robertson, 4 Mar. 1946; also in NAC, LBP, pre-58, v. 13; King comments on the speech in MKR, 181-6; For the complete text and background to the speech, see Eraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America and the Origins of the Cold War (New York 1986). These and other letters in NAC, John Bracken Papers, v. 10, f. D240ES. A Nov. 1978 taped interview with Diefenbaker by G. Marcuse and V. Rosenbluth recreates this speech. Interview on deposit at NAC, NETS A. See also Hansard, Mar. 1946, for statements by Diefenbaker and Power; Norman Ward, ed., The Memoirs of Chubby Power: A Party Politician (Toronto 1966), 380-1. NAC, WLMK, MKD, 22 Mar. 1946; 27 Feb. 1946. Commission testimony cited in R.V. Smith (1947) Ontario Reports, 387-9. See also Callwood, Emma, for further descriptions of the treatment of detainees. On trials arising out of the Gouzenko affair and their results, sources are Dominion Law Reports (DLR); Ontario Reports (OR); Canadian Criminal Cases (CCC); Criminal Reports (CR)', Keesing's Contemporary Archives; Reuben, Atom Spy Hoax. Detainees named in the first interim report, released 2 Mar. 1946, and the results of their trials: Emma Woikin, convicted of a violation of the Official Secrets Act (OSA), received a sentence of two and a half years and an additional six months for contempt of court; Kathleen Willsher, OSA, three years; Gordon Lunan, convicted of conspiring to violate the OSA, an offence under the Criminal Code (CC), five years; Edward W. Mazerall, CC, four years (R. v. Mazerall [1946] OR 762, 2 CR 1). Named in the second interim report, released 15 Mar. 1946: Dr Raymond Boyer, CC, two years (Boyer v. R. [1948J 94 CCC [Que. C.A.]); Harold S. Gerson, CC, five years; Squadron Leader Matt S. Nightingale, acquitted, OSA; Dr David Shugar, acquitted, CC. Named in the third interim report, released 29 Mar. 1946: Eric Adams, acquitted, CC; J.S. Benning, acquitted on appeal, OSA (R. v. Benning, OR 362, 1947); Professor Israel Halperin, acquitted, OSA; Squadron Leader Fred W. Poland, acquitted, OSA; Durnford P. Smith, CC, five years (R. v. Smith [1947] OR 378, 3 DLR 98 [C.A.]) Also tried for offences arising out of the investigation: Agatha Chapman, named by the commission as a 'cell organizer' (RRC, 686) demanded a trial and was acquitted, CC; Freda Linton and S.S. Burman, named along with Chapman, were never charged; Fred Rose, CC, six years (R. v. Rose [1947] 3 DLR 618 [Que. C.A.]); Henry Harris and W.M. Pappin were acquitted of offences relating to the issuing of a false passport. Convicted of passport offences: Dr John Soboloff, fined $500, and Sam Carr, six years for conspiracy to obtain a false passport. RRC, 82, 687; Harvison, Horsemen, 158. Gall up poll, Toronto Daily Star, 16 May 1946. Royal Commission testimony cited in Boyer v. R. (1948) 94 CCC 195, 218-22, 247. PRO, CAB 122/937, CTI 6, 1 May 1944; CAB 122/939, COS(45)4, 4 Jan. 1945. On RDX

Notes to pages 73-84 433

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53

generally, see Donald Avery, 'Allied Scientific Co-operation and Soviet Espionage in Canada, 1941-45,' Intelligence and National Security 8, no. 3 (July 1993), and his earlier article, 'Secrets between Different Kinds of Friends: Canada's Wartime Exchange of Scientific Military Information with the US and the USSR, 1940-45,' Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers 1986, 225-53. Interview by Marcuse and Rosenbluth with Cartwright, Nov. 1978, NAC, NFTSA. Ibid. NAC, WLMK, v. 390 f. 274607-11. The hearings ran from 13 Feb. to 27 June 1946. The commission heard 113 witnesses, took 6,000 pages of testimony, and examined 1,000 pages of exhibits. There were 10,150 copies of the royal commission report produced in English and another 1,750 in French (House of Commons Sessional Paper 208C-1947). The U.S. Army bought 13,000 copies of a sensational journalistic version by Richard Hirsch, The Soviet Spies (New York 1947). In Britain the commission's work was plagiarized by Bernard Newman in The Red Spider Web (London 1949). RRC, 620. Ibid., 280. RCE, 4538. RRC, 313. NAC, DBA, A12, f. AR 104814, Pearson, 'Memorandum for the Prime Minister,' 19 Oct. 1946; Pearson to Norman Robertson, 21 Oct. 1946; Robertson to Pearson, 25 Oct. 1946 RRC, 69-84. NAC, Dept of Justice, v. 2121 f. 150202, Williams, 'Corby Case,' 7 Dec. 1945. RRC, 221, 224; PRO, DO 127/75, High Commissioner to Viscount Addison, 17 Aug. 1946. RCE, 3036. RRC, 44.

C H A P T E R 4 Gouzenko - the Aftermath: Scientists under Surveillance 1 PRO, DO 127/75, High Commission to Viscount Addison, 17 Aug. 1946. American diplomats in Ottawa were not unaware that the commission report was being played for its anti-Communist publicity value - perhaps even, as one official mused, to such an extent that Moscow's propaganda interpretation of the affair was not that far off the mark. It was, he reported, the unanimous opinion of journalists that the Canadian government was 'not sorry to see all this publicity,' although the government's motives in this were unclear: NA, USDS, 861.20242/2-2846, Lewis Clark to Secretary of State, 28 Feb. 1946. 2 NAC, DEA, v. 2620 f. Temporary N-l,' 'Interview with Gusenko [sic],' Memo II. Gouzenko himself, it might be noted, would soon abandon this circumspect attitude. 3 The Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and Circumstances Surrounding the Communication by Public Officials and Others in Positions of Trust of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power (hereafter RRC) (Ottawa 1946), 71.

434

Notes to pages 85-93

4 Ibid., 11, 69-83. Donald Avery considers the royal commission's view of the CAScW as an example of its 'tunnel vision' derived from the report's status as a 'Cold War document' detached from any meaningful context of the wartime alliance: 'Allied Scientific Co-operation and Soviet Espionage in Canada, 1941-45,' Intelligence and National Security 8, no. 3 (July 1993): 117. 5 Using the Access to Information act the authors have obtained the release by CSIS of eighty-eight pages of documents from RCMP files on the CAScW that include entries dated 1944 to 1949. 'CAScW File,' S/SgtG.A. Renton report, 24 Feb. 1945. 'Extract,' 16 Oct. 1944; C.W. Harvison to Commissioner, 10 July 1945, RCMP, 'CAScW File,' report on the founding convention of the CAScW included in the internally circulated RCMP Special Section Intelligence Bulletin, 1 Aug. 1946, 338^6 (also released under Access to Information). 6 Ibid., J.D. Bird to Commissioner, 22 Apr. 1946. 7 Ibid., Cst G.B. Dexter, 'Subversive activities in ...,' 17 Jan. 1946; H.A.R. Gagnon to O/C 'D' Division, Winnipeg, 8 Apr. 1946. 8 Ibid., Memorandum, 14 Mar. 1947. 9 See NAC, DL, v. 3, f. 3-20. 10 After Shugar's departure, NATE went through several mergers, ending up with the United Office and Professional Workers of America. This union, which had prominent Communists on its executive, was among the first to be purged from the CIO. Officers of these unions were on the blacklists at the Canadian and American border crossings in the late 1940s; NAC, DL, v. 385 f. 1-28-1 [pt. 1], Wood to MacNamara, 8 May 1948; MacNamara to Gill, 19 May 1946. 11 Bulletin of the Montreal Branch, 1, no. 1 (Dec. 1944); Canadian Scientist 1, no. 2 (Nov. 1945). 12 Canadian Scientist 1, no. 5 (Apr. 1946): 7. 13 Canadian Scientist 1, no. 3 (Dec. 1945). 14 NAC, Evidence of the royal commission (hereafter RCE), 5058-9. 15 RCE, 5162-3 16 The royal commission was prepared to be more lenient in other cases where the witnesses were more tractable. A Colonel Jenkins, who also had a cover name in the Soviet documents, told the commission that he was guilty only of being friendly to Soviet diplomats, who 'misinterpreted our sincere endeavour, both my wife's and mine, to make them feel at home in Canada, and to show them something of Canadian life.' The commission exonerated him after he told them he was 'cured,' presumably of his hospitality: NAC, RCE, 52. 17 NAC, DBA, v. 2620, f. 'Temporary N-l,' U.K. High Commission to Norman Robertson, 9 Oct. 1945. 18 Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon (New York 1982), 131, 134. 19 NAC, DBA, v. 2620 f. Temporary N-l,' McKinley to Supt Rivett-Carnac with copies to the royal commission, 3 Apr. 1946. 20 Montgomery Hyde, The Atom Bomb Spies (London 1980), 56; The Times, 2 May 1946; News Chronicle, 10 May 1946; NAC, DBA, v. 2620 f. 8531-40C (2), Rpt no. A412,

Notes to pages 93-103 435

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36

37

18 May 1946. The presiding magistrate in Nunn May's trial expressed an opinion of the defendant not far from that of the News Chronicle correspondent. When his counsel vainly pleaded mitigation on the grounds that Nunn May had honestly done what he thought was for the benefit of humanity, while the Soviets were allies, Mr Justice Oliver indicated that the defendant was 'not a man of honour' and went on to refer to his 'crass conceit... wickedness ... degradation ... It is a very bad case indeed.' NA, USDS, 861.20242/5-2246. Interestingly, the transcript of the Nunn May trial was given to U.S. officials, even though it was not, and still is not, a public document in Britain. For a thoughtful presentation of the case against Nunn May and his defenders, see Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, rev. ed., 1965), 147-290. New York Times, 21 Mar. 1946, cited in Herken, Winning Weapon, 133. The FAS reported in the mid-1950s that about 1,000 scientists had encountered security problems. David Caute, The Great Fear (New York 1978), 461, 463. NAC, DBA, v. 2620, f. 8531-40c(2), Dispatch A.412, 18 May 1946; Margaret Cowing, Independence and Deterrence, vol. 2, Policy Execution (London 1974), 141. NA, USDS, 861.20242/7-1947, Airgram A-1581 'UK Atomic Energy,' 18 July 1947. NAC, DBA, v. 2619 f. 8531-40c(2), T.C. Davis to Sec. State, 15, 17 Apr. 1946. The Australian association also collapsed under attack by anti-Communists during this period. When the Montreal Branch of the CAScW issued a statement to the press expressing its unequivocal faith in the innocence of Professor Boyer, before he was even charged, eyebrows were raised at the royal commission and the message was read into the record of the hearings and turned over to the RCMP: NAC, RGB, 5155-8. RRC, 11,44. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 71. The British government must have been unimpressed with the commission's theories about the indoctrination of scientists. There was no official attack on the BAScW in the wake of the Gouzenko affair, although the effect of the Cold War climate gradually reduced membership in the early 1950s. NAC, RGB, 74; C.W. Harvison, The Horsemen (Toronto 1967), 159-61. Harvison, Horsemen, 159-61. NAC, RCMP, 'CAScW File,' J.D. Bird to Commissioner, 12 Apr. 1946; Harvison to Commissioner, 11 Dec. 1946. RRC, 687. A half century after the fact, these accusations of disloyalty remain a sensitive matter. When the government declares that its citizens are, or may be, disloyal or potentially disloyal, these judgments have a lasting effect even when their basis is illogical. The names have thus been changed to protect privacy. Professors R. Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein are particularly dismissive of the significance

436 Notes to pages 104-8

38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50

51 52 53 54 55

56

of the judicial process: 'Did acquittal verdicts throw doubt on the evidence brought by Gouzenko? Probably not.' The Gouzenko Transcripts (Ottawa nd), 14. NAC, RCE, 22, 27, 28 Mar. 1946; reprinted in part in Bothwell and Granatstein, Gouzenko Transcripts, 312-21. RRC, 161. Quoted in Frederick Gibson, To Serve and Yet Be Free: Queen's University, vol. 2, 19171961 (Kingston 1983), 279. RRC, 144. NAC, LStL, v. 118 f. J-10-4-H, 1950-1, O. Veblen to King, 18 May 1946; Sessional Paper No. 208, 7 Mar. 1947. NAC, DBA, v. 2620, J.A. Corry to Mackenzie King, 3 Apr. 1946. NAC, LStL, v. 118 f. J-10-4-H, R.G. Robertson to N.A. Robertson, 'FBI Request for Material' (nd). Gibson, To Serve and Yet Be Free, 280-2. Ibid., 284. James Barros, No Sense of Evil (Toronto 1986). Stanley Brice Frost, McGill University: For the Advancement of Learning, vol. 2, 18951971 (Montreal 1984), 240-3; Paul Dufour, 'Eggheads and Espionage: The Gouzenko Affair in Canada,' Journal of Canadian Studies 3^ (Fall-Winter 1981): 188-98. In 1949 Dr James told the Empire Club that the question before Canada was simple: 'Will you fight for Russia or for Canada? ... Choose your side. There can be no middle ground.': 'Canada or Russia, All Must Choose - Dr. F.C. James,' Toronto Daily Star, 18 Mar. 1949. A report from the American consul general in Montreal to the State Department on Communism at McGill noted that Dr James had altered his ideas to 'conform more to the conservative pattern of the majority of McGill's alumni, governors, and financial backers': NA, USDS, 842.00B/3-2248, North Winship to Secretary of State, 22 Mar. 1948. McGill did draw some unfavourable attention both from the media and from the minister of external affairs and the RCMP in Ottawa in 1947 regarding the activities of a student of Yugoslav origin who organized pro-Communist activities on the campus and led a delegation of student Communists to a meeting in Prague. Government sources quoted a McGill dean to the effect that 'this man is a menace and we should get rid of him.' As far as can be ascertained, he was allowed to complete his year at McGill but did not return. A file on Leon Davicho can be found in NAC, LStL, v. 19. Leopold Infeld, Why I Left Canada: Reflections on Science and Politics (Montreal 1978). Exhibits of the royal commission, released under Access to Information. NAC, RCE, 15 Feb. 1946; reprinted in Bothwell and Granatstein, Gouzenko Transcripts, 111-13. RRC, 48. Henry Ferns, Reading from Left to Right: One Man's Political History (Toronto 1983), 187-9. Reg Whitaker, 'Spy Story: Lifting Gouzenko's Cloak,' Globe and Mail, 6 Nov. 1984.

Notes to pages 109-15 43 7 57 The CP dispatch first came to our notice in a reference in William A. Reuben's The Atom Spy Hoax (New York 1955), 69-71. 58 NAC, Cabinet Conclusions, 7 Sept. 1949. 59 Ferns, Reading from Left to Right, 284-97. 60 In correspondence with the authors before his death, Dr Ferns confirmed the details of our account and expressed considerable interest in our reconstruction of the bizarre circumstances of his victimization.

C H A P T E R 5 The Russians, the Americans, and Us: Cold War Foreign Policy 1 In his Presidential Address to the Canadian Political Science Association in 1982, Denis Stairs commented that despite its peacemaker image, 'by the principal benchmarks of the international system ... [Canadian] foreign policies were undeniably, almost unrelievedly, partisan.' It may thus 'be somewhat surprising that so many observers have regarded Canada's cold war alignment as context rather than essence': 'The Political Culture of Canadian Foreign Policy,' Canadian Journal of Political Science 15, no. 4 (Dec. 1982): 676. 2 The literature of liberal-internationalism has tended to come either from practitioners such as Lester B. Pearson in his Memoirs (3 vols, Toronto 1972-5) and Escott Reid in Time of Fear and Hope (Toronto 1977) and On Duty (Toronto 1983), or practitioners-turned-academics such as John Holmes in The Shaping of Peace, 2 vols (Toronto 1979 and 1982) and The Better Part of Valour (Toronto 1970). For academic analyses of particular cases that stress this interpretation, see Denis Stairs, The Diplomacy of Constraint (Toronto 1974) and the sophisticated reformulation of the thesis by Douglas Ross, In the Interests of Peace (Toronto 1984). 3 The first strong statement on these lines was from journalist James M. Minifie, Peacemaker or Powder-Monkey (Toronto 1960), followed later in the decade by Stephen Clarkson, An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada? (Toronto 1968); L. Hertzmann, J. Warnock, and T. Hockin, Alliances and Illusions (Edmonton 1969); and John Warnock, Partner to Behemoth (Toronto 1970). From the political right came George Grant's Lament for a Nation (Toronto 1965). 4 R.D. Cuff and J.L. Granatstein, Ties That Bind (Toronto 1977) and American Dollars, Canadian Prosperity (Toronto 1978). A direct response is Don Page and Don Munton, 'Canadian Images of the Cold War 1946-7,' International Journal 32, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 577-604. Denis Smith's Diplomacy of Fear: Canada and the Cold War, 19411948 (Toronto 1988) consciously sets itself within a 'post-revisionist' framework. 5 Other diplomats with posts in Moscow during the late 1940s were John Holmes, later a distinguished academic, Robert Ford, Arnold Smith (an intellectual antagonist of Wilgress's views on the USSR), and the tragic figure of John Watkins (who would later become ensnared in a KGB entrapment but who wrote graceful sketches on Soviet life). See Donald Page, 'Getting to Know the Russians - 1943-1948,' in Aloysius Balawyder, ed., Canadian-Soviet Relations 1939-1980 (Oakville 1981), 15^0; Smith, Diplomacy of

43 8 Notes to pages 115-18

6

7

8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

Fear, 50-146; Lawrence Aronsen and Martin Kitchen, The Origins of the Cold War, a Comparative Perspective: American, British and Canadian Relations with the Soviet Union, 1941-48 (New York 1988), 148-98; Robert A.D. Ford, Our Man in Moscow: A Diplomat's Reflections on the Soviet Union (Toronto 1989); John Watkins, Moscow Despatches: Inside Cold War Russia, ed. Dean Beeby and William Kaplan (Toronto 1987). George Kennan, 'The Sources of Soviet Conduct,' Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 566-82. Kennan was, of course, right that Soviet power would eventually collapse, four decades later. It remains a matter of some controversy whether the implosion of Communism at the end of the 1980s was hastened or impeded by the isolation of the Soviet bloc initiated in the 1940s: Michael J. Hogan, ed., The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge 1992). In the British Foreign Office, Roberts (whose analysis had a great deal in common with Kennan's) stressed the fundamental weakness of the USSR and sought a form of balanceof-power 'co-existence,' but was soon outflanked by other officials who believed it necessary to pursue more 'active enmity' towards an implacably aggressive Soviet Union: John Zametica, 'Three Letters to Bevin: Frank Roberts at the Moscow Embassy, 1945-46,' in John Zametica, ed., British Officials and British Foreign Policy 1945-50 (Leicester 1990), 39-97. NAC, DBA, 2AE (S), v. 1, Wilgress to Secretary of State for External Affairs (hereafter SSEA), 25 Sept. 1945. NAC, DBA, 7802-40C, v. 1, Wilgress to SSEA, 27 Sept. 1945. NAC, DBA, 7802-40C, v. 1, Wilgress to Secretary of State, 29 Oct. 1945; 5198-40, v. 1, 27 Mar. 1946; 2-AE(S), v. 1, 24 Apr. 1946. Ibid., Wilgress to Secretary of State, 21 Mar. 1946. Wilgress pointed out that the moral superiority of the Western over the Soviet system was not obvious to the countries of Asia and Africa still labouring under Western colonial rule; here it was the West that had to make significant changes to avoid losing its moral ground. NAC, DBA, 2AE(S), v. 1, Wilgress to SSEA, 21 Mar. 1946. This characterization of British behaviour, although only hinted at by Wilgress from his vantage point in Moscow, represents a condensation of recent revisionist scholarship on Britain's role in the early Cold War that has emerged from an examination of Foreign Office and Colonial Office records released after the passage of thirty years. For a tour d'horizon of these revisionist themes see Anne Deighton, ed., Britain and the First Cold War (London 1990). See also, inter alia, the same author's The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford 1990); Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War (Stanford 1988); Fraser J. Harbutt, The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (New York 1986); Ritchie Ovendale, The English-Speaking Alliance: Britain, the United States, the Dominions and the Cold War, 1945-1951 (London 1985). Unlike the other writers cited, Ovendale is an enthusiast for British policy, but his analysis confirms Britain's early initiatives. Elisabeth Barker, The British between the Superpowers, 1945-50 (Toronto 1983), 241. NAC, DBA, 2AE(S) v. 1, Wilgress to SSEA, 14 Nov. 1945.

Notes to pages 118-26 439 16 The most comprehensive recent account of the Truman administration's foreign policy is Melvyn P. Leffler's massive A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford 1992). Leffler stresses that while the Americans were prudent in countering a potential Soviet threat, the United States overextended itself in its response, insisting upon clear geopolitical superiority rather than a balance of power, even in areas of the Third World far from the main confrontation. Throughout, Leffler insists, the Soviets were basically on the defensive, and American policy makers knew and understood this. Although generally supportive of the broad lines of U.S. policy, he does suggest that in refusing to recognize basic security concerns of the Communist states, the United States may have helped consolidate Cold War divisions. 17 Seech. 6. 18 Harbutt, Iron Curtain, 193. 19 Smith's Moscow reports can be found in NAC, WLMK, Memoranda and Notes series (hereafter M&N), v. 344; Mayrand's covering dispatch in NAC, DBA, 2AE(S), v. 1, Mayrand to SSEA, 16 Apr. 1945. 20 Page, 'Getting to Know the Russians,' refers to Smith as a 'premature Cold Warrior,' 23-5 and 36. 21 NAC, DBA, 62, v. 2620 f. N-l, Wrong to Robertson, 15 May 1946. 22 NAC, DBA, 62, v. 2620 f. N-l, Pearson to Robertson, 4 Mar. 1946. On Byrnes, Leahy, and the White House, see Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (Boston 1977), especially 109-62. 23 'AHC' [Arnold Smith], 'Soviet Russia: A Review,' International Journal 2, no. 1 (Winter 1946-7): 72-9. This drew a response from Frank Park of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Council, which predictably provided the Cold War mirror-image - a blameless USSR and gratuitously added that the article should have been suppressed in the interests of good relations with the Soviets. International Journal 2, no. 2 (1947): 173-7. 24 NAC, DBA, 52-F-(S), 30 Aug. 1947. 25 See Page and Munton, 'Canadian Images,' 577-604; Larry D. Collins, 'Canadian-Soviet Relations during the Cold War,' in Balawyder, ed., Canadian-Soviet Relations, 41-60; J.L. Granatstein, The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins 1935-1957 (Toronto 1982), 226-52. 26 Kennan, 'Sources of Soviet Conduct,' 576. 27 NAC, DBA, 52-F(S), Ford to SSEA, 10 Oct. 1947. 28 Ibid, C.P. Hebert, 'Memorandum to the Acting Under-Secretary,' 4 Nov. 1947; Page and Munton, 'Canadian Images,' 587. 29 NAC, DBA, 52-F(S), Smith to SSEA, 10 Dec. 1947. 30 Norman A. Graebner, ed., The National Security: Its Theory and Practice 1945-1960 (New York 1986), 21. 31 Smith, Diplomacy of Fear, 211. 32 One External official, R.A. MacKay, went further in commenting on Reid's paper by suggesting that Canada should strengthen the exercise of its sovereignty over its own territory in relation to American military encroachments and seek ways to strengthen the Com-

440 Notes to pages 127-30

33 34 35 36

37 38

39

40 41 42 43

monwealth as a counterbalance to American hegemony within the Western alliance. NAC, DBA, 52-F(S), MacKay, 'Comment on Mr. Reid's Paper,' nd., MacKay was alone among his colleagues in pushing nationalist concerns this far. Cuff and Granatstein,/4weAvaw Dollars, 204-15. Collins, 'Canadian-Soviet Relations,' 49. Holmes, Shaping of Peace, 2: 29. The revisionist view can be found in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954 (New York 1972). More recent evaluations of Marshall Plan aid and of the strategy behind it include Fred Block, Origins of International Economic Disorder (New York 1977), 70-108; Richard J. Barnet, The Alliance (New York 1983), 95-146; Charles L. Mee, Jr, The Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana (New York 1984); Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951 (London 1984); Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Europe, 1947-1952 (Cambridge 1987); Robert Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War (New York 1986); Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore 1989), 72-98. Holmes, Shaping of Peace, 2: 17. A recent American study documents, rather approvingly, how Marshall aid was coordinated with and acted as a cover for American clandestine activities against European Communists: Sallie Pisani, The CIA and the Marshall Plan (Kansas 1991). On the shortterm impact on the working-class standard of living, especially in France and Italy, see Barnet, The Alliance, 1 19-20. Cuff and Granatstein, American Dollars, 83-139; the American Embassy reported back to Washington a debate in the Canadian press over the question of whether Canadian exports should be financed directly by American purchases in Canada, or indirectly by Marshall dollars in the hands of European importers: 'there are two schools of thought,' the embassy drily concluded, 'although neither yields to the other in its generosity with American funds.' NA, USDS, NND 760050. B.W. Muirhead, in The Development of Postwar Canadian Trade Policy: The Failure of the Anglo-European Option (Montreal 1992), shows the remarkable short-run turnaround in Canadian exports to the United Kingdom of wheat, bacon, and flour brought about by Marshall dollars in 1948, but also points out that, in the longer run, Canada's exports to its traditional British trading partner failed to meet expectations (26-8 and 108-15). Louis St Laurent, The Foundations of Canadian Policy in World Affairs (Toronto 1947), 36-7. Ibid, 64-82. B.S. Kierstead, 'Canada at the Crossroads in Foreign Policy,' International Journal 3, no. 2 (1948): 97-110. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, documents exhaustively the gap between the relatively realistic internal appraisal of Soviet capabilities within the Truman administration

Notes to pages 131-40 441

44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

and the rhetoric of alarmism for public, and congressional, consumption. This is not to suggest that the administration was deliberately lying, but simply that it judged that stressing the military threat was a necessary simplification of a more complex and subtle challenge posed by the Communist bloc. See for example, Richard Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism, 2nd ed. (New York 1985); Athan Theoharis, The Yalta Myth (Columbia, Mo. 1970) and Seeds of Repression (Chicago 1971). Escott Reid, Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of Escott Reid (Toronto 1989), 232. NAC, WLM&M&N, v. 344, 4 Dec. 1947; in a memorandum entitled 'Current State of Relations between Canada and the United States,' written four years later, Wrong recognized that many of the State Department and administration officials who had been riding the tiger of anti-Communism in 1947 had, in the McCarthy era, ended up inside. Yet he insisted that they were 'the victims and not the cause of the domestic confusions,' and concluded with the standard plea for quiet, uncritical diplomacy: 'it is greatly in the interest of Canada and other countries of the free world not to add to their difficulties by furnishing ammunition to their domestic critics': reproduced in Hume Wrong, 'The Canada-US Relationship, 1927-1951,' International Journal 29, no. 1 (1973-4): 529-45. NAC, LBP, Nl, v. 6 f. 'Wrong, H.H. 1942-47,' Wrong to Pearson, 5 July 1947. Reid, Tune of Fear and Hope. Ibid., 142, 171. Reid does argue that they believed in the idea of Article 2 prior to their realization of its electoral significance. Lester B. Pearson, Words and Occasions (Toronto 1970), 73. Ibid., 158-9. Quoted in ibid., 180. Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 (London 1992), 253. John Holmes, Life with Uncle: The Canadian-American Relationship (Toronto 1981), 2. Dalton Camp, 'What Canada Needs Is a New Outlook,' Maclean's 104, no. 1 (7 Jan. 1991): 68.

C H A P T E R 6 Stand on Guard: In the Defence of Canada 1 Canada, Department of National Defence, Canada's Defence Programme 1949-50 (Ottawa 1949), 11. 2 David Stafford, 'The American-British-Canadian Triangle: British Security Co-ordination 1940-1945,' paper presented to the International Studies Association Conference, London 1989. Stephenson's exploits have been sensationalized in an extravagantly misleading fashion by Canadian journalist William Stevenson in two books, A Man Called Intrepid and Intrepid's Last Case. On the Stevenson/Stephenson myth see David Stafford, 'A Myth Called Intrepid,' Saturday Night (Oct. 1989). 3 R.D. Cuff and J.L. Granatstein, Ties That Bind (Toronto and Sarasota 1977), 101.

