"But the Story Was True": A Research Note on Canadian Intelligence Activities in Vietnam

Abstract

Recently declassified records reveal new information and confirm old assumptions about Canadian intelligence activities in Vietnam during the 1950s and 1960s. These records are now available online at Canada Declassified. This research note describes the new evidence and considers its implications for existing historiography regarding Canada and the International Commission for Supervision and Control and Canadian policy towards the American war in Vietnam. It suggests new opportunities for research on Canadian intelligence activities during the Cold War. More broadly, the note responds to the discussion in The Canadian Historical Review's December 2015 issue (volume 96, number 4) regarding the future study of Canada's diplomatic history and international action by suggesting that Canadian intelligence activities should be considered by scholars crafting narratives of Canadian international history.

Résumé

Des documents récemment déclassifiés révèlent des informations et confirment des hypothèses sur les activités de renseignement canadiennes au Vietnam dans les années 1950 et 1960. Ces documents sont maintenant accessibles en ligne sur Canada Declassified. La présente note de recherche décrit les nouveaux éléments de preuve et en examine les effets sur l'historiographie ayant trait aux rapports entre le Canada et la Commission internationale de surveillance et de contrôle ainsi qu'à la politique canadienne à l'égard de la guerre menée par les États-Unis au Vietnam. Elle suggère de nouvelles pistes de recherche sur les activités de renseignement canadiennes pendant la guerre froide. Par ailleurs, cette note constitue une réaction à la discussion lancée dans le numéro de décembre 2015 de la Canadian Historical Review (volume 96, numéro 4) à propos de l'étude future de l'histoire diplomatique et des activités internationales du Canada : elle propose que les activités de renseignement canadiennes soient prises en compte par les chercheurs qui écrivent au sujet de l'histoire du Canada sur la scène internationale.

The government of Canada has released a formerly top-secret document describing the intelligence activities of Canadian officers observing the implementation of the 1954 Geneva Accords in Indochina.¹ The 1962 memorandum, entitled "Intelligence Gathering Activities of the Canadian Delegation to the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam," resolves a number of historical questions, even while it suggests new avenues for further research. It was released in response to an Access to Information Act request filed by the Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project. This document and several others, which have been closed to Canadians for more than half a century, are now available online at Canada Declassified.²

It is now possible to identify the policy decisions that led the Canadian delegations to various International Commissions for Supervision and Control (icsc) in Indochina, and especially Vietnam, to gather intelligence and share it with Canada's allies. The commissions were created by the 1954 Geneva Accords, which ended French imperial rule in Indochina, and the icsc delegations were ostensibly there to control and supervise military forces as per the ceasefire agreement. The 1962 memorandum, along with other newly released records, offer ample evidence and granular description of how the Canadians collected intelligence and how it was shared with American, Australian, and British intelligence authorities. We now know the Canadians passed intelligence to their allies both via Ottawa, where it was sent to other national capitals, and by direct liaison with foreign intelligence services in the field.

The newly opened records provide important context for public statements that successive secretaries of state for external affairs – Paul Martin, Sr, and Mitchell Sharp – made in response to press reports that Canada was gathering intelligence in Vietnam. Both ministers' statements, to put it charitably, were incomplete. Similarly, the new information resolves a gap and some confusion in the secondary literature that has accused Canada of "complicity" in Vietnam while also indicating that the argument should be reconsidered and reformulated.

Finally, and most importantly, the documents pose new questions and open further avenues for research. In a 2015 issue of The Canadian Historical Review, David Meren called for a "re-engagement" with "Canadian diplomatic history and the broader history of Canada's international action."³ As Adam Chapnick pointed out in his response to Meren's article, the study of Canadian international history was long circumscribed by government secrecy and the lack of archival records open to all.⁴ The full extent of what Meren called Canada's "international action" has been shrouded in secrecy and has been much less accessible than the history of American foreign relations that Meren sets as a counter-example. Chapnick is right that access to records has improved, but the fight for access continues.⁵

