Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War

Dean F. Oliver teaches history at York University.

Unknown to most Canadians, John Bryden reveals, Canada was an
“intimate partner” in Allied intelligence-gathering during World War
II. Canadian cryptographers penetrated the codes and ciphers of Imperial
Japan, Vichy France, and fascist Italy, and in May 1940 reconstructed
the Italian armed forces’ entire order-of-battle. They located German
intelligence operatives in South America and tracked the movements of
Nazi submarines by analyzing wireless transmissions. They made an
important contribution to the Allied victory, but perused the private
messages of friendly powers, neutrals, and private citizens in the
process. Canada, it seems, had its very own “secret war.”

Bryden’s account of Allied activities is equally intriguing. Sir
William Stephenson (“Intrepid”) receives harsh treatment,
justifiably, as do the American intelligence services for their
unpardonable turf wars. The Russians appear brilliant and
characteristically mysterious by comparison, their espionage coups
positively breathtaking. Everyone was spying (successfully) on the Free
French, including the Canadians. Many of these insights are not new, but
from long-hidden Canadian sources Bryden systematically fills several
important gaps. Best-Kept Secret is a convincing argument for
international historical research and an indictment of government
secrecy.

The book is not for the uninitiated. Despite a brief primer on the
technologies and methods involved, Bryden plunges headlong into the
world of telekrypton cables and machine ciphers with scarcely a backward
glance. The avalanche of intelligence agencies, subagencies, and
officials is mesmerizing; some simple flowcharts would have worked
nicely. Bryden’s tendency to extrapolate wildly from his sources is a
more serious weakness. His comments on American duplicity in the Pearl
Harbor fiasco are pure speculation, as are remarks on the atomic bombing
of Japan. The last three chapters, which extend the story well beyond
the war years, specialize in such titillating hypotheses. After
cavalierly dismissing postwar British authors for spinning yarns with
little documentary support, Bryden falls into precisely the same trap.
It is an unfortunate ending to an otherwise fascinating book.