442 Notes to pages 140-3 4 NAC, DBA, f. 1497-40, Secretary of State for External Affairs to Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, London, 22 Apr. 1941. 5 D.W. Middlemiss and J.J. Sokolsky, Canadian Defence: Decisions and Determinants (Toronto 1989), 15-16. 6 J.L, Granatstein, How Britain's Weakness Forced Canada into the Arms of the United States (Toronto 1989), 26-40. 7 NA, USDS, 842.20/12-1245, Ray Atherton to Secretary of State, 12 Dec. 1945, with enclosures; 842.20 DEFENSE/5-346, Canadian Embassy, Washington to MRH, 3 May 1946. 8 NA, USDS, 842.20 DEFENSE/11-1245, J.G. Parsons, Memorandum of conversation, 12 Nov. 1945. 9 NA, USDS, 711.42/5-146, Edwin F. Stanton to Secretary of State, 1 May 1946. 10 The best account is Joseph T. Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada, the United States, and the Origins of North American Air Defence, 1945-1958 (Vancouver 1987), 6-30. See also the earlier version of James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, vol. 3, Peacemaking and Deterrence (Toronto 1972), 319-56. 11 J.W. Pickersgill and D.F. Forster, eds, The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 3, 1945-1946 (Toronto 1970), 266. 12 NAC, WLMK, Memoranda and Notes series (hereafter M&N), v. 419, Minutes of Cabinet Defence Committee, 9 July 1946. Canada's only significant step into external intelligence gathering was in electronic eavesdropping via the Communications Branch National Research Council (later the Communications Security Establishment). But the CBNRC was formally fixed as a junior partner in the wider Western network of listening posts under the 1947 UKUSA agreements; Canada did little more than gather raw data that was shipped to Washington for processing into a finished intelligence product. 13 Eayrs, Peacemaking, 401. 14 Brooke Claxton, quoted in Eayrs, Peacemaking, 49. 15 John Bryden, Deadly Allies: Canada's Secret War, 1937-1947(Toronto 1989). In 1949 the U.S. ambassador to Canada was reporting back to Washington on a five-week course i v e as well as defensive use of sponsored by the Defence Research Board on the offensive 'atomic, biological and chemical warfare.' The bacteriological laboratories in Suffield, Alberta, would be one of the sites for this course. NA, USDS, 842.00(W)/4-1449, U.S. Ambassador to Secretary of State, 14 Apr. 1949. Yet when peace campaigner James Endicott later made charges about Canadian complicity in alleged American germ warfare in Korea, they were hotly denied by Ottawa. 16 Eayrs (Peacemaking, 72) can cite only a single possible Canadian contribution to the 'defence intellectual' thinktanks like the RAND Corporation in the United States that were planning the next war, but even he admits that American-Canadian discussions tended in this era to turn into briefing sessions with Canadian participants lapsing into awed silence. Two recent studies of U.S. defence intellectuals fail to mention any Canadian contribution: Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (New York 1983) and Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York 1985).

Notes to pages 144-7

443

17 Lawrence R. Aronsen, 'Planning Canada's Economic Mobilization for War: The Origins and Operation of the Industrial Defence Board, 1945-1951,' American Review of Canadian Studies 15, no. 1 (1985): 38-59. 18 'War Book' emergency planning was first directed by an interdepartmental task force under the cabinet defence committee. Later, a special cabinet committee on emergency measures was struck. Some details are provided in Lawrence Aronsen, ' "Peace, Order and Good Government": Canada during the Cold War,' Intelligence and National Security l,no. 3 (Sept. 1986): 357-80. 19 David J. Bercuson, 'SAC vs. Sovereignty: The Origins of the Goose Bay Lease, 194652,' Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 2 (June 1989): 206-22. The Goose Bay arrangement was finally terminated unilaterally by the Americans in 1990. 20 NAC, Cabinet Conclusions, 2 and 9 Apr. 1953 and 6 May 1954. Although there were genuine worries about infringements of Canadian sovereignty, some Canadian concerns appear less creditable. For instance, the cabinet stipulated that the United States be approached 'informally' to ensure that in the manning of U.S. units on Canadian soil 'the proportion of negroes did not exceed 10%'! Cabinet Conclusions, 28 Nov. 1952. 21 The fullest discussion is in Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 30-90. 22 NAC, Cabinet Conclusions, 11, 18 Sept., 18 Nov. 1954; Cabinet Document CD-245, 17 Nov. 1954. 23 James Littleton, Target Nation: Canada and the Western Intelligence Network (Toronto 1986), 81. 24 Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 83-4. 25 In the late 1980s American pressure once again succeeded in drawing Canadian support for a new and extremely expensive North Warning System. This time it was not technology but politics (the end of the Cold War) that quickly rendered the project redundant. 26 NORAD is itself only the peak of a veritable mountain of binational defence arrangements between the two countries, most of which have never been made public and some of which have been concealed for years from Parliament as well as the people. In 1985 members of the Commons committee on external affairs and national defence were given a list of Canada-U.S. agreements in this area with items excluded. A more complete list, including the titles denied to the MPs, was obtained in Washington; it lists 364 separate agreements from the early 1940s into the mid-1980s ('Canada-US Arrangements in Regard to Defence, Defence Production, Defence Sharing,' nd, obtained Nov. 1985: thanks to William Arkin and James Littleton). 27 Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, 91-117; H. Basil Robinson, Diefenbaker's World: A a i r s (Toronto 1989), 15-23; J.L. Granatstein, Canada 1957-1967: Populist in Foreign Affairs The Years of Uncertainty and Innovation (Toronto 1986), 101-5; Peter Dale Scott, 'The Day NORAD Was Born,' Peace Magazine (Dec. 1986 / Jan. 1987): 26. 28 'The plain fact ... is that NATO is a military alliance': Dean Acheson, 'Canada: Stern Daughter of the Voice of God,' in Livingston Merchant, ed., Neighbours Taken for Granted: Canada and the United States (New York 1966), 142. 29 Middlemiss and Sokolsky, Canadian Defence, 18-19.

444

Notes to pages 148-56

30 See for instance, John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York 1987), 20-47. 31 R.D. Cuff and J.L. Granatstein, American Dollars, Canadian Prosperity (Toronto 1978), 204-15. 32 NAC, DBA A12, v. 2119, f. AR 434/19 (emphasis added). 33 NAC, Cabinet Conclusions, 13 Mar. 1953. 34 Denis Stairs, The Diplomacy of Constraint: Canada, the Korean War, and the United States (Toronto 1974), 279. 35 James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, vol. 4, Growing Up Allied (Toronto 1980), 225. 36 In fact the prime ministers in office from 1935 through 1957, Mackenzie King and Louis St Laurent, had no military experience whatever. John Diefenbaker had served overseas in the First World War but had been invalided home before seeing action. Lester Pearson also went overseas but failed to see action before he was hit by a bus in England and sent home. That completes the number of Canadian prime ministers with military experience. The United States has, on the other hand, elected a general as president a number of times, notably George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower. Most postwar presidents have either seen action in war or have spent time in the services. 37 Reg Whitaker, The Government Party: Organizing and Financing the Liberal Party of Canada, 1930-1958 (Toronto 1977), 199-200. 38 See Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto 1987), 160-6. 39 This is the conclusion reached by Lawrence Aronsen, 'Canada's Postwar Re-armament: Another Look at American Theories of the Military-Industrial Complex,' Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1981), 175-96. 40 This account follows Melissa Clark-Jones, A Staple State: Canadian Industrial Resources in Cold War (Toronto 1987), on the oil, forestry, and nickel sectors. 41 James P. Bickerton, Nova Scotia, Ottawa, and the Politics of Regional Development (Toronto 1990), 128. 42 Greig Stewart, Shutting Down the National Dream: A. V. Roe and the Tragedy of the Avro Arrow (Scarborough, Ont. 1989). 43 Edith K. Shaw, There Never Was an Arrow, 2nd ed. (Ottawa 1981). 44 NAC, Cabinet Conclusions, 7 Dec. 1955. 45 NAC, Cabinet Conclusions, 23 Mar. 1955. A recent book claims that the Americans were concerned about Soviet espionage penetration at the Avro plant: Palmiro Campagna, Storms of Controversy: The Secret Avro Arrow Files Revealed (Toronto 1992), 165-70. The argument is not as convincing as the author believes, although the United States was not above using national security as a cover for its economic self-interest. 46 Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, C.D. Howe: A Biography( (Toronto 1979), 340. 47 Danford W. Middlemiss, 'Economic Defence Co-operation with the United States, 194063,' in Kim Richard Nossal, ed., An Acceptance of Paradox: Essays on Canadian Diplomacy in Honour of John W. Holmes (Toronto 1982), 86-114.

Notes to pages 161-3 445 C H A P T E R 7 Security Screening Civil Servants 1 In this chapter we examine security screening of civil servants. As part of its Cold War orientation the government also launched a massive program of security screening of immigrants and citizenship applicants. Although the latter program was an enormously important aspect of the national insecurity state, we do not discuss this here because it has already been dealt with at length in Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto 1987). Two case studies of the screening process, those of the National Film Board and Herbert Norman, are given chapter-length treatment later in this book, and are referred to only tangentially here. 2 J.L. Granatstein, A Man of Influence: Norman A. Robertson and Canadian Statecraft, 1929-68 (Toronto 1981), emphasizes this point with regard to Norman Robertson. In CBC interviews with Robert Bryce, Geoffrey Pearson, and Gordon Robertson conducted by James Littleton in 1980 the sense of shock regarding the violation of trust was also stressed. J.L. Granatstein, in The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins 1935-1957 (Toronto 1982), describes the close-knit atmosphere at the top. See especially 10-18. 3 The Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and Circumstances Surrounding the Communication by Public Officials and Others in Positions of Trust of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power (Ottawa 1946), 689-90. 4 'Not the Branches but the Roots,' Montreal Gazette, 12 Mar. 1946; 'More Screening Necessary,' Financial Post, 6 Apr. 1946; House of Commons, Debates, 19 Mar. 1946; 'Personnel to Get Closer Screening,' Ottawa Journal, 20 Mar. 1946. 5 Ralph S. Brown, Jr, Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States (New Haven 1958). 6 'Weeding Out Traitors,' Vancouver Sun, 11 Mar. 1946. 7 NAC, PCO, s. 18, v. 103, f. S-100D, N.A. Robertson, Interdepartmental Committee on Security, 18 Apr. 1946 (Security Panel Document SP-1). PCO, Accession 83-84, f. 5-100M (1946-7), Security Panel Minutes, 24 June 1946. NAC, DBA, f. 50207-40, Heeney to Robertson, 27 Apr. 1946. PCO 18, v. 103, f. S-100-D, J.W.C. Barclay to cabinet Defence Committee, 4 May 1946 (SP-2); E.W.T. Gill to cabinet, 21 May 1946 (Cabinet Document CD-211). 8 In their internal history of the security service, Carl Betke and S.W. Horrall make the point that except for some exchange of information with defence intelligence, the RCMP worked in 'relative isolation within Canada,' since the force was 'assumed to have the sole domestic expertise': 'Canada's Security Service: An Historical Outline, 1864-1966' (NAC, RCMP Historical Section, 1978), manuscript obtained under Access to Information, CSIS Files, 579-80. 9 Larry Hannant, 'The Origins of Canadian State Security Screening' (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1992). 10 NAC, PCO 2, Accession 83-84, PARC 287339 f. S-100 (1947-8), 'Booklet on Security Prepared by the Security Panel for Use by Departments and Agencies of the Canadian

446 Notes to pages 164-7

11

12 13

14

15 16

17

18

19

Government' (May 1948). PCO 18, v. 1103, f. S-100-D, A.M. Cameron to Security Panel, 18 June 1946 (SP-3). NAC, DBA, f. 50207-40, C. Crean to Robertson, 12 Sept. 1946, with Robertson's handwritten response; Major J.A.K. Rutherford to Security Panel, 'Policy re vetoing,' 16 Sept. 1946 (SP-14); Security Panel Minutes, 23 Sept. 1946. NAC, DBA, 50207-40, Rutherford, draft memo for cabinet committee, 7 Oct. 1946 (SP-15). NAC, WLMK, Memoranda and Notes series (hereafter M&N), v. 420, 'Policy re vetoing of government employees,' 22 Nov. 1946 (CD-361), and Heeney to King, 6 Jan. 1947; v. 419, Cabinet Conclusions, 16 Jan. 1947. DBA, 50207-40, Rutherford to Security Panel, 22 Jan. 1947. 'To Bar Reds from Positions in Public Service,' Ottawa Journal, 24 Mar. 1947. NAC, WLMK/M&N, v. 419, Cabinet Conclusions, 14 Apr. 1947. House of Commons, Debates, 14 Apr. 1947, 2051. NAC, PCO, Accession 83-84, f. 5-100-M (1946-7), Security Panel Minutes, 17 Dec. 1947. NAC, WLMK/M&N, v. 419, Cabinet Conclusions, 8 Apr. 1946, 5 Nov. 1946, 27 Dec. 1946, 28 Jan. 1947, 29 Apr. 1947, 29 May 1947, 26 June 1947; v. 421, Heeney to cabinet, 26 May 1947 (CD-463). NAC, DBA, f. 50207-40, Rutherford to Security Panel, 15 May 1947 (SP-21). WLMK/M&N, v. 419, Cabinet Conclusions, 30 Dec. 1947. NAC, WLMK/M&N, v. 421, Heeney to King, 15 Jan. 1948. NAC, WLMK/M&N, v. 421, Heeney to cabinet, 23 Dec. 1947 (CD-579); J.L. Ilsley to cabinet, 19 Feb. 1948 (CD-612); v. 419, Cabinet Conclusions, 25 Feb. 1948. NAC, DBA, f. 50207-40, cabinet directive, 'Security investigation of government employees,' 5 Mar. 1948. This note of realism had been present since the first shock of the Gouzenko revelations. Norman Robertson advised Mackenzie King re Emma Woikin that the 'associations and influences' that led to her involvement in espionage occurred after she had been employed by the government: 'the possibility of this has to be recognized as one of the limitations upon the protection of any investigation that may be conducted as a prerequisite to employment.' NAC, DBA, v. 2620 f. 50242-40(1), N.A. Robertson to King, 23 Mar. 1946. NA, USDS, decimal files, 842-01717-1548, Dispatch 510, Internal security in Canadian Government Departments and Agencies, 15 July 1948. An early draft, which had probed membership in clubs, names of distant relatives and in-laws, and religious affiliation, was leaked to the press and roused public complaints from civil-service staff associations. The final version removed some of the objectionable questions: see Borden Spears, 'MPs Charge Ottawa Making "Loyalty Check" of All in Civil Service,' Toronto Daily Star, 11 June 1948. J.W. Pickersgill and D.F. Forster, eds, The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 4, 1947-1948 (Toronto 1970), 170-6. NAC, WLMK/M&N), v. 419, Cabinet Conclusions, 17 Mar. 1948, 31 Mar. 1948, 1 Apr. 1948, 21 June 1948; House of Commons, Debates, 22 June 1948, 5630. Earlier the minister of justice had stated in the House his personal view that 'no Communist should be allowed to serve in the civil service' and criticized the British for 'not going far enough' (Debates, 2321), but the official government view proved to be identical to that of the British on this point.

Notes to pages 168-72 447 20 'CS Association Decision Is Reached after Bitter Debate,' Ottawa Citizen, 19 Oct. 1948; 'Say CSAO Red Purge Aimed at Elections,' 20 Oct. 1948. 21 Ottawa Civil Liberties Association, 'The Civil Rights of Public Servants, a Tentative Study' (1948), NAC, FLP, v. 9 f. 151. 22 'An Error about Liberty,' Saturday Night, 10 Apr. 1948, 'Communists and Rights,' 24 Apr. 1948. 23 NAC, PCO 18, v. 103, f. S-100-M, Security Panel Minutes, 4 Oct. 1948, 10 Jan. 1949. The questionnaires had been drawn to the attention of the cabinet by newspaper reports and by opposition questions in the House: NAC, WLMK/M&N, v. 419, Cabinet Conclusions, 18 June 1948, 21 June 1948; House of Commons, Debates, 19 June 1948, 5488; 22 June 1948, 5629; 26 June 1948, 5916-7. PCO 18, v. 103, f. S-100-1 (1), E.F. Gaskell to Security Panel, 25 June 1949 (SP-45). The Security Panel then advised the government of its plans for a uniform model questionnaire: PCO 18, v. 103, f. S-100-M, Security Panel Minutes, 2 June 1948; WLMK/M&N, v. 319, Cabinet Conclusions, 20 July 1948. One of the changes insisted upon by the government was that no questions should be posed concerning 'collateral relatives' (i.e., indirect relations such as cousins). 24 Betke and Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service,' 586-7. 25 'Backstage at Ottawa,' Maclean's, 1 Sept. 1949. The anonymous author was, in fact, Blair Fraser, whose investigations had already so aroused the concern of the Security Panel that it had been overtly trying to 'modify' his critical views: NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-100-1 (1), Gaskell to Gill, 26 July 1949; v. 103, f. S-100-1 (1), Gaskell to Security Panel, 25 July 1949 (SP-45); f. S-100-M, Security Panel Minutes, 27 July 1949. 26 NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-100-1 (1) (1949-50), F.W. Lucas to Heeney, 21 Sept. 1949; G.B. McClellan to Lucas, 18 Jan. 1949, 22 Jan. 1949; Lucas to Heeney, 25 Jan. 1949, Lucas to L.H. Nicholson, 14 Feb. 1949; f. S-100-M, Security Panel Minutes, 2 Mar. 1949. 27 NAC, PCO 18, Security Panel Minutes, 27 July 1949; v. 189, f. S-100-1 (1), Heeney to deputy ministers, etc., 23 Feb. 1949, Gaskell to Gill, 27 July 1949, draft letter to deputy ministers, 31 Aug. 1949, Norman Robertson to Cabinet Committee on Emergency Measures, 31 Oct. 1951; v. 188, Security Panel, 5 Dec. 1950 (SP-91). 28 NAC, PCO 18, v. 103, f. S-100-M, Security Panel Minutes, 2 Apr. 1948; v. 188, f. S-100(c) (3), Gaskell memo for file, 1 Sept. 1949; v. 103, S-100-D, Gaskell to Security Panel, 9 Jan. 1949 (SP-48); v. 188, S-lOO-(c) (3), Gaskell to Security Panel, 7 Sept. 1950 (SP-85); NAC, DEA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 9 Nov. 1950. 29 Ernie Regehr, Arms Canada: The Deadly Business of Military Exports (Toronto 1987), 43. 30 NAC, PCO, Accession 1952, f. S-100-I-M, Security Panel Minutes, 18 Sept. 1952. Norman Robertson even speculated that 'we may have gone a bit too far in requiring security clearances': PCO 18, v. 189 f. S-lOO-l(l), Joint Security Committee to Security Panel, 18 Dec. 1950 and 4 Apr. 1951, R.G. Robertson to N.A. Robertson, 5 Oct. 1951, N.A. Robertson to Cabinet Committee on Emergency Measures, 31 Oct. 1951. 31 NAC, DEA, f. 20507-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 9 Nov. 1951. The question of American security authority over personnel on American bases in Canada was being discussed

448 Notes to pages 172-5

32

33

34 35 36 37

38

39

40

41 42

in terms of formal agreements between the two countries as late as 1957: NAC, C&I, Accession 83-84/347, box 4, f. SF-S-23(2). NAC, PCO 18, v. 103 f. S-100-D, Gaskell to Security Panel, 30 Dec. 1949 (SP-53), Security Panel Minutes, 3 Jan. 1950; v. 188 f. S-100-D, Gaskell to Security Panel, 20 Oct. 1950 (SP-78), Security Panel Minutes, 9 Nov. 1950. Ottawa Citizen, 22 Nov. 1951; Blair Fraser, 'How We Check for Loyalty,' Maclean's, 15 Jan. 1952; Hansard, 28 Nov. 1951, 1409. The RCMP representative on the Security Panel admitted that in this case there was 'some conflict of evidence in the police files.' Moreover, the man's union - the International Machinists - was considered 'well disposed' to the government and was being placed in an 'untenable position' when required to represent grievances of this kind: NAC, PCO 18, v. 189 f. S-100-M, Security Panel minutes, 9 Nov. 1951; f. S-100-5 (1950-1), R.G. Robertson to N.A. Robertson, 7 Dec. 1951. NAC, PCO 18, v. 143 f. D-16-2, A. MacNamara to N.A. Robertson, 2 May 1951. NAC, PCO 18, v. 188 f. S-100-D, Gaskell to Security Panel, 7 Nov. 1950 (SP-88), 24 May 1951 (SP-96), 10 May 1951 (SP-98). NAC, IB, v. 690 f. SF-S-129(2), P.M. Dwyer, memorandum to departmental security officers, 7 July 1953; Whitaker, Double Standard, 60, 196. NAC, C&I, v. 153 f. 1-18-7(1), Security Panel Minutes, 20 Nov. 1953. The RCMP commissioner did not consider sabotage a 'serious risk,' while the director of canal services 'felt that the difficulties of sabotage from a vessel were such that elaborate peacetime controls were not necessary.' Snickers were not recorded in the minutes. The U.S. Coast Guard kept files on American seamen (derived from military intelligence, the CIA, the FBI, congressional investigating committees, and private sources) and sent 'advisory' letters to shipping companies warning them to fire identified 'subversives' or risk losing their seaworthiness certificates. NAC, PCO 18, v. 188 f. S-100-D, Canadian ambassador to External Affairs, 8 Sept. 1950; NAC, DEA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 16 Sept. 1950. NAC, DOT, v. 2831 f. 306-10(1), H.V. Anderson to Director of Administration and Legal Services, 19 Sept. 1950. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York 1978), 392-400. William Kaplan, Everything That Floats: Pat Sullivan, Hal Banks and the Seamen's Unions of Canada (Toronto 1987), 74; NAC, DOT, v. 2831 f. 306-10(1), 'Report on meeting of the Security Panel,' 15 Sept. 1950. PCO 18, v. 190 f. S-100-9, 'Notes of a meeting of Security Panel,' 15 Dec. 1950. NAC, DEA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 18 Dec. 1951; PCO 18, v. 188 f. S100-D (SP-95), 24 Apr. 1951; PC 1439 (SOR/51-121), 22 Mar. 1951, The Great Lakes Seamen's Security Regulations.' These regulations were empowered under an act to 'confer certain emergency powers upon the Governor in Council' passed by the House of Commons only two weeks earlier. NAC, DEA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 18 Dec. 1951; PCO 18, Accession 83, box 16, f. S-100-9, E.F. Gaskell, memorandum for file, 29 Jan. 1952. NAC, PCO 18, Accession 83-84/213, box 15, f. S-100-I-D, P.M. Dwyer to Security Panel (SP-142), 3 Dec. 1952. It is of interest to note that the RCMP actually identified seventy-

Notes to pages 175-7 449

43

44

45 46

47

four applicants as 'possible' risks in 1951, but in the event only seven were denied cards indicating that the civilians in the Labour Department were exercising a certain amount of discretion in evaluating RCMP recommendations: box 12, f. S-100-9, George B. McClellan to Dwyer, 17 Nov. 1952. American figures from Caute, Great Fear, 605 nlO. NAC, DOT, v. 2831 f. 306-10(2), Security Panel Minutes, 20 Nov. 1953. NAC, IB, Accession 83-84/347, box 4, f. SF-S-23(2), Security Panel Minutes, 12 Mar. 1957. Kaplan, Everything That Floats, 76, says that the screening stopped at the end of 1953 without objection by the Americans, but this is not so. See NAC, PCO 18, v. 186, f. R-100-A (1950) on the Pontecorvo Affair, indicating that the RCMP had run file checks that turned up nothing. Chapman Pincher, in the Daily Express, 27 Oct. 1950, and in Their Trade Is Treachery (London 1981), insisted that Pontecorvo had in fact never been cleared as a result of a British-Canadian 'after you Alphonse' comedy of errors: each government thought the other had screened him. In Intrepid's Last Case (New York 1984), William Stevenson claimed that each of three Western security organizations had been hoodwinked into thinking that the others had cleared him for secret work (183). Margaret Gowing, in her highly respected Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945-1952, vol. 2 (London 1974), 151, has a different story, which reflects less creditably on Stevenson's hero, Sir William Stephenson ('Intrepid'): 'At the end of 1942 workers in the atomic laboratory at Montreal who knew Pontecorvo's ability had suggested his recruitment. Security vetting was done by the British wartime security organisation for the western hemisphere [i.e., Intrepid's own organization] and Pontecorvo's record was judged entirely clear.' In fact, the British director of the 'Tube alloys' (i.e., atomic) project reported to his assistant that the BSC had provided an 'unusually enthusiastic report' on Pontecorvo: Robert Bothwell, Nucleus: The History of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (Toronto 1988), 30. It should be noted that Pontecorvo was paid a British salary and was thus technically under the jurisdiction of the British government. After his disappearance, the FBI said they had passed information to the BSC in 1943 saying that Communist literature had been found in his house in the United States, but it was impossible to check this because the wartime organization had been disbanded: Gowing, Independence and Deterrence, 151. On the other hand, the highly security-conscious U.S. general Leslie Groves complained in 1945 about 'foreigners' working on the Canadian project and insisted that they either take on citizenship or leave. Pontecorvo assumed citizenship and stayed; Groves pronounced himself 'pleased': Bothwell, Nucleus, 78. The fullest account of Pontecorvo's defection is in Montgomery Hyde, The Atom Bomb Spies (London 1980), 125-42. NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-100-1(1), Gaskell, memo for file, 31 Oct. 1949. Perhaps the worst example of the tendency of the security-screening process to degenerate into an ideological purge took place at the National Film Board. This story is examined in detail in later chapters. The NFB story shows how the security-screening program offered a respectable framework for a witch-hunt. NAC, DBA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 7 May 1951. Statistics are drawn

450 Notes to pages 177-81

48

49 50

51 52

53

54

55

56 57

from lists in NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-100-1(1) (1949-50), McClellan to Lucas, 22 Jan. 1949, H.R. McNaughton to Lucas, 24 Jan. 1949, Lucas to Heeney, 26 Jan. 1949; f. S-IOO-(A) (1950-1), McClellan to Gaskell, 6 Jan. 1951, 2 Apr. 1951, and 9 July 1951; 1952 figures from PCO 18, Accession 1952. Names were available in documents obtained before the Privacy and Access to Information acts came into effect: under privacy provisions, any individual names of public servants denied security clearance are now 'severed' from documents made available to researchers, and indeed such documents may be withheld in total. We have refrained from using any of these names. Hugh Keenleyside, On the Bridge of Time (Toronto 1982), 293-5. NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-100-1, N. Robertson to C.H. Bland, 5 June 1951. Ruth Haythorne had independently come to the attention of the security investigators because she had allegedly been an officer of the Ottawa branch of the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, of which Kathleen Willsher (later convicted as a result of the Gouzenko spy investigation) had been secretary. The FCSO was closely connected with leading CCF intellectuals and Christian pacifists and broke up in 1942 when links with the Communists became an issue: see Thomas P. Socknat, Witness against War (Toronto 1987), 138^7, 340 n96. NAC, PCO 18, Accession 83-84/213, box 15, f. S-100-2-L, Robertson to McClellan, 21 May 1952, Robertson to Leopold [unsent], 22 Sept. 1951. House of Commons, Debates (1958), 83-4, 92, 137; NAC, PCO, Cabinet Minutes, 15 May 1958. Diefenbaker was well aware of the allegations against Pearson: see J.L. Granatstein, Canada 1957-1967: The Years of Uncertainty and Innovation (Toronto 1986), 290. NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-lOO-l(l), ad hoc committee on security clearances, minutes, 9 Dec. 1950. NAC, DEA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes 16 Sept. 1950, 31 Oct. 1950. Some of these silent cases came to our attention in the course of confidential interviews done for this book. June Callwood reported on some incidents of harassment of the Gouzenko detainees by the RCMP: Emma: Canada's Unlikely Spy (Toronto 1984), 225-6, 234. One case that reached the House of Commons was recounted in Donald Brittain's CBC television documentary 'Stand on Guard' (1983). NAC, PCO 18, v. 103, f. S-100-M, Security Panel Minutes, 28 June 1948, 10 Jan. 1949, 2 Mar. 1949; f. S-100-1(1) (1949-50), Nicholson to Lucas, 23 Feb. 1949; v. 188, f. S-100D, Gaskell to Security Panel, 2 Feb. 1950 (SP-57); v. 189, f. S-lOO-l(l) (1951), R.G. Robertson to Bland, 13 June 1951, Bland to Robertson, 18 June 1951. Betke and Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service,' 594-5. NAC, BC, v. 71, Claxton to Acheson, 7 Dec. 1950. Thanks to Professor J.L. Granatstein for drawing this letter to our attention. It is interesting to note that while Claxton was a minister his concern over the possibility of injustice had led him to propose an advisory board of ministers to consult on individual cases: NAC, DEA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 31 Oct. 1950; NAC, PCO 16, v. 19, Cabinet Conclusions, 8 Feb. 1950.

