George Ignatieff

GEORGE IGNATIEFF

*Interviewers: Hill, Pawelek -

 

[HILL]* Good afternoon. We are pleased to have with us today Ambassador George Ignatieff, formerly Canada's Permanent Representative to NATO, to the United Nations and to the Geneva Disarmament Conference also previously Provost of Trinity College, University of Toronto and now an active participant in the public debate on international peace and security issues. Ambassador Ignatieff, we are certainly delighted that you are ready to participate in this project, an oral history of Canadian policy in NATO, and we very much look forward to hearing what you have to say.

 

[IGNATIEFF] I am looking forward to participating in this project, which I think is very worthwhile. In teaching international relations at the University of Toronto, I found that there were very different perspectives in approaching just what Canada's role had been. On the whole the current generation, I think, underestimates the importance of Canada's contribution not only in NATO but in the United Nations and the whole system of international institutions.

 

[HILL] Ambassador Ignatieff, as you know, what we are trying to do in this project is to obtain the views of those Canadians who have been most active over the years in dealing with NATO. We are trying to examine the importance of NATO membership to Canada and how well NATO has served Canada's immediate and long term foreign policy interests over the years. We are trying to look at the main policy developments and issues in our field over the past 40 years in a fairly systematic fashion and to learn what happened and how Canada and the Alliance were affected by various developments. So the focus of our discussions will be on those periods of your career when you were directly involved in NATO affairs or NATO-related issues: for example when you were Canada's representative on the working group that set up the consultative and defense planning structure for the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization and when you were Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council more than a decade later. However, we would also like to get the real flavour of your own personal views and reflections on the world scene and on Canada’s foreign policy. So we will also touch on some of the other periods of your extensive, and if I may say so, very interesting career.

 

[IGNATIEFF] As far as NATO is concerned, I think that I should explain that I had really four different stages of intervention. One was working with Escott Reid in the negotiations of the North Atlantic Treaty itself, which was signed on 4 April 1949; I was then sent to Washington to replace Tommy Stone on the international committee which was meeting, representative of all the members that had signed the Treaty, to set up the consultative machinery provided for under the Treaty and particularly under articles 4 and 2, and then as defense liaison officer both in Washington in dealing with the Korean War, and then later as head of defense liaison in External Affairs. I was involved in developing the military aspects really related more to the Korean War. One of the factors that is sometimes overlooked is that nobody was extremely keen when we signed the Treaty to go into immediate military dispositions, deployments, and commitments. We were all in the process of demobilizing, which was one of the reasons why it seemed that there was a very direct imbalance of security in Europe, because the Soviets had not demobilized the way the Western powers had, but I should stress that back in ‘48 and '49 there was no great enthusiasm on the part of any of the allies to go into military commitments. It was all sparked by Korea, and then the fourth stage was when I was Ambassador to NATO, between '62 and '66, where I got involved in things such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Crisis, the Greek-Turkish crisis and all the other things that went on, and then of course the whole question of nuclear weapons.

 

[HILL] We will look at those various periods. These interviews are built in terms of your own career, so they are done in certain phases. And we have had the pleasure of reading your autobiography, The Making of a Peacemonger. Not only was it very revealing about international affairs, but I greatly enjoyed many of your anecdotes. I think it all helps to bring international affairs alive.

 

Part I - Early Years, to 1939

[HILL] If I might start very briefly with what we could call part 1, which would be the early years up to 1939, in your memoirs you referred to your experiences of the Russian Civil War, your years at school in England, and then finding a new home in Canada. You lived in Montreal and Toronto, worked in the interior of B.C., studied at Jervis Collegiate and then at the University of Toronto and then subsequently won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about those early years and the main impressions made on you by them, I think particularly as they affected your later approaches to your diplomatic life and your thinking about international peace and security.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, I think that the main effect on my career and my ongoing interest in peace and security really is the fact that I was in a sense a war child of World War I. That was that. My first recollections at the age of four, when one begins to have, not a very rational, but at least some impressionistic view of what is going on, was of the March revolution in 1917, and then through to the Civil War, which we encountered when the family moved down to the Caucasus - to Kislovoosk - to get away from the tensions and the whole upheaval in the capital city of Petrograd, as it was then. We were in the middle of the Civil War. My father was arrested and brought before a revolutionary tribunal. He was rescued by a student who recognized him as the former Minister of Education who had brought forth a lot of reforms, and we narrowly escaped death. We were on an execution list as hostages after an attempt on the life of Lenin in Moscow, when a whole lot of the Russian aristocracy were put to death in one way or another with or without trial. Father was arrested as a hostage, charged with counter revolutionary activities - which he could not have been very active in, because he was in bed, a sick man with heart trouble, at the time - but as I say he was rescued by a student from Moscow University, recognizing him he was a member of the tribunal. He said that if father was shot he would raise hell with the teachers and the students in the town where this tribunal was sitting, and as the Bolsheviks were then at that time relying on a good many of the students and teachers, that sort of thing in the social democratic ranks rather than the Bolshevik ranks, they let him go. We then were able to get through with the help of the White Russian movement to the sea coast of the Black Sea, and were taken off the beaches of Novorossijsk by a British war ship.

 

So my very first recollection was of civil war, of death. And what was worse, was that I saw the end of, not only of war but the breakup of a society as a result of defeat in war, which of course many saw at the end of World War II in Germany and Austria and Japan. In Russia, what isn't perhaps generally realized, was that the terrible losses and the failure to provide for munitions and supplies to the Soviet army led to terrible defeats in which whole armies were surrounded and defeated and taken prisoner. Then that led gradually to mutiny. It was the mutiny in the Imperial army that led to the breakdown of Tzar ism and that was my first experience with a breakdown in society. Trains stopped running, water wasn't safe, electricity or gas wasn't available and then food became scarcer and scarcer until you were lucky to get a crust of bread; that sort of breakdown in society as a result of war. This was the end of a war which in the west had been celebrated as a victory. In Russia it was celebrated by terrible bloodshed and the breakdown of society. This was all between the years of four to seven and those were impressionable years. Then of course we had a time in England as refugees. I started my schooling there and found myself in the equivocal position that most children of course would regard anybody from Russia as Bolshie, although my father was persecuted by the Bolsheviks; and we tried farming - father tried farming. It was a financial disaster, and little by little my elder brothers, of which I had four, found that they had a better chance of employment in Canada. One came over as a harvester, another one came over as an engineer and another one came over as a mining engineer. I was 15 when we came to Canada with my mother, and since I was brought in on a CPR colonization scheme which was bringing in labour not intellectuals, but labourers, I was sent to a railroad construction crew, actually on the Crows Nest Pass, joining the Crows Nest Line with the Trail Smelter. I worked there as an axeman, so I did get a certain amount of initiation in Canadian life as it was lived by the bohunk as well as an intellectual; this experience and other jobs, enabled me to get to university and win several scholarships, which culminated with the Rhodes Scholarship in 1930 for Ontario, which got me to Oxford. I think the significance of that was that these were the Depression Years. Everybody in Canada, except very few fortunates, were in one way or another in financial straits. I was living, in order to take the financial burden off my parents, in a little boarding house here and trying to get whatever jobs I could in hotels, on farms and that sort of thing. But it did lead up to entering the competition for the Rhodes Scholarships and brought me to Europe in the immediate pre-war years. In fact, I remember my father who had, when he recovered his health after the Revolution, become President of the Red Cross, looking after the emigres and the refugees and setting up clinics and that sort of thing. He was quite upset that I should be going back to Europe. He felt that we were very lucky to get away from that sort of background. The thought it was not good for me to be returning so soon to the continent which had brought so much distress to our family. But, he accepted that this was an honour and so on, although in a strange way I was plunged into the replay of the German threat, the German threat against Eastern Europe. I was in fact working on a Ph.D. in Eastern Europe in Bulgaria when the war broke out. I was working on some historical material relating to my grandfather's activities when he was dealing with the Eastern crisis in 1877/78 and here I found myself, in a way, looking back on the origins of the same sort of Eastern crisis enlarging and engulfing the whole of Europe and North America. I remember the time when I was at Oxford, I met Mike Pearson who was then Counsellor at Canada House and he brought a number of the Canadian students together, and I remember participating in a discussion which was very interesting, among the Canadian students on scholarships in Britain. Just what should Canada do? We were very divided during this period of 1939, just after the Munich crisis. I think that the majority of Canadian students felt that Canada should stay out of European wars, and I found myself in the minority arguing that even at that late stage it was not perhaps too late to try and do something to resurrect the collective security provisions of the League of Nations. This discussion I may say was before the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. I said that there was, it seemed to me, a chance of getting the Soviet Union, Britain and France to work together under the collective security provisions of the League Covenant to stop Czechoslovakia being consumed by the Germans, but if we did not do that, there was every likelihood that Germany would just move forward into Eastern Europe East as they had done before. And we would be faced with a much bigger threat in the end and Canada would have to come in.

 

[HILL] Just as a matter of curiosity, wasn't the alignment of Bulgaria and Romania pro-German at that time? Yugoslavia was more independent, I believe.

 

[IGNATIEFF] What I discovered, of course, was that the prejudices of the then King of Bulgaria, Boris, who was a German, had a great deal to do with the German orientation of the Bulgaria sovereign? Bulgarians were fundamentally pro-Russian and would have taken whatever side the Soviets would have taken, and were very unwilling victims of the German occupation. The Hungarians, less so, because they had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire; but with the Yugoslavs, you're quite right, popular opinion was definitely against the Germans. And that's what Tito was able to build on. But to return to the effects of going back to Europe, as I say and, to Eastern European politics in my Ph.D. project, which I never completed, because I was warned by British Intelligence that I would be among those candidates for early internment because of the German penetration into the Bulgarian government and military circles. My grandfather had signed the Treaty which gave Bulgaria its independence as a result of the war with Russia, so I was hardly inconspicuous. I never returned, but one of the main streets in Sofia is still named after my grandfather and he is regarded as one of their patron saints.

 

Part II - England, 1939-43

 

[IGNATIEFF] So, I got back to England at the outbreak of World War I, and decided to go to Oxford to join up. I joined up with the local regiment which was the "Oxford and Bucks". It was a curious system, you went to the regimental headquarters at the Oxford and Bucks and were met by a recruiting sergeant and doctor and the preliminaries of joining the Armed Forces were quickly over. The regimental sergeant major said: "You got a queer name here". I said: "It comes from Russia". "Oh," he said: "I was in Murmansk in the First World War". He said: "We used to fish with mills bombs. We threw the mills bombs up stream and the fish came up and took everything you had". Well, that was my introduction into the Armed Forces but then you were brought before a Board which was to decide your fate as to which branch of the Armed Forces you were to serve in. And, there was an Admiral, there was a General and an Air Force Group Captain and the head of Balliol and they looked through my university record you see, and were wondering which service I was best fitted for. Somebody suggested that I might go into the cavalry. I was not a particularly keen horseman - but the head of Balliol said: "Look, you have all these languages, you're a natural for the intelligence course." So they wrote out that I was to be made a cadet, training as an officer in the Intelligence Corps and that was that and I was sent to an extraordinary place, which is quite historic and now a notorious tourist spot. That was Woburn Abbey - seat of the Duke of Bedford. At the outbreak of war, in addition to the regular intelligence, MI5 and MI6 and so on, with the War Office, Sir Campbell Stuart, who was incidentially a Canadian, was asked by the Prime Minister, Mr. Chamberlain, to set up a headquarters at Woburn Abbey which would combine economic and political warfare with spying in one form or another against the Germans, in neutral countries. I was assigned to that part of the operation which had to deal with the interruption of supplies to Germany from Russia and the Balkans.

 

But, this was in 1940. Before the war when I had come back from Bulgaria, in 1939, there were exams for admission to External Affairs and Mike Pearson urged me to write them in London. I had written and forgotten all about it and apparently I was top of the list of eligible candidates for the Third Secretary competition of those who had written in London. Doctor Skelton, who was then Under-Secretary, had sent a message to Vincent Massey who was Head of the Mission in London begging for reinforcements, because they were very short staffed with all the things that had to be done with the Canadian Armed Forces coming over, the agreements that had to be negotiated, and dealing with the evacuation of Canadian women and children from the war zones. Getting women and children out of the war zone and a whole lot of English people, I mean children, being sent to Canada. That was my first job. The staff of Canada House were an extraordinary group of people: Vincent Massey, there was Mike Pearson, there was Hume Wrong, Charles Ritchie and Leon Mayrand, and that was all there was to deal with all these war problems. So Skelton said in reply to this appeal for help, he said: "Well, George Ignatieff passed the exam and we understand that he is somewhere in England, why don't you get him". So I was asked. I thought that that would be one way I could get into active service with the Canadian Armed Forces, instead of being in the strange menagerie at Woburn Abbey, where we were doing intelligence appreciations, and were also preparing propaganda leaflets that were thrown at the Germans about making peace, as well as conducting intelligence activities in Switzerland and in Portugal. But my reply to Mr. Pearson, who approached me, was, that if you can get me out and transfer me I am willing to come, and so that was done. I arrived at Canada House just at the time of the collapse of the Western Allies in Europe, just after Dunkirk and then without any training or preparation I pitched right into this whole business of how to get these Canadian refugees from Europe back to Canada, women and children. And then the immediate threat of invasion of Britain made the question of getting Canadians, non-combatants out of England more acute. So I was shoved right into this job alone, to organize this and put these people onto the troop ships that were going westward to bring the First Division over and that was quite an initiation into diplomacy. Particularly as the bombing started during the days as well as the nights, and became rather a complicated operation. In addition I was given the job of dealing with internment of prisoners of war and that was quite a handful, because the British saddled Canada with an unsorted collection of people they had arrested under the Alien Legislation. The Home Office and the War Office had just arrested people whether they were refugees or not; they were declared to be a threat in the event of invasion and they were shipped out to Canada and Australia. Some of them were torpedoed on the way, but we got this unsorted collection of people which included all kinds of refugees from Nazism as well as from Fascism in Italy. It took months to discover this and to set up a commission to inquire into them. We did not have their C.V.'s, we did not have any papers, nor did the British. They had simply given us lists of names. It turned out that people like Gregory Baum, the famous Catholic theologian, was among these people interned as an "enemy alien". He was of Jewish origin and had taken refuge in England and he was just shipped out with other people; lots of people were just refugees. But that took some time to sort out. But it gave me, that together with the Blitz, gave me again the impression that the civilians are increasingly the victims of war, in one way or another: When war breaks out the military take over with their priorities and everything else has to give way and that includes justice. Then there was the Blitz in England and air raid precautions. We all had to take turns, not only in duties during the day, being on the roof and watching.

