The Century of Secrets That Forged a Nation

How a hundred years of classified cables reveal the bloody birth of independence and the high stakes of global survival.

The coded message arrived in Ottawa on November 9, 1979, carrying the weight of a life-or-death decision. The subject line was clinical, but the contents were explosive: “Safe Haven for Members of U.S. Embassy in Iran.” In Tehran, the American embassy had fallen to student revolutionaries, and fifty-two diplomats were being held hostage. But six had escaped into the chaotic streets. They were hiding, terrified and hunted, and now the Canadian ambassador, Kenneth Taylor, was asking his government for permission to hide them. The risks were catastrophic. If the mob discovered the Americans in the Canadian residence, our own diplomats would likely face the firing squad or a lynching. The reply from Ottawa, buried in these Canadian diplomatic cables, was swift and terrifyingly simple: “You are authorized to accommodate USA Embassy staff.”

That single, covert decision defined a mature nation operating on the razor’s edge of geopolitics. But Canada did not start there. It began as a submissive colony, afraid to sign its own name to a piece of paper. To understand how a country finds its voice, you have to look past the history books and read the raw, unfiltered panic and fury hidden in the archives.

The Swollen Cork and the Blood of Vimy

In 1908, the state of Canadian foreign policy was not just subservient; it was an administrative disaster. A private letter from Governor General Earl Grey described the grim reality of the bureaucracy. There were only three men in the entire government who understood foreign relations. One was a drunk. The second had such difficulty expressing his thoughts that conversation with him was “as difficult as it is to extract an extra tight cork.” That left Joseph Pope, the only competent official, drowning in a sea of disorganized paper. The Governor General begged for a department to be created, if only to deal with the “swollen impossible cork” of incompetence that threatened to burst a blood vessel in the government.

When the First World War erupted in 1914, this lack of capacity turned from a bureaucratic joke into a national tragedy. Canada was automatically at war when Britain declared it, but the men dying in the mud of France were Canadian. As the body count rose, so did the rage of Prime Minister Robert Borden.

By 1918, Borden was in London, no longer the polite colonial administrator. He had seen the hospitals. He had read the casualty lists. In a blistering secret memorandum, he recorded a confrontation with the British War Cabinet. He told them that the British offensive at Passchendaele was a mistake, driven by incompetence. He described the Canadian Corps as the most formidable striking force in the Allied armies, led by a man, General Currie, who was superior to any British commander. Borden wrote that he “did not mince matters” when he told the British overlords that their refusal to promote brilliant civilians over professional soldiers amounted to “scrapping the brains of the nation” at a time when brains were desperate needed. The cables reveal a leader realizing that loyalty to the Empire was being paid for with the wasted blood of his citizens.

The Arctic Lie and the Signature

The war bought Canada a seat at the table, but the fight for independence was fought with fountain pens and polite, venomous letters. In 1923, the Halibut Treaty with the United States was ready for signing. Tradition dictated that the British Ambassador in Washington sign on Canada’s behalf. The Canadian government refused. A terse telegram from the Governor General to the Colonial Secretary laid down the new law: the treaty concerned Canada and the United States alone. The signature of a Canadian minister “should be sufficient.” It was a diplomatic coup, a declaration that Ottawa would no longer ask permission to manage its own backyard.

But asserting sovereignty required more than signatures; it required guarding the map itself. In 1925, the Americans looked north. The famous explorer Richard Byrd and Donald MacMillan were heading to the Arctic with US Navy aircraft. Canadian officials suspected a covert attempt to claim territory in the Arctic archipelago.

The cables detailing this incident read like a suspense novel. Canada moved quickly, establishing RCMP posts to assert sovereignty. When the American expedition arrived, they had failed to get the necessary permits. In a dramatic confrontation on the deck of a ship in Etah, North Greenland, the Canadian commander, G.P. Mackenzie, cornered Byrd. Byrd claimed he had a permit. Mackenzie called his bluff, repeating the lie in front of a witness and asking Byrd to confirm it. Byrd, trapped, replied, “Yes, that is correct.” He was lying. The Canadian government fired off a diplomatic note exposing the falsehood and asserting their laws. The State Department never replied to the note, but the message was received: the Arctic was not open for the taking.

The First Casualty of War

The path to World War II was paved with the illusion of unity, but the internal documents reveal a deep, fracturing bitterness between Ottawa and London. As Hitler’s shadow lengthened across Europe in August 1939, O.D. Skelton, the powerful Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, wrote a “Personal Note” that remains one of the most scorching indictments of British diplomacy ever written by a Canadian official.

