Cold War

RCMP feared traitor Kim Philby knew ‘most interesting’ Canadian secrets: documents

OTTAWA – The early-1960s revelation that British spy Kim Philby had worked for Moscow alarmed Canadian intelligence officials who feared that he had betrayed confidences gleaned from Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, once-secret archival records show.

Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby was recruited by Russian intelligence in the 1930s. He joined Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI-6, during the Second World War, rising through the ranks to become a senior liaison officer in Washington from 1949 to 1951.

British intelligence eventually learned of Philby’s treachery and confronted him in Beirut in late 1962. Early the next year, Philby slipped aboard a freighter to the Soviet Union, where he was granted asylum and lived until his death in 1988.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Cold War, RCMP

In Canada’s Northern Outposts, Rusting Relics Once Guarded Against Nuclear War

Chibougamau – Cold War Radar Pinetree Line

Strings of radars stretching across Canada were built to give early warnings of Soviet bombers coming over the Arctic. The region now faces a new era of militarization.

At the crossroads of Golf Street and Armed Forces Street, a large banana-shaped metal memorial on a pedestal gazes at the open sky in northern Canada. All but forgotten, its lower half blackened with time, it now stands forever still — or in repose, one might say.

In its glory days during the Cold War, the artifact — a radar — spun and bobbed with balletic grace, spat out bursts of waves and listened for echoes, as it continuously scanned the skies for Soviet bombers sneaking over the Arctic.

“It’s really crazy when you think about it, that this radar was the raison d’être of our whole town,” said Frédéric Maltais, who grew up in Chibougamau, a city in northern Quebec, on a military base that was shuttered at the end of the Cold War and became a golf course. “Imagine all the resources that went into managing one radar like that.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Cold War, USA

‘A clever agent’: notes from ‘watchers’ of spy Kim Philby made public for first time

Kim Philby & George Blake, Moscow

Secret surveillance of Britain’s ­notorious double agent, Kim Philby, made public for the first time in archived documents, reveals how keenly the Security Service wanted to confirm or disprove early suspicions of his high-level treachery.

In daily bulletins submitted to MI5 in November 1951, undercover operatives describe how Philby, codenamed Peach, moved about London.

They said he gave “no outward sign of being either nervous or on the alert, but your well trained man should not do so; every movement is natural – again as it should be”.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCold War

Who won the Cold War, anyway?

Conservatism may have won the Cold War, but conservatives lost the peace in the West

Thirty years ago this December 26, the impossible happened. One of the bloodiest states of the twentieth century (a horrific and highly competitive category) dissolved without violence. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had all but ended months earlier, when Russians took to the streets to defy the communist hardliners who had seized the government from an impotent Mikhail Gorbachev. That popular countercoup was itself largely bloodless: the soldiers called upon to enforce the hardliners’ rule refused to shoot their own countrymen.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCold War

As threats of ‘new Cold War’ between U.S. and China intensify, Canada needs firm strategy to adapt

 

Any strong words Trudeau may mouth about China are to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

Back in April, prominent U.S. senator Chuck Schumer tabled a sweeping 1,445-page bill that would lay the groundwork for America’s broad strategy to blunt China’s global rise.

The legislation, called the Innovation and Competition Act, identifies strategic industries like quantum computing, advanced semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, where it recommends the U.S. should ramp up public support. It proposes deeper protections for critical minerals, expands research spending, and aims to strengthen cyber defence capabilities, among other things.

Tucked away in three brief sections of the legislation, U.S. officials detail a role for Canada in their China policy. Despite receiving little attention in Canada, the plans are deeply consequential, providing a rough sketch of the shape of Canadian foreign policy for the coming decades.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted inCanada, China, Cold War, USA