 

During the Battle of Britain period, the air raids took place during the days. If we took shelter, we never got any work done, so it was agreed that we would take turns to be on the roof and ring a bell if we saw the flag on the Air Ministry, which was within sight of Canada House, hoisted for danger. We would ring the bell and everybody would just fly down to the shelter in CMHQ which was next door. In addition to that I had to do the coding and encoding along with a couple of English staff of all the messages coming in. Some of them were top secret dealings with military operations and others were not, but there again the military had strange ideas. I remember being woken up. I had to sleep at Canada House to be available for these duties, or next door in the CMHQ bunker, and I remember once getting very annoyed at being woken up to decipher an immediate top secret telegram for operations, and this was an amendment to a telegram dealing with naval operations that I had previously deciphered. But it said: "Instead of pillows, read pillows and pillow cases".

 

Well then, we had of course the diplomatic and political aspects of our mission as well. One of the things that I remember well was the first war conference attended by Mr. King in 1940, and the British official who was in charge of public relations had succumbed as a result of the bombing. We had several people break down under the strain of war. I was young, so I could take it, but we had a person, who was actually the janitor of the place, who committed suicide. We had the man who was looking after the coding and encoding, he had a breakdown and the man who was in charge of our public relations had a breakdown. This happened while Mr. King arrived and as the youngest and most junior I was sort of "pinch-hitting" in all these directions. I found myself not only attendant on Mr. Massey and briefing the Prime Minister but also being the public relations liaison. In trying to do all these jobs I remember failing to provide a photographer at the first meeting between Mr. King and Mr. Churchill. That was providential because I did satisfy Mr. Massey that I really could not be in three places at once. Somebody was borrowed from Canadian Military Headquarters, Campbell Moodie, to take on this job full-time and I was relieved of it. But even then, we had to look after Mr. King in his various capacities. He was made Freeman of the City of London because Canada was the main ally undefeated and with troops and supplies available to support the war effort based in Britain (before the USA and the USSR came into the war). The meetings between Mr. King and Mr. Churchill were extremely interesting, and very important in the sense that the priorities at that time were the supply of aircraft and tanks which Canada was given top priority to do and of course Lord Beaverbrook was another Canadian, who was put in charge of the production end in Britain and C.D. Howe was in charge of turning on the heat and producing aircraft and tanks in Canada, with American help. "Chubby” Power, the Minister of Defence for Air, was in charge of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan in Canada. The other thing was to get as much American help as possible and Canada was regarded at that time as the point of liaison. After Ogdensburg that made things much easier. And that was the beginning of our special relationship in defence. It all happened at that time when the European allies were defeated and indeed there was serious discussion as to whether the headquarters of the war effort would be moved from London to Ottawa, including the question of possibly moving the Bank and the reserves and that sort of thing.

 

[HILL] I think it was John Holmes who made the same point about Ogdensburg - that it was not really a strictly North American thing. It was really a device to get the United States involved, from the beginning.

 

[IGNATIEFF] It is difficult to see Canada and it's defence relationships unless you go back to this peculiar situation which some of us witnessed in 1940, which present day Canadians would hardly believe. When I say this sometimes I find it even difficult to believe myself. There was the situation where all the allies had been defeated. The British Army had been, the remnants of it had been rescued by every kind of boat and volunteer device at Dunkirk, but it was out of action, and into that situation the Canadian First Division arrived with Andy McNaughton. And Andy McNaughton was greeted literally as a saviour and the Canadian First Division was on duty to prevent the invasion, to defend Britain. Canadian airmen were in the Battle of Britain, and the Canadian Navy was fighting the Battle of the Atlantic, keeping Britain supplied with food as well as munitions of war.

 

[HILL] The Canadian Army were the only ones that had any arms in Britain at that time in any quantity.

 

[IGNATIEFF] They were the only ones, and some of them were of course not very adequate. There were Ross rifles and we shipped Ross rifles, we shipped Ross rifles all we could to arm the Home Guard in Britain. But we were thinking in terms of an immediate invasion at that time, and everybody was trained in some kind of defence and we all had to do air raid precautions as well as first aid and all the rest of it. So it was an incredible period to be in. You worked all day and you worked all night, and took snatches of sleep. It took the character of people like Charles Ritchie to make it sound funny, but it was not. The joke that Charles has in his memoirs you know, about his sleeping somewhere else when a bomb hit the place that he was supposed to be sleeping in and he came back the next morning to find nothing but one suit hanging above the ruins. I remember going with him to see this site, this was one of the ways in which we kept alive, we kept dodging the bombs by going to different places at night when we could sleep. Sometimes in bunkers, sometimes in Canada House, sometimes at home. But the crux of it was that Canada at that moment was the only undefeated ally and Churchill, in spite of all of his brave words, could not see any way in which we could prevail over the Nazis and Italy, unless the United States came in. He was not reckoning on Hitler invading the Soviet Union, although interestingly enough, Churchill anticipated that possibility. It was that very immediate reaction on the part of Churchill, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, who had absolutely no hesitation in saying that we were allies. And, indeed one of the things that affected our work at Canada House was that we were engaged through Ambassador Mayski in not only supplying Britain, but Canada began to supply food and various munitions to the Soviet Union, and Canadian ships were among the escorts of the munition supply and food which went up the northern route to Murmansk. I remember one of the things that we used to do with Mr. Massey was greet our naval heroes when they came back, because it was a dickens of a run, the way they were attacked by German Stukas as well as submarines. But anyway the crux of the strategy at that time was that with the help of Canada, the United States would somehow be brought into the war or at least be brought into the war effort. It was a success of course, there were the loans of the destroyers and the provision of supplies to Canada to help the production of aircraft, and the tanks, and munitions, and of course the tremendous undertaking of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan which was done also with American help and some American volunteers. But, it was through that threat to British survival, in the war effort, in 1940, that we first became really engaged in the whole business of the Canada/U.S. special relationship in defence, in Ogdensburg. And Mr. King regarded this as his most important achievement. There was no doubt in his mind, and in Churchill's mind. The two characters were very unlike. Mr. King was one of the most un-martial characters I have ever met. I remember when I greeted him on arrival in Prestwick, he got out of a Liberator bomber, backside foremost onto the parade ground, and did not quite know what to do. When he went around inspecting the troops he was much more interested in such essentials as how they were fed and what the postal service was and so on, which was appreciated. But they booed him; and he became increasingly unpopular when he refused to introduce conscription towards the end of the war, when we were short of troops in the line, but that is another story. McNaughton and Mackenzie King had in those early meetings with Churchill, had been told that the Canadian Army's primary duty would be to stand on guard in Britain while the British Army was reorganized. There was no discussion in those early meetings about use of the Canadian Army in Europe or being under British command. The trouble that later developed over the question of reinforcements and conscription had been anticipated by McNaughton. He had been in the First World War and had noted that Canadians had been thrust by British commanders into situations such as Vimy and the Somme and so on, where the casualties were likely to be highest, and he vowed that he would not commit Canadian troops in any situation which he had not personally reconnoitred. He went to Dunkirk to see if there were any use of the Canadian forces going in. He also went to Calais and to Norway. He was also prepared to go to Russia before there would be any commitment of Canadian Forces, of which there was talk for a while. But, an argument developed, and it was largely because the Canadian Armed Forces had not been in action while British Forces were in action in the Middle East, that increasingly McNaughton lost out in my opinion.

 

[HILL] He also did not want them to be used piecemeal, if I understand well.

 

[IGNATIEFF] He did not want them to be used piecemeal, they had to remain under Canadian command in McNaughton's view and concentrate on the liberation of Europe in the main attack. He did not want them down in Italy, and when they were sent to Italy and he wanted to go and inspect them and see for himself what was happening. General Montgomery said "That he would have him arrested". I think an unprecedented relationship between generals. No, McNaughton was a great national, I think nationalist, and it was at that time that I got to know him and it was because of that kind of background, that he asked for me when he was appointed by Mr. King in 1946 to represent Canada, first of all, in the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission and then at the United Nations on the Security Council, and he asked me to be his diplomatic advisor. There were various other candidates but we had got to know one another during the war, he used to come and see Mr. Massey. We were not very close friends; we were all rather frightened of the General, I might say, he was a very formidable looking character. In 1944, partly by the fact that I had shown signs of exhaustion, three people were sent from Ottawa to replace me and I was moved to Washington, D.C. to take over the work with John Holmes in Post Hostilities Planning. I was sorry to go in some ways, but I was thoroughly exhausted by this whole business of not being able to get any rest at night and working during the day, day after day.

[HILL] Well, it was a sort of theory that grew up afterwards, that the Blitz had all been great fun, but in fact when you look at it it had been pretty devastating.

 

[IGNATIEFF] It was devastating, as I mentioned that scene one Sunday when I was on duty and Pearson came into Canada House and we both climbed on the roof, there was no water, the electricity was broken off, the mains had been broken and the Treasury building was on fire. The files of the Treasury were being blown about White Hall. Pearson said "Well, just how much can a civilization stand of this kind of thing". As I say, he was not talking about giving in, or anything of that sort. It crossed our minds that if you just keep escalating aerial warfare, it does not break morale but it breaks down society. The military reckon that this is the way to intimidate the other side into giving in. You did not think of giving up, you got so numbed, you did not want to give up. You wanted to get at those bastards. What isn’t sufficiently taken into account is that you gradually reduce society to a standstill, all civilized life gradually comes to an end and under nuclear bombardment of course, this is escalated to an unacceptable degree. We were well within the margin of acceptability but even then, it just occurred to us, just how much can a city stand of the breakdown of essential services. It is now coming out, people are writing the same thing about the effects of the bombing of Berlin, Dresden and Tokyo. Just how much can a city take?

 

Part III - Ottawa and New York, 1944-mid-1950s

 

[HILL] I wonder if we can go on to the next part, which is Part III, that is from 1944 to the mid-1950s. You were partly in Ottawa at that time and partly in New York, mainly working on UN affairs. I wonder if you could say a few things about what you did in that time and also what part the UN played in Canadian foreign policy.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Here again one goes back to the preoccupation of Mr. King. What are the circumstances which brings Canada into war? He started on that simple proposition. We found ourselves at war because ’Britain was at war, but Mr. King insisted on waiting for a week and having the House of Commons decide to make a separate declaration of war. But as the war came to an end, or was coming to an end, and discussions began on the question of a collective system of security, Mr. King was very much pre-occupied with preventing any kind of automatic commitment from ever happening again, certainly in his lifetime. And the other thing was that the British, through Lord Cranbourne, the Commonwealth Secretary, actually sent a questionnaire to Mr. King, to the Canadian Government, asking a whole lot of questions but in effect saying "In the event that Britain is at war would Canada consider itself at war". And this was in the context of considering whether there could be such a thing as an imperial defense system such as Churchill dreamed of. There had been talk of an imperial defense system. Mr. R.B. Bennett had not approved of Canadian commitments to the imperial defense system, although he spoke very eloquently about the British Empire, and certainly Mr. King had not and it goes back to Mr. Meighen who had decided that Canada would not automatically be at war in the instance of the Carnak incident following World War I. So this was sort of the point of departure and I remember I was given the task to write an answer to these Cranbourne proposals in conjunction with National Defence. I describe in my book, how we could not come to any agreement because National Defence believed that it was inconceivable that officers of the Crown who took their commission and oath to the Crown could be at peace in Canada while other officers with regiments which were intertwined, would be at war. That one should be at peace and one should be at war was unconceivable to some brought up in the British tradition. They argued that the answer should be yes, Canada is at war, if Britain is at war. And I pointed out that Mr. King had been very careful to hold up the declaration, especially to break that continuity and that he was looking for some solution in terms of collective security through the new institution of the United Nations Security Council. Well we never did give any reply to Lord Cranbourne, I think it could be found in the archives that there was no reply. There was a very definite reply as far as Canada's relations in defence to the USA was concerned. We worked on this to follow-up Mr. King's exchange with President Roosevelt at Ogdensburg. What would be the nature of co-operation in peacetime between the United States and Canada? We prepared a paper on this in the Post Hostilities Planning Committee, which was accepted. It was of course revised to some extent by Hume Wrong and Norman Robertson, but we proposed setting up a Permanent Joint Board on Defence. The word was permanent. The idea was that without commitment to governments, the joint staffs of one side or the other would meet and consider plans for the defence of North America, but it would not be a treaty, it was very far from NORAD. It was a continuing consultation on defence problems, and the first area that the P.J.B.D. addressed was the closing down of US bases in Canada. That was because of McNaughton's Canadian national prejudices - he was a Mel Hurtig of his day. I think he wanted to wind them up as quickly as possible. He wanted to wind up these war-time commitments with the USA. As long as he had Fiorello La Guardia as his opposite number, things went very smoothly because he was a politician, and he quite realized what kind of sensitivities Canada had on that issue. But anyway the framework of the P.J.B.D., based on Ogdensburg, was accepted, but then we turned to the series of papers that came to us, mainly through London. That is why it was agreed soon after I came back in 1944 that John Holmes would go to London. The Foreign Office were keeping us much more closely informed of the thinking in the big power circuit, that is, U.S., U.K. and to some extent France, about the preparations for the United Nations and so on. And John Holmes was sent to London to be the point of contact, and I was made Official Secretary and at the same time I was also made Secretary of the Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee and the Secretary of the Tripartite Nuclear Agreement, under the Quebec Conference arrangements of 1943, whereby Canada agreed to supply the uranium and participate in the research on the nuclear reactions (not directly, though, involved in decision-making concerning the bomb). However, Mr. King, as usual in his cautious way, agreed that we would provide the materials, we would continue the research with the help incidentally of the British and the French, who had been evacuated to Canada, and those who were not taking part in the actual bomb project or the Manhattan project or in Montreal were then in Chalk River working on our reactor project. I was Secretary of that, a tripartite arrangement as well...

