[R-G] Classified Canada

[Anthony Fenton]

Copyright 2007 Micromedia Limited
All Rights Reserved
Canadian Business and Current Affairs
Copyright 2007 Canada's National History Society
Beaver

August 2007 / September 2007

SECTION: Pg. 52 Vol. 87 No. 4 ISSN: 0005-7517

ACC-NO: 1320618411

LENGTH: 1045 words

HEADLINE: Classified Canada

BYLINE: Moore, Christopher

BODY:


When it comes to the nation's intelligence and security history, much  
of our past is considered a state secret - and that's a shame.

"Turn on Your television!" Wesley Wark learned of the World Trade  
Centre attacks from a public-relations officer at the University of  
Toronto. That morning the university was being flooded with media  
requests for expert analysts, and Wark, who is a historian of  
security and intelligence studies, was in hot demand.

For several months after September 11, 2001, Wark found media  
interviews occupied him "seven days a week." Demand has slowed a  
little since then. Still, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of  
Iraq, and our constant twentyfirst-century concern with terrorism  
mean there is public interest in secret intelligence and counter- 
terrorism. I thought it was time to look into Canada's history of  
security and intelligence and what we actually get from it.

"Is there a particularly Canadian history of secret intelligence?" I  
asked Wark. He assured me we have one of the longest among modern  
nations.

During the American Civil War, pre-Confederation Canadian governments  
took steps to ensure that neither Union nor Confederate agents could  
provoke a breach of Canadian neutrality. A little later, a  
combination of Canadian espionage and Fenian ineptitude meant "Fenian  
planning was very nearly an open book for the Canadian security forces."

In the Second World War, Canada did significant work in signals  
intelligence, tracking German, Japanese and Vichy French  
communications through the shadowy "Examination Unit." One of the  
leading figures in that story was Lester Pearson - a future prime  
minister - who had become External Affairs' man on intelligence and  
security matters.

Canada later used its wartime contributions to lobby for a place at  
the table alongside its intelligence allies.

"Really," Wark says, "it was a case of Canadian chutzpah - of  
Canadians in the post-war era bargaining the country into the most  
secret club in the world."

Wark believes that, at heart, security and intelligence history is  
really about the history of ideas. It's a lesson he learned at  
Cambridge University in the 1970s, when he went there from his  
Alberta home to study "traditional diplomatic history." Just at that  
time, security and intelligence studies were being invented as a  
serious field of academic history. Britain had begun to open its  
intelligence archives and Cambridge scholars (often intelligence  
veterans themselves) were publishing a multi-volume official history  
of secret Intelligence in the Second World War. Wark was hooked.

Returning to Canada, he made the same discovery here that his mentors  
had made in Britain. A nation's security and intelligence processes,  
he argues, are a window into its idea of the world, a pointer to its  
deepest fears. The way Canada has practiced intelligence since the  
Second World War has both mirrored and shaped its more public  
diplomacy. International alliances, the search for middle-power  
influence, the effort to stay at the big table - "all this  
intelligence history really does explore how Canada has perceived  
itself and its place in the world, in our global alliances."

Yet intelligence history is not a field that Canada has encouraged.  
The public is interested, but Wark finds Canadian security archives  
are locked away much more completely than their Britain and American  
equivalents.

One of Wark's principal works has been an official history of  
Canadian intelligence activities from the 1940s until about 1970. He  
was given access to the historical archives of Canadian intelligence,  
and he thinks he has written a substantial history, one that follows  
Canadian intelligence from the darkest days of the Second World War  
through the travails of the Cold War. It sounds fascinating - the  
rich product of almost thirty years of scholarly engagement focused  
on otherwise unexamined source materials.

Problem is, you can't read it. The book is classified, and so are all  
the sources it draws on ("a treasure trove," Wark says). Officials at  
the Staff Intelligence Unit of the Privy Council Office in Ottawa  
told me some of the work has now been cleared through an Access to  
Information request and can be made available. But the book itself  
remains secret. Will the archives of mid-twentieth Century Canadian  
intelligence be opened and the book published as an official history?  
It's uncertain at best.

It's not just official secrecy that's complicating Canadian security  
and intelligence history. Diplomatic/military/ political history is  
deeply unfashionable in the scholarly community. Martin Rudman, who  
retired in June from Carleton University's Canadian Centre of  
Intelligence and Security Studies, reports that he is one of several  
scholars in the field who have not been replaced. "Canadians students  
of intelligence have to go overseas to study, and then there are no  
academic positions for them to return to."

Does it matter?

Reg Whitaker is retired from York University but remains involved in  
security studies as a consultant to both the O'Connor Commission on  
the detention of Maher Arar and the Major Inquiry into the Air India  
murders. He cheered last winter when Parliament refused to renew the  
preventive-arrest and investigative-powers clauses of the Anti- 
Terrorism Act, which were given a five-year sunset clause when first  
passed in 2001. Still, "it was a pretty awful debate," he says, with  
the two sides mostly trading charges of disloyalty on one hand and  
McCarthyism on the other. Few parliamentarians displayed much insight  
into the principles involved.

That's one reason why we need greater access to Canada's security and  
intelligence records, as well as more historians studying the  
subject. We might have a better-informed public if citizens could  
compare the anti-terrorist fervor of recent years against histories  
of, say, the anti-communist security activities of the early 1950s.

Christopher Moore comments in every issue of The Beaver.

Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, far left, and Lester B. Pearson,  
far right, pose with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Anthony  
Eden on their arrival at Rockcliffe Airport, Ottawa, on June 29,  
1954. During his early career in External Affairs, Pearson played a  
key role in Canadian security and intelligence matters.

GRAPHIC: Photographs