Cold War Communist defectors in Canada 1945-52

Canada accepted dozens of Communist defectors on behalf of allies
at 16:22 on July 31, 2005, EST.
JIM BRONSKILL

OTTAWA (CP) - About 30 East Bloc defectors secretly settled in Canada during the early years of the Cold War, a newly declassified study reveals.

The Canadian government quietly accepted the newcomers from behind the Iron Curtain through co-operative arrangements with Britain and the United States.

The foreign allies handled the early stages of each case, including initial extraction of valuable intelligence, before securing a new identity and home for the defectors in Canada.

"Between 1945 and 1952, Canada had an intake of some 30 defectors from Soviet and Communist Bloc diplomatic and consular missions," the study says.

"For a country that had never before experienced the problems of dealing with defectors, it was a significant number."

The long-secret figure is disclosed in an unpublished manuscript prepared for the federal government by Wesley Wark, a University of Toronto history professor.

Wark was hired in late 1998 by the Privy Council Office to comb through classified archives detailing some lesser-known aspects of the federal intelligence apparatus during the intriguing era.

The Canadian Press obtained a draft of the 265-page study in response to a request filed almost two years ago under the Access to Information Act.

Though much of the history concerns events that are half a century old, considerable portions of the document, including an entire chapter, were judged too sensitive to release.

Wark, who had special access to thousands of pages of still-secret records, fills in some gaps in the annals of Canadian intelligence, including the clandestine defector program.

He suspects Canada, with its vast geography, was seen as a safer haven than Britain or the United States for defectors to carve out a new life without being hunted down by the notorious KGB or other East Bloc intelligence agencies.

For Canada, the resettlement program was a means of earning its keep in the western intelligence alliance, Wark said in an interview.

"It does show that the Canadians were trusted by their counterpart agencies to be able to handle these cases."

The files he viewed held little information on the defectors.

"The records that survive don't give any details about the individual cases," he said. "And my sense was that the Canadians themselves were not always privy to much in the way of detail about these people and their backgrounds."

Reg Weeks, a retired major-general who worked in Canadian military intelligence, recalls Soviet defectors being treated with caution due to lingering doubts about their loyalty.

"Because if they defected once, they could defect twice," Weeks, 83, said in an interview. "You could never be really sure."

Prior to accepting the post-war defectors, Canada had grappled with - and nearly bungled - the case of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk who toiled in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa.

The cache of documents he slipped out of the mission in September 1945 revealed the existence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada, presaging decades of chilly relations between East and West.

As Wark notes, Gouzenko almost paid with his life for Canadian innocence about the intelligence value of defectors, as the KGB hunted him while the Canadian government mulled over what to do.

"The Gouzenko affair was a near miss, and it prompted some soul-searching by Canadian authorities."

Following the Gouzenko drama, the RCMP and the Department of External Affairs (now Foreign Affairs) created "channels of informal liaison" to discuss cases of political defection from the Iron Curtain, Wark writes.

In 1953, more permanent arrangements were put in place.

The RCMP oversaw the distribution of $10,000 grants to assist defectors and an interdepartmental committee was set up as "a clearing house" to consider each case on its merits.

The original committee membership was restricted to representatives from External Affairs, the security and intelligence directorate of the RCMP and the admission division of Citizenship and Immigration.

"The Defector committee operated on the quiet and gave itself no written terms of reference in its early years. It met only as required," the study says.

Canadian officials did not agree on a formal definition of a defector until 1958.

It was decided that a Soviet or satellite bloc citizen who, "without the knowledge and approval of his government," sought admission to Canada and was deemed to have "considerable intelligence value" could be accepted as a defector - either to exploit his knowledge or as a means of co-operating with a friendly intelligence service.

John Starnes, who held several key intelligence posts during the era, says defectors to Canada included diplomats, intelligence agents, codebreakers, military attaches, secretarial staff and security guards.

The usefulness of the information they provided to Canadian officials was as varied as the defectors, said Starnes, 87.

"The difficulty was that each defector was different, and in order to evaluate his or her information a great deal had to be known about their professional background and motives for 'defecting,' which was often very difficult to obtain," he noted.

"Sometimes the information was very helpful in dealing with cases which the RCMP Security Service had been attempting to solve for months, even years."

Wark said Canada's enthusiasm for accepting defectors on behalf of its key allies cooled in the 1950s when it became apparent not all of the candidates were top-flight coups.

In any event, the British and Americans began to resettle more defectors on their own, relying less on Canadian assistance.

Canada's official policy was to have diplomats working abroad steer would-be defectors to allied services rather than deal with them at the initial stages.

It is apparently one reason Soviet Col. Oleg Penkovsky, among the more notable Cold War defectors, wound up in the hands of the CIA despite having approached a Canadian foreign service officer in Moscow.

Source[/color]