Notes to pages 182-5

451

58 NAC, PCO, box 16, f. S-100-13, S.S. Garson to N.A. Robertson, 5 June 1950, with attached draft statement, 8 June 1950. 59 NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-lOO-l(l), ad hoc committee on security clearances, minutes, 9 Dec. 1950. An admittedly incomplete survey concluded that only 42 per cent of a total of some 97,000 'sensitive' positions had actually been screened. 60 NAC, PCO, Accession 83, box 3, f. C-20-5, Pickersgill to Cabinet, 16 Oct. 1952 (CD332/52); Cabinet Conclusions, 23 Oct. 1952. 61 In 1955 a modified directive was approved by cabinet: NAC, PCO, 'Security Screening of Government Employees,' 22 Apr. 1955 (CD-81/55); Memorandum, Chairman, Security Panel, 19 Dec. 1955 (CD-252/55); Cabinet Minutes, 29 Apr. and 21 Dec. 1955. 62 NAC, DBA, f. 50207-A-40, cabinet directive, 'Security investigation of governmental employees,' 24 Sept. 1952. 63 See Introduction by Dean Beeby and William Kaplan, eds, to John Watkins, Moscow Despatches: Inside Cold War Russia (Toronto 1987), xiii-xxxii, and J.L. Granatstein and David Stafford, Spy Wars: Espionage and Canada from Gouzenko to Glasnost (Toronto 1990), 103-14. Another diplomat who served in Moscow, R.A.D. Ford, thinks he was 'probably used as an agent of influence' (Our Man in Moscow [Toronto 1989], 147), although just what he means by this rather elusive label he does not make clear. Watkins's story ended tragically with his death, coincident with his interrogation by the RCMP regarding his past. 64 Betke and Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service,' 596-602; John Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows: The RCMP Security Service (Toronto 1980), 124-37. The best-documented examination is a paper by Daniel Robinson and David Kimmel, 'The Queer Career of Homosexual Security Vetting in Cold-War Canada' (Sept. 1993). Our thanks to Daniel Robinson for making available to us documents released under CSIS Access to Information requests: AIR-91-088, AIR 92-008. See also 'RCMP Hoped "Fruit Machine" Would Identify Homosexuals,' Globe and Mail, 24 Apr. 1992; Dan Beeby, 'Mounties Defend Gay Purge,' Calgary Herald, 25 Apr. 1992. Although the frenzy abated by the late 1960s, it was not until the late 1980s that an official policy was developed that ruled out homosexuality, as such, as constituting a risk. When the 1992 press revelations about the gay purge came out, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney referred to it as 'odious' and a 'fundamental violation of the rights of Canadians': 'PM Denounces 1960s Purge of Homosexual Civil Servants,' Globe and Mail, 28 Apr. 1992. 65 On Dwyer's subsequent role, see Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows, 119-23. In 1950, Stephenson had come to Ottawa to advise the government on its security and intelligence arrangements. Stephenson told Norman Robertson 'your problem is one of co-ordination ... There are several good cooks without a master-chef to control the final brew.' Dwyer's appointment was the answer to this concern: NAC, PCO 18, v. 188, f. S-lOO-(l), Stephenson to Robertson, 7 Sept. 1950, Dwyer to Robertson, 8 Sept. 1950. The ongoing civil-service establishment in Ottawa did not, it appears, take due notice of Dwyer's importance. In his new position he took a substantial drop in pay from his Washington MI6 days. But as his own papers (in the possession of his son, Chris Dwyer) make clear, an intervention

452 Notes to pages 185-91

66 67 68 69

70

71

72 73

from above was necessary to get the Civil Service Commission to recognize that Dwyer was more than just another clerk. NAC, PCO, box 14, f. S-100-1, Dwyer to N.A. Robertson, 4, 5 Mar. 1952. NAC, C&I, v. 119 f. 3-25-15, Dwyer to Security Sub-Panel, 21 Apr. 1953 (Security SubPanel Document 1). Kim Philby, My Silent War (London 1968), 111-25. Dwyer 'played a central role in halting the slide toward McCarthy!sm' (Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows, 119-23); 'the long process of reform ... undoubtedly began with Peter Dwyer' (James Littleton, Target Nation: Canada and the Western Intelligence Network [Toronto 1986], 22). For a somewhat different view of Dwyer's role that places less stress on his liberalism see Whitaker, Double Standard. NAC, IB, Accession 83-84/347, box 4, f. SF-S-23(2), Security Panel Minutes, 17 July 1956. This was an attitude shared fully by the Mounties themselves: Betke and Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service,' 590-3. As for Dwyer, he eventually moved into the newly formed Canada Council in the late 1950s and finished his career as a leading figure in state support for the arts in Canada an unusual fate for an old intelligence man, but one that by all accounts better suited his own temperament. NAC, IB, Accession 83-84/347, Dwyer to Security Panel, 10 Jan. 1957 (SP-185). NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-lOO-l(l) (1951), Gaskell to Robertson, 28 Dec. 1951.

CHAPTER 8 The Dog That Never Barked: Anti-Communist Legislation 1 Reg Whitaker, 'Fighting the Cold War on the Home Front: America, Britain, Australia and Canada,' in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, eds, The Uses of Anti-Communism (London 1984). 2 Ibid. 3 Material from Australia citing St Laurent collected in NAC, PCO, s. 18, v. 139 f. C-22-1. 4 Under section 98 it was an offence to belong to an 'unlawful association,' described as one whose purpose was to bring about any 'governmental, industrial or economic change within Canada' by force, or threats offeree, or 'which teaches, advocates, advises or defends the use of force, violence, terrorism, or physical injury to person or property.' It was the latter phrase that gave section 98 its particular notoriety, especially after the highly publicized trial of Tim Buck and seven other Communists in 1931. The Liberals had tried to repeal the section but were blocked by the Senate five times between 1926 and 1930; following their return to office in 1936 repeal went through without interference from the Senate. It has not often been pointed out that while repealing section 98, the Liberals added a subsection to the sedition section of the code specifying a seditious intention to anyone teaching, advocating, publishing, or circulating any writing advocating the use of force to accomplish change. Professor Friedland suggests that from a legal point of view 'in some respects this provision is stronger' than section 98: M.L. Friedland, National Security: The Legal Dimensions (Ottawa 1979), 25-6.

Notes to pages 191-8 453 5 NAC, PCO 18, v. 125 f. C-22, Drew to St Laurent, 7 Mar. 1949. 6 'Deport Alien Communists, Outlaw LPP, Legion Demand,' Toronto Daily Star, 19 Apr. 1948. 7 Beland Honderich, 'Communists Seen Menace, Business Launches Attack,' Toronto Daily Star, 28 Oct. 1948. 8 Hansard (1950), 2086. 9 Saturday Night, 16 May 1950. 10 Hansard (1950), 2312; L.M. McKechnie, 'Stiffer Laws on Sedition to Crack Down on Reds Hinted Move at Ottawa,' Toronto Telegram, 4 Jan. 1949. 11 'Should Canada Outlaw Communism?'; 'What's Our Best Weapon?' Financial Post, 13 May 1950. 12 Canadian Business, Oct. 1950. 13 NAC, DL, v. 3544 f. 3-26-59; NAC, LStL, v. 32, correspondence with Chamber of Commerce. 14 'C of C Opposes Labor Protection for "Red" Unions,' Globe and Mail, 14 Apr. 1948. 15 Robert Nielsen, 'Proposal to Ban Any Unions Can't Succeed - Ottawa,' Toronto Daily Star, 15 Apr. 1948. 16 'Demand Law to Bar Unions till Non-Communism Shown,' Toronto Daily Star, 10 Jan. 1949. 17 Labour Gazette 49, no. 8 (Aug. 1949); 976, 18 NAC, DL, v. 3544 f. 3-26-59, 1950 documentation. 19 Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto 1987). 20 //fl«san/(1950),"2088. 21 NAC, PCO 18, v. 189 f. C-22-1(1951), P.E. Trudeau to R. Gordon Robertson, 'Re: Communism in Canada,' 2 Jan. 1951. 22 J.E. Belliveau, 'Trade Unions Good for Canada's Society St. Laurent declares,' Toronto Daily Star, 14 Mar. 1949. 23 NAC, DL, v. 835 f. 1-28-1(1), G.F. Benson to Pearson, 25 July 1949; Pearson to Benson, 10 Aug. 1949. 24 Hansard (1950), 2088. 25 NAC, PCO 18, v. 139 f. C-22-1(1951), Trudeau, 'Re: Communism in Canada,' 2 Jan. 1951; Robertson to Trudeau, 6 Jan. 1951; VJ. Kaye to Trudeau, 20 Jan. 1951. 26 NAC, PCO 18, v. 139 f. C-22-l(1951), R. Gordon Robertson to D.W. Blair, 25 Jan. 1951 (emphasis added). 27 NAC, PCO 18, v. 139 f. C-22-l(1951), 'Remarks of the Hon. Stuart Garson, Minister of Justice ...' 28 'Mustn't Abandon Freedom with Anti-Red Law - Pearson,' Toronto Daily Star, 10 Mar. 1949. 29 J.W. Pickersgill, My Years with Louis St. Laurent: A Political Memoir (Toronto 1975), 149. 30 NAC, LStL, v. 40 f. C-20 (1948-9), St Laurent to Garson, 23 Feb. 1949.

454 Notes to pages 198-208 31 Regina Leader-Post, 21 Jan. 1948. 32 McKechnie, 'Stiffer Laws on Sedition'; Hansard (1949), 1202. 33 P.M. Richards, 'Business Angle,' Saturday Night, Apr. 1951. No evidence in government records has been found to support any such allegations. 34 NAC, PCO 18, v. 139 f. €-22-1(1951), Garson to N.A. Robertson, 3 Feb. 1951, with attached memorandum 'Internal security: suggested legislation for consideration short of the War Measures Act.' The hand of Inspector John Leopold, former undercover agent in the Communist party in the 1920s, and the hardest of hard-liners among Mounties on Communist questions ever since, was evident in all the RCMP proposals: indeed his name was on many of the Mountie memos. 35 Ibid., R.G. Robertson, 'Comments on RCMP memorandum concerning internal security,' 10 Feb. 1951. See also Robertson's comments on Inspector Leopold's recommendations for changes in the immigration and citizenship acts: R.G. Robertson to N.A. Robertson, 4 May 1951; 'J.L.' memorandum, 24 Mar. 1951. 36 NAC, PCO 16, v. 24, Cabinet Conclusions, 12 Apr. 1951. 37 Ibid., 3 May 1951. 38 Boucher v. the King (1951), Supreme Court of Canada Reports (SCR) 265 at 294 and 301. 39 Friedland, National Security, 26. 40 Ibid., 13. 41 Hansard (1953-4), 3668. 42 Friedland, National Security, 14; Report of the Royal Commission on Security (Ottawa 1969), 78. 43 15 Geo. VI (1951) c. 24. It is interesting to note the parallels to the Emergency Powers Act that replaced the War Measures Act in 1988, including the reference to a state of international emergency. No one in the 1988 debate seems to have paid any attention to the 1951 act. 44 See their (the League for Democratic Rights) lengthy pamphlet 'Protect Our Democratic Rights' (1952) in NAC, FLP, v. 9 f. 161; League brief transmitted to union locals by Robert Haddow, 22 July 1952, in private collection of the late Leo Roback. 45 NAC, PCO 16. v. 24, Cabinet Conclusions, 4 Dec. 1952. 46 Lawrence Aronsen, in 'Peace, Order and Good Government during the Cold War,' Intelligence and National Security 1, no. 3 (Sept. 1986), offers perhaps the most uncritical panegyric yet of 'liberal Liberalism.' 47 See Reg Whitaker, The Government Party: Organizing and Financing the Liberal Party of Canada, 1930-1958 (Toronto 1977), for an extended discussion of the roots of Liberal dominance in this era.

C H A P T E R 9 The Antagonists: Cops versus Commies 1 There are a number of sources on the Communist party. The most recent is Norman Penner, Canadian Communism: The Stalin Years and Beyond (Toronto 1988). Others include Ivan Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada: A History (Toronto 1975); Robert

Notes to pages 208-14 455

2

3

4

5

6 7 8

9

10

11 12

Comeau and Bernard Dionne, Les communistes au Quebec, 1936-1956 (Montreal 1980); Marcel Fournier, Communisme et anticommunisme au Quebec, 1920-1950 (Laval 1979), and the party's own history, Canada's Party of Socialism: History of the Communist Party of Canada (Toronto 1982), the latter being the least reliable. Financial support of the Canadian party by Moscow was no doubt part of the linkage. Recently, with the demise of the Soviet Communist state, revelations of financial patronage in the 1970s and 1980s have surfaced (Stephen Handelman, 'Soviets Secretly Paid Canada's Communists $2 Million,' Toronto Star, 14 Mar. 1992). It is not unreasonable to expect that this largesse extended back to the earlier era with which we are concerned. This point is made at greater length in Reg Whitaker, 'Left-wing Dissent and the State: Canada in the Cold War Era,' in C.E.S. Franks, ed., Dissent and the State (Toronto 1989), 203-6. At the founding, the Canadian party took on a dual form, with a 'secret' or 'illegal' organization paralleling the visible form. But this conspiratorial pretence of secrecy was dropped officially in 1924. In the early wartime period of enforced illegality during the Nazi-Soviet pact (1939-^1), the Communists did distribute underground pamphlets that exhorted Canadians to take up arms and transform the war into a 'civil war against the bourgeoisie': Penner, Canadian Communism, 167-8. This was, however, an isolated example of rhetorical excess, and there is of course no evidence that anyone, including the Communist rank-and-file, heeded this absurd and politically suicidal line. Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto: 1987), 211; NA, USDS, OIR 6245.1, 11 Aug. 1953, 'Communism in Canada: general appraisal of Communist movement.' RCMP Intelligence Bulletin, June 1947 (copy obtained under Access to Information Act in possession of the authors). Ibid., Apr.-May 1947. These bulletins, circulated internally under a variety of names, have been released for the period from the early 1920s through the mid-1950s in response to Access to Information requests made by Reg Whitaker and Greg Kealey. CSIS agreed to waive copyright to allow publication of these bulletins as source books in Canadian history. The Committee on Labour Studies has published two successive volumes under the joint editorship of Kealey and Whitaker: RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, 1939-1941 (St John's 1989) and RCMP Security Bulletins: The War Series, Part II, 1942-45 (St John's 1993). Two standard social-democratic sources on the CCF-NDP and the union movement apply this precise double standard to the Communists apparently without question: Walter Young, The Anatomy of a Party: The National CCF, 1932-1961 (Toronto 1969), 254-85; Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto 1968), 85-131. For an instance of a Communist-led union that did survive, see Gary Marcuse, 'Labour's Cold War: The Story of a Union That Was Not Purged,' Labour/Le Travail 22 (Fall 1988): 199-210. See n5, above. Merrily Weisbord's The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communism, the Spy Trials and the

45 6 Notes to pages 215-19

13

14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

22

23 24

Cold War (Toronto 1983) provides the best insight into the emotional universe of a representative group of Communists before and after the trauma of the Gouzenko affair and the Cold War fell across their paths. The 1955 campaign is recounted in some detail but from a rather curious perspective in Peter Oliver, Unlikely Tory: The Life and Politics of Allan Grossman (Toronto 1985), 5977. Professor Oliver depicts the Tory candidate as a tiny but courageous David confronting an all-powerful Communist Goliath. S.W. Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service: A Brief History,' RCMP Quarterly 50, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 45. NAC, NAR, v. 12 f. 147, Rivett-Carnac to Robertson, 24 Jan. 1939. Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Law and Order in Canadian Democracy (Ottawa 1952), 160. Elizabeth Grace and Colin Leys, 'The Concept of Subversion and Its Implications,' in C.E.S. Franks, ed., Dissent and the State (Toronto 1989), 62-85. Carl Betke and S.W. Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service: An Historical Outline, 1864-1966' (RCMP Historical Section 1978), obtained under Access to Information (CSIS files), 654-5. Keith Wai den, Visions of Order: The Canadian Mounties in Symbol and Myth (Toronto 1982), especially 117-36. CSIS files, C.E. Rivett-Carnac to the Director of Criminal Investigation, 'Re: Reorganization - Special Branch, headquarters and divisions,' 6 Jan. 1947. Copy obtained under Access to Information. RCMP, Intelligence Bulletin, \ May 1946. One must always qualify judgments on the effectiveness of counter-espionage operations with the proviso that they are based on public evidence: real successes in counter-espionage may, of course, have remained secret. But see John Sawatsky's, For Services Rendered: Leslie James Bennett and the RCMP Security Service (Toronto 1982) for the contrary opinion: 'Like the coyote flubbing his attacks on the defiant roadrunner, whatever the Security Service did failed to defeat, much less faze, the Soviets' (188). CSIS files, C.W. Harvison to L.H. Nicholson, 26 July 1955 (obtained under Access to Information). This was a long-standing attitude on the part of the Mounties. During the Second World War, they actively discouraged 'vigilante' patriotic groups, which they saw as a distinct nuisance, and they were never impressed with the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee as a model for Canada. NA, USDS, 842.00B/1-2948, George D. Andrews to Secretary of State, 29 Jan. 1948. Security Service files on individuals are protected from disclosure under the Access to Information and Privacy Acts. However, U.S. State Department files in the U.S. National Archives for the late 1940s and early 1950s contain consular correspondence on Communism in certain Canadian communities that drew almost exclusively upon RCMP files. For example, a 1948 report to Washington on Communism in Niagara Falls ran to thirtytwo legal-size pages of typescript and included information on no less than 202 area residents 'affiliated with or suspected of being affiliated with subversive organizations.' Much of this information was of a quality that could only be derived from inside sources:

Notes to pages 219-28 457

25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33

34

35

36 37 38

NA, USDS, 842.00B/4-1948, U.S. Consul, Niagara Falls, to Secretary of State, 'Report of Communist organization and membership in the Niagara Falls consular district,' 19 Apr. 1948. NAC, PCO 16, v. 24, Cabinet Conclusions, 12 Apr. and 3 May 1951. Betke and Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service,' 664-5. NAC, C&I, v. 153 f. 1-18-7 (pt. 1), L.H. Nicholson to R.B. Bryce, 20 Nov. 1957. The first estimate is from the Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the RCMP, Second Report, vol. 1, Freedom and Security under the Law (1981), 63 (hereafter McDonald Commission); the second is from John Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows: The RCMP Security Service (Toronto 1980), 93. CSIS files, C.E. Rivett-Carnac to the Director of Criminal Investigation, 'Re: Reorganization - Special Branch, Headquarters and Divisions,' 6 Jan. 1947. Betke and Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service,' 686, 701-3. CSIS files, Mark McClung, 'Memorandum on organization of the Internal Security Service,' 15 Mar. 1955. Numerous excisions have been made to this document under the Access to Information Act. CSIS files, Harvison to Nicholson, 26 July 1955, and Nicholson to Harvison, 27 July 1955. Interview with Mark McClung, Ottawa 1984. Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows, 108-10. Sawatsky, who unfortunately did not get the details of the McClung plan right, probably never saw the original but instead relied upon McClung's own account of it. Looking at the document and the response by Harvison, one is less convinced than either McClung or Sawatsky that Harvison did not have some valid criticisms. This was also the conclusion of the McDonald Commission, Second Report, 2: 669-71. See Reg Whitaker, 'Canada: The RCMP Scandals,' in Andrei S. Marcovits and Mark Silverstein, eds, The Politics of Scandal: Power and Process in Liberal Democracies (New York 1988), 38-61. On Western intelligence networks in general see Jeffrey Richelson and Desmond Ball, The Ties That Bind: Intelligence Co-operation between the UKUSA Countries - the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Boston 1985), and on Canada in particular, James Littleton, Target Nation: Canada and the Western Intelligence Network (Toronto 1986). Whitaker, Double Standard, contains detailed examples of how the protection of sources was used (or misused) by the RCMP to cover themselves. NAC, C&I, v. 164 f. 3-18-17(1), L.H. Nicholson to Stuart Garson, 7 Apr. 1955. McDonald Commission Second Report, 1: 632.

C H A P T E R 10 'Freda to the Professor through Grierson': The Persecution of a Film Maker 1 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore 1991). 2 Maria Tippett, Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the

458 Notes to pages 228-32 Massey Commission (Toronto 1990), 156-85: Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses and the Massey Commission (Toronto 1992), 16. 3 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, Report (Ottawa 1951), 274-5. 4 Ibid., 11-18. 5 Litt, The Muses, 213. 6 Rick Salutin, 'The NFB Red Scare,' Weekend Magazine, 23 Sept. 1978, 21; this story is reprinted in modified form in Salutin's Marginal Notes (Toronto 1984), 66-79. Martyrdom is of little significance if no one knows you are a martyr: this Canadian theme is struck by a number of the interview subjects in Len Scher's The Un-Canadians: True Stories of the Blacklist Era (Toronto 1992). 7 Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics of Wartime Propaganda (Toronto 1984), 3. 8 A revisionist attack on Grierson from the vantage point of a left-wing cultural nationalist has recently been published by Joyce Nelson, The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend (Toronto 1988). Nelson advances the thesis that Grierson was actually a clever apologist for the triumph of multinational capitalism at the expense of small nations like Canada. There is no space here to examine her argument, but if she is even partially correct, it is impossible to explain the actual reaction of the U.S. government to Grierson, as described in this chapter, as anything but bizarre and irrational. We choose not to believe that American officials were out of their minds. 9 NFB, Grierson to the Board, 7 Aug. 1945. In his draft, Grierson had originally added 'parochial' as well, but scratched it out. 10 NAC, LBP, Nl, v. 16 f. 'NFB 1943-45,' Robertson, memorandum for King, 10 Jan. 1945. 11 Evans, John Grierson, 211-15. 12 Ibid., 173. The documentary form left a lasting imprint on the Canadian imagination. Robert Fothergill, in his 1993 play centred on Grierson, Public Lies, has a character in 1970 assert that Grierson is the reason that 'Canadians still dream in black and white.' 13 To more subtle eyes, Grierson's films gave mixed messages. The content may have been 'leftish,' but the style was not dissimilar to that of fascist propaganda. It comes as no surprise to learn that Grierson was an admirer of the work of the bombastic Nazi film maker Leni Riefenstahl. 14 In more bureaucratic prose, a 1945 NFB document entitled 'National Film Board services provided under the War appropriations' indicated that film programs in these circuits 'have been designed particularly to promote the understanding of national objectives in relation to the improvement of industrial relationships, industrial and rural health, conservation of resources, the development of co-operative action and community enterprise.' 15 NAC, WLMK, Diary (hereafter MKD), 12 May 1941: J.W. Pickersgill, ed., The Mackenzie King Record, vol. 1, 1939-1944 (Toronto I960), 223. 16 On Kidd and Claxton, see Reg Whitaker, The Government Party: Organizing and Financing the National Liberal Party of Canada, 1930-1958 (Toronto 1977).

Notes to pages 233-8 459 17 NAC, BC, v. 44 f. KIDD, H.E. Kidd to Claxton, 12 June 1942; Claxton to Kidd, 18 June 1942. 18 Evans, John Grierson, 228; FBI file on Grierson, released under Freedom of Information; Kirwin Cox, 'The Grierson Files,' Cinema Canada 56 (June-July 1979): 16-24. 19 NAC, LBP, Nl v. 16, 1944 correspondence between Hazen Sise, Lester Pearson, and Maurice Pope. 20 NA, Records of the Office of Strategic Services, 29926, unsigned memorandum, 17 Feb. 1943. 21 NA, USDS, f. 840.6, R.H. Macy memorandum, 3 Nov. 1944. 22 NA, USDS, American Embassy, Ottawa 1945, v. 104, 59A543, box 1511, f. '800 John Grierson,' A.C. Frost to Ray Atherton, 21 Apr. 1945; Dana Doten to the Ambassador, 'A few minutes with John Grierson,' 24 Apr. 1945. 23 Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and Circumstances Surrounding the Communication by Public Officials and Others in Positions of Trust of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power (hereafter RRC) (Ottawa 1946), 482. 24 Merrily Weisbord, The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials, and the Cold War (Toronto 1983), 130. 25 Records of the Taschereau-Kellock Royal Commission on Espionage, Exhibit 37. 26 RRC, 487. 27 Ibid., 489. 28 Quotations from the Grierson testimony are drawn from vols 7 and 10 of the transcripts of the Taschereau-Kellock Commission proceedings declassified in 1981. A severely truncated - and somewhat misleading - selection can be found in Robert Bothwell and J.L. Granatstein, eds, The Gouzenko Transcripts (Ottawa nd), 341-3. The testimony is also quoted extensively in Evans, John Grierson, 249-54. 29 Grierson's reference is actually quite bizarre, reflecting perhaps how flustered he may have been by this inquisition. Count de Gobineau was a nineteenth-century French diplomat and writer whose Essay on the Inequality of the Races was a seminal text for racists. Faint echoes of his influence might be discerned in the Nazi theorists of racial supremacy. 30 Pierre Veronneau, Resistance et affirmation: la production francophone a I'ONF - 19391964 (Quebec 1987), 9-16, is not especially impressed at the francophone presence in the wartime NFB. 31 NAC, WLMK, MKD, 20 Feb. 1946. 32 The same day King revealed his doubts about Grierson, he confided to his diary that the Gouzenko evidence of Soviet penetration of the U.S. government showed that the Democratic administration was 'too greatly controlled by the Jews.' He further recalled that the late-Victorian sage Goldwin Smith had told him years earlier that Jews were 'poison in the veins of a community.' King concluded that while 'one cannot indict a race any more than one can a nation,' 'in a large percentage of the [Jewish] race there are tendencies and trends which are dangerous indeed.' This is mentioned only to indicate the irrational extremity of King's conspiratorial paranoia within which John Grierson and the NFB were caught.

460 Notes to pages 239-44 33 In an extraordinarily mean-spirited action, the government refused to pay the expenses incurred by Grierson when he returned from Britain early in 1946 to help the NFB during the transition period: Evans, John Grierson, 255-6. Grierson, in a letter he wished read to the board, expressed his 'pain and disappointment: not for the money itself, but for the manner and mood in which the Treasury Board has received my representations': NFB, Grierson to McLean, 21 Jan. 1947. 34 NAC, DBA; A12 v. 2120 f. AR1062/1, Hume Wrong to William Benton, 15 Mar. 1947. 35 NA, USDS, 842.20/2-2447, Julian Harrington to A.B. Foster, 24 Feb. 1947. 36 NAC, DBA, A12 v. 2120 f. AR1062/1, Robertson to Pearson, 27 Dec. 1946. 37 Ibid., Pearson to Robertson, 7 Mar. 1947; Robertson to Pearson, 10 Mar. 1947. 38 Ibid., Wrong to William Benton, 15 Mar. 1947. 39 Ibid., Wrong to Pearson, 19 Mar. 1947; Pearson to Ray Atherton, 20 Mar. 1947; Pearson to Wrong, 21 Mar. 1947. 40 Ibid., Smith to Pearson, 22 Mar. 1947. 41 Ibid., Wrong to Pearson, 24 Mar. 1947. 42 Ibid., Robertson to Pearson, 19 June 1947. 43 House of Commons, Debates, 23 Mar. 1948. 44 NAC, DBA, A12 v. 2120 f. AR 1062/1, Wilgress to A.D.P. Heeney, 23 June, 13 and 26 July 1949.