 

[HILL] That was when you were in Ottawa, was it?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, it was partly because of that that after the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Mackenzie King joined Attlee, the Prime Minister then who succeeded Churchill, and Truman, in making the declaration that the object of the three governments who had worked on this bomb project, was to develop atomic energy for peaceful purposes only and to find ways of developing safeguards to ensure this. And, this was a declaration which was made by the three governments and the very first decision at the United Nations, after San Francisco, was to set up the UN Atomic Energy Commission to work on this project. The point I think to stress is that although I was Secretary of the Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy, as well as Secretary of the Post Hostilities Planning Committee and Secretary of the Tripartite Committee on Uranium Supplies for Canada to the USA, I did not know a thing about the existence or the preparation of an atomic bomb. It was so secret, I would emphasize this, I have been asked just what did we know. I am sure C. D. Howe knew, and I am sure that Mr. King knew, but it was absolutely top secret and none of us knew at the official level, except Dr. C. J. Mackenzie, President of N.R.C. That had a great deal of relevance to the planning which took place, we planned without knowledge that the whole world technologically would be so tremendously affected by this new method of warfare.

 

[HILL] Actually, that is a point which John Holmes makes very strongly in the The Shaping of Peace. There is a whole section about that period and the fact that some people simply did not know about the atomic programme. Most of the people in Ottawa simply did not know what was happening in the US.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Well, this was, I think, looking back on it, quite deliberate on the-part of Mr. King. Mr. Churchill insisted on being a partner of Roosevelt in all strategic decisions. It was never quite to his satisfaction, but you know from all the correspondence one has between Churchill and Roosevelt, one realizes that he could never have enough influence on strategic issues. And he insisted at Quebec that Britain would be consulted before the bomb was used. Whether that agreement was made between the two of them out of the presence of Mr. King, and Mr. King just did not know that they made a decision, I do not know, I was not there. That was 1943; I was not in Quebec and the whole proceedings in Quebec were not committed to paper. The only papers that I saw had to do with the supply of uranium and how it would be partitioned and what purpose and all that. But the fact was that Mr. King, I do not think wanted to be consulted, I think C.D. Howe was told both of the tests at Los Alamos and when the bomb was dropped, but I was absolutely in the dark about the bomb, I did not know anything about it at all. Although, as I say, I was concerned with the supply of uranium, I did know what uranium was being supplied and also the safeguards which were developed for it. As I understood the situation, it was for health safety, that is radiation hazards and all the rest of it. The first Atomic Energy Act related principally to the handling of uranium for purposes of health hazards, and was not related to military uses. And when we came to New York, we were confronted of course by the Baruch Plan and the very first question that arose, Mr. Baruch raised it, was (and I was present in the conversations) , what would the three governments who were parties to certain shared knowledge about the atomic bomb do about sharing it with the other members of the commission and particularly the Soviet Union. I remember saying to Mr. Baruch: "Well we have been proceeding on the basis of 'need to know' and this has been interpreted pretty narrowly as far as you are concerned. Canadians have apparently not needed to know very much. I do not know a damn thing. Why don't you apply the same thing if the question is asked, why do you need to know. If you want to know how to make a bomb, why do you need to know. We are gathered here to stop making bombs, to abolish the arsenals and so on". But this was the approach that was adopted, and there was a scientific committee set up of scientists who exchanged information, that was necessary really to explain and to understand the Baruch Plan. I only learnt later that the Americans only had about five bombs in their arsenal and could have easily disposed of them instead of the 25,000 they have to dispose of now. But, the important development that I think relates to that UN Atomic Energy Commission was that on the whole, I supported the view that Mr. King and C.D. Howe - and at that time Mr. King was still Secretary of State as well as Prime Minister and then Mr. St. Laurent came in, I've forgotten which year, 1947, I think, - anyway, they all had the view that we should support the Baruch Plan in principle, so that we should not in any way strain our relations with the United States. Strangely enough, with more prescience than myself, Escott Reid felt that the Baruch Plan was not put forward in good faith, particularly the kind of additions and amendments that Baruch added himself, namely that any breach of the agreement would not be subject to the veto which had just been agreed at Yalta as one of the basic agreements for post-war co-operation. And, we had quite a row, which was characteristic of Escott, both in his good aspects and his bad aspects. He was a missionary in spirit. He insisted that we stand up to Baruch, when he saw that the Soviets were insisting on their proposal which was that we outlaw these weapons first and then decide how to control atomic energy for peaceful purposes, the Americans were insisting the other way, that we should set up this monopoly of international agencies with control of all the nuclear activities in all countries that had nuclear capability, and this proposal was not even all that acceptable to the British. I was asked by Mr. St. Laurent to try and explain this to Ernie Bevin, and Ernie Bevin, after I finished explaining that the dual use of reactors in uranium reactions could be for military and for peaceful purposes, and you had to have control and inspection of all stages of the process if you were to prevent diversion to military use, he said: "What would have happened if, when Faraday discovered electricity in England, he had come along and said to the government of the day: "Look here, this here source of energy is so dangerous it's got to be put under international control. Where do you think that electrification in the homes of Britain would be, where would Britain stand? The ordinary homes of the working classes in Britain would still be waiting for some international inspector." And he said: "I do not buy this at all". So it was, - but they went along in the vote on principle like we did, and Escott Reid urged that we get up and say that we insist on a proper examination of all the options for international control and not just the Baruch Plan; that we insist on examining the possibilities of international inspection without all the ready made provisions of the Baruch Treaty. We argued this, and McNaughton finally appealed to Pearson, and Pearson said on the telephone: "Well, take Ignatieff’s advice," advice that happened to coincide with what Ottawa instructed anyway. And we voted for the Baruch Plan in principle. I’ve always regretted that we did not take Escott Reid's advice more seriously, because in fact we never really recovered the ground that could have been made before proliferation of weapons began. The Tripartite Agreement broke down in 1947. We had a meeting in Washington in which the British, pleading for retention of the Quebec Agreement, said that they would not make nuclear weapons, provided there was consultation as to use. Truman, however, under pressure from Senators like Vanderberg and Hickenlooper, said they would not go along with it. The British decided then to make their own bomb. All kinds of ideas were put forward privately by Kennan and Lorry Norstad, the Air Force general, but they did not meet the British requirements; and proliferation started. And, of course, the Soviet counter-bomb followed in 1949; whether they had the bomb before, I do not know. Then of course the Gouzenko spy business broke in 1946, so that poisoned the atmosphere. Plus the rejection by the Soviets of the Baruch Plan and the Soviet advance into, or threatened advance into Iran, and Turkey, and the Communist pressure on Greece, all led to the Truman Doctrine and the begining of the Cold War. Now, whether that coincided with independent Canadian appreciation of the events leading up to the Cold War, I do not know. There were two members of the Department who had rather strong or developed views on Soviet policy. They were Arnold Smith and Escott Reid. Arnold Smith wrote me a series of letters from Moscow - they are in the archives - he started these letters because I was working on Post Hostilities Planning, and the first letter says: "It’s tremendously important what you are doing, George, and I thoroughly support what you are doing and your ideas would be very interesting to me." And then, before 1946, come these letters: "Are you so sure that we can count on Soviet co-operation. I see no signs of it from Stalin. He is not carrying out even the undertakings he made in Yalta about elections in Poland; he is not going to get out of Hungary, Romania; all these countries are going to be satellites." And it was the non-co-operation that he stressed. Escott went further. Escott went in the direction of George Kennan and of "containment" -I wrote an article I think for PAFSO on this subject. I knew George Kennan well at the time. George Kennan did not stress so much the idea of military measures against Stalin, as the need to drop illusions which were very rife in certain parts of the political machine in Washington, based on the concept of the Soviet Union as an ally and Stalin as "Uncle Joe", some sort of benevolent kind of dictator who really was not a danger in any way. Kennan and Harriman were working against the kind of optimistic appreciations of the Soviet attitude that were being put forward by Vice-President Wallace, who was quite openly sympathetic to the Soviet Union and continued to be. Truman was not, but it took quite a bit of effort on the part of people like Forrestal and Kennan, to make Truman take a tougher attitude on the subject, and the Truman Doctrine was the first sort of step in the direction of NATO. But the thing which really made all the difference, from the Canadian standpoint, was first of all the seriousness with which Mr. St. Laurent took the whole Gouzenko spy business.

 

Mr. St. Laurent, who had a very keen sense of justice and decency, was horrified when he was really confronted with the full evidence of the espionage that was going on, not only in the Soviet Military Attache's Office but through the various links that were revealed in the Gouzenko trial, the links to the British nuclear scientists who were working with us, and some penetration of the Civil Service. The Canadian Civil Service was comparatively less penetrated, it turned out, than the British, but we were working very closely at that time. People like Fuchs and Nunn May this put the whole joint effort into peril and St. Laurent, anyway as a Catholic, took a strong view. He was very amenable to the kind of argument that Escott Reid advanced; that we were faced with an ideological, cultural, economic, political threat to the kind of values that Western civilization stands for. And throughout, it was argued by Escott that this could not be dealt with by a military threat. To begin with we'd gone through a war and nobody's prepared for another war, but as Escott used to say you cannot kill ideas with cannons or nuclear weapons. You have to work against them by combining the influence of nations who think alike, and out of that came this idea that Canada was the sort of linch pin of the Atlantic triangle; the United States, Britain, France. Escott Reid, who was the chief advisor to Mr. St. Laurent at the time, was not keen about having Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey in the Alliance which he thought of in terms of the "Atlantic Community". Yes, Italy, because they belong to the Atlantic area, but not Greece and Turkey, no. Greece he might have tolerated, but not Turkey.

 

[HILL] When you say "He", are you referring to St. Laurent?

 

[IGNATIEFF] No, Escott. He was thinking in terms of the Atlantic community right from the start and a community of interest, community of policies and so on. And the various versions which Article Two went through, this is a very, very boiled down version which was finally accepted grudgingly by people like Dean Acheson. There were those in the State Department who perhaps shared Escott's ideas, but Escott would have had us unite around an almost religious mystique in defense of Christian values. There were those who were willing to take this approach seriously, but others like Hume Wrong, our ambassador in Washington, who would have none of it. What we ended up with was "strengthening free institutions", bringing about a better understanding of the principles on which these institutions were founded. There was no mention of "Judeo/Christian civilization" - but he retained the idea of promoting conditions of stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area. Escott had a great deal of influence on the thinking of Mr. St. Laurent. Pearson was pragmatic, I do not think he was persuaded, Pearson was always pragmatic. He did not believe in all this. Hume Wrong was positively skeptical about all this high flown oratory, after all it is a regional arrangement for self-defense in view of the proven inability of the UN Security Council to work because of the attitude of the Soviet Union on issues such as Greece, Turkey and Iran and the use of the veto. He kept, in all the correspondence saying: "Let's get away from all this oratory, it is not going down at all well in Washington. Even Dean Acheson, the son of an Episcopalian Bishop, cannot buy this stuff, he wants something that he can sell to Congress. They are not going to buy this kind of messianic language". But anyway, looking back on this, what I feel is that Escott was basically right in saying that what was required was a solidarity to prevent Soviet aggression and expansion, a solidarity among allies around policies strengthened through effective and constant consultation as against unilateral action. What's really weakened the Alliance was lack of consultation, and it started, I am afraid, in Europe, and was quickly followed by breakdown in consultation on the US side. One can never forget the fact that the most crass example of the breakdown in consultations was     over the Suez. This led to the report of the Three Wise Men. I worked with Pearson on the Three Wise Men's report in 1955, in Paris. He, as one of the authors who worked with the foreign ministers of Italy and Norway, realized how tremendously important it was for Canada, that if NATO was to be the triangle which helped to resolve the continentalist pulls to which Canada was exposed, there had to be regular consultations and resolving the intra-Alliance differences and trying to unite policies. It was important this should not just be about military affairs but should be about economic policies as well. Of course the whole movement towards the European economic community ran right across it; and likewise the British and French unilateral action on Suez, and while the Wise Men's Report said everything that could be said about strengthening the consultative procedure, the fact is that it has too often been ignored -by the USA as well as other major powers. But it should be considered that it was the non-military cooperative provisions which really made the North Atlantic Treaty acceptable to Parliament, as a departure from peace time commitments for Canada.

