Canada's Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and co-author
of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Shadows of War, Faces
of Peace: Canada’s Peacekeepers.

Is there anything more fascinating than stories of spies and espionage?
Secret agents seducing their way to secrets? James Bond imitators
battling evil? And to think that foreign governments spy in little old
Canada, while Canada breaks enemy codes! That gee-whiz tone
unfortunately characterizes this slender volume, which looks at several
examples of spying from the turn of the century to the present. Graeme
Mount has uncovered some interesting material on Spanish efforts to work
from within Canada against America during the Spanish–American war,
and he has traced the activities of Spanish diplomats in Canada as
Japanese spies during World War II. These are useful additions to our
knowledge, but there is little hard analysis here, little understanding
of the tradecraft. Where he ventures into broader issues—e.g., the
work of Canada’s Examination Unit in deciphering Japanese codes during
the 1939–45 war—he seems simply uninformed. Compared to John
Bryden’s Best-Kept Secret, this book is to the history of Canadian
codebreaking as Canadian foreign-intelligence efforts are to the
CIA’s.