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| John Graham at his home in Ottawa. (Dave Chan for The Globe and Mail) |
By Michael Posner, [Ottawa] The Globe and Mail
In
a little-known chapter of the Cold War, Canadian diplomats spied for
the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Cuba in the aftermath of the
1962 missile crisis – and for years afterward. A major part of that
story is told in a forthcoming memoir by retired Canadian envoy John
Graham. Mr. Graham was one of a series of Canadian diplomats recruited
to spy for the CIA in Havana. The missions went on for at least seven
years, during the 1960s. “We didn’t have a military attaché in the
Canadian embassy,” explained Mr. Graham, who worked under the cover of
Political Officer. “And to send one at the time might have raised
questions. So it was decided to make our purpose less visible.” Mr.
Graham said he worked as a spy for two years, between 1962 and 1964. His
mandate was to visit Soviet bases, identify weapons and electronic
equipment and monitor troop movements.
The
espionage missions began after President John Kennedy asked Prime
Minister Lester Pearson – at their May, 1963, summit in Hyannis Port,
Mass. – whether Canada would abet American intelligence-gathering
efforts in Cuba. As a result of the crisis, which brought the
superpowers to the brink of nuclear war, the Soviets had agreed to
withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuban territory, in exchange for
Washington’s pledge to remove its own missile batteries from Turkey and
Italy. To monitor Russian compliance, the United States needed to
supplement data gleaned from almost daily U-2 reconnaissance flights. It
had few assets on the ground. Its networks of Cuban agents had been
progressively rolled up by Castro’s efficient counterintelligence
service. And having severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961, it
had no embassy of its own through which to infiltrate American spies.
Soon
after the summit meeting, Ottawa sent diplomat George Cowley to Havana.
Now deceased, Mr. Cowley, who had served in the Canadian embassy in
Japan and sold encyclopedias in Africa, spent about two months in Havana
in the late spring of 1963. He was followed by Mr. Graham, seconded
from his post as chargé d’affaires in the Dominican Republic. His formal
training, he told The Globe and Mail, was minimal – a few days at CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va. At the end of it, an agency officer offered
him a farewell gift – a sophisticated camera with an assortment of
telephoto lenses. He declined the present, arguing that if he were ever
caught with it, he’d surely be arrested. “But how will we know what the
Soviet military convoys are carrying?” a CIA officer asked him. “We need
precision. Configuration is essential for recognition.” “I’ll draw you
pictures,” Mr. Graham said. “It was a bit like the character in Graham
Greene’s Our Man in Havana, but that’s what I did.”
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