C H A P T E R 11 'A Communist Nest': Witch-hunt at the NFB 1 Piers Handling, 'Censorship and Scares,' Cinema Canada 56 (June-July 1979): 29-30. 2 Written confirmation of the cooperation deal came in a letter from Eric Johnston, president of the American Motion Picture Association, to J.J. Fitzgibbons, president of Famous Players Canada Ltd, 21 Jan. 1948, with copies to Howe and to the U.S. ambassador, NA, USDS, 840.6 f. 1948-49 59A543. This was the same Eric Johnston who just two months earlier had ordered the Hollywood Ten (cited for contempt for refusing to answer the questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee) suspended without pay: Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York 1981), 83. On the Canadian Co-operation Project more generally, see Ted Magder, Canada's Hollywood: The Canadian State and Feature Films (Toronto 1993), 62-85; Maynard Collins, 'Co-operation, Hollywood and Howe,' Cinema Canada 56 (June-July 1979): 34-6; Manjunath Pendakur, Canadian Dreams and American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry (Detroit 1990), 134-41; Pierre Berton, Hollywood's Canada: The Americanization of our National linage (Toronto 1975), 167-91, and the NFB production Has Anyone Here Seen Canada? Ian Jarvie, in Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-1950 (Cambridge 1992), attacks the 'naivety' of nationalists like Berton, yet is at something of a loss to explain why the government accepted a deal that did so little for Canada; apparently missing the irony of his own judgment, Jarvie concludes that 'Canadian governments showed an admirable grasp of the political realities.' Jarvie is on surer ground when he attributes the success of Hollywood movies to the fact that 'American business and

Notes to pages 244-8 461 government assistance promoted and marketed them so effectively that competition was crushed' (93-9, 429). 3 NAC, DL, v. 853, NFB Minutes, 1 Dec. 1947. 4 NFB, Board Minutes, 14 July 1948; 22 Mar. 1949; 24 Nov. 1949. 5 Bert Hughes, an 'admitted' Communist who was denounced in the House of Commons, was gone from the board early. Another, George Brandt, was fired just on the eve of the well-publicized purge of 1949: NAC, DL, v. 853, NFB Minutes, 26 Apr. 1949. NAC, PCO 18, v. 189 f. S-100-1(1) and S-100(n)(3) contain references to the Brandt dismissal, but all the pertinent documents are missing. There appear to be other employees at this time who simply saw the writing on the wall and went elsewhere. 6 NFB, McLean to Grierson, 12 Sept. 1945. 7 Access to Information request 93-A-00080, Report by Cpl G.H. Miller, passed on by Insp. J. Leopold to the Commissioner, 18 Nov. 1949, and reports by Miller dated 25 June and 7 Nov. 1949. These reports incorporated what could only be called malicious gossip about 'gay private parties' given by members of the 'clique' at which McLean was usually in attendance, and even a suggestion that McLean was being blackmailed. Some of these innuendoes came from private film makers whose veracity was questioned by the Mounties themselves. 8 NFB, Board Minutes, 19 Nov. 1946; 20 Nov. 1946; 12 Feb. 1948; 24 Feb. 1948; McLean, 'Progress report of fiscal year 1946-^7,' 15 Apr. 1947. The 10 per cent cut brought the NFB's budget below $2 million; the 100-person cut would have constituted about 17 per cent of permanent employees in 1948. As an instance of the quality of press criticism taken so seriously by McCann, see the Montreal Gazette's mean-spirited editorial of 30 Jan. 1947 denouncing the documentary coup scored by the NFB in bringing out the historic first footage of Communist-held territory in Yenan, China, as a waste of taxpayers' money. 9 NFB, Board Minutes, 5 Nov. 1947; 24 Mar. and 4 May 1948; 22 Mar. 1949. Also a casualty of the privatization of distribution were international circuits in countries that could not afford to pay for commercial distribution. In 1947 it was reported that the NFB received some 600 enquiries from thirty-five countries each month, and hundreds of prints were shipped in response: 'Plans and programs for 1947-48,' 21 Apr. 1947. The NFB had previously underwritten part of this distribution as an aspect of Griersonian internationalism and the promotion of goodwill abroad. The Liberal government insisted upon full recovery of the costs. 10 NAC, DL, v. 853, NFB Minutes, 11 May 1948. The national-security clause would have allowed other departments of government to make films when the cabinet so directed 'in the interests of national security.' McCann cryptically explained that 'no one could predict what eventualities might exist in the next 5 years.' 11 Ibid., 22 Mar. 1949; 10 June 1948. 12 Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto 1991), 8. 13 NAC, PCO 18, v. 189, f. S-lOO-l(l), Lucas to Heeney, 26 Jan. 1949, with the latter's written comments.

462

Notes to pages 248-51

14 Evans, In the National Interest, 9. The RCMP's own files on the NFB provide slightly different figures. At the end of September, it had twenty-six suspects, of whom eighteen were arranged in order of their security importance. In early November, a memo indicates an additional twenty-seven names, of which twenty-four were taken seriously. This suggests at least forty-two cases considered serious by the police, six more than the figure mentioned by McLean. What happened to these is unclear, but of course they might have been terminated in the interim: Access to Information request 03-A-00080, A/Sgt W.T. James - Insp. R.A.S. MacNeil, 28 Sept. and 4 Nov. 1949. 15 NAC, LStL, v. 23 f. 128, Robert Winters to St Laurent, 26 Aug. 1949. 16 NAC, DL, v. 853, NFB Minutes, 26 Apr. 1949. 17 Rick Salutin, 'The NFB Red Scare,' Weekend Magazine, 23 Sept. 1978, 29. The private film maker with his list of subversives was 'Budge' Crawley, the head of Ottawa-based Crawley Films (information from Salutin). 18 Access to Information request 93-A-00080. Even if a suspect left the employ of the NFB, surveillance was maintained. One individual, described in the files as a 'person with very radical ideas and ... set in such ideas' quit the NFB and went to work for his father's private business in Quebec City. The Mounties quickly set up liaison with their Quebec detachment, who, despite acknowledging that there were 'very limited subversive activities' in that city, promised to keep the individual under 'close surveillance' and report back regularly to headquarters. 19 A.R. Sykes, 'Believe Suspicion Will Kill Film Board's Bid for Independence,' Ottawa Journal, 25 Nov. 1949. 20 The Montreal Gazette (28 Nov. 1949) likened the revelations about the NFB to 'a snatching up of the corners of a curtain. And what was made visible was not a house in order.' References in the House to Linton as a 'notorious Communist' and a spy were reprinted as if this were fact (although charges against Linton arising from the Gouzenko affair had been dropped by the Crown upon Linton's return to Canada). Journalists wrote about the NFB as a 'haven for intellectual left-wingers' and about 'parlour pinks' who remained on the payroll: Arthur Blakely, 'Curbs on N.F.B. Held Probable,' Montreal Gazette, 22 Nov. 1949. A later article in the Toronto Telegram (29 Mar. 1950) asserted that a 'routine check' by the RCMP in 1948 had turned up evidence that a Communist employee had photographed top-secret military equipment. Evans, in In the National Interest, reports an interview with the DND security officer, who denied any such incident (9 and nlO). 21 NA, USDS, 350.21/670.6, Laurence A. Steinhardt, Ottawa, 28 Nov. 1949. 22 NFB, Board Minutes, 24 Nov. 1949; 'The Public and the Film Board,' Ottawa Citizen, 4 Feb. 1950. 23 NAC, DL, v. 853, NFB Minutes, 29 Nov. 1949; 15 Dec. 1949, and note of 16 Dec. 1949. See also D.B. Jones, Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada (Ottawa 1981), 53. 24 NAC, PCO 18, v. 172 f. N-13 (1949-51), McLean to Winters, 22 Nov. 1949. 25 NFB, Foster to McLean, 19 Dec. 1949, letter read into Board Minutes, 31 Jan. 1950. 26 Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board (Toronto 1984), 262-3.

Notes to pages 251 -6 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

463

NFB, McLean to Alan Field, 6 Jan. 1950. 'Ross McLean Bids Adieu to Film Board Colleagues,' Ottawa Citizen, 13 Jan. 1950. NAC, PCO 18, vol. 103, file S-100-M, Security Panel Minutes, 27 July 1949. NFB, Board Minutes, 31 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1950; McLean to Alan Field, 6 Jan. 1950. Statement to the board on the firings in NFB, Board Minutes, 29 Mar. 1950. Irwin himself could still not make up his mind years later whether the lack of a public opportunity for those fired to defend themselves was a good or bad thing: interview with Arthur Irwin, 'A View from the Top,' Cinema Canada 56 (1979): 38; David MacKenzie, Arthur Irwin: A Biography (Toronto 1993), 230-42. Evans, in In the National Interest, grants that to Irwin's 'credit, the liberal in him refused to fall victim to the Red-baiting hysteria' (15). That Irwin and Robertson could find only three employees who qualified as security risks, even given the tough government standards for clearance, is not surprising. From the evidence on the RCMP files now released, most of the allegations were little more than hearsay and guilt by association. Comments such as 'alleged to have been a "parlour pink" ' and a 'staff contributor' to a union newspaper edited by a 'well known Communist' do not inspire confidence: Access to Information request 93-A-00080. Salutin, 'NFB Red Scare,' 21. NAC, PCO 16, v. 19, Cabinet Conclusions, 28 Mar. 1950. For example, Jack Pickersgill makes the handling of the NFB purge the centrepiece of his portrait of St Laurent's 'liberal attitude' to the Communist issue: My Years with Louis St. Laurent (Toronto 1975), 146-9. Ibid., 146. Evans, John Grierson, 264. Salutin, 'NFB Red Scare,' 21. Salutin, in ibid., reports a number of such instances, some of which also came to light in interviews conducted for this book. Material released under Access to Information request 93-A-00080 contains a request from the University of Saskatchewan for a security clearance on an ex-NFB employee applying for 'an important position with the University' (Supt T.W. Chard, 'F' Division to Commissioner, 25 Nov. 1949). The RCMP was prepared to comply with this request, although there is no record in the file of the result of the check. This suggests that the initiative for pursuing those purged may not always have come from the RCMP. NAC, DEA, f. 50207-A-40, Security Panel Minutes, 27 Apr. 1950 and 1 Mar. 1952. 'Smearing the Film Board,' Ottawa Citizen, 21 Nov. 1949. 'The Public and the Film Board,' Ottawa Citizen, 4 Feb. 1950. NAC, PCO 18, v. 172 f. N-13(3) is filled with such protests. Ottawa Citizen, 4 Feb. 1950. Magder, in Canada's Hollywood, 76-80, makes the same point. Peter Morris, 'After Grierson: The National Film Board 1945-1953,' in Seth Feldman, ed., Take Two (Toronto 1984), 183. Irwin's biographer concurs with this judgment: MacKenzie, Arthur Irwin, 238. The purge did have the desired effect on one element of public opinion. The RCMP used its sources to probe the impact on the opinions of 'left-

464

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Notes to pages 256-69

ists.' It found that the latter had 'become very cautious in discussing controversial political issues'; there is nothing, one Mountie reported, 'to indicate resentment of a reasonably discreet screening of the Board's personnel': Access to Information request 93-A-00080, Cst J.T. Halward, Toronto Special Section, 30 Nov. 1949. Peter Morris, 'After Grierson: The National Film Board 1945-1953,' Journal of Canadian Studies 16, no. 1 (1981): 11. NAC, PCO 18, v. 139, Cabinet Conclusions, 23 Feb. 1951. NFB, Arthur Irwin to Archibald A. Day, 30 Oct. 1950. On the Freedom Speaks project, see Evans, In the National Interest, 20-2. NFB, Day to Irwin, 11 Dec. 1950; Irwin to Day, 14 Dec. 1950. NFB, Irwin to Winters, 19 Jan. 1951. Evans, John Grierson, 265. Chris Whynot, 'The NFB and Labour, 1945-1953,' Journal of Canadian Studies 16, no. 1 (1981): 18-20. Salutin, 'NFB Red Scare,' 21.

C H A P T E R 12 The Debate That Never Was: Selling the Cold War 1 Reg Whitaker, The Government Party: Organizing and Financing the National Liberal Party of Canada, 1930-1958 (Toronto 1977). 2 M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830-1970 (Baltimore 1990). 3 'Canada in the New, Non-British World,' International Journal 1, no. 3 (Summer 1948): 215. 4 'Minister of External Affairs Tells Truth about Soviet Russia,' Toronto Telegram, 14 June 1948. 5 Keith Wai den, Visions of Order: The Canadian Mounties in Symbol and Myth (Toronto 1982), 118-36. 6 Donald Creighton, 'Canada and the Cold War,' in Towards the Discovery of Canada: Selected Essays (Toronto 1972), 243-55. 7 Louis St Laurent, The Foundations of Canadian Policy in World Affairs (Toronto 1947), 19. 8 L.B. Pearson, Words and Occasions (Toronto 1970), 68-9. 9 NAC, LStL, v. 222 f. C-9. This speech was prepared by the department, so it is quite possible that Smith actually wrote the words. 10 R.D. Cuff and J.L. Granatstein, Ties That Bind (Toronto 1977), 149. 11 J.I. Gow, 'Les Quebecois, la guerre et la paix, 1945-60,' Canadian Journal of Political Science 3, no. 1 (1970): 88-122. 12 See Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Cm/5 on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954 (Amherst, Mass. 1978). 13 On the activities of these groups see Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during World War II,' Labour/Le Travail 17 (Spring 1986): 160-2.

Notes to pages 269-75 465 14 On Scott's activities see NAC, FRS, v. 10; interviews with Brough and Kay Macpherson and Phyllis Clarke. 15 Nelson Wiseman, Social Democracy in Manitoba: A History of the CCF/NDP (Winnipeg 1983), 37-62. It is true, as Wiseman reports, that another MLA opposed to NATO was not expelled, but in his case impeccable anti-Communist credentials dating back to the 1930s seem to have overridden the ideological deviation. 16 J.T. Morley, Secular Socialists: The CCF/NDP in Ontario (Kingston and Montreal 1984), 204-7; Irving Abella, Nationalism, Communism and Canadian Labour (Toronto 1973), 93-101. The Carlin affair and the struggle of the Steelworkers' union against the allegedly 'Communist' Mine-Mill and Smelter Workers that lay behind it have been recently discussed at length and with considerable sensitivity to both sides in Cameron Smith, Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Family (Toronto 1989), 299-325. 17 Walter D. Young, The Anatomy of a Party: The National CCF, 1932-61 (Toronto 1969), 282-4. 18 David Lewis, The Good Fight: Political Memoirs 1909-1958 (Toronto 1981), 348. Lewis's long struggle to drive the Communists out of the party and the union movement is critically examined in Cameron Smith, Unfinished Journey. Many years later, his mistrust of the Communists and their motives was undimmed and still bitter: interviews with David Lewis, Ottawa 1980-1. 19 John Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows: The RCMP Security Service (Toronto 1980), 194; interview with MJ. Coldwell, 1965. 20 Quoted in Charles Lipton, The Trade Union Movement of Canada, 1827-1959 (Montreal 1967), 294. 21 Frank Williams (pseudonym for Frank Park), 'Confusion, Contradiction, Mar Roberts' Reportage of "Cold War," ' Canadian Tribune (8 Nov. 1948). The Roberts story is described in Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto 1987), 151-2. 22 Unless otherwise noted, information on the Shortliffe case is drawn from Frederick Gibson's excellent chapter 'The Cold War and the University,' in his To Serve and Yet Be Free: Queen's University, vol. 2, 1917-61 (Kingston and Montreal 1983), 272-96. We have also benefited from the memories of Shortliffe's widow and his son, Gary Shortliffe. 23 Shortliffe, 'Class Conflict in International Politics,' International Journal 4, no. 2 (1949): 108. 24 International Journal 4, no. 3 (1949): 289. 25 Gibson, 'The Cold War,' 290. 26 Ibid., 292. 27 Ibid., 295. 28 Ibid., 295-6. 29 Stanley Barrett, 'The Far Right in Canada,' in C.E.S. Franks, ed., Dissent and the State (Toronto 1989), 229. 30 Gostick was so excessive that he merited a rare distinction for a right-winger: a file in the RCMP Security Service's counter-subversion branch.

466

Notes to pages 276-81

31 NA, USDS, 842.00B/11-1248, EC. Spalding to W.P. Snow, 12 Nov. 1948. 32 Gerald Caplan, The Dilemma of Canadian Socialism: The CCF in Ontario (Toronto 1973), 120-9. 33 Gladstone Murray, 'She's Redhead Who's out to Beat the Reds,' Toronto Telegram, 30 Jan. 1959. Murray carried on an affable correspondence with Lester Pearson, but perhaps not much should be made of this: Pearson was affable with all his correspondents, with the exception of James Endicott of the Canadian Peace Congress. 34 The best known of his anti-Communist tracts is Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London 1944). 35 Watson Kirkconnell, A Slice of Canada: Memoirs (Toronto 1967). 36 Ottawa Citizen, 23 June 1947. 37 Kirkconnell, Slice of Canada, 328. 38 Watson Kirkconnell, 'Communists on the Canadian Campus Are Now Briefed for Their Mission,' Saturday Night, 18 Jan. 1949. 39 Watson Kirkconnell, The Humanities in Canada (with A.S.P. Woodhouse) (Ottawa 1947); Liberal Education in the Canadian Democracy (Hamilton 1948); Canadian Federation for the Humanities, The Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities J943-1983: A Short History (Ottawa 1983), 3-4. 40 NAC, LStL, v. 32, Kirkconnell to St Laurent, 24 Jan. 1948. 41 Toronto Telegram, 23, 24, 30 Mar., 1 Apr. 1959. Gostick's Canadian Intelligence Service 9, no. 2 (Feb. 1959) urged that Kirkconnell be made secretary of state in Ottawa. While all this was going on, Kirkconnell was exercising his peculiar view of freedom of expression by firing the editor of the student newspaper on his campus for 'blasphemy' and then ordering him to 'leave town within 24 hours': Globe and Mail, 23 Mar. 1959; Toronto Daily Star, 6 Feb. 1959. 42 The questions of interest to us on Cold War issues wereusuallyjust tacked on to marketing surveys for corporations; they lack depth. The questions were usually not very sophisticated in the way they were put - some indeed were so 'loaded' as to virtually assure a certain kind of response. The results were not broken down by the socio-economic and other characteristics of the respondents in ways that produce a useful cross-section of opinion. Questions were often not repeated in later surveys, or were asked in different ways, so that it is not possible to draw a longer-range profile of changes over time. In short, the Gallup results are at best a very crude indicator. This is doubly lamentable because there were some relatively advanced and sophisticated surveys of Cold War opinion carried out in the United States at this time. The Canadian data are so weak that comparisons are hardly useful. Some history of the early Gallup experience in Canada can be found in Claire Hoy, Margin of Error (Toronto 1989), 9-19. 43 These are found in the form of Canadian Institute of Public Opinion (CIPO) press releases, many but not all of which can be consulted in the CIPO office in Toronto. 44 CIPO, 22 Mar. 1947. 45 Paul Evans and Daphne Gottlieb Taras, 'Canadian Public Opinion on Relations with China: An Analysis of Existing Survey Research,' Canada and the Pacific Programme, Working Paper 33 (Mar. 1985).

Notes to pages 281-7

467

46 CIPO, 10 Mar. 1948. 47 Ibid., 17 May 1952. However ill-informed Canadians were, they apparently approved of sending Canadian troops for the defence of Europe. At least English Canadians approved; a narrow majority of French Canadians disapproved: CIPO, 2 Dec. 1950. 48 S.D. Clark, The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto 1968), 216. 49 CIPO, 24 Apr. 1948. 50 Ibid., 15 May 1946. 51 Ibid., 16 Apr. 1949; 20 Apr. 1949. 52 Ibid., 8 Dec. 1954. 53 Ibid., 18 Apr. 1951. 54 Ibid., 16 May 1953. 55 Ibid., 28 Nov. 1953. 56 Ibid., 20 Aug. 1947; 21 Apr. 1954. 57 Ibid., 29 Mar. 1952. 58 Ibid., 3 Mar. 1951. 59 Ibid., 15 Nov. 1950. One rather bizarre question posed in 1952 revealed that on a scale of moral turpitude Canadians were considerably more shocked by people who left small children unattended at home than by those who were Communists - although the latter were considered more morally objectionable than bookies or people who cheated customs when crossing the border! (Ibid., 2 Apr. 1952). 60 Ibid., 2 Mar. 1946. 61 Ibid., 30 Nov. 1955. 62 Ibid., 19 May 1954. 63 Ibid., 26 Feb. 1947. 64 Ibid., 1 May 1947. 65 Ibid., 13 Sept. 1950. 66 Ibid., 18 June 1952. 67 A relatively comprehensive study was published in 1955 by Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (New York 1955); see also Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (New York 1963). 68 These observations are drawn from Reg Whitaker, 'Fighting the Cold War on the Home Front: America, Britain, Australia, Canada,' in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, eds, The Uses of Anti-Communism (London 1984). 69 See especially Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, Mass. 1967).

C H A P T E R 13 The Cold War in the Provinces 1 Other provinces could also be mentioned. Manitoba since the time of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919 was an ideologically divided society; in the late 1940s, there were Communists elected to the provincial legislature and the Winnipeg council and school board. One of the latter, Joe Zuken, survived in office for decades. On Zuken and Cold

468 Notes to pages 287-91 War controversies in Manitoba, see Doug Smith, Joe Zuken: Citizen and Socialist (Toronto 1990), especially 134-66. In Alberta, Social Credit passed film-censorship laws and repressive labour legislation accompanied by anti-Communist rhetoric. See Alvin Finkel, 'The Cold War, Alberta Labour, and the Social Credit Regime', Labour/Le Travail 21 (Spring 1988): 131-8, and his The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta (Toronto 1989), 99-140. There were Cold War controversies in Nova Scotia as well, where an attempt by the Nova Scotia Labour Relations Board to decertify a union on the grounds of Communism was overturned by the courts in a memorable civil-libertarian decision by Mr Justice Ivan Rand in the Supreme Court of Canada: Smith and Ruhland Ltd. v. the Queen ex rel. Andrews et al. (1953) 2 Supreme Court of Canada Reports (SCR), 95, (1953) 3 Dominion Law Reports (DLR), 690. 2 Ronald Williams, 'Where Is Red Strength?' Financial Post, 28 Sept. 1946. 3 See, inter alia, NA, USDS, 842.00B/3-647, Howard K. Travers to Andrew B. Foster, 6 Mar. 1947. 4 NA, USDS, 842.00B/2-1148 and 842.00/2-1248, George D. Andrews to Secretary of State, 11, 12 Feb. 1948. 5 Re Legal Professions Act, re Martin, 1 DLR (1949), 105. On the Martin case, see Thomas Berger, Fragile Freedoms (Toronto 1981), 155-7. 6 Erwin Kreutzweiser, 'Should Politics Prevent Admission to the Bar?' and editorial 'Mr Martin and the King,' Saturday Night, 4 Dec. 1948; 'Inequality before the Law,' Montreal Gazette, 18 Mar. 1949; Elmore Meredith, 'Communism and the British Columbia Bar,' Canadian Bar Review 28 (1950): 899-900. 7 Meredith, 'Communism,' 895. 8 Re Legal Professions Act, re Martin, 2 DLR (1949), 559. 9 Chitty's Law Journal 1 (Nov. 1950): 7. 10 Harry Rankin, Rankin's Law: Recollections of a Radical (Vancouver 1975), 62-72; interview with Harry Rankin. 11 Rankin, Rankin's Law, 70. The RCMP in 1952 tried unsuccessfully to implicate Rankin and one of the other lawyers forced to sign the non-Communist statement in a Chinese immigration fraud case. The Mounties had, it seems, no evidence, even though they did have a motive for trying to stop radical young lawyers: Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto 1987), 99-100. 12 Gerald L. Caplan, The Dilemma of Canadian Socialism: The CCF in Ontario (Toronto 1973). On the so-called 'Gestapo' affair of 1945 the best account is David Lewis, The Good Fight: Political Memoirs, 1909-1958 (Toronto 1981), 261-87. 13 Peter Oliver, Unlikely Tory: The Life and Politics of Allan Grossman (Toronto 1985), 59-77. 14 This alleged comment does not seem to appear in the official record of the legislative debates, but it has been recalled by more than one legislative reporter. Oliver reports that the Communists were able to run a photo of Frost with his arm around Salsberg and quote the Premier as saying, 'Salsberg's the only real opposition we have around here': Unlikely Tory, 71.

Notes to pages 291-4

469

15 A.K. MacDougall, John P. Robarts: His Life and Government (Toronto 1986), 100. 16 'Student Mob Wrecks Office of Communists in Windsor,' Windsor Daily Star, 8 Apr. 1948. NA, USDS, 842.00/4-1248 CS/A, Bernard Gotlieb to Secretary of State, 12 Apr. 1948, and 842.00B/3-2548 CS/A, Gotlieb to Secretary of State, 25 Mar. 1948, in which the U.S. consul in Windsor reports that his 'RCMP informant' had assured him that the Communists had been steadily losing ground in Windsor since the end of the war. 17 H. Kallmann, G. Potvin, and K. Winters, eds, Encyclopedia of Music in Canada (Toronto 1981), 892, 925; Gerald Hannon, 'The Big Chill,' Globe and Mail, 29 Feb. 1992; interviews in Len Scher, The Un-Canadians: True Stories of the Blacklist Era (Toronto 1992), 29-38. 18 'Urge Oath of Allegiance for all Toronto Teachers,' Toronto Daily Star, 18 Mar. 1948; 'Won't Let LPP Candidates Hold Meetings in Schools,' Toronto Daily Star, 23 Apr. 1948. 19 Other Ontario municipalities where overt attempts were made to proscribe Communist participation include Hamilton and the Lakehead: NA, USDS, 842.00/2-1347 CS/A, Robert English to Secretary of State, 13 Feb. 1947, A.W. Rasporich, 'Faction and Class in Modern Lakehead Politics,' Lakehead University Review 8, no. 1 (Summer 1974): 59, reports dismissals of left-wing civic employees who 'had penetrated such apocalyptic sectors as the local incinerator.' 20 Monroe Johnston, ' "I'm not a Communist" Centre Director Says as Board Fires Her,' Toronto Daily Star, 25 July 1947. Our thanks to James Struthers who brought this story to our attention and filled in some of the background. Mary Jennison was on the RCMP Red list, and she later became a leading figure in the Canadian Peace Congress. 21 Ruth Roach Pierson, 'They're Still Women after AW: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto 1986), 48-60. 22 This account is based on Susan Prentice's excellent 'Workers, Mothers, Reds: Toronto's Postwar Daycare Fight,' Studies in Political Economy 30 (Autumn 1989): 115-41. 23 Quoted in Herbert Quinn, The Union Nationale (Toronto 1963), 124. 24 Reg Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism during World War II,' Labour/Le Travail 17 (1986): 149-52. 25 Whitaker, Double Standard, 125-9. 26 On the Quebec Communists, see Marcel Fournier, Communisme et anticommunisme au Quebec, 7920-7950 (Montreal 1979); Robert Comeau and Bernard Dionne, Le droit de se taire: histoire des communistes au Quebec de la premiere guerre mondiale a la revolution tranquille (Montreal 1989). An insider's memoirs are Gerard Fortin (with Boyce Richardson), Life of the Party (Montreal 1984). 27 On Rose's elections, see Merrily Weisbord, The Strangest Dream; Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials, and the Cold War (Toronto 1983), 122-38. The 1943 by-election was even fictionalized in an unpublished novel by Montreal poet A.M. Klein. 28 Montreal Star, 20 Aug. 1947. 29 Ronald Williams, 'Quebec: Keystone in Master Plan of Communists,' Financial Post, 30 Nov. 1946. Comeau and Dionne estimate that in 1947 there may have been 1,500 party members in Quebec (Le droit de se taire, 495-6). This would represent approximately 7

470

30 31 32 33 34

35

36

37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Notes to pages 295-302

per cent of all party members across Canada - about four times less than Quebec's share of the Canadian population. NA, USDS, 350-21/570-3, Laurence A. Steinhardt to Secretary of State, 9, 15 Sept. 1949. Conrad Black, Duplessis (Toronto 1977), 394-5. Quoted in Quinn, Union Nationale, 128 n73. Black, Duplessis, 338. In fact, an electoral 'non-aggression' pact was in place whereby numerous provincial Union Nationale members and federal Liberal MPs did not intervene against each other in elections. This arrangement did not break down until 1956-7. See Reg Whitaker, The Government Party: Organizing and Financing the National Liberal Party of Canada, 1930-1958 (Toronto 1977), 290-1, 294-300. Black, Duplessis, 338-41. Duplessis follower and future federal Tory cabinet minister Noel Dorion collected the McCarthyite charges in the pamphlet Le communisme et le parti liberal (Quebec 1948). Michael Behiels, Prelude to Quebec's Quiet Revolution: Liberalism Versus Neo-nationalism, 1945-1960 (Montreal 1985), 228. The Le Devoir article was later republished in Gerard Dion and Louis O'Neill, Le chretien et les elections (Montreal 1960), 113-23. Abbe Dion, it might be noted, had written a short book on Quebec Communism, Le communisme dans la province de Quebec (Quebec 1949). Behiels, Prelude, 75-6. A lengthy and apparently fair account of Trudeau's trip to the USSR and of the controversy set off by his Le Devoir articles can be found in David Somerville's anti-Trudeau book, Trudeau Revealed by His Actions and Words (Richmond Hill 1978), 50-67. Black, Duplessis, 559-60. See especially Robert Rumilly, Linfiltration gauchiste au Canada francais (Montreal 1956). Fortin, Life of the Party, 140. Black, Duplessis, 390. The best factual description of the saga of the Polish art treasures can be found in Aloysius Balawyder, The Maple Leaf and the White Eagle: CanadianPolish Relations, 1918-1978 (New York 1980) 187-218, and more exhaustively in Balawyder, The Odyssey of the Polish Treasures (Antigonish 1978). The above account is drawn from Black, Duplessis, 390-1. See also Leslie Roberts, The Chief: A Political Biography of Maurice Duplessis (Toronto 1963), 140-5. Roberts, The Chief, 145. Ibid., 391. NAC, PCO, Cabinet Minutes, 20 May 1958. Ibid., 6 June 1958. Ibid., 2 July 1958. See also Cabinet Documents CD-121/58, 13 May 1858, and CD-175/ 58, 24 June 1958. NAC, PCO, Cabinet Minutes, 6 Oct. 1959. Canadian Civil Liberties Bulletin, 21 May 1938, in NAC, Hazen Sise Papers, v. 33 f. 'Canadian Civil Liberties Union, 1937-9, 1947.' On the origins and initial reaction to the

Notes to pages 302-6 471 Padlock Law, see Lucie Laurin, 'Communisme et liberte d'expression au Quebec: la "Loi du Cadenas" 1937-1957,' in Comeau and Dionne, Le drolt de se taire, 112-33. 50 Reg Whitaker, 'Political Thought and Political Action in Mackenzie King,' Journal of Canadian Studies, 13, no. 4 (1978). 51 Fineberg v. Taub, Quebec Superior Court (1940), 1 DLR, 114. 52 Whitaker, 'Official Repression of Communism,' 147. 53 NA, USDS, 842.918/2-1848, Eugene M. Hinckle to Secretary of State, 18 Feb. 1948. 54 Len Scher's oral history of the domestic Cold War includes the testimony of some of those at the receiving end of the Quebec Red squads: Scher, The Un-Canadians, 130-60. 55 The RCMP did not lack resources of its own in Quebec. When the sensational story broke in 1992 that Claude Morin, ex-minister in the Parti Quebecois government of the 1970s, had been a secret RCMP informant, it was subsequently learned that his career as a Security Service asset had begun as an anti-Communist informant on the Laval University campus in the early 1950s. 56 'Alleged Red Paper Lures Buyers with Richard Photo; Nine Arrested,' Montreal Gazette, 11 Mar. 1951. 57 The Communists were not the only targets of Duplessis's authoritarian wrath. The Jehovah's Witnesses, a religious sect particularly unpopular in Catholic Quebec for their aggressive door-to-door proselytizing, fell under ferocious attack during this era. The use of the law against this sect resulted in a number of celebrated Supreme Court cases in the 1950s. See William Kaplan, State and Salvation: The Jehovah's Witnesses and Their Fight for Civil Rights (Toronto 1989). 58 'Quebec's Evil Law,' Globe and Mail, 19 Mar. 1955; 'The Front Page,' Saturday Night, 21 Aug. 1954. 59 NAC, CLC, v. 3 f. 3-3, Jodoin to S. Kraisman, 22 Dec. 1955; v. 6 f. 6-8, Gordon Gushing to W.H. Sawyer, 29 Dec. 1955. 60 Switzman v. Elbling and the Attorney General of Quebec, (1957), 7 DLR (2d), 357. 61 Black, Duplessis, 386. 62 A recent overview of Duplessis's use of anti-Communism against the unions is in Jacques Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme quebecois (Montreal 1989), 236-43, 259-61. 63 See Pierre Trudeau, ed., The Asbestos Strike (Toronto 1974). 64 The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, required union officials to file affidavits that they were not Communists. In addition, it banned closed union shops, denied unions the right to make political contributions, and provided for government injunctions against strikes in what were declared emergency situations. Unions that failed to file were excluded from the protection of federal labour boards, leaving them open to lockouts and raids by rival unions. 65 This provision attracted the attention of U.S. diplomatic representatives in Canada who noted that the CRO, acting as both judge and jury, could force locals to sever connections with international unions: NA, USDS, 842.504/2-2549, Ferris to Secretary of State, 25 Feb. 1949. 66 Ronald Williams, 'How Tough Can You Get with Labor? Quebec, Taft-Hartley Act Two Lessons,' Financial Post, 12 Feb. 1949.