These newly released documents about Canadian intelligence activities in Vietnam remind us that there remains more to learn about Canada's role in the Cold War world. What follows suggests that the study of Canada's "international action" must include analysis of Canada's Cold War intelligence policy as something distinct from, if not always separate from, the study of Canada's foreign, defence, or development policies. Just how much remains secret, of course, is unknown. We do not know what we do not know. But increased declassification of historical intelligence files will open new veins for research into Canadian and international history. Unlike Australia or the United Kingdom, there is no official or authorized history of Canada's intelligence organizations. Access to more records will allow us to understand more about the function and role of these machines of government and their connections with foreign governments. But, beyond institutional history, there are other rich veins: what role did Canadian intelligence organizations play in both the hot and cold battles of the Cold War and beyond; did Canada regularly cooperate and support its intelligence allies in their wars abroad; was intelligence used – or not – in the government of Canada's decision-making and policy-making; did Canadian intelligence organizations always agree with their allies, or did they differ in how they interpreted world affairs; and did they always cooperate, no matter the issue, or were there limits to their cooperation? The government of Canada's willingness to open these records offers some hope for the release of more historical records. Greater transparency into this element of Canadian history will be the crucial ingredient for building a fuller understanding of Canada's role and actions in the postwar world.

The document

The six-page memorandum on "intelligence gathering activities" was prepared for discussion by the Intelligence Policy Committee (ipc) in early 1962.⁶ Its unnamed authors were officers in the Department of External Affairs (dea) who worked in cooperation with the Joint Intelligence Bureau (jib) and the director of military intelligence. The memorandum was considered by the Joint Intelligence Committee (jic), which suggested amendments that the dea drafters accepted before distribution to the ipc.⁷ The memorandum itself was marked "top secret" and also "limited distribution," and there were seventeen copies of the document printed. D.B. Dewar, the secretary of the ipc, requested that all copies of the memorandum be returned to him after the discussions in the ipc.⁸

Canada had been invited to join India and Poland to form the icsc in 1954, and the three countries sent delegations to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.⁹ The Canadian delegation in Laos performed an intelligence-gathering function until the end of the icsc delegation there in 1958. While it had been "originally envisaged" that the delegation in Cambodia would also gather intelligence, that delegation did not do so.¹⁰ The major Canadian effort was in Vietnam. The document states plainly that "over the past six years the Canadian Delegation to the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam has been collecting military, economic and topographical intelligence on Vietnam and biographical information on members of the Polish delegation." Most of this intelligence, "which chiefly concerns North Vietnam is passed to the British, United States and Australian intelligence authorities."¹¹

The public record to date

There has been journalistic reporting and speculation of Canadian intelligence activities in Vietnam for over fifty years. In 1967, the Montreal Star reported that Canadian officers on the delegation were "functioning as spies when they were supposed to be serving as international civil servants."¹² Paul Martin, Sr, the secretary of state for external affairs, issued a press release the next day declaring that "members of the Canadian Delegation are not engaged in clandestine or spying activities." Martin directly addressed the Montreal Star's claims that the Canadian delegation in Vietnam prepared its reports "in duplicate with one copy for Ottawa and the other for the United States Embassy in Saigon." Martin said this was speculation and that only Ottawa decided what information was passed to other governments; the delegation had no such authority.¹³ The controversy was so great that Martin feared he might have to resign over the issue.¹⁴

Three years after the Montreal Star article, Brigadier Donald Ketcheson was quoted in the press saying that when he served with the icsc in Vietnam, he passed information to the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (cia) officers in Vietnam. The Department of External Affairs, he said, knew about this intelligence exchange but "looked the other way."¹⁵ This information obviously contradicted Martin, but, by this time, the secretary of state for external affairs was Mitchell Sharp. Sharp distributed a copy of Martin's statement, which he said "continued to express the policy of the Government." And yet Sharp offered a caveat: "I cannot, understandably, speak with absolute assurance with respect to practices which may or may not have been followed at a much earlier date in very different circumstances from those now prevailing in Vietnam."¹⁶

The slow drip of details continued. Another three years later, as part of a 1973 television special on the Vietnam War produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a former us Marine Corps intelligence officer recalled receiving reports from the cia based on information provided by Canadian icsc members about anti-aircraft weapons in North Vietnam in 1962 and 1963.¹⁷ This was an explosive claim. The American air war only started in 1964. But a 1973 audience hearing the charge that the Canadians were identifying anti-aircraft weapon sites could be forgiven for assuming Canada was directly aiding the massive American bombing campaigns against North Vietnam. It was an easy stretch to charges of hypocrisy: in 1965, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson had given a speech at Temple University calling for a pause in the American bombing of North Vietnam to facilitate the search for a peaceful settlement.¹⁸ All of the news stories had broken at the peak of the war and the nadir of its popularity in the United States and Canada.

