Embassy, March 22nd, 2006
NEWS STORY
By Christina Leadlay
Dead Diplomats, Often a Murky Business
The deaths of Canadian diplomats during the Cold War were often tinged with police cover-ups and the scent of espionage; today the threats are more direct if not less dangerous.
Herbert Norman had had enough. Canada's ambassador to Cairo felt tortured by the repeated allegations and accusations that he was a Communist sympathizer. So, just after breakfast on April 5, 1957, Mr. Norman left his wife at his official residence, walked to the building where the Swedish Minister lived, found his way to the roof, took off his gold watch and laid it carefully on the sidewall, and then jumped to his death, landing on the Minister's car, which suffered considerable damage.According to a report by Foreign Affairs Canada's department of history, "the final years of Norman's career were darkened by questions arising from allegations in the United States that he was a communist," despite the fact that his own country was convinced of his loyalty. Mr. Norman's tragic and untimely death made international media headlines and led to a meltdown in Canada-U.S. relations in 1957, wrote The Egyptian Mail in 1997.
Accusations of espionage and suspicion surrounding ideological sympathies were perhaps the greatest risks to Canadian diplomats during the Cold War, "some of them much more dangerous in terms of reputation than physically," says Denis Stairs, a fellow with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute in Calgary. For today's Canadian foreign service officers, those challenges have changed with the politics of the times. The Cold War may be over, but other threats are heating up. Acts of terrorism like the suicide car bomb that claimed the life of Glyn Berry, Canada's most senior diplomat in Kandahar, Afghanistan, are a testament to the new risks and challenges of international diplomacy.
At the time of Mr. Berry's death, many news outlets --including Embassy-- said he was the first Canadian diplomat to be killed in the line of duty, or that he was the first in Afghanistan. The Globe and Mail said Mr. Berry is the first Canadian diplomat to be killed in the line of duty since 1954, but didn't elaborate. According to Peacekeeper Park, an online living memorial, three Foreign Service Officers from External Affairs were killed while involved with the International Commission for Supervision and Control (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) UISC between 1954 and 1965.
"As far as I'm aware no Canadian diplomat has died as a consequence of political violence," says Mr. Stairs, who was once a professor of Mr. Berry's. "It's not so much that Glyn Berry is a precedent, but the case I think is a reminder of the dangers involved. The military are used to this, but other public servants are obviously not used to it. My reading is that in Foreign Affairs they were really shocked by this," he says by phone from Halifax.
After a bit of digging, with some help from the Library of Parliament, it turns out that Mr. Berry is one of a few Canadian foreign service officers who have met untimely and tragic ends. Thankfully, such incidents so far have been rare, but looking at newspaper records, when they do happen, it's typically under suspicious circumstances. Rarely is it a clear cut-and-dry event like the death of Mr. Berry. However, given the global political climate of the 21st century, threats leading to tragedies like this are qualitatively different from what diplomats have known before, and are setting a frightening new precedent. "It's not so much because the world has changed, but because government policy has changed in response to it," says Mr. Stairs, explaining that since Canada has taken a more interventionist role in the world, Canadian diplomats, soldiers and aid workers find themselves facing threats they had not faced before.
Mr. Norman's misfortune is, on the surface, seemingly straightforward. Wracked by anxiety over renewed CIA allegations that he harboured Communist sympathies and that his loyalty was therefore in question, Mr. Norman was said to have committed suicide (a 1990 report by Peyton Lyon from Carleton University concluded that Mr. Norman was not a spy). While most historians accept that the ambassador took his own life, one theory persists that Mr. Norman was pushed to his death.
The mysteries surrounding some of the more bizarre deaths of diplomats are not always easily resolved. To this day, the circumstances leading to Mr. Norman's death are fuzzy. This appears to have been an all-too-common occurrence during this period in history, where what you said and who you associated with could put your reputation and personal safety at risk.
Police Cover-up
Take, for example, John Watkins, who was literally interviewed to death in 1964. Canada's former ambassador to Moscow was interrogated for two days by the RCMP in a Montreal hotel room, by officers accusing him of being a Soviet spy and a homosexual (Mr. Stairs says that sexual entrapment was a danger to Western diplomats, one which could lead to a tarnished reputation, at worst). Mr. Watkins died during the questioning. In 1981, RCMP Superintendent Harry Brandes recalled how his interviewee "in the middle of a sentence and reaching for a cigarette [Watkins] gasped, flung his head back and remained motionless," reports the Gazette in 1981. The official (but untrue) story in 1964 was that the retired 62-year-old diplomat had suffered a heart attack while at a dinner with friends. A proper inquiry into Mr. Watkins's death was launched in 1981 where it was revealed that the RCMP had covered up the death, citing reasons of national security and "to protect Mr. Watkins' reputation."
Both Mr. Norman and Mr. Watkins died amidst accusations of espionage, accusations which were found to be untrue in both cases. Both men were closely connected to then-prime minister Lester Pearson, and theories abound that their deaths were part of an American plot to discredit Mr. Pearson, whom the CIA though was a Soviet Agent himself.
A mythology has since arisen from these men's mysterious Cold War-era deaths. In 1986, James Barros wrote No Sense of Evil about the case of Mr. Norman, while Canadian playwright Timothy Findlay used Mr. Watkins's story as the basis of his 1993 play "The Stillborn Lover." Ian Adams, who had followed the Watkins case since the 1960s, published a book on the case in 1999, and was involved in a 2003 television movie, Agent of Influence (starring Christopher Plummer) set almost entirely in an interrogation suite in a Montreal hotel in 1964. The National Film Board of Canada has also produced a film about the ill-fated ambassador.
Another mysterious and unsolved death with rumours of espionage is that of Marc Bastien, a 34-year-old systems administrator working at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow who was found dead in his apartment in December 2000. Initially, officials said he died of natural causes, but further investigations showed that he had antidepressants and alcohol in his blood. Theories surfaced that Mr. Bastien was drugged and robbed, or was a victim of entrapment, but in an interview with the Ottawa Sun in Dec. 2001, Mr. Bastien's parents said all of his belongings were accounted for. Months after Mr. Bastein's death, while being detained in a Toronto jail, American Delmart Vreeland stated that Mr. Bastien was his contact in Moscow while he was carrying out a covert mission to obtain Russian military information. Mr. Vreeland, who describes himself as an ex-U.S. naval intelligence agent but whose credibility is questionable, says that Mr. Bastien was murdered because he was a spy who knew too much.
While espionage allegations may not have entirely vanished from international diplomacy, the dangers of working in combat situations are indeed on the rise. Glyn Berry's death signals the new norm in terms of job risks. There are Canadian diplomats currently in Iraq, Haiti and in other countries with security alerts where Canada is exercising the 3D approach (defence, diplomacy and development). Canadian soldiers, diplomats and aid workers alike are equally at risk from non-state actors willing to use random violence like suicide or car bombs in an attempt to intimidate and change policy.
Of course, the cases of Mr. Watkins, Mr. Norman and Mr. Bastien are each unique and can't be explained away with the Cold War scenario (Mr. Norman might have been targeted for his ideological sympathies regardless of his job). But compared to other stories of Canadian diplomats whose lives have been on the line since the end of the Second World War, stories like that of Mr. Berry will likely become more common.
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