 

[HILL] You mean primarily on the economic side or the political side too?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Well, it started by being ignored on the economic side, then began being ignored on the political side. I mean this last - in recent times, on the Reagan business, the attack on Libya, the trade disagreements about how to deal with the Soviet Union and Poland and all the rest of it. Those are the sort of things which Canada realized was of the essence, if the Soviet Union was to face a united front. The idea that was behind the Treaty, was that the Soviets should know if they moved against anybody in Western Europe or North America that they would have to contemplate a world war. There was not going to be any chipping away as there had been by the Nazis. There was that looking back in experience. In that sense, the idea was that there should be a community which would act together and confront any adversary. This is what had been weakened. This is where the failure in 1947 on the control of the atom and the Cold War together combined, and the Korean War combined to produce a new emphasis on the one weapon which seemed to give the West superiority over the Soviet Union, and China. It started during the Korean War. My functions as Senior Counsellor of the Embassy in Washington were threefold. One was to represent Canada on the international committee working out the various bodies and institutions which would be established under the North Atlantic Treaty, the Council, the Military Defense Committees, and so on.

 

The only question on which there was any real, I would not say difference of opinion, the only matter of any difficulty, was whether Canada should or should not be a member of the Standing Group in NATO. We did not want to be members of the Standing Group. But what happened was that Italy, very early in the proceedings, claimed a seat on the Standing Group which was to be reserved to the United States, Britain and France - (the idea was that they would act as the main strategists of the Alliance, working out the strategic plans). I was simply told to say in the international committee that if Italy claimed a seat there was no way in which Canada would stand down, so there would have to be five members instead of three. But, I was told at the same time that we were quite happy if we weren't on it. We held to the policy of stressing the functional principle as viewed by Mr. King. Mr. St. Laurent continued the same, especially in terms of Canada's economic power; it was not in any way the assertion of Canada's military power. It was on the basis of the functional principle that we sought the seat on the Security Council of the UN, following Australia. Mr. King let Australia have it on the grounds that he was very leery about any military commitment. The functional principle, as far as he was concerned, was that we were being asked to supply food through UNRRA, and that sort of thing. I remember being Canada's representative on the Far Eastern Economic Commission in 1947. I was given absolutely no instructions whatsoever, and we were sitting around discussing what we would do and I said "I must say, speaking for Canada, I am not entirely clear why Canada is on this commission because we are not an Asian country". Somebody said there was "no use in having a dairy without a cow and Canada is a cow. In fact, we will elect you as chairman of this commission". But we were being sought all over the place for our economic resources, what we could put forward, particularly in terms of food and supplies in one form or another: minerals that the United States wanted, food and materials for Europe and Asia. When I went to Washington there had been a report on the problem of strategic supplies, supplies of strategic material in time of war, the Paley Report, and the Americans were very alive to the dangers in the event of war; they would be cut off from supplies of certain strategic materials and they wanted to get them from Canada on some assured basis, and they offered a deal on free trade in fact. Mr. King and Mr. St. Laurent turned that down, but in terms of the functional principle, Canada was interested in its economic contribution, through the United Nations. We were interested for instance, at the beginning, in our role on the Economic and Social Council of the UN. This, turned out to be rather a disappointment, because the Council never fulfilled its functions as expected, especially coordinating all these agencies that were set up. But Canada was an influential member of each one of the functional agencies, being the host to ICAO, but also in founding and establishing the Food and Agricultural Organization. The ILO, in Geneva, and the World Health Organization, under Dr. Chisholm, were also important. We were right in the forefront as the exponents of the new multi-lateral, co-operative, approach to international affairs. What we realized gradually was the fact that when we thought we would be setting up a new framework of internationalism, built around the United Nations, with a diminution of national sovereignty, the Soviet Union, quickly followed by the other big powers, each insisted on the right to unilateral action. It was anything but the cooperative approach we had hoped for. We began to feel that already, and in the fifties, over the Korean War. On the one hand, North Korea invaded South Korea with, apparently, the connivance or assistance or support of the Soviet Union. Then Communist China intervened. At the time when I was in Washington, I am not sure which Communist power was regarded as the more dangerous to security. I think, on the whole, if one looks back to the fifties, one finds that the United States felt that it was China that was the greatest threat. The fact that it was an American commander or who had decided to go against the advice of India and other countries and cross the 49th parallel - that was not sufficiently taken into account. It was the war in Korea, and later the threat to the offshore islands of Matsu and Quemoy, that brought Canada into discussions about the possible use of nuclear weapons for the first time, and the deployment of nuclear weapons over Canada. This was what I was involved in, very much, in the defense-liaison field in Washington. That and the termination of the war with Japan, the Japanese Peace Agreement. That proceeded quite well, without any great friction with the United States, but we ran into immediate' difficulties over the question of the fact that the United States was persuaded that China represented the main military threat and they began to deploy nuclear weapons into Alaska and at sea, and we were involved in over-flights. Our first reaction was that there had to be requests for each individual over-flight, with an indication of exact timing and direction of flight and all the rest of that. We had to have a flight plan, in addition; and that was the first agreement, I think. The first agreement indicated also that if we were to be involved in over-flights of Canadian territory we would need to be consulted about the possible use of nuclear weapons against China, because we pointed out, if nuclear weapons were used against China, there was the Sino-Soviet military treaty at the time, in effect and we could not be sure that it would not be Soviet as well as Chinese retaliation, and at least Canada would be involved in nuclear alerts. And it was agreed that there would be periodic meetings with officials in which I was involved; and Bob Boyce, then Secretary of the Cabinet, was to discuss under the conditions of strict secrecy the kind of conditions, the kind of circumstances, which might give rise to the declaration of a nuclear alert or a state of alert in Canada. We did recognize that it was unlikely that there could be a threat of retaliation against the United States that did not affect a state of an alert in Canada. In addition, there would be meetings with ministers, at the ministerial level at least once a year, in which the Foreign Minister, the Secretary of State in the United States, would meet with Pearson; and other senior people and the Minister of Defence would go to similar consultations about possible circumstances in which there might be a use of nuclear weapons. And that was the state in which the discussions relevant to the joint defense in North America under NORAD stood when I was sent to Yugoslavia. In other words it was Korea that first of all raised the initial question of continental defence and over-flights and deployments, but the initial agreement was on the strict basis of retention of sovereignty, in the sense that it was to be an on-going consultation about not only the clearance of each flight or deployment but also consultation about the possible consequences of these things in terms of possible use. There was ’one occasion when I remember that senior officials came up from Washington and met in my presence with the Prime Minister and Mr. Pearson. It was under President Eisenhower, and the question had been put to him by the Pentagon, of the possible uses of nuclear weapons over the Matsu and Quemoy crisis, and St. Laurent and Mr. Pearson were adamant that this was quite out of the question. We would never agree to the use of nuclear weapons in the defence of the offshore islands, as this would involve a risk of escalating into a nuclear war. It was right out of the question. We did have several meetings and the thing which I emphasized was that there was no automaticity, there was no blank cheque given about a declaration of alerts or deployment of nuclear weapons or anything of the sort that now exists under NORAD. We agreed to a programme of over-flights and deployments, subject to consultation, so that we would not be woken up at all hours of the night. There would not be processing of every flight plan, but they would give us a schedule of flights over a period of, let us say, a month; which was the way we were operating when I was sent to Yugoslavia. Now that happened between 1956 and 1958.

 

[HILL] Could I just interrupt at that point. There is one point I would like to check first, that is, you were somehow involved in the work on the treaty itself, and then there was also the working group in Washington on the mechanisms that were set up afterwards. Could you distinguish between those two?

 

This situation has been unclear to me. Was the work on the treaty not also done in Washington?

 

[IGNATIEFF] It was done in Washington but at that time Tommy Stone was the representative on the international committee, which was dealing with details; but in fact the Treaty was negotiated at the Ambassadorial level, Hume Wrong really was dealing directly with that and the Assistant Secretary Hickerson. Now the international committee met to discuss various drafts of specific articles, but the main substantive of proposals were dealt with at the ambassador to foreign minister level. Escott Reid, who was Assistant Under-Secretary, was the official responsible under Pearson, who was then Under-Secretary, to prepare the various proposals and reactions and so on.

 

Now I was involved in the actual treaty negotiations distinct from the institutional arrangements, later, only because I was temporarily brought from New York to be head of the UN Division. This was in 1948. The meetings of the UN had been moved to Paris, and it had been decided that Gerry Riddell who was normally the head of the UN Division, would go to Paris, and I would take his place, and while I was in Ottawa, it was only for the three months, I think it was, Escott who, knowing that I had been involved in defense matters in London, in Post Hostilities and all the rest of it, brought me into the small group that worked within, sending instructions on these North Atlantic Treaty issues. In other words I was involved in the actual negotiations in the sense of dealing with the exchange of various views, particularly on Article 2 and Article 4, whereby "the parties would consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial independence or political security of the parties is threatened". That was one of the articles which we really thrashed out there.

 

[HILL] You were also in Ottawa in this period?

 

[IGNATIEFF] I was under Escott.

 

[HILL] Working with him? Because there was the time you were at the UN just prior to that, in New York; and then you were back here; then you went to Washington after that, presumably.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Then after that I was moved to Washington in 1948, I went there in time for the signature in 1949. Tommy Stone was moved and I took his place with the rank of Counsellor on the International Committee to work out the details of what the permanent Council would be, the Defense Committee and the various bodies and so on. And there was the question of the standing group and all the rest of it.

 

[HILL] I think that you mentioned earlier, that the only really controversial issue in that period, is really that of the standing committee, and its responsibilities and so on.

 

[IGNATIEFF] There was some controversy about the question of the permanent Council. We did not move to an immediate permanent Council. Dana Wilgress was our Ambassador and at the time they used to meet as required but not regularly. But we favoured an idea of a regular meeting, but it was not until 1955 and the Report of the Three, that the full machinery for regular consultation was adopted. This provided that, first of all, the permanent Council would meet at least once a week, but before they met, the Counsellors of the Ambassadors would meet the previous day. We met, I think, on Thursdays and they met on Wednesdays, or maybe on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But they met the previous day and went over the agenda and discussed what the difficulties were. If Canada felt very strongly on something and disagreed with something, the counsellors would report to the Ambassador that, you know, you are going to have trouble over this item on the agenda tomorrow and the position is as follows. It enabled us, also of course, to get instructions or guidance or consult other delegations to see if others could be persuaded to change their views. But the whole consultative machinery really was comparatively modest. While we worked out the main framework, it was not until the 1955 report from the Committee of Three that the consultative machinery really came into action. Also, the thing that struck me about the consultative machinery is that while it did not include economic questions for the reason that the European Common Market was being set up in Europe, you could raise any question of concern to the solidarity of the Alliance. Particularly, there was always a dialogue about arms control and the relationship between defence and arms control. That is one of the reasons why I still maintain that we should remain in the Alliance. My experience in the North Atlantic Council consultations is that the kind of discussions that take place are the very kind of discussions which those who advocate relating foreign policy to defence policy actually achieved in the North Atlantic Council. This is precisely what has happened. The smaller powers raise political issues and the political implications of military planning. My reservation and objection is that because NORAD was established in effect by agreement between the Pentagon and National Defence, in the transition from the St. Laurent to the Diefenbaker regime. There was no similar provision made for the discussion of contingency plans under NORAD of the same kind that went on in regard to the other commands reporting to the North Atlantic Council. The military would have to come to the Council with their contingency plans and we discussed them for their political implications. How would governments react to this? But in the case of the North Atlantic Planning Group, as it was called, there was no report and no discussion. NORAD did not report to NATO and the fact is that they can declare an alert as President Kennedy did for NORAD at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, without prior consultation.

 

Part IV - Ottawa and Yugoslavia, in the 1950s

 

[HILL] That brings us up to around the end of the fifties, when you were at Defence Liaison and then Ambassador to Yugoslavia. We spoke a little of your involvement in the Report On Non-Military Co-operation, but also there was the famous visit to the Soviet Union.