The news report and the not-quite-airtight denials from the secretaries of state have become part of the historiography of Canada and the Vietnam War.¹⁹ They were recounted by James Eayrs in the fifth volume of his In Defence of Canada series, accusingly titled Indochina: Roots of Complicity.²⁰ Eayrs could rely on more than just newspapers: the Department of External Affairs allowed Eayrs to view archival records that detailed a conversation between the Canadian ambassador in Washington and State Department officials regarding the passing of intelligence, and he saw a 1956 report with marginalia indicating the intelligence information had been sent to the Australian, British, and us governments. Eayrs described the news stories from 1967, 1970, and 1973, observing: "Official denials resounded. But the story was true."²¹

Eayrs' evidence and argument were repeated in full in Victor Levant's Quiet Complicity: Canadian Involvement in the Vietnam War.²² Eayrs, and, by extension, Levant, used the newspaper reports and Canadian archival documents to reveal that, in 1956, Ottawa passed information gathered by its icsc delegation to other countries. This revelation had not been denied by either Martin or Sharp. But there was no obvious connection between the evidence of intergovernmental intelligence sharing in the 1950s to the later claims that Canadians were passing intelligence directly to cia officials in Vietnam.

In a 2016 article, Mariam Matejova and Don Munton analyzed the early discussions between Americans and Canadians in 1954 in which the Canadians had agreed to send the United States information collected by the Canadian members of the delegation. They also found Canadian reports in the National Archives of the United Kingdom: evidence beyond doubt that Ottawa was sending information to the British.²³ Their article is valuable, but it focuses primarily on the mid-1950s and does not resolve the question of whether Canadians were passing intelligence to American intelligence officers in the field.

Up until this point, the archival records used by scholars have been limited largely to intergovernmental exchange in the mid-1950s; the press accounts published in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggest that there was an unauthorized liaison in the field in the early 1960s. The ipc document reveals the evolution of Canadian intelligence activities over the first eight years of the icsc, confirming that Canadians passed intelligence to allies both from Ottawa to other capitals and from Canadians in the field to other intelligence services.

Origins

Canada's intelligence-gathering activities in Indochina seemed like a good idea to many people. On August 19, 1954, the Canadian jic prepared a brief suggesting that "advantage should be taken on Canadian membership on the three Commissions to gather intelligence on Indo-China."²⁴ Already, by mid-August, there were a number of Americans and Canadians who had seen Canada's invitation to participate on the icsc as an intelligence opportunity. Matejova and Munton describe a July 1954 conversation between Arnold Heeney, the Canadian ambassador in Washington, and State Department officials, in which Heeney suggested that Canada would share intelligence gained in Indochina with the United States.²⁵ In 1954, too, the cia "had expressed interest in the intelligence gathering potentialities of the Canadian presence in Indo-China."²⁶ It is unclear which came first: the cia's interest or Heeney's offer. And, separately, in early August, the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence's (dsi) representative on the jic had raised the issue with his colleagues on the committee. The dsi's interest stemmed from the hope of gaining some information from Polish doctors working in Indochina.²⁷ The idea that the Canadians could gather useful information in Vietnam seems to have been a relatively widespread

Figure 1.

Military Component Canadian Delegation to the International Control Commission in South Vietnam.

Source: © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada / Department of National Defence fonds e010782774 (2021).

assumption of those who worked in the realm of intelligence, both in Canada and elsewhere.

There was another widespread assumption amongst Canadian officials considering an intelligence collection role – namely, that "great care" was needed to "avoid the compromise of such efforts." To this end, the jic's August 1954 brief "specifically ruled out" any liaison between "either the cia or uk sis representatives in the field." Any passing of intelligence information, the jic recommended, should not be done by Canadians in Indochina but, rather, by arrangements made in Ottawa with us and uk authorities.²⁸ Such arrangements, presumably, would reduce the likelihood of exposure and provide Ottawa with full control over what information was passed to others.