472

Notes to pages 306-14

67 Accounts of the Bill 5 affair can be found in Quinn, Union Nationale, 92-4; W.E. Greening, Taft-Hartleyism in Quebec,' Canadian Forum 29, no. 340 (May 1949): 29-30. We have also benefited from a privately prepared study by the late Leo Roback of Research Associates, 'The Duplessis Government and Organized Labour,' 1951. 68 NAC, CLC, new v. 159 f. 14-10-82, pamphlet of Comite des Droits Unionistes, 11 May 1954. 69 Robert Duffy, 'Duplessis Lashes Union on Labour Board Stand,' Globe and Mail, 14 Dec. 1955. 70 Financial Post, 13 Nov. 1954. 71 'Ruling Takes Punch out of Bill 19,' Financial Post, 12 Nov. 1954. 72 Financial Post, Dec. 1951. 73 Irving Abel la, Nationalism, Communism and Canadian Labour (Toronto 1973), 161. 74 Comeau and Dionne, Le droit de se taire, includes a number of studies on Communists in the Quebec trade union movement (369-494). 75 Numerous anecdotes to this effect can be found in Pierre Laporte, La vraiface de Duplessis (Montreal 1960). 76 L'action catholique, 5 Dec. 1947. 77 NAC, LStL, v. 23, correspondence with L.-P. Rainville, J.-A. Tremblay et al.; v. 122, f. M-75-T. 78 NAC, PCO 18, v. 172 f. N-13(1949-51), W.A. Irwin to J.W. Pickersgill, 24 July 1950; R.H. Winters to Duplessis, 31 Sept. 1950. Pierre Veronneau, L'office national dufilm: I'enfant martyr (Montreal 1979), 10. 79 NAC, PCO 18, v. 172 f. N-13 (1949-51), Winters to St Laurent, 2 June 1950. 80 NAC, PCO 16, v. 20, Cabinet Minutes, 30 Sept. 1950; CD-223-50, 23 Sept. 1950. 81 Ibid., Georges Leveille to St Laurent, 10 Oct. 1950. 82 NA, USDS, 842.00B/6-749, Eugene M. Hinckle, memorandum 'Alleged Communist activities of Hazen SISE,' 7 June 1949. 83 Quoted in Behiels, Prelude, 131. 84 Quoted in ibid., 227-8.

C H A P T E R 14 Labour's Cold War (I): Communists and Unions, 1945-1949 1 Irving Abel la, Nationalism, Communism and Canadian Labour (Toronto 1973). See also Charles Lipton, The Trade Union Movement of Canada 1827-1959 (Montreal 1967), and for the United States, Bert Cochrane, Labor and Communism (Princeton 1977). 2 Jacques Rouillard, Histoire du syndicalisme quebecois (Montreal 1989). See ch. 13, above. 3 International unions also systematically lied about their total membership in Canada. Bengough estimated in 1950 that strict reporting would add another 50,000 to the actual membership. Ratios in dues are based on the congress budget and its reported membership at the time. In the CCL, Pat Conroy estimated that the national unions paid twenty times more than the international unions. Precise numbers are difficult to come by

Notes to pages 315-25 473

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18

19 20

because of such vagaries in reporting of membership, conflicting reports filed with the Department of Labour, seasonal employment, and so forth. For instance, John Stanton, Life and Death of the Canadian Seamen's Union (Toronto 1978), provides a documented account by a lawyer who did work for the union. Donald Brittain's NFB/CBC film Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks dramatizes Banks's brutal actions on behalf of the SIU. Jim Green's Against the Tide (Toronto 1986) and William Kaplan's Everything That Floats (Toronto 1987) present the story of the CSU, but quite apart from the other purges in the TLC and, in Kaplan's case, without exploring the issue of nationalism. NAC, CLC, v. 6 f. 6-1, Report of Seamen's Organizing and Grievance Committee. NAC, CLC, v. 6 f. 6-12, Bengough to William Green, 18 July 1945. See Stanton, Life and Death, 883-9. Toronto Telegram, 18 Apr. 1955. NAC, CLC, v. 362 f. 'Communist Party, 1944-1958.' NAC, CLC, v. 6 f. 6-15, Misener to Buckley nd [June 1948]. See also Stanton, Life and Death, 90-114. Labour Gazette 47:1574. NAC, DL, v. 131 f. 125, press release 12 May 1948. Globe and Mail, 1 Aug. 1948. U.S. and Canadian authorities worked out a reciprocal policy banning radicals from crossing the border. The Canadian Department of Labour, in one memo, recommended blacklisting officers of the UE, Mine-Mill, and six other CIO unions along with any trade unionists who had supported Henry Wallace in the U.S. presidential campaign of 1948. See Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto 1987), 154-64. NAC, CLC, v. 6, f. 6-15, Mitchell to McManus, 22 July 1948. NAC, DL, v. 835 f. 1-28-1 pt 1, Bengough to MacNamara, 22 July 1948. Access to Information requests for Security Service files on the CSU in the late 1940s alone have yielded thousands of pages, which, despite sometimes heavy censorship, indicate extremely detailed surveillance of the national union and of locals. Interestingly, after Pat Sullivan's defection the RCMP decided not to interview him about Communist activity for fear that he would turn their interest in him into more self-publicity: Access request 1025-9-91041, J. Leopold to o/c 'O' Division, 23 Apr. 1947. NAC, DL, v. 3498 f. 1-10T-100-1 pt 2, MacNamara to Mitchell, 17 July 1948. Globe and Mail, 1 Aug. 1948. The RCMP mounted close surveillance of the Ottawa demonstration, but were rather taken aback by the innocuousness of the affair. Some CSU members were even allowed to watch Mackenzie King's speech to the Liberal convention from the public galleries; not a heckle was raised: CSIS files, Access request 1025-991041, Report by Cpl G.H. Miller, Special Branch 'A' Division, 4 Aug. 1948. Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wise., Pulp-Sulfite Workers Papers, ff 1 p 1948, Burnell to J.P. Burke, 3 Sept. 1948. NAC, DL, v. 3498, f. 1-lOT-lOO-l pt 2, Harry Walker to A. MacNamara, 10, 12 Oct. 1948.

474

Notes to pages 325-37

21 Abella, Nationalism, Communism, 136. 22 TLC, Proceedings, (1948). 23 Labour Gazette 48 (1948): 1367-73; NAC, DL, v. 3498 f. 1- 10T-100-1 pt 2, unidentified newspaper clipping; Percy Bengough, 'There's Nothing to Stop Them Getting Together,' Labour Gazette 49, no. 7 (Jan. 1949). 24 Montreal Gazette, 18 Apr. 1948. 25 NAC, DL, v. 3498 f. 1-lOT-lOO-l pt. 2, Brief 'submitted by Associated Representatives of International Unions in Canada to the Executive Council of the AFL'; see also NA, USDS, 842.5043/3-2147, end. no. 3, 4-747. 26 RCMP Special Branch, Monthly Bulletin (Nov-Dec 1948); NAC, CLC, v. 6 f. 6-15, Bengough to Hewitt, 19 Nov. 1948; Hewitt to Bengough, 25 Nov. 1948; CLC v. 3 f. 3-21, Green to Bengough, 11 Dec. 1948. 27 NAC, CLC, v. 3 f. 3-21, Bengough to L.O. Thomas, 6 May 1949. 28 Labour Gazette 49 (1949): 243-4. 29 Ibid. 30 Some evidence has emerged that Communists in France, for example, hoped to weaken the Marshall Plan by tying up shipments of strategic materials to Europe. These attempts failed, and the Americans did not seem especially alarmed. See 'Communist Capabilities in the Maritime Occupations of the World,' NA, USDS, OIR Report 5328, 28 Mar. 1951. The implementation of screening on the Great Lakes is discussed in Ch. 7. 31 NAC, DL, v. 3498 f. 1-lOT-lOO-l, pt 3, Bengough to MacNamara, 4, 17 Mar. 1949; Kaplan, in Everything That Floats, dismisses the issue of nationalism in this dispute as a 'red herring'; we suggest that it was central to the dispute. 32 Quote recalled by Leo Roback as related to him by Kent Rowley. Salsberg does not recall this comment. 33 NAC, DL, v.. 3498 f. 1-10T-100-1, pt 3, Bengough to MacNamara, 4, 17 Mar. 1949. 34 Financial Post, 19 Mar. 1949. 35 Ibid., 26 Mar. 1949. 36 Wisconsin State Historical Society, Pulp-Sulfite Workers Papers, ff Ip, 1949, 'Burnell.' 37 Richard Nielsen, 'The Thing about Hal Banks ...' Globe Magazine, 5 Dec. 1970, 7-11; affidavit of McEwen in NAC, PCO 18, v. 125 f. D-16-3-S; NA, USDS, 842.5045/4-849. 38 Maclean's 63, no. 18(1 Dec. 1950). 39 Seafarers International Union, Proceedings (Baltimore 1949), 135. 40 NAC, PCO 18, v. 125, f. D-16-3-S, MacNamara to N.A. Robertson, 6 Apr. 1949, press release, 20 Apr. 1949. 41 NAC, PCO 18, v. 125 f. D-16-3-S, A.D.P. Heeney to DBA, 6 July 1949. 42 On the British strikes see Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War (Stanford 1988), 230-70. 43 NAC, CLC, v. 5, 'Paper Makers,' J.W. Caron to Bengough, 29 Mar. 1949; J.A. D'Aoust to Bengough, 23 May 1949; La Nouvelliste, 26 Mar. 1949. 44 NAC, CLC, v. 1 f. 1-6-50, McGowan to Bengough, 10 June 1949. 45 Interviews with Norman Penner, Joseph Salsberg.

Notes to pages 337-48 475 46 TLC, Proceedings (1949), 60-1; Labour Gazette, 49, no. 831 (July 1949). 47 There is extensive documentation of the British government's preoccupation with the CSU sympathy strikes in the Public Record Office, London: see especially PREM 8/1081 and CAB 130/46. 48 NAC, PCO, v. 125 f. D-16-3-S, N.A. Robertson to Cabinet, 17 June 1949. 49 Lindsay Thursday Post (Ontario), 22 June 1949; Labour Gazette, 49, no. 819 (July 1949). 50 NA, USDS, 842.86/6-1749,7-8/49,7-1549; NAC, PCO 18, v. 125, f. D-16-3-S, A.D.P. Heeney to DBA, 6 July 1949. 51 Canadian Business (June 1949): 23; Hansard, 9 Dec. 1949, 2478-9. 52 TLC, Proceedings (1949), 60-1. 53 Interviews with Salsberg and Norman Penner. 54 'Uncover World-Wide Plot to Destroy Canadian Shipping,' Financial Post, 23 Apr. 1949. CSU v. CLRB and Branch Lines Ltd. (1951) 2 Dominion Law Reports 256. Although Kaplan condemns the CSU's Communist leadership, he nonetheless declares roundly that the CLRB decision 'was wrong in law, and there is little doubt that the order was politically motivated': Everything That Floats, 71. 55 NAC, CLC, v. 835, f. 1-28-1, pt. 1, MacNamara to Heeney, 26 Aug. 1949. 56 NA, USDS, OIR 5328, 28 Mar. 1951,41. 57 Ibid., 38-9. Kaplan, Everything That Floats (41-71), suggests the strike was dictated by a Communist-line anti-Marshall Plan strategy. However, his argument from the presence of Communists in the CSU to their control of the union and its transformation into a tool of Communist foreign policy is sketchy. 58 NAC, CLC, v. 6 f. 6-15, Bengough to Hewitt, 19 Nov. 1948.

C H A P T E R 15 Labour's Cold War (II): Purging the Trades and Labour Congress, 1949-1955 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Financial Post, 1 Oct. 1949. A.G. Hearn, TLC, Proceedings (1949), 240. Harry L. Simons, AFL Fur Workers, TLC, Proceedings (1949). TLC, Proceedings (1949), 57 ff. Labour Gazette 49 (1949): 1351-2. Ibid., 1352-3. The clerks were not the only ones missing at the 1950 convention. Two hundred and seventy-five delegates had defied Frank Hall and the international vice-presidents by supporting the CSU or abstaining; only 22 of them returned as delegates in 1950. In a sample of 110 delegates from Toronto, whose votes mirrored the national vote, those who supported the expulsion were about four times as likely to return: NAC, CLC, v. 6, f. 6-3, G. Harrison to William Turple, 7 Oct. 1949. 8 See also Financial Post, 28 Oct. 1950. 9 See ch. 13 above for the case of the law student, Gordon Martin, denied entry to the B.C. Bar. 10 Financial Post, 12, 26 Aug. 1950.

476

Notes to pages 348-55

11 Among those denied entry were Bruce Magnuson, of the Lumber and Sawmill Workers; Sam Lapedes, president of a United Garment Workers' local in Toronto; Reg Wright, the head of a Chemical Workers' local; Alex Gauld, from a Toronto Plumbers' local; and Helen Weir, the business agent for the Hotel and Club Employees' union. Also barred in a preliminary move against the Vancouver Civic Employees union were its two officers and representatives, Jack Phillips and Donald Guise. TLC, Proceedings (1950); Financial Post, 16, 23 Sept. 1950. 12 Labour Gazette 50 (1950): 1800-1. 13 TLC, Proceedings (1950). 14 Ibid., 404. 15 Ibid., 402. 16 During this period, overall TLC membership climbed from 459,068 to 470,926. At the same time membership in national unions and locals chartered directly by the TLC decreased from 104,265 to 80,953. The proportion of workers belonging to international unions climbed from 77 per cent to 83 per cent. The rise demonstrated the success of the international unions in getting the TLC to hand over the national unions. The majority of the remaining national membership belonged to public employees' unions, one area that the international unions could not penetrate. (A year later, the first national union of public employees was created with 50,000 members.) In the CCL, meanwhile, the proportion of members belonging to international unions dropped very slightly from 67 per cent to 66 percent. While overall membership in the CCL increased from 301,729 to 312,532, the number of union members directly chartered by the congress increased slightly faster, from 98,461 to 107,587. Source: Labour Gazette 51 (1951): 1121. 17 'Anti-Communist Provisions in Union Constitutions,' Monthly Labour Review, US Labor Statistics 67 (Oct. 1954): 1097-1100. 18 NA, USDS, OIR 6245.1, 1 Aug. 1953. 19 Financial Post, 12 Dec. 1953, 19. 20 Western Business and Industry 27 (1953). 21 TLC, Proceedings (1954), 236. 22 Labour Gazette 54 (Sept. 1954), 1244. 23 NAC, CCF, v. 362 f. 'CP,LPP, 1944-48,' Ingle to Williams, 16 Oct. 1948, Williams to Ingle, 11 Nov, 1948. 24 Transfer of 'counter-subversion' files from the Security Service records to the National Archives of Canada in the late 1980s has revealed the existence of a vast surveillance archive on unions. Access to Information requests by the authors covering a few selected unions for the period of this study (the TLC itself, UE, the CSU, the Mine-Mill and Smelter Workers - a tiny slice of the total) have yielded thousands of pages of sometimes heavily censored files. The Security Service's internally circulated monthly Intelligence Bulletins, also released under Access to Information, are being published by the Canadian Labour History Committee, edited by Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker. The series will include bulletins from the 1920s through the 1950s. Three volumes, covering the years 1933-4 and the Second World War, had appeared by the end of 1993.

Notes to pages 355-65 477 25 This relationship is further explored in Reg Whitaker, 'Left-wing Dissent and the State: Canada in the Cold War Era,' in C.E.S. Franks, ed., Dissent and the State (Toronto, 1989), 203-6. 26 'Bengough Says Communists Should Not Be Countenanced,' Trades and Labour Congress, Journal 31, no. 30 (Nov. 1952); TLC, Proceedings (1952), 324ff. 27 See ch. 13, above. 28 CSV v. CLRB and Branch Lines Ltd., CCH, Canadian Labour Law Reporter, 23 Feb. 1951. 29 Thomas Berger, Fragile Freedoms (Toronto 1981), 152. 30 Ibid., 153. 31 The CLRB itself held this view in 1959 when the Seafarers International Union asked the board to deny bargaining rights to a rival union that was competing with the SIU for the right to represent tugboat workers in British Columbia. The SIU argued that the Vancouver local of the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers (CBRT) was dominated by Communists. The board rejected the SIU's argument, saying that the charge was not proved, Communism was not illegal, and the board was not concerned with the political views of union members. 'Tinge of Red No Union Bar,' Vancouver Province, 23 Oct. 1959. 32 G. Shier, Toronto Municipal Employees Union, TLC, Proceedings (1949), 346. 33 See n!8, above. 34 Interview by G. Marcuse, 15 Dec. 1983, deposited with NAC. 35 Bryan D. Palmer, Working-Class Experience: The Rise and Reconstitution of Canadian Labour, 1800-1980 (Toronto 1983), 251-2.

C H A P T E R 16 Ban the Bomb! The War on the Peace Movement 1 Don Munton, 'Public Opinion and the Media in Canada from Cold War to Detente to New Cold War,' International Journal 39, no. 1 (Winter 1983-4): 171-213. 2 The James G. Endicott Papers [JGE] are in the National Archives of Canada. The late Dr Endicott generously allowed access to his papers, which were still in the process of being organized. The biography of Dr Endicott by his son, Stephen Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto 1980), is an excellent source, very well documented. There is also a recent collection of Endicott's speeches and writings, The Best of Jim Endicott (Toronto 1982), and an interview with Endicott by A. Silverman in Revue Internationale d'action communautaire 12, no. 52 (Autumn 1984): 53-6. On the history of the Canadian Peace Congress in its early years there is Gary Moffatt, A History of the Peace Movement in Canada (Ottawa 1982), and one history of a local peace council: Edith Holtom, To Prevent a Third World War: Ottawa Scene 1948-68 (Ottawa nd). Both the latter sources were privately printed. Thomas P. Socknat, Witness against War: Pacifism in Canada 1900-1945 (Toronto 1987), 289-91, briefly places the Canadian Peace Congress within a broader context of twentieth-century pacifism. Lawrence S. Wittner has published the most comprehensive history of the world movement to date:

478 Notes to pages 365-8 The Struggle against the Bomb, vol. 1: One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement through 1953 (Stanford 1993), which does discuss the Canadian situation, 98-101 and 211-14. 3 E.P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (London 1982), 158. 4 NA, USDS, OIR 4859.7, 842.OOB/11-548, 'Peace as a Communist tactic 1949,' Office of Intelligence, F.L. Spalding to Secretary of State, 5 Nov. 1948. 5 Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform, vol. 2, The Zenith of Stalinism (London 1975), 576-7; David Caute, The Fellow Travellers (New York 1973), 289. Wittner, One World or None, is generally unsympathetic to the 'Communist-led' peace movement, although he does allow that Moscow's own fear of nuclear war may well have been genuine and not simply a cynical tactic as Western critics, then and now, have implied (181). 6 Author interview with Dr Endicott, Toronto, 11 Nov. 1983. The largely negative impact of the peace campaign on the Communist trade-union movement in France is discussed in George Ross, Workers and Communists in France (Berkeley 1982), 59-63. 7 Moffat, A History, 18; Endicott interview. 8 On Ward and Johnson, see Caute, Fellow Travellers. The Americans gave very close scrutiny to the tour of the 'Red dean' in Canada: NA, USDS, 841.OOB/11-1248, H.L. Groves to Secretary of State, 18 Nov. 1948; 842.00/12-1048, American Consulate General, Vancouver, to American Ambassador, 10 Dec. 1948; American Embassy, Ottawa confidential file 1948-49, 59A543, Box 1745, William P. Snow, memorandum, 5 Nov. 1948, and W.N. Dale memorandum, 9 Nov. 1948, H.L. Groves to Secretary of State, 10 Nov. 1948. 9 Endicott interview. 10 NA, USDS, 842.00B 1-549, Groves to Secretary of State, 5 Jan. 1949; 842.00B/4-149, Eugene M. Hinckle to Secretary of State, 1 Apr. 1949; 842.00B/5-949, Hinckle to Secretary of State, 9 May 1949; 842.OOB/10-649, Laurence Steinhardt to Department of State, 6 Oct. 1949. 11 Details of Peace Congress activities and finances are in NAC, JGE, NAC, FLP, and in Stephen Endicott, Rebel, 261-308. Even the professional Red-baiting journalist Ronald Williams acknowledged that finances were a major problem. See ' "Peace" Costly Red Front, Communists Dig Deep to Finance Campaign,' Financial Post, 10 Sept. 1949. 12 This was the judgment of the official Canadian military historian of the Canadian effort in Korea: H.F. Wood, Strange Battleground (Ottawa 1966), 199; the same version is accepted by Denis Stairs in his Diplomacy of Restraint (Toronto 1974), 250-62. A Gallup poll taken a few months after the Endicott charges indicated that only 3 per cent of the Canadian people definitely believed the charges, while 10 per cent thought that 'they may be true': CIPO, 20 Sept. 1952. In light of the angry official denunciations of Dr Endicott's charges of possible Canadian involvement in research into bacteriological warfare, it is most interesting that the U.S. ambassador to Canada informed his government in 1949 of a five-week course for the armed forces being offered by the Defence Research Board on the 'offensive' as well as 'defensive' uses of 'biological and chemical' warfare. The bacteriological laboratories at the Suffield, Alberta, testing grounds were the site for part of

Notes to page 369 479 the course. NA, USDS, 842.00(W)/4-1449, U.S. Ambassador to Secretary of State, 14 Apr. 1949. See also John Bryden, Deadly Allies: Canada's Secret War, 1937-1947 (Toronto 1989). 13 For one thing, there is the strange fact that the American government later dropped a prosecution against an American who made similar charges after he sent a lawyer into China on a prolonged search for evidence - evidence that the American government seemed reluctant to have aired in court. There is the admission that the U.S. military did have the 'capacity' for bacteriological warfare at the time. Finally, there is the 'Japanese connection.' The International Commission report had mentioned in passing that the activities cited in the Chinese reports strongly recalled the pattern of bacteriological warfare waged by the Japanese during the Second World War. We now know not only that the Japanese engaged in large-scale experiments on human prisoners (experiments that for sheer barbarous cruelty vie with the horrors of Auschwitz and Belsen) but that the victorious Americans gave immunity to prosecution for war crimes to the men who presided over these horrors, in exchange for the data from their 'experiments.' Dr Endicott himself wrote to an associate in Canada in 1952 that 'the whole Japanese germ war set-up was taken over by the Yanks, or as much of it as escaped Soviet destruction.' International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare in Korea and China, Report (Peking 1952). Robert Gomer, John W. Powell, and Bert V.A. Roeling, 'Japan's Biological Weapons, 1930-1945,' Bulletin oj'the Atomic Scientists (Oct. 1981), 47-53. Robert Whymant, 'The Brutal Truth about Japan,' Manchester Guardian Weekly, 22 Aug. 1982. Tracy Dahlby, 'Japan's Germ Warriors: Plumbing the Horrors of "Devil's Brigade," ' Washington Post 26 May 1983. NAC, JGE, 1952 correspondence, Endicott to Bruce Mickleburgh, 4 Apr. 1952. Stephen Endicott, Rebel, 289-302; Endicott interview. Stephen Endicott, 'Germ Warfare and "Plausible Denial": The Korean War, 1950-1953,' Modern China 3, no. 1 (1979); Paul Cassell, 'Chemical and Biological Warfare,' Stanford Law Review 35, no. 259 (Jan. 1983): 270-1. On the aborted sedition trial of John W. Powell, see Stanley Kutler, The American Inquisition (New York 1982), 215-42. There are also documents from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) released up to 1982 that make the circumstantial case even stronger, including JCS 1927/3 (Feb. 1952) concerning a 'Biological Warfare Cover and Deception Plan' to be implemented 'without reference to the Secretary of State.' (Thanks to Stephen Endicott for making these documents available.) 14 Stephen Endicott, Rebel, 295-8; Clem Shields, 'Endicott Raps Govt. at Stormy "Peace" Meeting,' Toronto Telegram, 12 May 1952; 'Endicott Repeats Claim Germ Warfare Waged, Challenges Parliament,' Globe and Mail, 12 May 1952. The Toronto Daily Star buried its story of the rally on page 39 ('Eject 30 Students When Endicott's Speech Jeered'), while its front page featured the hugh banner headline 'NUNS DESCRIBE TORTURE BY REDS.' 15 NAC, DBA, v. 2411 f. 102-AZW-40. Amid the 'voluminous' material on Dr Endicott in the possession of the RCMP there was 'information on his personal morals': G.P. DeT. Glazebrook to Escott Reid, 26 May 1952.