 

[IGNATIEFF] I left Washington in 1953. I had a year at what was then called the Imperial Defence College in London, on defence planning, and then I came back to be head of Defence Liaison in 1955. Now the most important issue that came up, apart from the visit to the Soviet Union, was something which I alluded to only in passing, in my book, but it has profoundly affected my attitude to Canada/U.S. defence relations, and that was that Pearson, very much concerned about the increasing pressures on Canada from the United States, following the deployment of nuclear weapons and over-flights, wanted a statement to be prepared by the equivalent of your institution in the present days, the Parliamentary Centre, (but there was not a Parliamentary Centre in those days) for the information of parliament. What he had in mind was that the elected responsible body should be given a paper to be jointly prepared by the departments of Defence and External Affairs, and the title of it as I recollect was: “Implications For Canadian Foreign and Defence Policies Of The Advent Of Nuclear Weapons and Inter-continental Missiles". And the essence of it was that he wanted a short paper which would inform the representatives in parliament and the Canadian public of the new - consequences both on defence and foreign policy - of the new strategic geographic position of Canada, on the shortest route for missiles and long range bombers between the two superpowers who were by then in a state of confrontation. This is something that had to be, he thought, at least considered, by the House of Commons. And Mr. St. Laurent was of course in total agreement and I was told to prepare such a paper with General Foulkes, who was then Chief of the General Staff, and I said: "Well I cannot of course do so on my own authority, but if the Prime Minister writes to the Minister of National Defence, Ralph Campney, I will then contact General Foulkes and follow this up and certainly I will do as you wish. I entirely agree that is what should be done". Five letters were written as I recollect, at least two by the Prime Minister and three by Mr. Pearson to National Defence on the minister level and were not answered, on such an absolutely basic issue! And the reply given by Foulkes to me was that the information which would have to be included in such a paper for an effective discussion in parliament would compromise the special relationships which he had with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in Washington and General Bradley, the head of the US Army. National Defence's reaction was simply not to reply to the Prime Minister. Of course to press the issue would have created a cabinet crisis on an extremely important issue. The final act in this strange play which I would hardly believe ever happened if I had not been one of the players, was that I think in 1955, - it was Easter 1955 - it was agreed that Bob Bryce, as Secretary to the Cabinet, would call a meeting at which Foulkes would come and I would attend. Anyway, in the meantime I had come to Toronto for Easter to visit my mother-in-law and had had a terrible automobile accident, nearly got killed. I came to this meeting on crutches and feeling extremely weak and vulnerable. I still remember that Foulkes bluntly said that there would be no joint paper. It was Foulkes who got us into NORAD under false pretences in addition to stone-walling the established elected representatives of Canada. The public would not believe it. And that is why Mr. Diefenbaker was so unreasonable, if you like, about National Defence and its demand for nuclear war-heads. He was in a rage about the way that they had misrepresented things and brought him into this impossible position which finally ended up with the fall of his government. The trouble Mr. Diefenbaker found himself in was - if you like - a delayed reaction from the St. Laurent/Pearson failure to get National Defence under Campney to move on a report to Parliament. In this situation, as I say, when I came from hospital and I said "General Foulkes, do you not understand that we cannot in External Affairs plan rationally our relationships with the United States or the Soviet Union or with Europe, unless we have the guidance of Parliament on these crucial issues, especially on what are the consequences of our new strategic position between the two super powers in the nuclear age. What are the consequences? That we must know, and we must set them out, not necessarily in any detail about exactly who does what, but what are the essential factors and consequences of the situation". He said: "First of all, that I repeat that I will not do anything to prejudice the information that I get and which I pass on in my own way to the Prime Minister. Secondly, I do not need any "eggheads" from External Affairs to tell me how to run defence policy in Canada, and this is the final answer you get George". And that was it. Well, when I reported this to Pearson, Pearson first of all decided to tell St. Laurent, that he would not press this to a crisis in the cabinet, which was a typical Pearsonian reaction. He decided that he would pick up an invitation which he received from Molotov in a general sort of way - why don't you come and visit me in Moscow - to go and see for himself what was the danger of war. I mean, was there a danger of war from the Soviet Union in the new strategic position to which we in Canada were exposed?

 

[HILL] This was in some way related to the NORAD issue?

 

[IGNATIEFF] It was part and parcel of the failure to get from National Defence a joint appreciation of what were the consequences. So, he said: “Well, if they will not tell me, I will go and find out from Moscow and see if they are preparing to fight a war with United States, start a nuclear war". You could not say that in public. Again, it would show that there was a crisis in the cabinet. I did not say that in my book, but this was not a joy ride in any way as far as I was concerned. And why should I have been, as Defence Liaison, brought into this journey to the Soviet Union, which I certainly did not want as an ex-Russian. I knew there was going to be trouble. I said to my wife when I left: "I am faced with an impossible situation. If I refuse, I am a coward. If I go I know there is going to be trouble, they will find some way of compromising me". So, I did not go with any blithe spirit. I kept a diary and the diary, actually from day to day, is also in the Trinity College archives. I used most of it in my book, The Making of a Peacemonger. The basic thing here was that the Soviets were themselves engaged in an argument as to whether or not they could risk a nuclear war to pursue a policy of military expansion. The successor named by Stalin, Malenkov who had been his private secretary, was dead against the use of nuclear weapons and indeed against war as a means of promoting Soviet policy. Now the importance was that he came out quite definitely in a statement at lunch at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. There were Molotov and Kaganovitch and Voroshilov and several others who seemed to disagree with Malenkov. They argued that, particularly if they were threatened, if their interests were basically threatened, they would not hesitate to go to war. It was in those circumstances that Pearson was quite anxious to see Khrushchev, who was obviously on the rise, and about to take power as General Secretary. Khrushchev took the same view that Malenkov did; that war and nuclear war were out of the question as a means of settling international disputes. But he said, "You must understand that we do not go back in any way on our concept of competition with the capitalist world. We will do so by political and economic methods. So far as security is concerned, if you insist, as you have done just a few months before, on bringing West Germany into NATO and re-arming Germany, we will do the same with East Germany. The only circumstances in which we will reconsider the security policies of Europe is under conditions of neutralization of the two Germanies. And that was the essence of what was said, but it is important to tie this to why Pearson went to the USSR in 1955. He was the first North Atlantic Minister to go, and he spoke a great deal about this, but nobody has related it to this stalemate in the cabinet and with National Defence. No sooner had we got back with the report, than I was sent off to Yugoslavia, as I related. I was sent off with direct instructions from Mr. St. Laurent, in effect to test out exactly what Khrushchev had said to us in his policies towards Eastern Europe. That is, were the Soviets, by invading Hungary, on the way to moving westward into Yugoslavia and possibly threatening the West?

 

[HILL] When you went to Yugoslavia was that actually after the Hungarian uprising?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, just after.

 

[HILL] Because, there again, I had not realized that was the reason why you were sent to Yugoslavia.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, I do not like to say that in the book, I say simply that this is the one occasion when I was sent on a mission and had the opportunity of being told directly by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister what I had been sent to do.

 

[HILL] That was a change.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Which was not the usual experience. But, in fact, when I arrived, Tito had followed up his breach with Stalin by getting aid from the United States, military aid from the United States. And while he called himself a Communist, he was already finding ways in which to complete the breach with the Communist bloc, militarily anyway. So, I had a very interesting time in Yugoslavia but as I say, the purpose of my being sent was really a follow-up on the mission to the Soviet Union and the concerns to know just where we stood in regard to the threat of nuclear war. Because what of course, Foulkes was getting, was a "worst case scenario", from the Pentagon, as one could imagine. The Soviets were said to be massing here and massing there and doing this and that with the massive capability they enjoyed.

 

[HILL] What were the conclusions you came to about Soviet foreign policy at that time, while you were in Yugoslavia? I remember in your book you mentioned you had at least some meetings with President Tito and at one stage you actually briefed the NATO Council on Tito's foreign policy thinking. You must have had his views on what the Soviets were up to as well.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Well, what I was convinced of was, that first of all the Communist threat should not be thought of in monolithic terms. There was not one great Communist threat or a combination of the Soviet Union, Communist China and the whole of the satellite world. They all had internal problems. The Soviets were still suffering very severely from the effects of World War II, and they were not in the least bit anxious for another war. They were very much obsessed about what to do about Germany and they were not inclined to push things to the point of nuclear war, but would obviously use every method short of war to expand their influence, as they eventually did in Egypt and Cuba.

 

[HILL] I read somewhere recently that, during the Hungarian uprising, the Soviets at some point became convinced that Czechoslovakia was about to revolt as well. That really worried them.

 

[IGNATIEFF] That it might spread, yes. That is so. I go into that in the 1967-1968 period because I was representing Canada on the Security Council in the Czech crisis. It was obvious to me that what the Soviets feared, was the revival of that natural economic orbit of central Europe, and that would include Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria and Hungary as well as Romania to some extent, all these countries had been within the Austrian/Hungarian/German imperial economic orbit. They prospered mightily in providing certain raw materials, having assured markets for all kinds of high quality goods instead of making Kalashnikov rifles to export to Africa which they get very little for, aspirins and such. That, I believe, is the real reason for turfing out Dubcek. Because Dubcek, as I understand, was on the point of arriving at something like a free trade agreement with West Germany. They had come very close to it and the Soviets put their foot down.

 

[HILL] Just before we finish off this afternoon, just one final question on Yugoslavia. I have the impression that your period there was one that you enjoyed particularly. I have the impression that you enjoyed the bilateral diplomacy. Of course you were head of an embassy for the first time yourself, and the political situation must have been very interesting.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, it was an extremely interesting time, to begin with because, as I say, Tito was playing a very, very sophisticated game. On the one hand, he claimed that he was still a Communist; as he said to me "Once a Communist I will die a Communist". On the other hand having broken completely from the Warsaw Pact and from the COMECON, he would not accept what he regarded as Soviet monopolistic claims over the Balkan economies, especially shipping.

 

He would not accept that COMECON should decide on what kind of industry would be developed in Yugoslavia. What he and Dimitriev of Bulgaria wanted was some general autonomy for the Balkans, as a minimum condition for remaining in the Communist bloc. It would be outside the direct control of central planning from Moscow, which he did not like at all. And the other thing was that he was an extremely sophisticated and astute politician. I mean of all the dictators I have ever come across, Tito had a much keener sense of keeping in touch with public opinion; and he kept away from the sort of daily routine of Belgrade by living in Brioni. But if he heard that there was some strike, or if there was even unrest in the university, he would suddenly descend on the situation and resolve it. He decided, and always in favour of the popular side, - I used to say to him: "You are the only dictator I have come across who I would really think would win an election". He would say: "I know that". I would say to him: "Why don't you go to the next step and allow an opposition". He said: "That is contrary to Communist doctrine, you cannot have an opposition, it affects our whole planning, our whole rationing system and so on, you cannot have an opposition".

 

But he allowed a certain tacit opposition and as I say he managed to resolve individual disputes in favour of the popular sentiment. I mean, the University of Belgrade, when they were having university trouble because they were expelling professors who were not Communists and the students were in a state of uprising and the police arrived with machine guns and all the rest of it to subdue the students, Tito comes and says, "Since when have you ever thought that you educate students with machine guns, whoever thought of such a thing, get out, all of you". So of course the students all cheered Tito, danced around him, as "our friend, our protector". He did not resolve anything, he did not put the professors back, who had been fired. He simply resolved the particular confrontation in favour of the students, and left. And likewise if there were a strike, he would come along and make some Solomon judgment and buzz off. He would not stay around and negotiate. He would say: "That is the way it is going to be, half and half". He was a very astute politician and I got into a fairly favourable position with Tito because of the Hungarian refugees. He, of course, was caught in this situation that he had broken with Stalin but was still a Communist, and when the fighting was concluding in Budapest, the Austrians had closed the frontier and some of the last freedom fighters had absolutely nowhere to go but to Yugoslavia. And the Yugoslav police and military rounded them up and put them into concentration camps. I heard about this and asked the Foreign Affairs Minister whether this was true and was told at first that they had never heard about it. I let slip that I was not just being curious but that Canada might be able to help.

 

Sure enough, I get a call from them - not from the Foreign Ministry because they did not like to eat their words - but from the Ministry of the Interior, none other than the secret police - and they said: "We understand you are interested in this subject. In what way"? I said, "Well you know Canada accepted a good many refugees from Hungary, through Austria, and it occurred to me that, as I understand you have refugees, we might be able to help you." (I was a friend of Jack Pickersgill at the time, then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration). And they said: "Well, if that is the case, would you like to go and see the camp?" And I said: "Yes". I went there the next day and there were hundreds of them and I sent a cable to Jack Pickersgill and asked for an immediate mission to come to Yugoslavia. He sent a mission right away and we got some of the best, because the people who went to Yugoslavia were people who fought to the last. They were the most convinced freedom fighters and I have run into some of them in Toronto, I have forgotten how many we took but I would say 500 or 600, it was quite a lot. Once we took them and of course it became known that they were there, then other governments like Sweden and Norway, Britain and France took some. The whole thing was wound up in a matter of months and Tito was very grateful because if he had sent them back to Hungary they would have been shot and he would have lost American aid and if he kept them he was afraid they were really anti-communist, really tough people. There were actors, there were professors and professionals and some students and so we shipped them out. They were very grateful.