The jic then formally proposed the idea to Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson in a memorandum at the end of August.²⁹ The jic recommended that a "final decision" on such a plan be delayed until the Canadian commissioners to each delegation had arrived in the country, familiarized themselves with the situation "on the ground," and could make their own decision.³⁰ The first Canadian commissioner in Vietnam, Sherwood Lett, simply refused to participate in the scheme – or, as the jic's document put it, "was reluctant to accept this responsibility."³¹ But Lett's successor, David Johnson, agreed to participate when he took up the post in August 1955. After he agreed, he was sent "a questionnaire listing various points of intelligence interest."³² This questionnaire was likely prepared by Canada's jib, which was responsible for drafting later questionnaires sent to the icsc and disseminating the responses.³³

Increased intelligence collection in 1956

The intelligence information that the Canadians gathered in late 1955 and in early 1956 seems to have whetted London and Washington's appetite for more. In 1956, British and American officials pressed Canada for more information from the Canadian delegation. In June, the "uk sis [Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes referred to as mi6] representative in Washington" asked the Canadians to question their own officers "returning from Indo-China on the basis of a uk sis questionnaire."³⁴ The Canadians agreed to do this and then pass the answers to the British. Separately, the cia asked if their own officers could interview returning Canadian officers; the Canadians gave a similar reply to that of the British: Canadian officials would interview the returning Canadian officers themselves (seemingly on the basis of a cia-prepared questionnaire) and the answers would be passed to the cia. By late 1956, then, there were multiple questionnaires that guided the interviews of Canadians returning from Indochina: one provided by the sis, one from the cia, and then others prepared by Canadian service intelligence directorates. In November, the questionnaires were amalgamated into one document, and the questionnaire was sent to the delegation abroad. At some point in the 1950s, the Australians began contributing their intelligence requirements to the questionnaire.³⁵

After 1958, rather than being interviewed at the end of their tour, Canadian officers were debriefed in the field by a member of the delegation appointed for this purpose (the delegation's intelligence and security officer). This information was reported back to Ottawa, where the jib published summaries – initially, annual ones, then monthly – of "all economic, transportation, and logistic intelligence" and passed this information to "pertinent Canadian, British, U.S., and Australian intelligence agencies."³⁶

The Canadians gathering information in Vietnam were both civilians and military: a smaller amount of information was gathered by diplomats on the delegation, in what seems to have been moments of opportunity. The "bulk of the intelligence collected," however, was gathered by officers of the Canadian delegation when they were on month-long visits to "fixed team-sites" throughout North Vietnam. At a team site, the officers of the delegation were always accompanied by a North Vietnamese officer and "denied access to the local people and restricted in their movements."³⁷ They were "not allowed to carry any material of an intelligence nature, nor to correspond with the Delegation on this aspect of their activities." Instead, they gathered intelligence almost exclusively from personal observation and, on occasion, photography, with the information they gleaned "committed to memory."³⁸ Their reports were often supplemented with hand-drawn maps and diagrams.

Another recently declassified nine-page report from one officer travelling by train to Dong Dang from Hanoi in October 1957 reveals the enormous detail that could be gained from a single train trip and sent back to Ottawa for distribution to allies. The train trip was six hours and forty-five minutes, during which the Canadian officer travelled in a first-class coach compartment. (When a single Canadian officer travelled alone, he shared the compartment with an officer from the Indian delegation.) The long trip and the distance covered allowed the Canadian officer to report on train schedules, to distinguish between passenger trains (with French engines) and commerce or freight trains (with larger Chinese and Russian engines). The officer noted the location of all rail bridges and the fact that every rail bridge was garrisoned by the People's Army of Vietnam (pavn) or North Vietnamese troops. Along the route from Hanoi to Dong Dang, the officer could observe and identify the locations of seven military installations, ranging from training sites with airfields, to pavn headquarters, to anti-aircraft gun emplacements. The report included sightings of factories and crops along the way.

The Dong Dang site was manned by approximately twenty pavn soldiers equipped with small arms. Officers from the delegations visited important towns in the surrounding region. Travel to these towns allowed the Canadian members to report on the quality of the roads, the estimated capacity of bridges and ferries, the old French fortifications (mostly destroyed and not rebuilt), radio stations, and surrounding crop and industrial production. Vehicles were closely examined; the officer in this case noted that most tires were in poor repair and that any new tires seen were "from China and are marked 'Export' in Chinese characters." Although pavn units had little mechanical transport, the jeeps and trucks that the Canadians observed were made in Russia. Sightings of weapons larger than small arms were rare: "One mortar was seen by my predecessor, while on occasion I saw an anti-tank weapon." Small arms were Russian or Chinese, dating from before the Korean War and usually from the Second World War era.³⁹