480 Notes to pages 369-74 16 Ibid., Canadian Ambassador to the United States to Secretary of State for External Affairs, 3 June 1952. 17 NAC, PCO, Cabinet Minutes, 15 May 1952. NAC, DBA, v. 2412, 102-AZW-40, P.P. Varcoe to Minister of Justice, 15 May 1952. See also James Rusk, 'Cabinet Eyed Traitor Charge for Endicott,' Globe and Mail, 5 Jan. 1983. Pearson's reference to Britain was inaccurate: a year and a half earlier the British cabinet had considered laying treason charges against the Daily Worker newspaper for publishing news about atrocities committed by the South Korean government. Just as in the Canadian case, the cabinet was dissuaded only by the mandatory death penalty: PRO, CAB 71(50), 6 Nov. 1950. 18 House of Commons, Standing Committee on External Affairs, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, 24 Apr. 1952. NAC, C&I, v. 739 f. 570898, WJ. Bambruk to P.T. Baldwin, 7 Mar. 1950; 'E.B.' to Commissioner of Immigration, 21 Mar. 1950. NAC, DBA, 102AZW-40( 1), Reid to Pearson, 9 May 1952. 19 Endicott interview. 'Endicott: Fool or Genius?' interview with Endicott by Marjorie McEnaney, 1966 (CBC Archives). Stephen Endicott, Rebel, 287. NAC, DBA, 102-AZW-40 (1), V.W. Odium to Reid, 4 Mar. 1949; Odium to Secretary of State for External Affairs, 27 June 1946; 102-AZW-40 (2), Reid to Pearson, 26 May 1952. 20 NAC, PCO, v. 30, Cabinet Minutes, 6 May 1952.NAC, C&I, v. 856 f. 555-10, list dated 1 May 1954. Dr Endicott once entered the United States by 'looking prosperous' and carrying copies of the New York Times and Fortune magazine under his arm, as the American ambassador to Canada reported dourly to Washington: NA, USDS, 842.OOB/10-749, 17 Oct. 1949. For more details on controls over travels, see Reg Whitaker, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration (Toronto 1987), 148-77. 21 Stephen Endicott, Rebel, 239-40. John English, Shadow of Heaven: The Life of Lester Pearson, vol. 1: 1897-1948 (Toronto 1989), 61, 103, briefly mentions the relationship with Mary Austin. 22 L.B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson, ed. John A. Munro and Alex I. Inglis, vol. 2 (Toronto 1973), 184. 23 'Danger in Witch-hunt,' Ottawa Citizen, 30 Mar. 1950. NAC, LStL, v. 22 f. C-9, report of meeting, 4 May 1950. NAC, JGE, 1950 correspondence, Pearson to Endicott, 3 May 1950. NAC, LBP, v. 1 f. 'Endicott, Mrs. J.,' Mary Austin Endicott to Pearson, 20 Apr. 1951; Pearson to M.A. Endicott, 30 Apr. 1950; M.A. Endicott to Pearson, 25 May 1951. 24 NAC, LBP, v. 22 f. 'Pearson, L.B., Speeches 1947-51,' 'Notes for a talk to the Current Events Club of Toronto,' 1951. 25 The exact wording was as follows: 'We demand the absolute prohibition of nuclear weapons, which are a weapon of mass destruction of human beings, under strict international control, and we declare that any government that first uses them is a war criminal, and we call upon all people of good will to sign this appeal.' 26 NAC, JGE, Endicott to R.A. MacEachern, 21 Sept. 1950. Wellington Jeffers column, Globe and Mail, 3 Sept. 1953. 'Clergy Rap "Peace" Vote,' Toronto Telegram, 8 Sept. 1953; 'Creeds Condemn Peace Ballot as "Red," ' 14 Sept. 1953. Toronto Daily Star, CIPO survey, 23 Sept. 1953.

Notes to pages 374-8 481 27 NAC, JGE, 'Notes for an open letter to delegates of the General Council of the United Church of Canada, 1950.' Churchill, who spoke of a 'prolonged period of Cold War,' even admitted that Soviet agreement with Western arms-control proposals would offer a 'difficult problem' to the West, inasmuch as the 'deterrent' meant the 'vast superiority' of the United States: NAC, PCO, Cabinet Conclusions, 14 Jan. 1952. A recent analyst of Pearson's role in disarmament negotiations concludes: 'Ultimately Canada did not believe that disarmament was possible and that it continued to depend for its security on increasing Western power so as to keep the Soviet Union in check ... Its main interest was in helping the United States achieve its objective of using the negotiations to strengthen itself militarily at the expense of the Soviet Union.' Joseph Levitt, Pearson and Canada's Role in Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, 1945-1957 (Montreal 1993), 7-8. In 1952, the Department of External Affairs instructed Canada's representative at the U.N. disarmament commission that 'our purpose in building defensive strength in association with our allies in NATO is not only to deter and, if necessary, defeat aggression, but also to reach such a position of strength that the Soviet Union will wish to negotiate with the Western world.' Albert Legault and Michel Fortmann, A Diplomacy of Hope: Canada and Disarmament 1945-1988 (Toronto 1992), 93-4. 28 'Endicott's Soviet Trip Toughens Ottawa Policy,' Financial Post, 6 May 1950; 'Endicott Called Foreign Agent,' Montreal Star, 5 July 1952; 'Public Privileges Belong Only to Loyal,' Port Arthur News Chronicle, 27 Jan. 1953. Stephen Endicott, Rebel, 286. 29 NAC, JGE, George Drew to Mary Jennison, 6 Feb. 1951. House of Commons, Standing Committee on External Affairs, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence, 23 Feb. 1953. 30 'Misled, States Coldwell,' Ottawa Citizen, 1 Sept. 1950. NAC, JGE, 1950 correspondence, Coldwell to Endicott, 4 May 1950, Endicott to Coldwell, 5 May 1950; 1953 correspondence, T.C. Douglas to Coldwell, 16 Nov. 1953. Trades and Labour Congress, Journal 31(11 Nov. 1952). 'And There Is No Peace,' Canadian Forum, June 1950. 31 'J.G. Endicott Alleges Libel, Sues Telegram Publishers,' Toronto Daily Star, 1 Apr. 1948. Endicott interview. 'Endicott "Menace to Freedom", Priest Charges,' Toronto Telegram, 12 May 1952. 'Red Menace in Canada,' Telegram, pamphlet distributed 1951, p 5. Frank Tumpane, 'The Red Bamboozle,' Globe and Mail, 20 Apr. 1955, and 'A Lesson to Be Learned,' 25 Feb. 1953. NAC, JGE, 1950 correspondence, 12 Aug. 1950. 32 Maclean's, 15 July 1952. NAC, DBA, v. 2412, 102-AZW-40 (2), Escott Reid to Pearson, 26 May 1952. 33 Stephen Endicott, Rebel, 300-1. 34 NAC, DBA, v. 2412 f. 102-AZW-40, A.D. Dunton to Alfred Phillips, 19 Nov. 1952. NAC, FLP, v. 19 f. 291, Dunton to E.M. Aplin, 9 Oct. 1953, Aplin to Dunton, 16 Oct. 1953. When interviewed in Ottawa in May 1984, Dunton could not recall much external pressure on the CBC to deny air time to left-wing advocates. A genuine liberal, Dunton is rather fondly remembered by some former CBC employees as a quiet but effective defender of freedom of expression: Len Scher, The Un-Canadians: True Stories of the Blacklist Era (Toronto 1992), 45, 66. 35 'Endicott Seeks Protection after Fire in House,' Toronto Telegram, 1 Oct. 1953; 'No Place

482 Notes to pages 378-90

36

37 38

39

40 41

42 43 44 45

for Intimidation,' 2 Oct. 1953. University of Toronto, Varsity, 2 Feb. 1954; The Toronto Daily Star, 1 Feb. 1954, reported that the British author of the humorous novel Tight Little Island, a friend of the Red dean, tore down his effigy from the gallows ('I could not stand to see him hanging up there') and was promptly jailed for five days for 'disturbing the peace.' 'Hoodlums Storm Dean's Meeting,' Calgary Herald, 23 May 1950. NAC, JGE, Association for the Liberation of Ukraine in Canada, The Peace Congress.' 'Reds Using Congregation,' Toronto Telegram 29 Jan. 1953; 'Ask Bathurst Church Inquiry,' 17 Feb. 1953. 'Bathurst Street Members Vote Confidence in Domm,' Toronto Daily Star, 12 Mar. 1953. NAC, JGE, Endicott to Rev. L.B. Campbell, 22 May 1950, Endicott to E.G. Hunter, 30 Nov. 1952. Ibid., 1950 correspondence, Endicott to Mary Endicott, 6 Mar. 1950, 5 Apr. 1950, 15 Apr. 1950; Endicott to Legation of Federated People's Republic of Yugoslavia, 31 July 1950; Canadian Peace Congress press release, 23 Aug. 1950. Endicott suggested that the prize might better be named after the people than after great leaders. As it turned out, Lenin had a Soviet shelf-life that was only about thirty years longer than that of Stalin. NAC, JGE, Peace Congress files, 1956-7. 'Endicott Deviates from Soviet Action,' Calgary Herald, 19 Mar. 1957. NAC, JGE correspondence, Endicott to E. Hunter, Dec. 1956, 9 Oct. 1957; Endicott to F. P. Jones, 1 Mar. 1957; Mary Endicott to Jones, 7 Mar. 1957. NAC, JGE, Peace Congress Minutes and Correspondence, 1956-7; Endicott to Bruce Mickleburgh, 10 May 1956. NAC, JGE correspondence, Endicott to Percy Bengough, 11 Aug. 1950. The Best of Jim Endicott, 65. Transcript in Gary Marcuse, 'Cold War in Canada,' CBC Ideas, 27 Mar. 1984. Best of Jim Endicott, 190-1. Endicott interview.

C H A P T E R 17 The Korean War: Second Thoughts about American Leadership 1 Lester B. Pearson, Words and Occasions (Toronto 1970), 107. 2 John Holmes, The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order, vol. 2, 1943-1957 (Toronto 1982), 143-64; Denis Stairs, The Diplomacy of Constraint: Canada, the Korean War, and the United States (Toronto 1974). 3 L.B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson, ed. John A. Munro and Alex I. Inglis, vol. 2 (Toronto 1973), 184. 4 NAC, LBP, N l , v. 15 f. 'Korea: Canadian policy, 1950-51' (hereafter LBP/KCP), Pearson to Wrong, 16 Apr. 1951. 5 The conventional wisdom on Korea is well summed up in David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (New York 1964). This served for many years as the standard account of the conflict. The question of who caused the Korean War seemed simple to Rees and other

Notes to pages 390-3 483

6 7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15

Western observers at the time who focused narrowly on the opening military incident and declared the North Koreans the aggressors, but is in the considered opinion of the leading scholar on the issue the 'wrong question': 'Who caused the Korean War? No one and everyone, all who were party to the intricate tapestry of events since 1945. Who "caused" the Korean War? Placing that emphasis, we abandon history for politics, for philosophy, for the human terrain where there are no "facts." ' Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract 1947-1950 (Princeton 1990), 621. In 1950, however, there was no time for such moral complexity, either for the dominant interpreters of the Western response, or for the small number of left-wing dissenters in the West who assiduously set about to show that it was really the South that 'caused' the war (see ch. 16 on the Canadian peace movement). Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford 1992), 366. A bibliographical survey of recent writing on the Korean conflict is Rosemary Foot, 'Making Known the Unknown War: Policy Analysis of the Korean Conflict in the Last Decade,' Diplomatic History 15, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 411-31. Cumings's, Origins of the Korean War (2 vols, Princeton 1981, 1990) is a massively documented study. A provocative re-examination of the war is in Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York 1988) and Halliday, 'Anti-Communism and the Korean War,' in Ralph Miliband, John Saville, and Marcel Liebman, eds, The Uses of Anti-Communism (London 1984), 130-63. A fair-minded recent history by a British writer is Callum A. MacDonald's Korea: The War before Vietnam (New York 1986). Stairs's Diplomacy of Constraint indicates some of the Canadian qualms about U.S. diplomacy. NAC, BC, v. 31, Claxton to George V. Ferguson, 27 May 1953; v. 217, Claxton to T.W.L. MacDermot, 3 Dec. 1950. Bruce Cumings, 'Korea - the New Nuclear Flashpoint,' Nation (1 Apr. 1984), 416-18. NAC, LBP/K:CP, U.S. Department of State note, ISJuly 1950; Pearson to Wrong, 20 July 1950. In fact Acheson had said as much publicly a few months before the war when he had placed Korea outside America's 'Asian defence perimeter.' This speech later led to rightwing criticism that Acheson had in effect invited Communist aggression by this display of appeasement. An influential document in the shaping of American global policy, NSC-68, had already laid out this kind of rationale for American leadership in Apr. 1950, two months before the Korean conflict began. Korea in effect helped sell the message of NSC-68 to Congress and the public. See Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 355-97. NAC, LBP/K:CP, 'Discussions with Mr Acheson and officials in Washington, July 29 and 30, 1950.' Stairs, Diplomacy of Constraint, 55-60. See the evidence offered by Shirley Hazzard, Defeat of an Ideal (Boston 1973) and 'The Betrayal of the Charter,' Times Literary Supplement, 17 Sept. 1982, 987-8. Holmes, in The Shaping of Peace, 2, passes rather primly over this entire discreditable episode in a

484 Notes to pages 393-7 single paragraph while claiming that an 'unhappy' Canada resisted the U.N. witch-hunt 'firmly if not vociferously' (301): we may take this as diplomatic language. Recently James Barros has come to the curious conclusion that Secretary General Lie was under the influence of the USSR: Barros, Trygve Lie and the Cold War: The UN Secretary General Pursues Peace, 1946-1953 (Dekalb, 111. 1989). It seems difficult to square this with his role over Korea. 16 NAC, LBP/K:CP, 'Discussion with Mr. Trygve Lie, Forest Hills, NY, July 31, 1950.' It is not known what happened to this Canadian, but some Canadians did suffer in Lie's FBIinspired purges. 17 NAC, PCO 16, v. 20, Cabinet Conclusions, 27 July 1950. 18 NAC, LBP, N l , v. 2 f. 'Lower, A.R.M.,' Lower to Pearson, 3 Oct. 1950; Pearson to Lower, 12 Oct. 1950. Pearson's biographer notes that by 1951 the U.S. response to the Communist threat 'became increasingly troubling to him,' and quotes Pearson as telling his son, Geoffrey, that 'emotionalism has become the basis of [American] policy': John English, The Life of Lester Pearson, vol. 2, The Worldly Years, 1949-1972 (Toronto 1992), 56. 19 NAC, LBP/K:CP, Pearson to Acheson, 15 Aug. 1950; Acheson to Pearson, 8 Sept. 1950. 20 Ibid., 'Memorandum - Canada and Korea - September to December 1950,' 8 Dec. 1950. 21 A recent article based on documents originating from Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung concludes that the crossing of the thirty-eighth parallel was the act that directly triggered Chinese intervention: threats of escalation to include bombing of the Chinese mainland had no effect in gaining Chinese withdrawal (pace MacArthur), since the reason for Mao's intervention was precisely to deter further escalation. See Thomas J. Christensen, 'Threats, Assurances and the Last Chance for Peace: The Lessons of Mao's Korean War Telegrams,' International Security 17, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 136-8. 22 Escott Reid, Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of Escott Reid (Toronto 1989), 260-1. 23 NAC, LBP/K:CP, Memorandum, 'Canada and Korea - September to December 1950,' 8 Dec. 1950; A.D.P. Heeney, memorandum for Pearson, 'Canadian policy in Korea,' 9 Dec. 1950. That U.S. bombs were falling on Chinese territory has recently been confirmed by retired admiral Jeffrey Brock, who was in the theatre of operations at the time: interview on Gwynn Dyer's In the Defence of Canada series, CBC television, 1986. 24 James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada, vol. 4, Growing Up Allied (Toronto 1980), 248-50, 374-5. 25 Herbert Norman offered a reading of the political situation within China that suggested that bringing the war to the Chinese mainland would be self-defeating. Douglas LePan, on the other hand, offered a version of the falling dominoes theory favouring an all-out confrontation with the Communists whereby any threatened Communist gain would be met by nuclear attack on the USSR. NAC, LBP/K:CP, Norman, 'Possible effects in Asia of the defeat in Korea,' 8 Dec. 1950; LePan, 'Some guides to immediate action,' 9 Dec. 1950. 26 Reid, Radical Mandarin, 262-3. 27 NAC, LBP/K:CP, Wrong to Pearson, 16 Feb. 1951, with enclosed 'Record of conversation with Mr. Dean Rusk,' 14 Feb. 1950. It should be pointed out that Rusk was by no

Notes to pages 397^00 485

28

29 30 31

32 33 34

35

36

37

means concocting a story simply to throw Wrong off the trail. It seems from declassified documents that the U.S. administration really was at this time pursuing the idea of driving a 'wedge' between the Soviets and the Chinese, and harboured genuine, if deluded, hopes of encouraging an anti-Moscow 'third force' (neither Chiang nor Mao) in Peking: see John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York 1987), 147-94. A Sino-Soviet split did take place in the late 1950s, so American intelligence was not inaccurate. However, the notion of encouraging a Titoist third force was off the mark, since it was Mao himself who led the breakaway. And the idea that this split would be best advanced by continued American intransigence towards the Communist leadership seems rather perverse. NAC, LBP/K:CP, Pearson to Wrong, 29 May 1952; Wrong to Pearson, 5 June 1952; Pearson to Wrong, 10 June 1952; Pearson to Norman Robertson, 16 June 1952; Robertson to Pearson, 26 June and 5 July 1952. Halliday, 'Anti-Communism and the Korean War,' 149-51. NAC, LBP/K:CP 1952, Escott Reid to Pearson, 19 Feb. 1952, with DBA memorandum, 'The Korean War and the situation in the Far East.' NAC, LBP/K:CP 1952, Despatch D-1052, 6 June 1952; NAC, PCO 16, Cabinet Conclusions, 28 May, 5 June, 18 June, and 15 July 1952; Stairs, Diplomacy of Constraint, 24658. Meanwhile the Canadian brigadier who had answered the call to repress the Koje uprising was made the fall guy for the government and the senior military command: his career was abruptly and rather callously terminated. Mike, //; his diary is reproduced at 315-35; Stairs, Diplomacy of Constraint', Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York 1969). MacDonald, Korea, 187. Stairs, Diplomacy of Constraint, 277-8; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President (New York 1984); MacDonald, Korea, 174-98; Rosemary Foot, A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks (Ithaca, NY 1990), mentions Canada only in passing (159-205). Britain, too, tried to exercise constraint on American behaviour. Despite its relatively greater weight, it too failed, and served only to expose 'British illusions about guiding the American colossus ...': Callum MacDonald, 'The Diplomacy of Restraint: The Attlee Government and the Korean War,' in Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman, and W. Scott Lucas, eds, Contemporary British History 1931-1961: Politics and the Limits of Policy (London 1991), 218-29. See also Peter Lowe, 'The Significance of the Korean War in Anglo-American Relations 1950-53,' in Michael Dockrill and John W. Young, eds, British Foreign Policy 1945-56 (London 1989), 126-49. Roger Dingman, 'Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War,' and Rosemary Foot, 'Nuclear Coercion and the Ending of the Korean Conflict,' International Security 13, no. 2 (Winter 1988-89): 50-112, are both highly sceptical about the effect of American nuclear threats on the behaviour of their adversaries. See also Foot's book-length account of the peace process, Substitute for Victory. Stairs, Diplomacy of Constraint, 279.

486 Notes to pages 401-7 38 Gabriel Kolko, The Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York 1985), 81-2. 39 NAC, PCO 16, Cabinet Conclusions, 26 Apr. 1954. 40 Ibid., 17 Feb. 1955. 41 Ambrose, Eisenhower, 231-44. 42 NAC, PCO 16, Cabinet Conclusions, 1 Mar. 1955. 43 In 1956, Mao wrote that 'if we are not to be bullied in the present-day world, we cannot do without the Bomb': quoted in Foot, 'Nuclear Coercion,' 112.

C H A P T E R 18 'The Black Madness of the Witch Hunt': The Herbert Norman Affair 1 Lester B. Pearson, Words and Occasions (Toronto 1970), 92. 2 Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, no. 146. 3 Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York 1982) 224. 4 See John W. Dower, ed., Origins of the Japanese State: Selected Writings ofE.H. Norman (New York 1974) and Roger Bowen, ed., E.H. Norman: His Life and Scholarship (Toronto 1984). 5 Norman's personal civil-service file in the National Archives has a large collection of letters and telegrams received in Ottawa following the news of his death. The tone of almost all is of either anguish and sorrow at the senseless loss or anger at the Americans for having brought this on. In contrast the much smaller number of communications from the United States tend to be anti-Norman. The tone of the latter may be caught in a telegram from an American that ghoulishly read :'KEEP 'EM JUMPING.' Newspaper editorial opinion was also almost universally supportive of Norman and critical of American behaviour: this opinion seemed to cross over partisan and ideological boundaries, uniting Tory as well as Liberal papers. 6 NAC, ADPH, v. 2 f. 'Memoirs, 1956,1957,' c. 14 no. 4, 16 Apr. 1957. 7 Roger Bowen, Innocence Is Not Enough: The Life and Death of Herbert Norman (Vancouver 1986); James Barros, No Sense of Evil: Espionage, the Case of Herbert Norman (Toronto 1986). On Barros's methodology and scholarship, see Reg Whitaker, 'Return to the Crucible,' Canadian Forum (Nov. 1986): 11-28. Sections of this chapter have been adapted from this article. 8 Bowen, Innocence, 215. 9 Jeff Sallot, 'Clark Assails Alberta MP for Query on Diplomat,' Globe and Mail, 11 Apr. 1987. Clark responded firmly that 'there are no skeletons left in that closet.' 10 Peyton Lyon, The Loyalties of E. Herbert Norman,' Report prepared for External Affairs and International Trade Canada, 16 Mar. 1990 (Lyon Report). This report has been printed in its entirety in Labour/Le Travail 28 (Fall 1991): 219-59. 11 Quoted in Bowen, Innocence 218. On Lattimore's ordeal, which was not unlike Norman's, see Robert P. Newman's harrowing account, Owen Lattimore and the 'Loss' of China (Berkeley 1992).

Notes to pages 408-13 487 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20

21

22

23 24

Barros, No Sense of Evil, 16. Bowen, Innocence, 232-3. Barros, No Sense of Evil, 31. See Athan Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia 1988). NA, SISS, 'Herbert Norman,' Robert Morris, memo to file, 30 Apr. 1957, based on notes contributed by Nelson Frank, 24 Apr. 1957. When informed about Norman's suicide, Jaffe was reported by SISS staff as 'more amused than shocked.' Gratuitously, Jaffe then added that it was 'possible' Norman had been a homosexual, since he had 'walked in a peculiar feminine way,' and allegedly had marital difficulties in 1942. This is mentioned only to indicate the sleazy quality of 'intelligence' gathered by SISS on Norman. SISS files also contain extensive material from Pat ('I was a Commie for the RCMP') Walsh's Canadian Anti-Communist League - taken very seriously by Robert Morris, SISS counsel - and even from the extreme right-wing, and anti-Semitic, Canadian Intelligence Service, one of whose documents bears a pencilled notation by SISS staff: 'FILE - GOOD STUFF.' William Rusher, who was counsel to SISS during the 1957 Norman affair, makes much of the Emmerson incident in his Special Counsel (New York 1968), 183-214. Rusher has no doubt that Norman represented a 'lifetime of service in the cause of Communism' (213). Barros, No Sense of Evil, 41. Ibid., 42. D. Clayton James, The Years of Mac/Arthur, vol. 3, Triumph and Disaster, 1945-1964 (Boston 1985), 391. Bruce Cumings is even more scornful, describing him as an extreme right-wing 'racist and anti-Semite,' a 'thoroughly loathsome person' who inspired nearuniversal 'personal revulsion,' whom MacArthur aptly liked to call '"my little fascist" ' (Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, The Roaring of the Cataract 1947-1950 (Princeton 1990), 104-6. Cumings, Roaring of the Cataract. Callum A. Mac Donald, Korea: The War before Vietnam (New York 1986), 211, 213; Eliot A. Cohen, ' "Only Half the Battle": American Intelligence and the Chinese Intervention in Korea, 1950,' Intelligence and National Security 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1990): 129-49, spreads the blame around more evenly and also credits the Chinese for their stealth and skill. Bowen, Innocence, 180. Since Barros is persistently inquisitive about alleged cover-ups of Norman's past, it is interesting that he omits to mention that Norman's accuser, Charles Willoughby, was actually a German immigrant to America who anglicized his original name of Adolf von Weidenbach. See chs 3 and 4. NA, SISS, 'Lester Pearson' file, James Walter-Benjamin Mandel, 8 Dec. 1953, claims that the Halperin address book contained the names of between 140 and 150 Americans. Lester Pearson confirmed in Parliament that it contained 163 names and addresses of persons then resident in the United States (Hansard, 1 May 1950). Ostensibly, when SISS asked Igor Gouzenko to testify in 1953, it was to confirm the espionage status of these American names. Nothing came of this.

488 Notes to pages 413-20 25 Barros, No Sense of Evil, 56. 26 What was taken as especially damning was the name of Klaus Fuchs, convicted of atomic espionage in 1950. Yet Fuchs was a fellow scientist who had been cleared by the Americans to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project, and who moreover had been in Canada in the early war years as an 'enemy alien [German]' internee. Whatever the extenuating circumstances, the very presence of Norman's name in the same book as that of Fuchs was taken as a classic case of guilt by association. 27 'The Pearson Case', Time, 29 Apr. 1957. Park had been director of the council in 1946 but was so no longer in 1957. 28 RCMP Security Service files, record of interrogation, early 1952. The interrogator was RCMP inspector Terry Guernsey. 29 Frank Park has transmitted to us a deposition regarding this celebrated telephone number finder, dated 11 Feb. 1987. He states unequivocally that it was not a 'personal' possession, but went with the office. 30 Barros, No Sense of Evil, 124. 31 Ibid., 126. 32 Ibid., 155. 33 Lyon's conclusion is unequivocal: 'Not a line, not a single comment from his co-workers awakens doubt about his orthodoxy or loyalty' (Lyon Report, 5-6). 34 See ch. 7. 35 Barros, No Sense of Evil, 90. Perhaps Barros in the course of his research picked up a bizarre statement about Canadian constitutional practice to be found in the internal files of SISS. A committee researcher confidently informed the counsel that 'the RCNMP [sic] is responsible only to the Crown. It cannot be restrained or directed in any way by the Canadian government'[!]: NA, SISS, Bob McManus-Robert Morris, 15 July 1957. 36 Barros, No Sense of Evil, 60. 37 CSIS files, 26 pages, pencilled date '26.1.52.' 38 Whitaker, 'Return to the Crucible,' 21. 39 Barros, No Sense of Evil, 80. 40 Lyon Report, 12. 41 Barros, No Sense of Evil, 115-16. 42 See ch. 7. 43 John Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows: The RCMP Security Service (Toronto 1980), 145. 44 Lyon Report, 23-4. 45 Bowen, Innocence, 219-25. 46 Carl Betke and S.W. Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service: An Historical Outline, 18641966' (RCMP Historical Section 1978), obtained under Access to Information from CSIS, 740-1. 47 NA, USDS, NND 877415, box 2481, contains ample evidence of the high sensitivity felt by the State Department re Canadian-American relations at the time of the Norman affair, including the deliberate suppression of public notice that the State Department was undertaking a study of closer economic integration of the North American continent, and an

Notes to pages 420-4 489

48 49 50

51 52 53

54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61 62 63

64

intervention to prevent Eisenhower's chief of staff from referring in a speech to the idea of Canada-U.S. free trade: 611.42/4-3057, memorandum of conversation, 30 Apr. 1957, and 611-42/7-2257, Herter-Sherman Adams, 22 July 1957. Betke and Horrall, 'Canada's Security Service,' 741-2. See ch. 2 for an earlier example of RCMP-FBI cooperation against the Canadian prime minister. See Theoharis and Cox, The Boss. John English, The Worldly Years: The Life of Lester Pearson, vol. 2,1949-1972 (Toronto 1992), 180-1. English's judgment accords closely with the view we have developed in this book. Rusher, Special Counsel, 232. Barros, No Sense of Evil, 169. English, Worldly Years, 87. It was Gouzenko himself who actually backed out, apparently fearing for his safety in travelling to the United States. Eventually Senator William Jenner, accompanied by the U.S. ambassador to Canada, interviewed Gouzenko in Ottawa, while the latter was surrounded by Canadian officials; Jenner got nothing of any significance from him: NA, SISS, 'Lester Pearson' file. English, Worldly Years, 413, n42. Barros, No Sense of Evil, 160. FBI Records, file 100-364301, 'Sise, Hazen,' Freedom of Information request 217,653. The entire Bentley-Sise episode is explored in detail by Pearson's biographer John English: Shadow of Heaven: The Life of Lester Pearson, vol. 1,1897-1948 (Toronto 1989), 302-10. The FBI 'Espionage, R[ussian]' file on Pearson is 65-60356, Freedom of Information request 262,554 (our thanks to William Kaplan for passing this on to us). The releasable parts of the file make a dossier about two inches thick. A cross-reference indicates the existence of an FBI file on another Liberal prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. Elizabeth Bentley's memoirs, Out of Bondage, first published in 1951, were reprinted in 1988 with a lengthy, sympathetic, but scholarly afterword by Hayden B. Peake, a retired CIA employee (New York 1988); a more critical account of Bentley's credibility as a witness can be found in Herbert L. Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four Studies in FactFinding (Stanford, CA 1962). Barros, No Sense of Evil, 164. FBI Records, file 'Sise, Hazen,': memorandum, SAC New Orleans to Hoover, 14 Jan. 1954. Ibid., memorandum, SAC, New York to Hoover, 28 Sept. 1951. Reprinted as an appendix to Barros, No Sense of Evil, 193-206. Barros, No Sense of Evil, 181. Ibid., 169. On this page of Barros's text there is a passage in which he equates Pearson's Methodist upbringing to Marxism and quotes Pearson's memory of late-night discussions about social injustice as an Oxford student in the 1920s as proof that he had thus set out on the road to Moscow. This preposterous passage forms an almost perfect example of selfparody: see Whitaker, 'Return to the Crucible,' 27-8. NA, SISS, 'Herbert Norman,' Robert Morris, notes on meeting of 20 Mar. 1957; Morris's

490 Notes to pages 424-5 notes have a slightly different version of what O'Connor said: 'I am sure that would blow us out of the water on our northern border. The release of that kind of testimony would get us in a terrific jam with our Canadian friends.' Herter-Eastland, 22 Mar. 1957. No less a person than Senator Joseph McCarthy had already been in touch with Eastland specifically requesting that the Pearson material be released in order to influence the election for secretary general of the United Nations, a position for which Pearson was a candidate: McCarthy-Eastland, 4 Mar. 1953. 65 J.L. Granatstein, Canada 1957-1967: The Years of Uncertainty and Innovation (Toronto 1986), 290. 66 Quoted, approvingly of course, by Barros, No Sense of Evil, 180. 67 Lyon Report, 20.