 

Part V - The Diefenbaker years. 1959-62

 

[HILL] Ambassador Ignatieff, from 1959 to 1962, you were to be Deputy High Commissioner for one year in London and then you became Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs with responsibility, I believe, to serve as Mr. Diefenbaker's personal advisor on national defence issues and nuclear affairs. I wonder if you could tell us something about those three years. This seems to me to have been a period in which there was this whole question of acceptance or not of nuclear weapons for the Canadian armed forces. And then of course this was the period of Howard Green, the beginning of his period. I wonder if you could just tell us something about how you saw the crucial issues of that period, including the relationship of Canada's policies towards NATO?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Well a word, perhaps on how I was catapulted from being Ambassador in Yugoslavia, appointed by Mr. St. Laurent and Mr. Pearson, into the high ranks of the Civil Service under the Conservative Administration. That in itself, I think, needs some explanation, because I was associated with Mr. Pearson and it was known that Mr. Diefenbaker regarded those who had been associated too closely with Mr. Pearson as "Pearsonalities” and was not too keen about them. Nor was Mr. Drew. It was interesting, one of those happenstances, that the first Secretary of State for External Affairs that Diefenbaker appointed was Sidney Smith, who had been the President of the University of Toronto. It so happened that my brother, to whom I was very closely attached, Nicholas, was appointed Warden of Hart House. He had been overseas and came back as a veteran to help the university cope with the influx of veterans under the policy the government financed for post-secondary education. He found himself in frequent friction and disagreement with the President who did not quite see things from the eyes of veterans who expected to be treated as adults, to say the least, and not as undergraduate children. Without going into too many details, their disagreements grew and my brother had a massive stroke and died at Hart House all of a sudden. The President was, apparently, tremendously affected by this. He sensed somehow this might have been related to the state of tension that had developed between the two, and I did not know this as I was in Washington. However, I attended the funeral, but did not know at the time, I found out from correspondence, through mutual friends, what happened. But to my great surprise, I was summoned from Belgrade by Sidney Smith to the meeting of heads of Canadian missions in Europe, to Paris, in the presence of John Diefenbaker, in 1958, when there was a meeting of ministers at heads of government level at NATO. And I was even more surprised when we'd assembled and I had taken a very meek place at the back, expecting to be regarded with intense suspicion as a Liberal appointment, when the Minister said: "And we would like to start with an outlook on NATO which is not from within NATO. I think the first person best qualified to start the discussion would be Mr. Ignatieff". And I was totally unprepared for this and I explained that the outlook from Yugoslavia was that of a non-aligned nation which regarded both the Warsaw Pact and NATO as responsible for the militarization of Europe. They considered that the militarization on one side provoked militarization on the other and acted like a reciprocal pump, escalating the situation. The outlook from Yugoslavia therefore was one of extreme criticism of the policies of both sides. Moreover, both sides were provoking a nuclear confrontation and - instead of working out a kind of mutual accommodation or strategy of defence, - they were both subordinating strategy to nuclear weapons and this presented a very serious problem which, from the point of view of the non-aligned, was not being properly addressed, either between the alliances or in arms control negotiations. Well, again, I thought I would be knocked down for this kind of neutralist talk, but that was the attitude of Tito and Yugoslavia. George Drew intervened to say that he had not come to listen to such neutralist talk. He thought that the Conservative government was pledged to support the Alliance, and that he had expected a ringing assertion of Canadian support for NATO and what was all this business of listening to what the Yugoslavs thought. What did that matter? To my great surprise Sidney Smith intervened to say that the new government intended to look at all the options in relation to the Alliance, that we would possibly consider for instance adopting a position similar to that of Mexico or Sweden: that the government was not bound by the commitments necessarily of the Liberal government and that therefore it was very appropriate to listen to what Mr. Ignatieff had to say.

 

Well, then I was introduced to the Prime Minister, which I found very surprising, and the Prime Minister asked me to introduce the various heads of Canadian missions. Nothing more was said, and I returned to Belgrade and almost immediately received a telegram from Sidney Smith, then Secretary of State for External Affairs, saying that they wanted me to return to Ottawa. When I went to see the Minister he said that they were very anxious that I should accept the post of Deputy High Commissioner in London. I said to Mr. Smith "You saw how Mr. Drew reacted to my intervention over NATO in Paris, at the head of missions meeting, and it was not likely that he would take kindly to this appointment”. So, Mr. Smith said "Well let's try it, and let it be for the Prime Minister to decide and he has decided you will go”. I said "Well, it is putting me into a very difficult position, I really can't see how I can be of any use in London and, I am happy in Yugoslavia”. Then the Minister looked at me and clutched me by both hands and said "Do this for Nick's sake", which was my brother who died.

 

I could not very well refuse on those grounds, and all I asked was to be given the chance to go across Canada which I did to pick up as much information as I could about current Canadian internal problems, because I knew Mr. Drew was extremely conscious of the need for diplomats to know more about Canada than about the country to which they were accredited. And after a brief trans-Canada visit including one to where I had worked on railroad construction in the Kootenay Valley, I arrived in London, and found my fears at first were more than justified. Mr. Drew regarded me with suspicion, both on the grounds that the Prime Minister had chosen to send me and because I was a "Pearsonality" as far as he was concerned. Indeed jokes went on with Prince Philip. Prince Philip was reported to have asked Drew "How are you getting along with your Pearsonality"? Because I often filled in for Mr. Drew at functions at Buckingham Palace. There was a certain amount of leg pulling, and at first Mr. Drew announced that I was to only do those things which he specifically assigned me, that it was not to be assumed that as his deputy, I could act in his place, or make decisions in any degree. I must say that the improvement really grew from two sources. One was that my wife and Firenza Drew became great friends. She had a great influence on George Drew. She was a very remarkable woman. She was the daughter of Edward Johnson, the great Metropolitan Opera singer, and head of the Metropolitan Opera, a man of great talent, and so was she too, being brought up in Italy and so on. The other thing that happened was that the Prime Minister came over, and whether it was because I had this "bohunk" background, but he showed Mr. Drew very clearly that I was in his favour. As this was so much the exception as far as the bureaucracy was concerned, he had to take that into account. I was asked by the Prime Minister to be his sort of liaison while he visited London and this was his first visit after he had won the election, I mean the second election, and he wanted to meet all the good and the great. As I had been in London with the Masseys, I knew some of these people and arranged meetings, and took the Prime Minister around. Then he made a great speech in the Albert Hall on the Empire sponsored by Lord Beaverbrooke. He stood out a great and perhaps the last spokesman for the Empire at the time when the British were retreating from the Empire and Commonwealth in favour of the European Community.

 

[HILL] Actually, I attended that meeting.

 

[IGNATIEFF] It was an extraordinary experience. But anyway, my stay in London coincided with the effort of Diefenbaker to divert, as you probably remember, 15 percent I think it was, of trade from the United States to Britain and the drive for promotion of trade. It was a busy time, you had to go around making speeches and marketing Canadian products, and it was not too easy because Mr. Drew is a person who is intensely personal in his relations. He either liked or disliked you, and as I say he started by disliking me. Then we became fast friends and I found myself having to do more than I thought was my share particularly in social functions. Mr. Drew was a good deal of the time in Canada, and I had to fit in representing him in all kinds of functions which meant making speeches, and going to Buckingham Palace. I was there to represent Canada at the famous dinner given by the Queen for De Gaulle, in his only official visit to England, and that was the last time I saw Churchill incidentally. He was in a wheelchair and was thought to be asleep and Macmillan came up to him and said: "Did you see any change in the General”? And he looked up and said: "Yes, before he was like a bottle of hock; now he is like a bottle of burgundy". Stroke or not, he was still very much on the ball. It was also Mr. Drew's plan to move the High Commission's office from Canada House in Trafalgar Square to Grosvenor House in Grosvenor Square, and to buy the old American Embassy, and we had to negotiate this purchase and plan to move. It was a busy time and so I was somewhat surprised that after less than two years I was asked to come back to become Assistant Under-Secretary and in the meantime of course Sidney Smith had died. So, I had rather taken for granted that perhaps my sudden elevation would stop, but nothing of the kind. His successor was Howard Green. Howard Green arrived in London and I will never forget my first meeting with him. He came into my office and exchanged a few civilities and then he said: "I would like to borrow your office tomorrow". I thought to myself, here we go, I am going to be put out, but he said "Only for tea you understand, and it will be two old ladies. Do you think you could provide just tea and biscuits, and you can come too". What happened was, this was the first official visit of the new Foreign Minister of Canada to England and instead of going to see immediately Selwyn Lloyd, the Foreign Secretary or the high people in Whitehall, his first thought was that he would meet with the two nurses who had looked after him when he was first wounded in 1917 in the First World War. He invited these two old ladies who had been his nurses and looked after him in hospital. I thought well my goodness, what a new and sincere approach. And we started to talk and then of course it turned out that while Howard Green had been educated in the University of Toronto he had been born and brought up in the Arrow Lakes which is close to the Kootenay district. He had served in the Kootenay Regiment in World War I. I knew exactly where his home was, where his mother lived and we chatted about all these things and the old paddle wheelers on Kootenay lake and the whole life in that part of the world. We became friends. Again, it was a question that he felt that I was part of, somehow or other related to, his background. I was not some smart aleck bureaucrat that did not understand him. The result was that when I came to Ottawa I found myself as Assistant to Norman Robertson, who was Under-Secretary and had been appointed Under-Secretary by Sidney Smith. But the difficult situation was that while Diefenbaker could not refuse Sidney Smith's appointment of Norman Robertson, he would not warm to Norman Robertson; he found him too intellectual. He was obviously the outstanding figure in the whole of the Foreign Service. He had figured as advisor to Mackenzie King whom, incidentally. Diefenbaker admired. He patterned a great deal of his politics and strategies on Mackenzie King but he did not get on too well with Norman. The result was that, when I arrived, again to my great surprise I was summoned by the Prime Minister, and he said: "You are to feel that you can come to my office any time and I would like you to come everyday". This put me in an extremely difficult position. I could not say no to the Prime Minister, I could not. I went to see Howard Green and Norman Robertson, and told them the strange development and I said "I will do whatever you say, I do not believe in this leap-frogging system." And they said: "I think for all our sakes you'd better do what the Prime Minister wants, I think he particularly wants advice on the question of NORAD and these nuclear problems." And that did turn out to be the problem uppermost in the Prime Minister's mind. What happened was, as I described briefly in my memoirs, that the NORAD Agreement had been drawn up during the last months of the St. Laurent, Pearson regime, and came to Cabinet just before the election, and Prime Minister St. Laurent said that this was not to be decided until after the election: there were too many political issues. It was known, as Pearson reflects in his memoirs, that Pearson did not want a bilateral defence command, that he had argued with Dulles and with the State Department that he did not see why one of the commands of the Alliance should be bilateral and confined to North America, while all the others were subject to the North Atlantic Council and the consultative machinery which was involved. And of course he was faced with the adamant position that the Americans had that they would not allow any other ally to have a finger on the nuclear trigger. That was the key issue, and they were insistent that this should be therefore a separate command structure and that it would be related to NATO only nominally, being described for NATO purposes as the "North American Regional Planning Group". But in fact they did not report to NATO and did not submit any of their plans and so on. And the question of consultation with allies over the rise of nuclear weapons was therefore unresolved. I will come to that. But, the key problem from the Canadian standpoint was, that Mr. Diefenbaker in the early days of his Prime Ministership, when he was still also Secretary of State for External Affairs (before he had appointed Sidney Smith) was confronted by National Defence with making a decision. I mention that because I think Sidney Smith would have seen what was up. He was an intelligent man and would have seen the fish hook in this particular fish sticking out and would have warned the Prime Minister. But, the Prime Minister, as I said, before Smith's appointment, was not only Secretary of State but was in a very self-confident mood and General Pearkes, under the urging of General Foulkes, (they were old pals in the army) , went to him and said: "This has been to Cabinet"; which you know, literally was one of these half truths. It had in fact been to Cabinet and had not been approved. But, Pearkes said: "It had been to Cabinet and it is just waiting for signature, the Americans have signed it, it is simply a joint defence arrangement for North America, you know the kind we have been working on for some time. It comes under NATO and the Liberals have been working on this for years and it just was not signed before the election". And so the Prime Minister signed it, without looking into the background and without getting the implications and all the rest of it. And then he discovered, later, that this subordinated Canadian defence to American strategy, the nuclear strategy, and that having signed the NORAD Agreement, which was what the Americans wanted, i.e. for purposes of defence, the Canada-US frontier was down. That was one of the reasons why, when I was in Washington, we insisted that there should be detailed consultations and permission to deploy and overfly Canada in each case. I was under instruction very definitely to say that the Canadian Government would not agree that the border did not exist for the purposes of defence. We realized then that this would be the end of Canadian sovereignty, for purposes of defence. This, together with the presence of trans-nationals in the economic field, very seriously affected us. NORAD therefore represented a very major political decision regarding our sovereignty. This was not explained in any way to Mr. Diefenbaker, whose one great, I think sincere, belief was in Canadian integrity, unity and nationalism.

 

[HILL] If I might interject, I still think you get that sort of situation now, where there are people who would like to have a sort of "straight alliance", mainly anti-Soviet. They would brush aside the whole sovereignty business.

 

[IGNATIEFF] This was exactly it, and Foulkes was in on the Pentagon view, that the enemy was the Soviet Union, that they were a direct threat to North America and that for purposes of defending North America there could be no separation of authority or sovereignty. But this was not explained to Mr. Diefenbaker, and then he was told that the Arrow aircraft, which was under a British-Canadian consortium to build an all weather interceptor specially for Canadian purposes, in other words it was one case of a weapon which was constructed, planned, designed to fit Canadian needs - he was told by National Defence after he had signed NORAD, there was no need for such an aircraft, because the United States would take care of all that and they would not buy the Arrow in any shape or form; they had all kinds of aircraft and missiles and we were going into the missile age anyway. And in his fury, I think, Diefenbaker not only made the decision to scrap the Arrow, but he said that every Arrow plane, even the few models that had been made, had to be destroyed.

