Shattered Illusions: KGB Cold War Espionage in Canada by Donald G. Mahar (review)

In the era of the Rosenbergs and the Cambridge Five, Canada as a site of Cold War espionage is often reduced to a footnote. While the scholarship of Canadian Cold War surveillance is growing, public knowledge of the history is limited to a select few texts. The mistaken belief that Canadian history is inherently dull and its Cold War experience virtually nonexistent is why Donald G. Mahar's Shattered Illusions: KGB Cold War Espionage in Canada is an important read. Mahar, a retired Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis) officer, tells the compelling and at times unbelievable story of Yevgeni Vladimirovich Brik and James Douglas Finley Morrison. With first-hand information, including material from his interviews with Brik and insider knowledge of Canadian counter-intelligence, Mahar presents a thrilling real-life espionage story spanning over forty years.

Shattered Illusions follows the life of Lithuanian-born Russian Brik, his formative years on either side of the Iron Curtain, his recruitment by the kgb (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopansnosti), and his later arrest and imprisonment in Russia. The short chapters, generally chronological, allow for a quick read. The story is helped along with thirty-two relevant photographs. It is informative (at times verging on too much detail) about Brik's education, training, and voyage to Canada. Beginning in the early 1950s, Brik, a contact for the kgb, was responsible for passing coded information back to the Soviet Union through agents in Canada. His life took a sudden turn in the mid-1950s when he fell in love with a Canadian (the wife of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer no less). When he attempted to defect the rcmp Security Service persuaded him to become a double agent. Operation KEYSTONE followed and was designed to deal with Brik (codenamed GIDEON) and Morrison (codenamed LONGKNIFE), the rcmp officer who sold information back to the Soviet Union. It was the stuff of spy novels.

In this story of Brik, Operation KEYSTONE, and its aftermath, Mahar reveals how simple misjudgements unravelled carefully wound plans and subsequently ruined lives. Character flaws and hubris are at the centre of this tale of espionage and treason; extramarital affairs, gambling debts, and, at one point, a poorly timed craving for Montreal smoked meat power the course of unfortunate events.

Mahar's book unveils new information about Operation KEYSTONE. In 1982 journalist John Sawatsky exposed the treasonous actions of LONGKNIFE in For Services Rendered. Sawatsky presented a shockingly dark image of the rcmp that challenged the revered national symbol. Until Mahar's book, however, the finer details of Operation KEYSTONE remained unknown. Shattered Illusions provides names and identities for the figures that were previously known only by their code-names and it concludes the story that was unfinished in 1982.

The greatest strength of this book is the writer's background but Mahar does not present his views as much as he might. Mahar writes from a position of experience from his years in the rcmp Security Service and csis. With insight into the central personalities and events of the story, he offers a different perspective of Cold War counter-intelligence. Although he plays a part in Brik's later life, Mahar keeps himself in the periphery, referring to himself in third person. Indeed with this modesty the book's focus remains on Brik and not the writer, but something is missing. Without presenting Mahar's own opinions and experience the story wanes. Mahar's research for the book included a series of interviews with Brik in the 1990s but he says little about the nature of these conversations and how they were conducted. Mahar does not elaborate on his impressions of Brik, presenting instead a few glimpses of the man's character that leave the reader curious.

While the writing is uneven, too detailed in some areas and at times losing sight of the greater purpose, it is important to...