More analysis and research is required to determine the usefulness of the delegation officers' intelligence to Canada's American, British, and Australian allies. But both the initial requests and the continued questions from Washington, London, and Melbourne (home of Australia's jib) point to the value that other intelligence services placed on Canadian activities. In 1963, the cia attaché at the us Embassy in Ottawa told the jib that the Canadian reports had "made valuable new contributions as well as confirmed other intelligence." He wrote that the Canadian reports on railroads and highways were of "particular value," as were reports on telecommunications facilities. These were of "special value to our current basic survey of telecommunications facilities in North Vietnam."⁴⁰

The Canadian officers in Vietnam and the jib asked the cia for information and advice to improve their intelligence-gathering activities. Reporting on rice crops was particularly important, and, yet, "practically no Canadian Officer has any background knowledge regarding the planting, cultivation and/or harvesting of rice." The jib asked if the cia could provide information "as to what a good or poor rice crop looks like."⁴¹ It seems that the cia, in the end, did arrange to teach the Canadians about rice.⁴² The jib posed additional requests to the cia for information regarding cement, fertilizer, armaments, shipbuilding, railroads, and other subjects that would help the Canadians gathering intelligence in Vietnam.⁴³

The Canadians were unsuccessful in keeping their intelligence-gathering activities secret. According to Brigadier Lloyd E. Kenyon, who served on the

Figure 2.

Military Component Canadian Delegation to the International Control Commission in South Vietnam.

Source: © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada / Department of National Defence fonds e010782762 (2021).

Canadian delegation in 1963–4, a member of the Polish delegation who later defected to Canada revealed that "Canadian officers in the North were notably insecure." When the Canadian officers left their bedroom, an agent working for the Poles would enter the room, lift up the ink blotter on the desk, and find the officer's notes made for preparing an intelligence report.⁴⁴ North Vietnam accused Canada of espionage and expelled a member of the Canadian delegation.⁴⁵ Newly released Polish archival records make clear that both the North Vietnamese and the Poles knew of what they called Canadian "espionage" activities.⁴⁶

Intelligence liaison in the field from 1957

The memorandum resolves the questions of whether and how the Canadian delegation passed information to other intelligence services. Previously released archival records have only revealed that the Canadian delegation passed information to Ottawa and that the jib in turn distributed the intelligence to American, British, and Australian allies. The newspaper reporting from the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as Kenyon's oral history account, suggest that the Canadians did pass intelligence to foreign intelligence services in the field – that is, in Vietnam itself – but the details have been murky.

Ketcheson, when explaining that he passed information to the Americans in Vietnam, argued that the dea had "looked the other way," suggesting that this liaison was not officially sanctioned. Kenyon's oral history also claims that the Canadians passed intelligence to the Americans directly in the field (and, among other things, received money from the cia to buy bicycles to make intelligence gathering easier). Kenyon has suggested that the in-country exchange was established exclusively based on verbal instructions.⁴⁷

As explained above, such liaisons had been forbidden in the earliest years of Canada's intelligence collection. In February 1957, however, the "injunction against passing information directly" to the "uk sis and the cia" in the field was lifted. Just how and why this change occurred is not entirely clear; passive writing and some haziness surround the description in the document. The decision to allow "liaison in the field" was made "apparently at our own [that is, Canadian] initiative" and with the "approval" of the American and British intelligence agencies. The document lists three reasons for the change: to allow "a greater flow of useful British and United States information on Vietnam" – that is, it seems, a greater flow of information from the British and Americans to the Canadians; so that field liaisons would speed up the passage of information from the Canadians to the sis and cia; and so that it would allow officers in the field "to deal with intelligence needs as they arose on a day-to-day basis."⁴⁸

It seems possible that the Canadians believed they would receive better and more timely information from the Americans and British in Vietnam than if they relied on Washington or London to forward information. But the year after the liaison was allowed, in 1958, requests for information from the British and Americans "considerably increased" to the point that, in August 1958, an army officer was designated as a full-time "Intelligence and Security Officer" to coordinate "the intelligence collection activities including direct liaison with the British and United States representatives."⁴⁹ Kenyon explains that the officer made a weekly visit to meet with the British military attaché in Saigon and to the headquarters of the American Military Assistance Advisory Group.⁵⁰

The fact that officers in the field, like Ketcheson and Kenyon, were unclear whether or not the liaison was the result of official and stated policy is perplexing and raises questions about both the clarity and communication of policy regarding the direct sharing of intelligence. But, in addition to the 1962 memorandum detailing the liaison, a 1961 telegram refers to "an authorized clandestine exchange on the ground with uksis."⁵¹ The liaison was not a rogue operation; it was Canadian policy.