 

[HILL] They were burnt, weren't they?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Apart from the mounting cost of the Arrow, which was given as the explanation for scrapping it, he was horrified when he found himself committed under the joint plan to the Bomarcs to be installed in Canada to defend, if you please, the heartland of the industrial empire of the United States. We were told that in NATO we had also to accept nuclear capable weapons, the 104 Starfighter converted to nuclear strike aircraft, and the Honest Johns for the Army. Suddenly Mr. Diefenbaker found himself, instead of considering a Canadian defence policy, tied to a defence policy subordinated to a certain type of weapons, that is a nuclear weapons programme. There was no question of any Canadian defence policy. It went absolutely against all his concepts of what Canadian unity and Canadian sovereignty were all about. I was witness, because I was asked by the Prime Minister to attend some cabinet defence meetings, which was unusual for a civil servant. But Bryce and I were asked to attend, I saw the fury with which Diefenbaker attacked the representatives of National Defence. On one occasion he was so outspoken to Hugh Campbell, who was Chief of the Air Staff, he said "You have misled me, deliberately misled me, time and time again, you talk about a bomber threat then you say it is a missile threat, and that the Americans have to decide, and you face me with a fait accompli." Harkness, the Defence Minister, had to intervene to say that he could not accept such attacks, personal attacks on the chiefs of staff, when he was the minister responsible. It is difficult to understand the build-up of this crisis in the cabinet, which ended of course with the breakup of the cabinet and the defeat of the Diefenbaker government, except in the terms that Diefenbaker felt that he had been misled by National Defence, he had been tricked into accepting, as I say, a defence policy for Canada which was subordinated to a certain type of weapons programme and also to the interest of a foreign government. It affected his whole attitude in relation to the United States. I mean a lot has been said about his personal antipathy to a young President such as Kennedy. But it had this background in the defence issues, where he felt he had been cornered into a subordinate position and contrary to all his convictions. The only solution that he could see was twofold, one was to try to strengthen the ties with Britain and the Commonwealth and there he ran into, the fact that the tide was going out as far as he was concerned. The British were about to enter the Common Market. The other was to gain time by encouraging Howard Greene and his various initiatives on arms control and disarmament negotiations.

 

[HILL] That was the period of the European free trade area.

 

[IGNATIEFF] It was beginning, but he did turn on this tremendous effort to divert trade and it became almost a matter of faith, that you know you could do it and it was amazing what was in fact accomplished. I do not know if the actual diversion amounted to 15 percent or not, the Department of Finance and Trade experts always questioned Diefenbaker, that was one of the things that annoyed him and George Drew. But the fact was, that there was an extraordinary amount of things sold in England. Things I didn't expect to be sold. Furniture, costume jewelry, clothes, all kinds of things. It was a real drive, but the other thing was that he wanted to use NATO in some way or another to extract himself from this, what he felt was an isolated position, and it was when it became clear, as I had to report to him, that there was no way in which the Americans would agree to re-open NORAD or review it. In fact, the attitude of Air Marshal Miller, who succeeded Foulkes, was rather similar - there was nothing to discuss as far as I was concerned. We met several times with Bob Bryce and tried various possible options but there was nothing that they were willing to re-open. And so, on that front he chose, not through I think any great conviction, to follow the path that Howard Green accepted with conviction. Howard Green having been a veteran in the First World War and wounded, and seen in his early age what a hell of a thing world war is, was a convinced pacifist and was absolutely against the nuclear commitment in any form. He was for the elimination of nuclear weapons. He would have been a leader in the peace movement if he had been given the chance. In fact, his closest friend and colleague in the House of Commons was the member for Kootenay, Mr. Herridge, who also had been a veteran and lost his arm. He was a member of the CCF. Anyway, it was the Prime Minister who decided. I advised him. And I said: "The only sort of way that you can hold some kind of position in principle against nuclear weapons is to say: 'We are negotiating on the reduction and control of these weapons in the multilateral fora, and pending that we do not accept nuclear warheads even though we have the Bomarks and the Honest Johns and all the rest of it". This was the position that he held, and Howard Green rushed around starting with a very fertile area, which had a good deal of public support namely to stop nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Because the fallout problem was particularly serious in Western Canada when testing was being conducted in the atmosphere. There was fallout, radioactivity, as far east as Calgary and the Prairies. But it was quite noticeable in British Columbia, coming in from the Marshall Islands and also from the Soviet tests and the Chinese tests too. So, he joined up with the Foreign Minister of Ireland, Aiken, to lead the attack on nuclear testing at the UN. He organized the monitoring of radioactivity and our Air Force did the monitoring, at a very considerable risk I may say, because they were flying through radioactive clouds and quite a number of them suffered as a result. This was the time of the Sputnik and the race for the moon with all these missiles with a greater and greater thrust, and interestingly enough, Mr. Green anticipated the danger of an arms race extending into outer space. In 1962 when we both attended a meeting of the disarmament committee in Geneva at ministerial level, without consulting the Americans and to their great annoyance, Howard Green launched his campaign for a treaty excluding military uses of outer space. It came as a surprise both to the Soviet Union and to the United States, and the United States objected very strenuously, and said that "This has really gone beyond any tolerance that Canada should have done a thing like this, without even consulting its closest ally in NATO or anybody".

 

It did result in the United States and the Soviet Union, at least, having to ban the orbiting of nuclear weapons in space, because it was taken up by other Governments of the United Nations and at that time the United Nations was still more influential than it is today - the two nuclear super powers were pressured into at least signing a treaty, which excluded the orbiting of nuclear weapons into outer space and that still remains as a memorial to Howard Green's initiative. As I say, in monitoring, in the partial test ban, and in the question of peaceful uses of outer space, Canada did show some, not only initiative, but some results. We got support from other countries, and therefore Diefenbaker was able to say - it did not persuade National Defence or those who believed in the nuclear deterrent as the answer to Canadian/American security - that the jury was still out, that there was a possibility that some agreement would be reached affecting nuclear weapons which would enable Canada not to accept nuclear weapons. In addition, the NATO forum was used in addition to the UN. Mr. Diefenbaker sent me to NATO when Jules Leger had his first heart attack, to try and do whatever I could in conjunction with non-nuclear-weapon countries like Norway and Denmark to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons: particularly Norway and Denmark, which would not even allow nuclear weapons on their soil. And he said that that is the position we want to occupy, not the NORAD position. The situation gave some ground for discussion because the Europeans had raised, themselves, the question of just how you consult and control the nuclear weapons within the Alliance. There had been an agreement in 1958 that there would be stock-piles of nuclear weapons established by the Americans for the use of the Alliance. But it was clearly understood, the Americans made it very clear, that this required specific agreements with governments, both on sharing nuclear information and having access to the two-key basis to the stock piles. I mention this because that was the last fling from the Diefenbaker side to try and avoid the crisis in the cabinet, to use that particular formula. When I was in NATO we were discussing the possibility of a multilateral nuclear force based on merchant vessels being equipped with nuclear warheads, and the crews of these weapons would be drawn from all countries willing to participate.

 

[HILL] I wonder if we could go on to that one in the next phase, that was when you were actually Ambassador to NATO. I just wanted to ask one last question if I could, on the Diefenbaker period, which is: from what I know I have an impression that Diefenbaker and his government remained committed to, and saw NATO as, a fundamental part of Canadian policies. As you mentioned, there were all these problems with NORAD and so on - but nonetheless my impression is that they still wanted to work through NATO. And in fact didn't they launch some sort of declaration, the Canadian Government, which was agreed by the rest of the allies in this period?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, Diefenbaker looked to NATO rather in the same way as the Liberals had previously, namely that the other allies, especially as far as Mr. Diefenbaker was concerned, would counter-balance the United States, through the consultative machinery of NATO. He attended NATO ministerial meetings with satisfaction and was impressed by the fact that NATO had this kind of provision for consultation at various levels. He thought he could see some way of getting through NATO what he was not able to get bilaterally, that is what indeed Pearson had thought, namely that the NORAD arrangement, whatever the nuclear command and control arrangements, should be subordinate to the North Atlantic Council, like other military commands. On that basis, I was sent to see what I could do. We had at that time of course not weakened the Canadian contribution; we had an air division and we had a full brigade and we had a commitment to build up to a division and we had at that time a more effective naval component. So, we were allies in reasonably good standing. What was, of course, a growing defect was that while we had an excellent quality of personnel training, we won in all these various contests in terms of discipline and performance in manoeuvres and that sort of thing, but here we had an air division equipped with nuclear-capable weapons but no agreement to have the warheads, and we had to see the 104s for instance go on alert as a symbol without any capability of actually doing anything; and our air force personnel, naturally, they were very unhappy about going through the motions of going to alert without being able to actually have access to these weapons, and likewise the army was in a similar situation that there were to be these Honest Johns, heavy howitzers, equipped with nuclear warheads, there they were. They could go through the motions for training but there were not any warheads and so that became an increasingly acute problem. Things came to a head, I am now talking about NATO. First of all, the Europeans themselves had raised the question just what was to be the answer to participation in planning and control over nuclear weapons and the Americans had tried, as I say, this multilateral force idea, which Canada did not take any part in. Diefenbaker did not want us to be in this, what he called “The Pirates of Penzance", and it was a very strange idea that this motley crew would be in a vessel armed with nuclear weapons which was supposed to be plying the oceans as a ordinary merchant vessel, and it was something that was tried in World War I, certain merchant vessels were disguised to fight the German submarine menace. But with modern methods of detection the Soviets would have quickly nailed any of these ships by the presence of the missiles on deck. And, I did not take part in these discussions, but they were seriously pursued, the key to that problem was really the relations between France and Germany. Germany had been required under the Western European Union Treaty, and under the Paris Agreements that brought Germany into NATO, to foreswear, of course, access, I mean to having their own nuclear weapons or to having direct access to nuclear weapons. They could have American nuclear weapons on their territory or allied, and the French were particularly concerned about the Germans having nuclear weapons. I have never been quite sure whether the independent deterrent set up by de Gaulle was really intended against the Germans, as much as against the Soviets. But anyway, they were very nervous about the whole idea of the Germans, and part of the MLF scheme was, if you please, to have Germans in these crews and therefore the Germans were a little more interested than some of the others to get on board these "Pirate" ships. In the end, as far as we were concerned, things came rather to a head over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here was a state of affairs where Khrushchev attempted forcibly to bring to the attention of the Americans the threat he felt the Soviet Union was exposed to by the positioning of American missiles in Turkey right on its border, as well as in Italy. For such reasons, I gather, Khrushchev decided to move warheads and nuclear missiles into Cuba, and these were detected by reconnaissance aircraft. Livingston Merchant, who had been the American Ambassador to Canada and was on reasonably good terms with Mr. Diefenbaker, came to see him and showed him the photographs just at the same time that Dean Acheson, the former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the United States, came to NATO ‘equipped with all kinds of photographs. And the Council met at night and we went over these photographs. I reported that the Council had accepted the evidence of these photographs as sufficient proof that indeed Soviet vessels were on the way to Cuba with nuclear missiles.

 

[HILL] Can I just ask a question here. You at this time were Ambassador to NATO, I believe?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, I was already, I had gone in the summer, this was in the fall of '62. And Mr. Diefenbaker in his memoirs acknowledges the fact that he did receive my report. But Livingston Merchant having shown him the photographs, which he did, received the following reply from Diefenbaker: "Well, that is fine, but I do not accept in a matter of such seriousness - you say this is a direct nuclear threat to North America - that this should be decided unilaterally by the United States. I think that this should be put before the United Nations as a threat to the peace, and there should be an international commission established to establish exactly what are the facts. Is there a threat or is there not a threat and that should go to the Security Council". This, in effect, was what he said. He was of course horrified when he discovered that President Kennedy had authorized the declaration of a nuclear alert under NORAD. We were still discussing in NATO what the allied response to the Soviet action should be, and what degree of alert was appropriate. The NORAD alert, declared by President Kennedy, was of the highest degree and affected North America only. The situation was that Diefenbaker, having taken the position that this had to go to the United Nations, and should be dealt with by an international commission, certainly was not in any mood to accept the implication that Canada was in a state of war readiness by the say-so of the US President. And this was done....

 

[HILL] Without any consultation between....

