Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–51.

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Not a great power in economic or military strength, and still colonial in many of its attitudes, Canada in the interwar years seemed content to rely on Britain to provide such political and military intelligence as it chose about other powers. But the Second World War began to change attitudes in Ottawa, and Canada soon took its first steps into the collection of SIGINT, or signals intelligence. The Examination Unit, hidden away in the National Research Council, intercepted French, Japanese, and German radio traffic; soon Camp X, set up near Whitby, Ontario, began training secret agents under the auspices of Sir William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination, based in New York; and Hydra, a secret radio station at Camp X, linked London and North America and became Canada’s entrée to postwar SIGINT. All these events are detailed thanks to Kurt Jensen’s quite astonishing collection of material that he has had opened under Access to Information requests. The resulting work, well-written and clear, tells us more than we have hitherto known about Canada’s becoming a player in the secret intelligence world.