Kenyon's interview suggests that the liaison relationship was haphazard and dependent on the personal interest of officers on the delegation.⁵² The exchange in Vietnam seemed to create problems for the exchange of information between capitals: there was confusion in 1961 when some information was passed by the Canadian delegation to the uk military attaché in Saigon that was not also sent from Ottawa to London. The information in this particular transmission was "outside [the] strict jib field," which suggests the local exchange included intelligence beyond the types mentioned in the jib's periodic reports.⁵³ More research is required to fully explain how the liaison worked, what it achieved, and, most crucially, if and when it stopped. Did the Canadians continue to share intelligence in the field with the cia after the "Americanization" of the Vietnam War in 1964? Kenyon, in his oral history, mentions that the intelligence requests from the Americans changed after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.⁵⁴ But how did it change and for how long?

And what came next? How did Canadian intelligence activities in Vietnam – along with the political and media reactions to revelations of spying – alter the direction of Canadian intelligence going forward? There was clearly push back in the dea. In 1970, Thomas Delworth, a dea officer who had served as senior political adviser to the icsc in Saigon and Hanoi in the 1960s, was asked to reflect on his experience as part of an internal review of Canadian intelligence activities. He was by then ambassador to Indonesia, but what he saw on the icsc continued to irritate him. The justification for Canada's intelligence activities in Vietnam, Delworth said, was a "quid pro quo," the price paid for the increased amount of intelligence that Canada received from its allies. This argument – that "for the privilege of getting all this precious information [from allied intelligence services], we [Canada] simply must give something in return" – had left him with "a very bad pain in the posterior." Canada's "intelligence policy," he wrote, should, "like defence policy," follow "foreign policy, not the reverse."⁵⁵ Clearly, he believed that Canada's intelligence activities in Vietnam operated on a separate track from Canada's foreign policy and that the two were serving different ends. Here is more grist for the argument that Canada's intelligence activities operated, at least at times, on a separate track of Canada's "international action" in world affairs and must be studied in more detail.

Delworth – obviously, a critic of Canada's intelligence activities in Vietnam – thought Canada's approach was "naive in the extreme, and politically potentially suicidal." This is striking, for he was writing after both Martin's 1967 and Sharp's 1970 public statements. It emphasized the enormous risks perceived by these ministers in the exposure of Canadian intelligence activities. "I hope," wrote Delworth, that "we have learned something from our painful experiences in this connection in North Vietnam where we were engaged in extensive efforts which had nothing to do with Canadian interests, simply to have a contribution to make." He ended his observations with a plea: "This kind of lunacy must stop. But if some small efforts are to continue, please oh please, let us be more professional about it."⁵⁶

Look back, looking forward

The 1962 memorandum reveals and clarifies the extent of Canadian intelligence activities in Vietnam. But the document, and this research note, make no effort to determine the value of these activities. There are obvious questions about the effects of the policy. Were Canadian intelligence activities in Vietnam worth the effort and the later public charges of Canadian complicity in the American war? And from whose perspective should these activities be evaluated? One means of assessing the value would be to determine whether the information passed to Canada's allies can be understood to have shaped the actions of the Americans, Australians, or British towards Vietnam. But another, perhaps more important, assessment should be made against just what the government of Canada was seeking to achieve from passing intelligence to its allies.

There is still significant room for analysis and debate as to whether the Canadian intelligence activities in Vietnam were "lunacy," as Delworth put it. This research note is not meant to render judgement. But the facts remain: Ottawa parlayed Canada's role as an international observer into an intelligencegathering opportunity. In the abstract, this may not be surprising. States spy on each other. But did the intelligence-gathering activities of the Canadians on the icsc represent a break in common Canadian practice, or did Canada frequently turn its active participation in international organizations into intelligence collection opportunities? To what extent did Canada's efforts to present itself as an honest broker and good global citizen provide the cloak for cloak-and-dagger work? How did Canadian "international action" in the intelligence world help or hinder other Canadian actions on the world stage? When it comes to Canadian international history in the postwar world, the research tasks are nowhere near over. They are just beginning.