Skelton wrote that the “first casualty in this war has been Canada’s claim to independent control of her own destinies.” He watched in horror as Canada drifted into a war caused by British policies initiated without Ottawa’s knowledge. He described the British attitude as “bland arrogance,” assuming that Canada would “trot behind, blindly and dumbly, to chaos.” Skelton was a patriot, but he was a realist. He saw his country being maneuvered into fighting Hitler “in his own back yard,” the very place where the enemy was strongest and the Allies weakest. His memo was a cry of frustration from a nation that had grown up, only to find itself treated once again like a child in the family parlour.

When the balloon finally went up, the chaos predicted by Skelton arrived. The evacuation of the Canadian legations in Europe in 1940 was a nightmare of burning documents and fleeing diplomats. Jean Désy, the minister in Brussels, chronicled his escape in a letter that drips with exhaustion. He described the bombing of Ostend, where his hotel was damaged by a mine, and the sight of British refugees being machine-gunned by German aircraft. He fled to Paris, then south, his car overheating, trapped in a column of refugees, sleeping in barns, and begging for gasoline. It was the end of the old diplomatic order, burned to ash on the roads of France.

The Atomic Ultimatum and Canadian Diplomatic Cables

The war changed everything. The British Empire was fading, and the United States was the new titan. Canada had to pivot, and the Ogdensburg Agreement of 1940, negotiated between Prime Minister Mackenzie King and President Roosevelt in a train car, sealed the continental marriage. But the marriage was volatile.

By 1950, the world was facing a new terror in Korea. The United States, bogged down and desperate, was considering the unthinkable: the use of atomic weapons to turn the tide against the Chinese.

Lester B. Pearson, then Secretary of State for External Affairs, sent a secret memorandum to Washington that stands as a defining moment of Canadian courage. He did not plead; he warned. He told the Americans that the atomic bomb was not just another weapon. Its use would destroy the cohesion of the Western alliance. He warned that using it against an Asian people for a second time would sever the links between the West and the East forever. Then came the ultimatum: the Canadian people would hold their government responsible if they did not speak up. It was a stark reminder that being an ally did not mean being a silent accomplice to Armageddon.

The Cold War also brought the war home. The tragedy of Herbert Norman, the Canadian ambassador to Egypt, remains a scar on the department’s history. Hounded by the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee over allegations of communist sympathies, Norman committed suicide in Cairo in 1957. The cables from Washington reveal the desperate scrambling of diplomats trying to manage the fallout. Ambassador A.D.P. Heeney reported a conversation with Pearson, who was shaking with anger. Pearson warned that if the Americans continued their witch hunt, the Canadian public reaction would be “violent” and “unanimously anti-American.” It was a grim lesson in the cost of standing between superpowers.

The Midnight Escape from Tehran

Decades later, the wires hummed with a different kind of crisis. The 1979 revolution in Iran had turned Tehran into a fortress of paranoia. When the American embassy fell, the world watched the hostages on television, blindfolded and paraded before the cameras. But the secret cables tell the story the cameras missed.

Ambassador Kenneth Taylor’s request to harbour the six escaped Americans was not just a humanitarian gesture; it was a covert operation run from an embassy. The risks were calculated in cold blood. A cable from Ottawa noted that while the Ambassador’s residence had diplomatic immunity, that was of “little use in face of determined mob incursion.” They were on their own.

For weeks, the Canadians played a dangerous game, issuing fake passports and coordinating with the CIA, all while maintaining a poker face to the Iranian authorities. When the “Canadian Caper” succeeded and the Americans flew out of Tehran to freedom, the relief in the cables was palpable. But the aftermath required legal armor. When Iran protested at the United Nations, Canada’s reply was icy and unyielding, citing “ancient and universally held principles of international law.” We had not just saved lives; we had upheld the rules of civilization in a place where they had vanished.

The New World Disorder

The archives do not end with a sunset. They continue into the murky, violent realities of the modern era. In 1994, the cables from Rwanda began to arrive in Ottawa. They described a descent into hell. “Day 58 of the Rwandan Crisis,” reads one report. It describes the Deputy High Commissioner in Kigali, shaken awake by mortar barrages, counting the seconds between explosions.

These documents, stripped of the polish of history books, reveal the terrifying texture of reality. They show us that Canada was not born fully formed. It was forged in the fire of these crises, shaped by men and women who sat in small rooms, reading secret cables, and deciding, again and again, that they would not be silent. They remind us that independence is not a gift; it is a heavy burden, carried one secret at a time.

The Hansard Files digs through dense archives to uncover these buried stories, from the bureaucracy of 1908 to the courage of 1979. Support independent historical investigation by subscribing today to help us keep digging.

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Source Documents

• Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. (2009). A History in Documents, 1909-2009.