Primary Sources, Abbreviations, and Subjects Interviewed

Abbreviations used in the notes to refer to frequently cited collections are indicated here in parenthesis.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF CANADA, OTTAWA (NAC) Government Archives Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, RG 41 Canadian Commercial Corporation, RG 65 Citizenship and Immigration (C&I), RG 26 Defence Production, RG 49 External Affairs (DBA), RG 25 Immigration Branch (IB), RG 76 Justice, RG 13 Labour (DL), RG 27 National Defence (DND), RG 24 National Film Board, RG 53 National Film, Television and Sound Archives (NFTSA) Privy Council Office (PCO), RG 2 Public Service Commission, RG 32 RCMP, RG 18 Royal Commissions, RG 33 Solicitor General, RG 73

Transport (DOT), RG 12 Manuscript Division Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) Brooke Claxton (BC) M.J. Coldwell Communist Party of Canada Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) George Drew James G. Endicott (JGE) A.D.P. Heeney (ADPH) C.D. Howe (CDH) William Lyon Mackenzie King (WLMK) Liberal Party of Canada Frank and Libbie Park (FLP) Lester B. Pearson (LBP) Norman A. Robertson (NAR) Louis St Laurent (LStL) Frank R. Scott (FRS) CANADIAN GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Department of National Defence

492

Primary Sources

Royal Canadian Mounted Police

SUBJECTS INTERVIEWED

UNITED STATES NATIONAL ARCHIVES, WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A. (NA)

Note: Some of these subjects were interviewed prior to the research on this book, for earlier projects. The notation (d) after a name indicates that the interviewee is now deceased. A number of interviews conducted by G. Marcuse were recorded on audiotape and have been deposited in the National Film, Television and Sound Archives (NFTSA), National Archives, Ottawa. These are indicated by an asterisk (*).

U.S. Department of State (USDS) Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Records of the U.S. Senate, Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON, ENGLAND (PRO) Cabinet Records (CAB) Dominions Office (DO) Foreign Office (FO) OTHER COLLECTIONS Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Program Archives, Toronto Canadian Institute of Public Opinion Toronto (CIPO) National Film Board Archives, Montreal (NFB) Trade Union Research Bureau, Montreal University of British Columbia Special Collections Wayne State University Walter P. Reuther Library Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wise. Mass Communications History Centre American Federation of Labour Papers International Association of Machinist Papers PRIVATECOLLECTIONS Personal papers of Peter Dwyer Personal papers of Leo Roback

*A. Tom Alsbury *Peter Aylen *Gerald Baldwin (d) C. Bayfield *Thomas Berger *Emil Bjarnason *Andrew Brewin *Robert Bryce *John Cartwright (d) *Caroll Chipman Phyllis Clarke (d) M.J. Coldwell (d) *Roy Cooper *John G. Diefenbaker (d) Davidson Dunton (d) *James Endicott (d) Dave Fairie Henry Ferns (d) Paul and Sally Frankel Terry Guernsey (d) *John Jackson *Effie Jones (d) Victor Kiernan David Lewis (d) Lee Lorch *Mark McClung (d) *Angus Macphee C.B. Macpherson (d)

Primary Sources 493 J.R. McRuer Dvora and Fred Marcuse Phyllis and Frank Margolick *George North (d) Khayyam Paltiel (d) Frank Park ^Geoffrey Pearson *Norman Penner *Len Peterson *Harry Rankin Charles Ritchie Leo Roback (d) Gordon Robertson Gideon Rosenbluth

Stanley Ryerson *Joseph B. Salsberg *John Sawatsky *Joseph Sedgwick (d) Lister Sinclair *Paul Siren Arnold Smith *Steven Staryk *L.A.D. Stephens *Syd Thompson *Don Wall *Bill Walsh Joseph Zuken (d)

PICTURE CREDITS National Archives of Canada: Attlee, Truman, and King in Washington, 1945 C-23273; Lester and Maryon Pearson inside Kremlin, 1955 117600; Louis St Laurent, 1948 C-27905; John Grierson PA-120568; Seamen's Union members PA-128759 National Film Board: E. Herbert Norman PA-134317; Brave New World, 1945 (Nicholas Morant) C-47570 Montreal Gazette: Police removing posters C-53628 Montreal Star: Igor Gouzenko PA-129625; Fred Rose on trial PA-116426 Canadian Tribune: Communist candy-bar boycott PA-93691; Rev. James Endicott PA-93737; Peace petition PA-93532; Communists against the Iron Curtain (Capital Press) PA-93703; Anti-Communists strike back (WJ. Novik) PA-93668

Index

Abella, Irving (Nationalism, Communism and Canadian Labour) 312-13 Aberhart, William ('Bible Bill') 14, 296 Acadia University 277 Access to Information Act 28, 108, 354-5, 413, 450n48, 455n8, 456n24, 476n24 Acheson Dean 37, 39-41, 68, 135, 147, 181, 241, 372, 389, 392-6, 398-9, 424, 443n28, 483nll Action Catholique, L' 307-8 Adams, Eric 70, 79-80, 432n36 Addison, Viscount 81 Air Force, U.S. (USAF) 139, 144-7 Alaska Highway 141 Alberta 468nl Alberta Press Act 302 Alert Service 276 Allende, Salvador 372 Amado, Jorge 372 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 312-19,324-5,327-32,335-7, 340, 342, 344, 346, 349-50, 362; Miami meeting with Trades and Labour Congress, 1949 328-9 American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO) 257

American Federation of Musicians 291 American Motion Picture Association 460n2 Anderson, Sir John 47 Anthony, M.E. 35, 54, 58, 64 Aragon, Louis 372 Arctic, Canadian 171 Army Signals Corps 102 Arrow (CF-105), Avro 155-7 Article 2, Atlantic Charter 134-6, 441n49 Asbestos Strike 1949 (Quebec) 295, 305 Associated Screen News 249-50 Association for the Liberation of the Ukraine in Canada 377-8 atomic bomb 3, 11,31, 364-6; British 48; international control of 47, 89, 92, 98, 373, 481n27; Soviet 37, 144, 365, 402; threatened use in Asia 400-1 Atomic Energy of Canada 167n atomic research: by British scientists in Canada 31, 43, 87, 89, 94, 176; in Canada 31, 33, 43-4, 61-2; U.S. monopoly of 42-3, 365 atomic secrets 39-40, 59, 61-2, 68, 85-6, 89,91-3,203 atomic weapons, in Canada 144, 422 Attlee, Clement 33, 39^0, 42, 48 Attorney General's List, U.S. 168, 199, 350

496 Index Australian Association of Scientific Workers 94-5, 97, 435n25 Avery, Donald 434n4 A.V. Roe, Ltd. See Roe, A.V., Ltd Aylen, Aldous 70 Baird, Irene 177 Balkan Powderkeg (NFB) 230-1, 238 Baltic states 118-19 Bank of Montreal 301 Banks, Hal 174-5, 324, 332-*, 337-8, 353-4 Barbie, Klaus 294 Barker, Elizabeth 118 Barros, James (No Sense of Evil) 406-8, 410, 414-19, 484nl5, 488n35, 489n63 Bathurst Street United Church 378 Bayfield, Cecil 28, 30, 35, 58-9 Beaudoin, Elphege 345 Beaudry, Laurent 123 Bell, J.K. 356-8 Bengough, Percy 312-14, 316-21, 32332, 335-40, 343, 345-6, 352-3, 355, 360-2, 382 Banning, James Scott 70, 76, 432n36 Benoit, Paul 303 Bentley, Elizabeth 308, 422^, 489nn57, 58 Berlin air corridor 149 Berlin crisis, 1947 127 Bernonville, Jacques de 294 Berton, Pierre 460n2 Bertrand, Ernest 177 Bethune, Dr Norman 308, 422 Bevin, Ernest 40,55,57, 117-18 Bickerton, James 154 Bird,J.D. 85-6 Black, Conrad 296, 299-300, 304 Blunt, Anthony 409 Boilermakers union 328, 335, 337 BOMARC missiles 147, 422 Boucher case 201

Bo wen, Roger (Innocence Is Not Enough) 406,408,416,418-19 Boyer, Raymond 72-4, 85, 90, 97-100, 102, 106-8, 235, 432n36, 435n25 Boyzcum, John 303 Bracken, John 69 Bradley, H.A. 345,347 Brandt, George 461n5 Brecht, Bertolt 372 Britain (United Kingdom) 2, 5, 20, 31, 114-15, 117-18, 133-4, 135-6, 140, 147-8, 189, 230, 242, 263, 438nl3, 475n47, 480nl7, 485n35 British Association of Scientific Workers (BAScW) 86, 92, 94, 98-9, 435n31 British Columbia 287-90 British Columbia Labour Relations Board 351 British dockworkers 332, 333, 335, 340 British High Commission, Ottawa 34-5, 68 British North America (BNA) Act 300-1 British Security Coordination (BSC) 31, 60, 140, 185, 449n44 Brock, Admiral Jeffrey 484n23 Brockington, Leonard 9, 322 Bryce, Robert 179, 420n, 445n2 Buck, Tim 32-3, 90, 215, 219, 332, 367, 452n4 Burgess, Guy 175,409 Burman, S.S. 432n36 Byrnes, James 34, 38, 40-1, 49-50, 53-4, 61-2, 120 cabinet directives on security: 1948 1657; 1952 183-4 Cadieux, Marcel 123 Calgary Herald 381 Callwood, June (Emma) 450n54. See also Woikin, Emma Cambridge University 107, 408-9, 417 Cameron, Donald 234, 250

Index Camp, Dalton 137 Campney, Ralph 146 Canada Carries On (NFB series) 231 Canada Council 452n71 Canada Evidence Act 65 'Canada's Defence Programme,' White Paper, 1949 138 Canadian Arsenals 167n Canadian Association of Scientific Workers (CAScW) 80, 84-91, 94-103, 434nn4, 5, 435n25 Canadian Association of Social Workers 292 Canadian Bar Association 53, 67 Canadian Bar Review 289 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 18,81,169,243,245,252,256, 273-4, 276, 278, 377, 481n34; International Service 252, 256 Canadian Brotherhood of Railway, Transport and General Workers 477n31 Canadian Business 192 Canadian Chamber of Commerce 151, 191-3,277-9,348 Canadian Commercial Corporation 151, 167n Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) 272, 312-14, 320,322,348 'Canadian Co-operation Project' 234, 244, 250,460n2 Canadian Forum 376 Canadian General Electric 173-4,355 Canadian Industrial Preparedness Association (CIPA) 151-2 Canadian Institute of Chemistry 87-8 Canadian Intelligence Service 275, 487nl6 Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) 345, 353, 363 Canadian Labour Relations Board (CLRB) 88, 320, 323, 338-9, 355-6, 475n54, 477n31

497

Canadian Legion 16,191 Canadian Maritime Commission 334 Canadian National Steamships 318, 332-3 Canadian Newspaper Managing Editors Association 196-7 Canadian Peace Congress (CPC) 204, 212-13, 364-83, 469n20 Canadian Scientist 89,98, 100 Canadian Seamen's Union (CSU) 174-5, 314-16, 318-27, 329-41, 342-4, 346, 349, 355-6, 363, 473nn4, 16, 18 Canadian-Soviet Friendship Council 97, 211,272, 414, 439n23 Canadian Tribune 272 Canol pipeline project 141 Carlin, Robert 271 Carr, Sam 34, 50, 66, 71-2, 209, 432n36 Cartwright, J.A. 73-4 Catholic Teachers Alliance of Montreal 306 Catholic Women's League 276 Caute, David 176 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 224, 227, 233, 362, 395, 405 Chalk River nuclear reactor 45, 86-7, 176 Champion 303 Chapman, Agatha 432n36 Charbonneau, Archbishop, of Montreal 295 Chemical Front 73 Cherry, Evelyn and Lawrence 253, 257-8 Chiang Kai-shek 365, 367-8, 371, 396, 401 Chicago Tribune 422 Chicago nuclear reactor 45-6 China 2, 9, 247, 273, 281, 354, 364, 3678, 371, 375, 379, 381, 387, 390-2, 3946, 401 -2, 412, 461 n8, 479n 13, 484nn21, 23, 25, 484-5n27 China, Nationalist (Taiwan) 392, 401, 403 'China lobby' 392, 396 Chitty 's Law Journal 289

498

Index

Chubb, Frank 85,91,97 Churchill, Sir Winston 10, 33, 42, 44, 52, 68, 118, 120, 230-1,374, 481 n27 civil liberties 69, 74-5, 80-1, 144, 168-9, 204-5, 212, 268-9, 282-3, 285, 347, 358,376 civil service, Ottawa 14, 22-3, 33, 84, 161-71, 175-87 Civil Service Association of Ottawa (CSAO) 168 Civil Service Commission 452n65 Clark, Joe 407, 486n9 Clark, S.D. 17,282,286 Clark-Jones, Melissa 152 Claxton, Brooke 109, 127, 143, 181-2, 187, 228, 232-3, 238-9, 249-50, 390-1, 450n57 Clutterbuck, Sir Alexander 80-2 Clyne, J.V. 334-5/ Cockcroft, Dr John 45-6, 86, 88, 92, 94, 98-9 Coldwell, M.J. 55,219,271-2,375 Colonial and Sarnia Steamships Ltd 322 Combat 302 Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the RCMP (McDonald Commission) 457n28 Commission des Relations Ouvrieres (CRO) 305-6, 471 n65 Commonwealth, British 117-18,130 Commonwealth Security Conference, 1951 181 Communications Branch, National Research Council 442nl2 Communications Security Establishment 442nl2 Communist Control Act, U.S. 188 Communist 'fronts' 80, 82, 84, 168-9, 183,211 Communist Party of Canada (Labour Progressive party, LPP) 10-12, 32, 51, 62, 72, 80, 82, 84, 90, 96, 101, 167, 183,

197-201, 207-26, 267-72, 275-7, 28890, 302, 454-5nl, 455nn2, 3, 46970n29 Communist Party Dissolution Act, Australia 189 Communist 'study groups' 95-100, 236-7 Compton, Arthur 46 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 312-14, 319-20, 325, 434n10 Conroy,Pat 272,312,314 continental defence, Canada-U.S. 138-47, 152-7, 443n26 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) 11, 16, 22, 81, 123, 209-11, 219, 249, 263, 267-73, 276-7, 283, 285, 3056,311,320,354,361,375-6,381, 431nl5, 450n50; in British Columbia 271; in Manitoba 271, 465nl5; in Ontario 271 'Corby' work group (Gouzenko case) 34 Couchiching Conference 402 Council of Foreign Ministers 31, 33-4, 38, 40, 430n50 Crawley, Budge 462nl7 Crawley Films 249-50 Creighton, Donald 264 Criminal Code 65, 197, 200-4; Section 98 of 10, 190-1, 198, 200, 210, 215, 452n4 Cuba 334 Cuff, R.D. 128-9 culture, Canadian 18,227-9,256 culture, popular 19,228-9,264 Cuneo, Ernest 60 Czechoslovakia 4 Daily Express 89 Daily Worker 480nl7 Dale Community Centre, Hamilton 292 Davicho, Leon 436n50 Davies, Joseph 62 Davis, Harry 331-3, 335, 337, 340 Davison, Mr 87-8

Index Day Nurseries and Day Care Parents Association, Toronto 292-3 Defence, Department of National (DND) 109, 138-57, 167n, 172, 181-3, 186, 249-50, 252, 254, 274-5, 462n20 defence committee, cabinet 142-3, 443nl8 defence expenditures 149-57, 228; regional effects of 153-4 Defence Intelligence 162,167 Defence of Canada Regulations 7, 211, 302 defence production, Canadian 139, 1434, 150-7, 172 Defence Production Sharing Agreement, 1958 156 Defence Research Board (DRB) 143, 167n, 442nl5, 478nl2 Defense, Department of, U.S. 233 de Gaulle, Charles 149 Democratic party, U.S. 123,131,206. See also Truman administration Dennis case, U.S. 188 Desranleau, Bishop, of Sherbrooke 295 Desy, Jean 123 Devoir, Le 297-8, 308 Diefenbaker, John 58,69-70, 146-7, 179, 264, 370, 424, 444n36, 450n52; government of, 1957-63 146-7, 156-7, 179, 300-1, 424 Dien Bien Phu 400 Dion, Abbe Gerard 470n36 Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line 145 Domm, Rev. Gordon 378 Donald, J.R. 73 Dorion, Noel 470n35 Doten, Dana 234 Douglas, T.C. ('Tommy') 376 Drew, George 133, 191-2, 194-6, 198, 200, 201, 204-5, 222, 248, 252, 263-4, 266, 290-1,375, 43In 15 Dubois, W.E.B. 371

499

Dulles, John Foster 401 Dunning, Charles 106 Dunton, Davidson 243, 377, 481n34 Duplessis, Maurice 14, 17, 205, 265-6, 296-309, 361, 378, 470n57 Duplessis Bridge 296 Dupuy, Pierre 123-4 Dwyer, Peter 34, 185-6, 429n20, 451n65, 452nn69, 71 Eastland, Senator James 423,48990n64 Eckroyd, Lawrence 352 Ede, Chuter 94 Edmiston, William 343, 344-5, 347 Egypt 405 Einstein, Albert 104-5 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 150-1, 153, 399401,420, 444n36 Eisenhower administration 286, 399-401, 420. See also Republican party Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd 43, 167n Elson, Bob (New York Times) 430n7 Emergency Powers Act 144, 203, 443nl8, 454n43 Emmerson, John K. 412, 487nl7 Encyclopedia of Music in Canada 292 Endicott, James G. 202, 204, 364-83, 442nl5, 466n33, 477n2, 479nl5, 480n20, 482n39 Endicott, Mary Austin 372-3, 378, 381, 480n21 Endicott, Rev. James, Sr 369 Endicott, Stephen 477n2 Engineering Institute 87 English, John 421, 489n50 Evans, Gary 251 Evenement, L' 308 External Affairs, Department of 11, 33-5, 54, 59, 63, 95, 107-8, 113-37, 140, 146, 162, 167n, 252, 264, 338, 371, 375, 377,

500

Index

387-9, 396, 398-400, 403-4, 407, 41516, 418-20, 430n 10, 481 n27 Famous Players Canada Ltd 233-4, 460n2 fascism 408-9,412-13 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 32, 34, 36, 52, 56, 59, 62, 79, 94, 106, 21718, 221, 223-5, 233, 239, 303, 403-11, 413-14, 418-23, 43In 11, 449n44, 489n57 Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS), U.S. 92, 94 Fellowship for a Christian Social Order 450n50 Felton, Monica 371 Ferns, Henry 107-10, 437n60 Ferris, Harold 109 Field, Alan 252 Fifth Amendment, of U.S. Constitution 65 Fil ion, Gerard 298 film industry, private Canadian 233, 243, 249-50, 461n7 Financial Post 192, 249-51, 276, 287, 294, 306, 331-2, 336, 338, 342-3, 348, 352, 354, 374 Finland, Soviet invasion of 376 First World War 6-7 Fitzgibbons, J.J. 460n2 fluoridation, as Communist plot 279 Ford, Robert 123, 437n5, 451n63 Foreign Affairs 115 Foreign Office (British) 39-40, 115, 11718, 438n7 Forrestal, James 37,61 Fortin, Gerard 299 Foster, Harry ('Red') 9 Foster, Ralph 251 Fothergill, Robert (Public Lies) 458nl2 Foulkes, General Charles 146-7, 150 France 4-5, 125, 128, 139, 149, 189, 2934, 334, 362, 371-2, 478n6 Franco, Generalissimo Francisco 408, 412

Franq, Marcel 350 Fraser, Blair 172, 376-7, 447n25 free trade, Canada-U.S. 129-30,153 Freedom Foundation 279 Freedom Speaks (NFB series) 256-7 Frost, Leslie 291,468nl4 Frowde, Chester 30 'fruit machine' 184-5 Fuchs, Klaus 186, 202, 488n26 Fulton, Davie 182 Fur and Leather Workers Union 307, 320, 344 Gagnon, H.A. 86 Gallup polls (Canadian Institute of Public Opinion) 279-86, 374, 466n42, 478nl2. See also public opinion, Canadian Garson, Stuart 194, 196-7, 199-204, 36970,419 Gaullism 139 germ (biological or bacteriological) warfare charges, Korea 202, 368-70, 442nl5, 478nl2, 479nl3 German Canadians 8 Germany 4, 8-9, 20, 33, 128, 135, 140, 149, 189,354 Gerson, Harold S. 432n36 Gillis, Clarie 249 Glazebrook, George 416 Globe and Mail 29, 303, 323, 374, 376 Gobineau, Count de 230, 237, 459n29 Godbout, Adelard 297 Goodman, Eddie 291 Goose Bay, U.S. air base 144-5, 443n 19 Gordon, Alex 322, 346 Gostick, Ron (Canadian Intelligence Service) 275, 279, 465n30 Gousev, Feodor 43, 46-7 Gouzenko, Igor 10, 27, 30^1, 40, 51, 53, 56, 58-9, 77, 81-2, 92, 108-9, 217, 221, 255, 422, 424, 487n24, 489n53

Index Gouzenko spy affair20, 35, 38-9, 41, 45, 48, 52, 55, 60, 89, 103, 107, 110, 115, 141, 161-6, 190, 207, 215, 227, 268-9, 282-3, 308, 404, 413-14; trials? 1 Gowing, Margaret (Independence and Deterrence)449n44 Granatstein, J.L.I28-9, 450n57 Grant, George264 Graydon, Gordon55 Great Depression, 1930s?, 11, 13-14,21, 87, 296, 408 GreecellS, 132, 230-1 Green, William313, 319, 324, 327-9, 331, 336 Gregg, Milton350 Grierson, John 19, 227-45, 249, 257, 423, 458nn8, 9, 12, 459nn28, 29, 32, 460n33 Grossman, Allan291 Groves, General Leslie44, 46, 48, 56, 59, 61,92-3, 449n44 Guernsey, Terry416, 419 habeas corpusS, 65-6 Haddow, Robert307 Halifax, Lord38, 120 Halifax (city)333 Hall, Frank324-8, 337, 342-7 Halperin, Israel65, 69, 103-6, 413-14, 416, 432n36, 487n24, 488n26 Halton, Matthew29 Hamilton (city)469n!9 Hammarskjold, Dag301 Harris, Henry432n36 Hart, John387 Harvey, Russel324, 342 Harvison, Clifford W.35, 54, 58, 64, 72, 79, 81, 85, 99-100, 218, 223, 457n33 Haythorne, George 177-8 Haythorne, Ruth 178, 450n50 heavy water production, in Canada43, 45 Hebert, C.P.I23

501

Hebert, Louis298 Heeney, Arnold 162-5, 172, 180, 187, 247,405,415-16 Hepburn, Mitchell ('Mitch')14 Herter, Christian423 Hewitt, Robert327-8 Hickenlooper, Senator Bourke93 Hiroshima, atomic bombing of8, 20, 30, 45, 89, 93 Hiss, Alger204 Hitler, Adolf4-6, 9, 118 Hollis, Roger34, 39 Hollywood:blacklist246; film industry 19, 227, 229, 234, 241, 243-4, 246, 248, 255, 257; HUAC hearings 227, 229, 236, 24In; 'Hollywood Ten' 204,460n2 Holmes, John 128, 137, 437n5 Home from the Cold Wars (Leslie Roberts)272 homosexuality, as 'security risk' 184-5 Hoover, J. Edgar52, 60, 217, 219, 303, 402,410,419-21,423 Hotel-Dieu convent, MontreaBOO House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAQ61-2, 79, 162, 191, 227, 229, 236, 241,456n22, 460n2 Howe, C.D.43-4, 62, 72-3, 156, 174, 243^ Howes, Dr F.S.88 Hughes, Bert461n5 Humanities in Canada, The (Watson Kirkconnell)278 Humanities Research Council of Canada (HRCC)277-8 Hungarian revolt, 1956380-2 Hurley, Patrick J.61 Huxley, Julian239, 241 Hyde Park aide-memoire on atomic cooperation, 194441,44 Hyde Park Declaration, 1941140 hydrogen bomb37, 40, 145, 382

502

Index

immigrants 18 Immigration, Department of 323, 332-3 Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire 276 Imperial Relations Trust 229 Inchon landing (Korea) 387, 394 India 389, 395 Indian Student Assembly, Cambridge 417-18 Indochina war 400 Industrial Defence Board 144 Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigations Act 356 Infeld, Leopold 107 Ingle, Lome 354 Innis, Harold 264, 269 Inquiries Act 58, 64-5 Inside Fighting Russia (NFB) 230, 232 Institute of Pacific Relations 404, 411, 420 Intelligence: U.S. 143-4, 211, 213, 234, 339; Canadian 143,162,396-7 Intelligence Bulletin (RCMP) 212-13, 217, 220, 276, 327, 455n8, 476n24 International Association of Machinists (IAM) 316, 332, 344, 448n33 International Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks 324, 328, 336, 343-4 International Chemical Workers 343, 3445, 347, 350 International Federation of Seamen and Dockers Union (IFSDU) 339 'international intelligence community' 223-5, 419-20, 457n35 International Journal 120 International Woodworkers of America 320, 325, 361 internment camps: in Second World War 8; proposed for emergencies 144 'Intrepid.' See William Stephenson Intrepid's Last Case (William Stevenson) 60, 441n2, 449n44 Iron Curtain, The 27, 227

'iron curtain' speech (Churchill), in Fulton, Missouri 68, 118, 120 Irwin, Arthur 252-*, 256-7, 463n31 Is may, Lord 135 isolationism, American 5-6, 114, 130-2, 140-1,388 Italian Canadians 8 Italy 8, 128, 189,362,370-1 Jackson, C.S. 361 Jackson, A.Y. 292 Jaffe, Philip 411,487nl6 James, Cyril 107, 436n49 Japan 4, 8-9, 20, 33,40, 140,404, 409-12, 479nl3 Japanese Canadians, internment during Second World War 7 Jarvie, Ian (Hollywood's Overseas Campaign) 460n2 Jehovah's Witnesses 470n57 Jenkins, Colonel 434nl6 Jenner, Senator William 489n53 Jennison, Mary 292, 469n20 Jodoin, Claude 303, 307, 345 Johnson, Rev. Hewlett ('Red Dean of Canterbury') 192,366-7,372,375,377, 478n8, 482n35 Johnston, Eric 460n2 Joint Chiefs of Staff 162 Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. 479nl3 'Jones,' Mr and Mrs 101-3 Justice, Department of 30-1, 35, 42, 50, 58,66,67,72, 198 Kaplan, William (Everything That Floats) 339, 474n31, 475n57, 489n57 Keetbaas, Dirk 292 Kellock, Mr Justice Lindsay 57-8, 67, 701,77,80,96,201,238 Kemmer, K. 94

Kennan, George ('Mr X') 115, 123, 127, 438nn6, 7

Index Keynesianism 22-3, 122-3, 150, 153 Khrushchev, Nikita 215 Kidd, H.E. 232-3 Kierstead, B.S. 129-30 Kim II Sung 390 King, William Lyon Mackenzie 10-11, 27, 29-30, 32-43, 45-8, 50, 52-3, 55-7, 5961,63,66-9,79,89, 119, 121, 127, 129, 131, 140, 142-3, 198, 230-2, 238-9, 241, 243, 245, 265, 302, 444n36, 446n 17, 459n32; diaries 27-8,45 Kirkconnell, Watson 151, 277-9, 308, 466n41 Klein, A.M. 469n27 Kobbe, Fernando de 36 Koje Island incident (Korea) 398-400, 485n31 Kolko, Gabriel 400-1 Korea, North (People's Republic of Korea) 368, 387-8, 390-1, 395-6, 398, 482-3n5 Korea, South (Republic of Korea) 368, 387, 390, 392, 394-5, 483n5 Korean War 11,21, 113-14, 127, 133, 137, 139, 141, 144, 149, 151-2, 154, 171, 198-9, 202, 205, 276, 290, 348, 354-5, 368-9, 372, 387-401, 412, 442nl5, 482-3n5, 483nnl 1, 12; threatened use of nuclear weapons in 391, 396, 400, 485n36,486n43; armistice, 1953 388, 399-400 Labor, Department of, U.S. 351 Labour, Department of 175, 177-8,251, 317, 322-^, 331-4, 337, 339, 359, 449n42 Labour Gazette 345 Labour government, U.K. 36, 38, 41, 263, 332,338-9 LaCroix, Wilfrid 191, 198 LaCroixBill 191, 198,323 Lady Nelson 332

503

Lady Rodney 332-3 Lakehead, Ontario 469nl9 Lamb, Marjorie 276 Lapalme, Georges-Emile 297 Laski, Harold 94 Lattimore, Owen (Ordeal by Slander) 407-8, 486nl 1 Laurendeau, Andre 308-9 Law and Order in Canadian Democracy (RCMP) 216 Law Society of British Columbia 288-90, 347 Leahy, U.S. Admiral William 56, 60, 120 Leffler, Melvyn (Preponderance of Power) 439nl6 Legal Professions Act, British Columbia 288-9 Legg, Stuart 231,235,242 Leopold, John ('Esselwein') 178, 219, 249, 454nn34, 35 LePan, Douglas 396, 484n25 Lewis, David 271-3 Liberal Education in the Canadian Democracy (Watson Kirkconnell) 278 Liberal governments 11-12,22, 123, 1334, 151, 161-2, 164-5, 167, 173, 179-84, 186-7, 194-206, 228, 230, 261-2, 2658, 270, 283-4, 296-7, 299-304, 307-9, 317, 320, 323^, 330, 332-3, 338, 350, 354-5, 358-61, 402-4, 422, 454nn46, 47. See also King; St Laurent Lie, Trygve 393, 484nl5 Linton, Freda 235-6, 238-9, 241, 432n36, 462n20 Littleton, James 145 London Conference, 1946 55 Long, Huey ('Kingfish') 296 Low, Solon 161-2, 191-2 Lower, Arthur 263, 394 Loyalists, Spanish 408,412,423 Loyalty-Security Program, U.S. 103, 162, 164, 166, 168, 179, 181, 194

504 Index Lumber and Sawmill Workers 343 Lunan, Gordon 64, 103-4, 109,414, 432n36 Lundeberg, Harry 318,333 Lyon, Peyton (Lyon Report on Herbert Norman) 407, 417, 419, 424, 486n 10 MacArthur, General Douglas 150-1, 387, 391, 394-6, 404, 406, 411-12, 487n20 McCann, J.J. 177, 246-8, 461 n8 McCarran Internal Security Act, 1950, U.S. 188 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, 1952, U.S. 188, 224 McCarthy, U.S. Senator Joseph 19, 62, 79, 103, 161, 177, 283, 285, 377, 403-4, 490n64 McCarthyism ('witch-hunting') 96, 131, 166, 175, 182, 186-7, 189, 217-18, 262, 274, 282, 284, 286, 290, 293, 309, 358, 371-2, 402-3, 405, 411, 424, 441n46, 452n69 McClellan, George 178, 222, 416 McClung, Mark 223, 359, 457n33 McCormick, Colonel W. 422 MacDonald, Malcolm 34, 57 MacDonald College 88 McEwen, Robert 333 McGibbon, Pauline 276 McGill University 88, 106-7, 242, 436nn49, 50 McGowan, Charles 335 MacKay, R.A. 439^0n32 McKinley, Dr D.W. 92-3 Maclean, Donald 175, 409 McLean, Ross 243-53, 461n7 Maclean's 170,252,263,376-7 MacLeod, Alex 291,411 McManus, T.G. 332-3, 337-9, 348 MacMillan, Sir Ernest 291-2 MacNamara, Arthur 324, 333-4, 336, 339 McNaughton, Frank 59

Macpherson, C.B. 269 McRuer, Mr Justice J.C. 74, 76 Magnuson, Bruce 343-4, 361 Magnuson Act, 1950, U.S. 174-5, 448n38 Manchester Guardian 94 Manhattan Project 43-4, 92, 94, 109, 488n26 Manitoba 467-8nl MaoTse-tung 401, 485n27, 486n43 Maple Leaf Gardens 9, 369, 371, 376 Maritime Workers Federation 356 Marshall, General George C. 129, 132 Marshall Plan (European Recovery Plan) 11,21, 114, 122, 127-30, 135, 211, 270-2, 276, 278, 281, 320-1, 330, 339, 342, 346, 354, 361-2, 393, 399, 421,440nn38, 39, 474n30 Martin, Gordon 288-90 Marx, Karl 230, 237 Marxism 99-100, 178-9, 183-4,410 Massey, Vincent 228, 245, 251, 255-6 May, Alan Nunn 35, 37-40, 44-6, 71, 856, 88, 91^, 97, 99, 108, 435n20 Mayrand, Leon 119 Mazerall, Edward 74, 85, 90, 97, 108, 432n36 Meany, George 362 Menon, Krishna 389 Menzies, Sir Stewart 429n20 Methodism 178 Mickleburgh, Bruce 380 Mid-Canada Line 145 MI5 (British security) 34-5, 39-40, 221, 230, 405 Military Co-operation Committee (MCC), Canada-U.S. 142-3 military-industrial complex 150-7 Mindszenty, Cardinal 266 Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (MineMill) 193, 320, 323, 351,465nl6 Misener, Captain Scott 322 missiles, intercontinental ballistic 144-5

Index MI6 or SIS (British Intelligence) 31-2, 34, 39,56, 186, 223-4, 429n20 Mitchell, Humphrey 337, 345 Molotov, V.M. 38 Montreal atomic laboratories 44-5, 86-7, 99 Montreal-Carder electoral district 294, 469n27 Montreal Forum 303 Montreal Gazette 289, 461 n8 Montreal-Matin 308 Montreal Star 327 Montreal Trades and Labour Council 345 Morin, Claude 471n55 Morris, Peter 256 Morris, Robert 423-4, 487n 16 Moscow conference, 1946 49, 53^ Motinov, Lieutenant Colonel 108-9, 235, 238 Motion Picture Association of America 244 Mulroney, Brian 451n64 Munich Agreement, 1938 4-5, 178 Munton, Donald 124 Murray, Gladstone 276, 466n33 Murray Hill Area Project 43-4 MUSKOX, Operation 61, 141-2, 431nl3 Nagasaki, atomic bombing of 8, 20, 45, 89 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 405 National Archives of Canada 101 National Association of Technical Employees (NATE) 87-8, 434nlO National Federation of Canadian University Students 277 National Federation of Democratic Youth 303 National Film Act 243^, 247, 250 National Film Board of Canada (NFB) 78, 19, 81, 169, 227-58, 307-9, 422, 449n46, 458nn6, 14; n on-theatrical distribution 231-2, 246-7

505

National Research Council (NRC) 33-4, 88, 92, 95, 99-100, 103, 108-9, 167n, 169,235,238 Nazi-Soviet pact, 1939 6, 178,409 Nelson, Joyce (Colonized Eye) 458n8 Neruda, Pablo 372 Newman, Archibald H. 244, 250 Newman, Peter 306 News Chronicle 93, 435n20 Niagara Falls, Communism in 456n24 Nicholson, L.H. 223, 419-20 Nietzsche, Friedrich 402-3 Nightingale, Matt 76-7, 432n36 Norman, Herbert 106, 108, 131, 179, 224, 403-25, 484n25, 486n5, 487nl6, 488nn26, 47 North American Air Defence treaty (NORAD) 146-7, 150, 443n26 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 5, 11, 113-14, 122, 126-7, 134-7, 139-41, 147-50, 152, 156-7, 171,211, 265-6, 270-2, 276, 281, 3456, 354, 388, 392-3, 399, 402, 421, 424, 443n28 North Warning System 443n25 Nouvelliste, La 335 Nova Scotia 154, 468nl Nova Scotia Labour Relations Board (NSLRB) 356-7 NSC-7, U.S. National Security Council document 124 NSC-68, U.S. National Security Council document 483nl2 O'Connor, Roderick 423, 490n64 October Crisis, 1970 189, 203n Odium, General Victor 371 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 31, 233 Official Secrets Act (OSA), Canada 35, 58, 64-6, 68, 71, 73, 75-8, 91, 96-7, 104, 107, 202-3

506

Index

Ogdensburg Agreement, August 1940 140, 147 Oliver, Mr Justice 435n20 Ontario 154, 290-3 Ontario Human Rights Commission 291 Oppenheimer, Robert 94 Orenda Engines 156 Osborne-Dempster, William 62, 431nl5 Ottawa Citizen 250, 254-5, 277 Ottawa Civil Liberties Association 168-9 Ottawa Journal 30 Our Northern Neighbour (NFB) 230 'Padlock Law,' Quebec 17, 96, 190, 216, 269,301-4,373, 378 Page, Donald 124 Palmer, Bryan 362 Paper Makers union 335 Pappin, W.M. 78, 432n36 Parent, Madeleine 344 Park, Frank 108, 236, 414, 416, 439n23, 488n27 Parliament of Canada 39 Patton, General George S., Jr 20 'Pax Americana' 127,130 PC 411, order in council 57-8 PC 6444, secret order in council 39, 58 peace movement 364-83; Soviet control of 365-7, 375-82 Peake, Hayden B. 489n58 Pearkes, George 146 Pearl Harbor, attack on, 1941 140 Pearson, Drew 29, 56, 59-61, 431nlO Pearson, Geoffrey 445n2, 484nl8 Pearson, Lester B. 37, 41, 47, 49, 54-5, 60,68,78, 113, 120, 134, 155, 179n, 195, 197, 201, 206, 239-40, 265-6, 275, 370, 372-5, 387, 391-405, 415, 417-19, 420n, 421-4, 444n36, 450n52, 466n33, 484nl8, 489nn57, 63, 490n64 Permanent Joint Board on Defence (PJBD) 140-2, 146

Peron, Juan 392 Petain, Marshall 294 Philadelphia Enquirer 62 Philby, Kim 185-6,409 Phillips, Jack 351,361 Phillips, Nathan 291 Philpott, Elmore 278 Picasso, Pablo 372 Pickersgill, J.W. 172, 197, 252 Pincher, Chapman 449n44 Pinetree Line 145 Poland, Fred 70, 432n36 Poland 296,299-301 Polish treasures, custody of 299-301 Pontecorvo, Bruno 44, 176, 449n44 Pope, General Maurice 127 Port Arthur Board of Education 375 Port Arthur Trades and Labour Council 350 Potsdam Conference, 1945 12 Powell, John C. 479nl3 Power, C.G. ('Chubby') 69 Presbyterian church 374 Prime Minister's Office (PMO) 107, 167n, 219,252 prisoners of war, Korea 398-9 Pritchett, Harold 361 Privy Council Office (PCO) 162, 167n, 185, 196,201,252 Progressive Conservative party 123, 133, 146-7, 249, 263-4, 266. See also Diefenbaker, John, government of Progressive Party, U.S. 262,331 psychological warfare 256-7 public opinion: American 37, 39, 427n6, 467n67; Canadian 12,39, 72, 261-4, 279-86, 427n6, 467nn47, 59 Public Record Office, London 73 Pusan 387 Quebec (French Canada) 17, 123-4, 133-

Index 4, 154, 198, 203n, 205, 214, 263-7, 283, 293-309, 393 Quebec accord, 1943 41, 44, 48 Quebec Court of Queen's Bench 304 Quebec Labour Code 190, 304-7, 355 Quebec Liberal party 296-7, 307 Queen's University 103-6, 272-5 Quemoy and Matsu crisis, 1955 401 Quiet Revolution, Quebec 295, 301, 309 Rand, Mr Justice Ivan 201, 304, 356-7, 358-9 RAND Corporation 442nl6 Rankin, Harry 290, 468n 11 Rankin, John 61 RDX, chemical explosive 72-4,99 Red Army, Soviet 148 Red Channels 276-7 Red squad: Ontario 62, 290, 431nl5; Quebec 96, 302-3, 373, 471n54 Redin, Colonel Nickolai 431nll Reid, Escott 120-6, 131, 134,370-1,3956, 424, 439-40n32, 441n49 Republican party, U.S. 130-1, 132, 205-6, 262, 286, 396, 398-9. See also Eisenhower administration Rex v. Buck et al, 1931 200, 211, 219, 452n4 Richard, Maurice ('Rocket') 303 Richards, Berry 271 Ridgeway, General Matthew 391 Riefenstahl, Leni 458nl3 Ritchie, Charles 33, 396 Rivett-Carnac, Charles 34, 36, 216-17, 220-2 Robarts, John 291 Roberts, Frank 115, 438n7 Roberts, Leslie 272 Robertson, Chief Justice 76 Robertson, Gordon 171, 181, 187, 196, 199-200, 445n2 Robertson, Norman 11, 30-1, 34, 36^0,

507

42, 47, 52-3, 55, 57, 67, 120, 127, 162, 176, 178, 180, 185, 187, 196, 199, 231, 239^1, 252, 337-8, 395, 415, 445n2, 446nl7, 447n30 Robeson, Paul 371 Robinson, Reid 193 Rockefeller Foundation 278 Rockliffe RCMP barracks, espionage detainees held in 28, 58-9, 64-6, 81, 103, 238 Roe, A.V., Ltd 155-7, 173, 444n45 Rogov, Major 76, 91 Roman Catholic church 265-6, 293-301, 306, 374 Ronning, Chester 399 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 44, 60, 140 Roosevelt, Theodore ('Teddy') 151 Rose, Fred 32, 34, 51, 66, 71-4, 76, 97, 99, 208-9, 235-6, 239, 294, 432n36 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel 202, 204 Rowley, Kent 316, 344 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada 87 Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) 288 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP): Security Service 7, 10, 27-8, 30, 32, 34-6, 42, 50, 56, 58, 64, 66, 70, 72, 75, 79, 83-5, 90, 95, 98, 101-2, 144, 162-72, 174, 177-8, 180-7, 192, 198201, 203, 207-26, 248-9, 252-3, 264, 272, 274-5, 276, 300, 303, 324, 327, 333, 338, 354-5, 359, 367, 369-71, 4045, 408, 413-16, 418-20, 422, 436n50, 445n2, 448nn33, 37, 42, 451n63, 454n34, 456nn21, 22, 24, 457n36, 461n7, 462nl8, 463n38, 463-4n44, 471n55, 473nl6, 476n24, 479nl5; Vancouver Special Branch 218; Winnipeg Special Branch 85-6 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Massey Commission) 228-9, 245, 251,255-6

508 Index Royal Commission on Security, 1969 (Mackenzie Commission) 203 Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts ... (Kellock-Taschereau Commission) 45, 51, 53, 57, 64, 67, 69-72, 78-80, 235-8, 241, 413; reports 45, 74, 79-87, 91-100, 119, 161-6, 239, 430n4, 433nn43, I,434nl6 Royal Military College 274-5, 308 Royal Roads Military College 109 Rumilly, Robert 298 Rusher, William 421, 423, 487nl7 Rusk, Dean 397 Russian-Canadian Federation 352 sabotage, in Criminal Code 201-2, 454n33 St Laurent, Louis 30, 34, 51, 55-8, 66, 124, 129, 133-4, 182, 189, 194-7, 201, 204, 248, 256, 264-5, 275, 278, 300, 308, 335, 338, 370, 402, 421, 444n36, 446nl9 Salsberg, J.B. 214, 290-1, 331-2, 338, 468nl4 Salutin, Rick 248, 252-3 San Francisco Conference, 1945 12 Sartre, Jean-Paul 372 Saturday Night 169, 198, 227-8, 289, 303 Saurus, Conrad 336 Sawatsky, John 223,418, 430n7,457nn28, 33 scientific community, international 39 Scott, Frank 269, 273, 304 screw threads, Canada-U.S. joint committee on 141 Seafarers' International Union (SIU) 1745, 314-15, 324-6, 329, 332-4, 337-8, 340, 353-*,477n31 Second World War 3-13 security classifications, civil service 167 Security Panel 162-5, 170-80, 183-5, 217, 220, 247-8, 252, 447nn23, 25, 448n33

security screening: American system. See Loyalty-Security Program, U.S.; and appeals procedures 175,180-2,187; British system 162, 166, 180-1, 187, 446n 19; of civil service 102-3, 161-71, 175-87, 213, 217, 245-54, 415-16, 418-21, 424, 447n30, 449n46, 451n59; of defence industries 171^, 213, 330, 355; of Great Lakes seamen 174-5, 203, 330-1, 448nn37, 40, 448-9n42, 449n43; of homosexuals 184-5, 451 n64; and immigration and citizenship 152, 1934, 217, 223, 371-2, 445nl Security Sub-Panel 185-6 Sedgewick, Joseph 64 sedition, in Criminal Code 200-1, 452n2 Senate 200, 202-3, 452n4 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SSIS), U.S. 79, 179, 404, 409, 411-12, 414, 416, 421^1, 487nnl6, 17, 24, 488n35 Seoul 387, 390 Shipping Act 335 shipping fleets: deep-sea (Canadian merchant marine) 319, 330-41; Great Lakes 319-20, 322-5, 329 Shortliffe, Glen 272-5, 465n22 Showier, Birt 322, 332, 346 Shugar, David 85, 87-8, 90, 97-8, 101, 432n36, 434nlO Shutting Down the National Dream 155 Sinclair, Gordon 292 Sise, Hazen 308, 422-3, 489n57 Smith, Arnold 81-2, 90, 116, 118-21, 123-6, 240-1,266, 437n5 Smith, Denis (Diplomacy of Fear) 131 Smith, Durnford 70, 80, 107, 432n36 Smith, Sydney 301 Smith Act, 1940, U.S. 188 Smith and Rhulands, Ltd 356 Soboloff, John 432n36 Social Credit party 191-2

Index social democrats, in Cold War 266-73, 361 social security 22 Solandt, Dr Omond 143 Solicitor General, Department of the 419 Sorge, Richard, spy ring 412, 412n South Africa 189,303, 334 Soviet bloc 21, 114-26, 128 Soviet-Canadian relations 115-26 Soviet Communist party, 20th Congress, secret session 215, 220 Soviet Embassy, Ottawa 35, 75, 83, 91, 108-9, 235-6 Soviet espionage 27, 32, 34-5, 40-2, 47, 52, 56, 62-3, 68, 75, 81, 84, 89, 209, 217, 409, 444n45 Soviet military threat: in North America 138-57; in Europe 148-9 Soviet secret police (NKVD) 34 Spadina electoral district, Toronto 215, 290-1, 456n13 Spanish Civil War 178,408,412,423 Stairs, Denis (Diplomacy of Constraint) 388, 399, 437nl Stalin, Joseph 4, 10, 115, 117-18, 124, 128,207-9,402 Stalin Peace Prize 380, 482n39 Stalingrad 9 Stanton, John 338 Staryk, Steven 292 State Department, U.S. 33, 49-50, 57, 59, 62,98, 115, 131,213,219,224,234, 239-40, 287, 339-40, 351, 358, 360, 374, 392, 395, 397, 403, 412, 420, 423-^, 436n49, 441 n46, 456n24, 4889n47 Stephenson, William ('Intrepid') 31-2, 35, 60, 140, 185, 441n2, 449n44, 451n65 Stevens, Homer 353, 361 Stevenson, William 60 Stimson, Henry 37 Stockholm peace pledge 348-9, 367, 3734, 480n25

509

Stone, Thomas A. ('Tommy') 36, 59-60 Strategic Air Command, U.S. 144 strategic stockpiling (Paley Report) 152-3 Struthers, James 469n20 Student Christian Movement 277 suburbs 17 Suez crisis, 1956 113,380-2 Sullivan, Pat 316, 319, 321-5, 340, 473nl6 Supreme Court of Canada 53, 81, 304, 306, 357 Supreme Court, U.S. 188 Sweden 136, 139 Switzerland 136, 139 Switzman, John 304; Switzman v. Elbling and the Attorney General of Quebec 304 'Symphony Six' 291-2 Syngman Rhee 368, 390, 394 Taft-Hartley Act, U.S. 188, 192-3, 195, 205, 305-6, 311, 314, 323, 326, 345, 352, 354-5, 360, 470n64 Tarshis, Lorie 416 Taschereau, Mr Justice Robert 57-8, 65, 70, 77, 96, 103-4, 304 television 18-19, 247 There Never Was an Arrow 155-6 Third World 379-80,417 Thompson, E.P. 365 Thomson, Roy 242 Time 414 Time of Fear and Hope (Escott Reid) 134, 424 Titoism 139 Toronto (city) 9, 17,382 Toronto Board of Education 291-2 Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) 291-2 Toronto Telegram 192, 264, 279, 376 Toronto Trades and Labour Council 350 Trade Union Commission, LPP 343, 360

510

Index

trade unions 154; public attitudes towards 284-5 Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) 303, 306, 310-63, 375-6, 382; 'bloc voting' system, proposed 329, 331, 336, 342, 346, 350; Calgary convention, 1949 342-7; Communists in 310-63; international unions in 312, 314, 31719, 326-7, 329-31, 335-6, 341, 342-*, 347, 350, 361-2, 472-3n3, 476nl6; international vice-presidents ('roadmen') 325, 328, 331; left wing of 319, 321-2, 326, 329, 361; Montreal convention, 1950 348-51; national unions in 312, 314, 350, 353, 362, 4723n3, 476nl6; nationalism in 326, 3289, 340; right wing of (anti-Communist bloc) 324, 326, 329, 336-7, 342-7, 357; Victoria meeting, 1949 325-7 Transport, Department of 174-5 treason: in Criminal Code 202-3; proposed charges against James Endicott 369-70 Treasury Department, U.S. 33, 52 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott 196, 298, 489n57 Truman, Harry S. 33, 37, 39-42, 54, 56, 61, 89, 92, 131, 152, 188, 262, 392, 396 Truman administration 116, 130-2, 162, 164, 194, 204-5, 255, 262, 286, 399, 420, 439n16, 440-1n43 Truman Doctrine, 1947 114, 118, 132, 230, 272 Trust Fund to Contest the Padlock Law 303 Tsuru, Shigeto 409-10 Tumpane, Frank 279, 376 Turple, Wass 344,346 Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temples 10 Ukrainian Canadians 8, 277, 352 UKUSA agreements, 1947 442nl2 Union de Bucherons 299

Union Nationale 296-309, 470n34 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, Russia) 4, 9-11, 18, 27, 29, 31, 38-42, 53, 208-9, 273, 279-80 United Auto Workers 320 United Church 359, 369, 378, 382 United Electrical Workers (UE) 173-4, 307, 320, 324, 347, 351, 355, 361 United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union (UFAWU) 322, 336, 344, 346, 351,352-3 United Jewish People's Order (UJPO) 352 United Nations 20-1, 36, 38, 40, 53-4, 62, 93, 113, 122-7, 134, 242, 247, 301, 373; anti-Communist purge 483^nl5, 484nl6; General Assembly 49, 430n50; Korean multinational force 387-8, 390-8; peacekeeping, Canadian contributions 141; Security Council 36, 49, 55 United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) 49-50, 55, 430n50 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 89, 239-42,251 United Office and Professional Workers of America 434nlO United States 13, 20, 41; Army 254, 433n43; Canadian image of 281; Congress 39; Embassy, in Ottawa 233, 239-40, 244, 249-50, 272, 276, 295, 321,440n39; National Archives 456n24; Western leadership 114, 116-18, 121-3, 126-37 United States-Canada Permanent Defence Agreement 118 University of Alberta 378 University of British Columbia (UBC) 288-9 University of Ottawa 299 University of Saskatchewan 463n38 University of Toronto 107, 375

Index uranium, Canadian 45, 61 uranium isotopes U233 and U235 92 Urey, Harold 92 Vancouver Civic Employees union 336, 344, 346, 350-1 Vancouver Sun 162 Vancouver Trades and Labour Council 316 Vandenberg, Arthur H. 54, 131, 262 Van Fleet, General James 390 Veall, Norman 85-6, 88, 91, 97-8 Veterans, war 15-16 Veterans Affairs, Department of 176-7 Vichy regime, France 294 Victoria Trades and Labour Council 324 Vietnam War 362, 390 Villeneuve, Cardinal 294 Vishinsky, Andrei 55 Wallace, Henry 262,331 Walsh, Bill 360 Walsh, Pat 275, 299, 371, 487nl6 War Book 143-4, 443n 18 War for Men's Minds (NFB) 231 War Measures Act 7, 10-12, 28, 42, 50-2, 54, 58, 64, 144, 190, 203, 268, 359, 454nn34, 43 Ward, Rev. Harry F. 366 Warsaw (city) 380 Warsaw pact 270-1 Wartime Information Board (WIB) 7, 12, 33-4,230,236,243,414 Washington Conference, 1945 42, 47-9, 51,57 Washington Times-Herald 45 Washington University, St Louis 274 Watkins,John 184, 437n5, 451n63 Watson-Watt, Sir Robert 88, 94 Western Business and Industry 352 Wiener, Norbert 104-5 Wilgress, Dana 55, 115-22, 125-6, 242, 437n5,438nnll, 13

511

Wilkie, Wendell 9 Wilkinson, George 324 Williams, E.K. 53-4, 57, 67, 77, 79, 108, 236-7, 430n4 Williams, Ronald 276, 294-5, 306, 332, 343, 348, 354, 478nll Willoughby, General Charles 404,411-13, 487nn20, 22 Willsher, Kathleen 68, 71, 432n36, 450n50 Windsor, Ontario (city) 291,469nl6 Winnipeg Free Press 67 Winnipeg General Strike 10, 15-16, 191, 215,467nl Winnipeg Tribune 377 Winters, Robert 248-9, 251, 257, 308 Wittfogel, Karl 404-5, 416 Woikin, Emma 64, 68, 71, 432n36, 446nl7. See also Call wood, June Women, in postwar period 15 Wood, S.T. 48, 50-3, 57, 164, 169, 196-7 Woods Gordon 252-3 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) 339 World in Action (NFB series) 231 World Peace Council 364, 367, 372, 376, 380 Worthington, Major General F.F. 142, 146 Wright, Hume 132 'Wright-Wrong' memorandum 132 Wrong, Hume 30, 34, 45, 49, 51-2, 55, 119, 132, 240-1, 389, 397-9, 441n46, 484-5n27 Yalu River 387, 395-7 Yates case, U.S. 188 Yugoslavia 139, 140, 380 Zabotin, Nikolai 54, 63, 76, 235, 238, 255 Zarubin, Georgi 50-1, 54 Zuken, Joe 467-8nl