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, and for that reason Diefenbaker said that he did not accept the NORAD declaration of readiness because the President had failed to consult him. And you see that provision, the power of the USA to make a declaration of a nuclear alert by NORAD without consultation, is still the most objectionable feature of NORAD, because the reaction time now of missiles and computerized controls of these weapons has been reduced to a matter of minutes, so in any case now I should imagine it is questionable whether there can be a consultative process to declare an alert in NORAD. Anyway NATO consultations proceeded daily on exactly what the degree of danger and threat was, and one ally after another, beginning with France, declared solidarity with the USA. I was without any instructions. I think it started on Sunday, I think it was Wednesday or Thursday before Diefenbaker finally accepted a state of alert, as he says in his memoirs, based on the advice he was getting from NATO, not from NORAD. An interesting historical fact was that on Tuesday, at least two days, or a day and a half, before the final decision by the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, Harkness, concerned that there might be a state of mutiny, declared that Canadian Armed Forces were officially, as far as NORAD was concerned, in a state of alert. But this had not been authorized by the Government, until the Cabinet made the decision a day later. And this had been preceded by the fact that Canadian ships of Maritime Command in Halifax (since the threat was a maritime one and SACLANT, the commander of the naval forces of the Atlantic, was taking up precautionary battle stations), had slipped anchor and left immediately without even waiting for Harkness. Our forces in Europe did not know what to do and kept on getting in touch with me and asking me what the hell was happening, what was going on? I did not know, I got absolutely no instructions until Thursday, when the Prime Minister made his statement in the House to the effect that of course Canada could not stand idly by, as it were, in the face of a threat against the Western hemisphere, and we must declare a state of alert. But, this focused attention on just how unready, in a state of war alert, the Canadian Forces were. After the crisis had been resolved - in the way that is well known, through direct contacts between President Kennedy and Khrushchev, using both the UN and the Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin in Washington as well as direct communications with Khrushchev - Kennedy, as a gesture towards the allies for showing solidarity (we were not excluded), invited the whole North Atlantic Council to Washington. I still have the little tray which he gave each one of us with our names on it. He received us in the Oval Office, thanked us for the solidarity that we had shown, and invited us to visit all the nuclear installations in the United States. This was in 1962, and so I learned what all the installations were, the silos, the Strategic Air Command, the headquarters, the various military command units, and the submarine bases. I was actually on board a nuclear submarine. Now, while I was in Washington being thanked by the President, on my own initiative, I worried about this business, particularly the role of the 104s (modified for a nuclear-strike capability because the Air Division had been well equipped for an interception role). The Air Division was regarded as one of the really important units of the Alliance, and there was no doubt about the quality of our airmen. Air Marshal Dunlop was in command, and I used to constantly meet him. But here we faced a situation where our Air Division was equipped with nuclear- capacity aircraft, without the communication in a crisis. They were subject to possible missile attacks, because they were targeted as a nuclear-capable unit, but with no warheads. So, all they could do was to take off and get out of the way. So I went to see Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, on my own, in Washington DC, and asked him what was his advice. He was supposed to be the Chief of the Pentagon. The curious thing about it was, that he took down one of his black books, he had a whole lot of black reference books behind his desk, and looked up the 104 and said, "Yes, this is a high level interceptor, planned and built for the Korean War for the interception of the then advanced MIG types that the North Koreans had use of from the Soviet air force". Their main characteristic was manoeuvrability at high levels; they were speedy and manoeuvrable at high levels of interdiction. And I said: "How does this relate to their conversion into nuclear strike aircraft"? He said: "That should never have happened, they are totally useless. To begin with, they are not reliable at low levels, and they have to be for the role of nuclear strike aircraft, they have to fly under radar or at low levels to avoid radar and that is why there are a lot of accidents. I believe your division is luckier than the Germans, perhaps they're better fliers, they are not supposed to be flown at low levels. The other thing is that we have no need for them as carriers of nuclear weapons. We are moving into the missile era, and we will be deploying missiles to take care of that particular thing”. I said: "What do we do with the 104?” He looked at me and said: "Well, if you want to keep the 104, try photography”. I said: "Are you serious". He said: "Yes, it has a possible role in photography". I said: "How do we tell the Soviets that the aircraft they knew to be nuclear-capable are only good to take photographs." Well, he said "That is your business, that is for diplomats, I do not know. I would scrap them". Well, it was against that kind of background, which I reported to a meeting of NATO parliamentarians in 1965, that the 104 issue continued unresolved. I reported they really had to make a decision, either to take out and substitute another aircraft, which we could, or use them for a different role, even photography or interception. It was a deadlock in Ottawa over this. I suspect that National Defence did not want to admit they made a mistake, that it cost a very considerable sum to convert these aircraft into this role. This deadlock continued until 1965 when Hellyer came over with a delegation for the meeting of NATO parliamentarians. He went directly to the SACEUR, got from him what he could have got from me, but did not get it from me. I felt that I had to tell the opposition what my own views were on the subject. My only contribution to Canada's role in NATO, was that I did stress to Diefenbaker, and this was accepted, that if we were looking for a defence policy, moving towards a Canadian defence policy, the first responsibility and obligation of every country under the Alliance was self-defence. And I said what was striking was that most of our Forces were either doing peace-keeping functions, which I thoroughly supported, or were situated in the central area in NATO and that we had really no plans and no forces trained and committed to Canadian or northern defence and what we should look at was to train at least some of our forces for northern defence; re-open Churchill and train at least part of our forces in Arctic weather; and work out an arrangement with Norway and possibly the British, the Germans and some others of reciprocal defence commitments with our European allies to undertake a share of North American defence, as it was intended under NATO. Our European partners would share in the responsibilities of the defence of the deterrent, and we would in our turn take part in defence of Northern Norway which was mostly exposed to the nuclear concentrations of the Soviets in the Kola Peninsula. And this was tried out, indeed I went on the first manoeuvres in the Northern Arctic, and it was a success in the sense that we were better equipped and trained, even with our limited resources, than any other. There was one occasion when Canadians stood out in such matters as the least frost bitten, the most mobile, we had the ski-doos, we had all kinds of things, skiis, and impressed the Norwegians even with our mobility; and we had helicopters. This was the direction which I still feel is desirable under an alliance, that you need to have a division of labour based on specialization. The other big defect in NATO which I worked to change, but it is not changed, is the lack of standardization of equipment, this is really a scandalous state of affairs. It is that partly sheltering under the American nuclear guarantee, but also increasingly using defence as a means of developing high tech industry, each country developed it's own weapons (I may say that, except for Canada, which, as you know, merely assumed a subsidiary role to American defence industry under the defence sharing agreement). The result was that in maneuvers and exercises in NATO, each country virtually had a motley selection of equipment even for such basic things as ammunition for quick-firing weapons. The ammunition was not standardized and therefore you were not sure if the lines of supply would even provide the basic amount required for a matter of days with the kind of rapid-firing weapons used in modern warfare. Tanks were not standardized, the carriers for troops, trucks were not standardized and this has been serious because what has happened has been that governments have sought to make deals with industries. And various firms bid for contracts, and therefore, in a way again, our strategy in NATO has been subordinated to commercialized trade in equipment.

 

Part VI - Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council. mid-1960s

 

[HILL] Can I ask you another point? In 1963 there was a change in Government. The Liberal Government under Lester Pearson came in, and I believe right at the outset he took decisions on the question of nuclear equipment for the forces which resolved that irritant. Then in 1964 there was the Defence White Paper, which really looked in some other directions, I mean not outside NATO but at some degree of pull back. One could already see at that time that Canada was not perhaps going to play quite so prominent a role in the future as it had in the past. For example, Germany was already becoming very strong, France was under De Gaulle and coming up again. This was also the period of the McNamara strategy in the US, and the move towards forward defence and flexible response. Could you tell us something about the changes in allied strategy in that period, and how Canada fitted in? What part did Canada play in thinking about both the conventional side and the nuclear side?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Well, of course Pearson won the election by saying that "The government had not lived up to its commitment, it had gone nuclear capable without getting the warheads". He would get the warheads and then negotiate Canada out of the nuclear role. But, I think it would be honest to say that the allies regarded this whole business as something that was peculiarly Canadian and not anything for them to interfere with. We were questioned very severely about what we were going to do in the matter of the Air Division because the 104s were taken out and the CF-5 began, but I felt that commercial considerations prevailed over defence interests. I may say that Mr. Hellyer came over and I attended the briefings about the aircraft needs but he bought an aircraft off the shelf which did not fit any of the needs which were described by the military. Again, our Armed Forces were made the victims of defence industry contracting, and again our strategies were subordinate to equipment, rather than equipment made related to stated, defined functions. It has been our main problem in defence, I have always said, it is not so much weakness of our defence expenditures in terms of GNP. I went over all this sort of thing many times in our examination every year in NATO and I was given all kinds of ingenious arguments both by Liberals and Conservatives, that we had to count in the CNR deficit and the cost of the Trans-Canada Highway and Air Canada and all kinds of things in view of the transportation needs of a big country. And they used to look at me and say, "You see we are big boys now and do not try that kind of stuff, all we want to know is what is your commitment to European defence". The only constructive new element that happened after the change of government was really this; the effort to bring some degree of specialization in Northern and Arctic defence. That did come out, I raised it under Diefenbaker, but it was approved under the Liberals and we did take part, and it did raise the morale of the Armed Forces, as I say they were shown to be tops in their defence operations in the Arctic environment. Unfortunately, the Europeans never did accept this idea that there should be reciprocity. There is training of course here, there is some use of Canadian air space for training of aircraft and gunnery and all that sort of thing, but no idea that certain countries, particularly those which have interests and contacts in the Arctic, should accept specific commitments for the defence of the Canadian North as we have accepted in support of Norway.

 

I would not say that by the time I left in 1965, 1966, that, - apart from the fact that in dealing with Mr. Pearson and Mr. Hellyer, NATO found that, you know, they were at least willing to put up reasonable arguments, and they had decided on certain equipment in the direction of conventional weapons, - but there was no marked shift in increasing Canada's commitment and we were, in fact, in my experience, subject to more severe questioning. Because I think it was true to say that under Mr. Diefenbaker the NATO people realized that there was not much use going after the representative of Canada in NATO because he was immobilized, but they did expect a little more from the Pearson administration. Although the brigade remained, the air division was definitely weakened in my opinion by having this CF5, which was an army support role aircraft which was not regarded as a very big contribution to strengthening the NATO alliance. As I say the only significant new element was this business of accepting the commitment to support Norway.

 

[HILL] In this period, while you were there, a good deal of NATO's attention was devoted to relations with France. You must have been kept very busy in that time. There was a lot of work done, in the group of 14 I think, working out the arrangements for negotiating with France. Did Canada play a particular role in this area, in helping to keep the French in the Alliance?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, I was pretty active in this operation because, first of all, I had succeeded Jules Leger, and by this time Jules Leger was Ambassador and we were very close friends and worked very closely with the French Government, and I was also friends with a series of French Ambassadors to NATO, but particularly with Ambassador de Leusse, the representative at the time when all this came to a head. I was also chairman of the committee in NATO dealing with early warning, and this was something which even the French felt could not be easily destroyed. This system gave of course protection to France as well as to the others. Distances were all so small. My recollection was that the actual decision of France to leave the integrated command came as a great surprise. De Gaulle had his reservations about all international institutions, he called them all "machins", NATO, the UN, all the organizations, were all "machins". He really did live in the 18th Century, and thought in terms of restoring the monarchy, and one knew his prejudices and peculiarities. He hardly ever received the Secretary General of NATO, Dr. Stikker. Once when he did, I remember Stikker telling me about it. I said: "Well, how did it go"? He said: "Well, he asked me two questions, one was 'Est- ce-que'il y aura une guerre (in French)'?" Stikker said: "No, because of the Alliance. I do not think there will be a war, because of the nuclear deterrent and the United States; as long as it stays with the United States there will not be a war". Then de Gaulle said: "(In French) Est-ce-que le President des Etats-Unis est un homme responsable"? And Stikker said: "I do not discuss heads of state, I do not think I am competent to respond to that". Then the conversation ended. But the strange thing was that, as I say with all these eccentricities, it really did come as a shock. His moves often came as a surprise even to his officials, the Quai d'Orsay and to the commanders. Like the Cuban Missile affair: what happened was that he declared solidarity with Kennedy over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then afterwards, the US naval commander, SACLANT, came over to Paris expecting to be thanked by General de Gaulle, because - de Gaulle had given Lorry Norstad, SACEUR, one of the highest orders of the Legion d'Honneur. I think that was largely because Lorry Norstad was in disagreement with President Kennedy about missiles. So Admiral Dennison, when he came over, also expected to get the Legion d'Honneur. But, to his great surprise, when he thanked the President, the President said: "What do you mean the French fleet was under your command". Dennison said: "Well, you know it's an integrated naval command. There were the French, the British, the Canadians, some Germans, and our own". De Gaulle said: "I never heard of it". And he was very agitated; and this I heard from Robert Schumman. Dennison got no Legion d'Honneur. The General summoned the Admiral of a French Navy and said: "Was it true that the Navy was under command of an American Admiral during the Cuban Missile Crisis"? He said: "But, do you realize that France could have been plunged into nuclear war by a decision of the United States under this integrated command. Nobody ever told me". This is very interesting because there is a parallel to Diefenbaker. I always feel that there is a certain parallelism, which is not sufficiently realized in Canadian reading of the situation, that de Gaulle felt that he had been misled by President Kennedy by not being told that NATO commands were integrated. He had not been briefed on the implications of an integrated command, nor had Diefenbaker, and their reaction was remarkably similar. De Gaulle flew into a rage and said, "Absolutely, we will leave as of today all integrated commands, army, navy, air force and you will learn that you will receive orders only from the President of France, he alone has the authority to declare war, and that rule will be observed from now on and I want this carried out immediately". Well, as I say, this came as a sort of a tantrum if you like, not unlike Diefenbaker’s reaction, but it took some time to filter down to the French. It was not a decision in any way favoured by the Quai d'Orsay or by the French Department of Defence. They found themselves.in a very difficult position because, you know, there were all the pipelines based on France, the headquarters were in France, all the military machinery was in France and this is what the French establishment favoured. And here the General said, immediately, everything had to go. And so it was that our talks with the Quai d'Orsay and with De Leusse and so on were not in the form of so-called confrontation, it was sort of hand-holding, and particularly as I had gone through something of the sort with Diefenbaker on a parallel situation of the implications of integrated command not being explained, I was able to explain or make suggestions. Anyway, we were in constant consultation, and by this time of course the Secretary of State for External Affairs was Paul Martin and he came over and had talks with Couve de Murville, and Couve explained that there was no way whatsoever that the President's mind would be changed. This was final, the only question was how to disentangle these arrangements and to what extent the French would be in support of the military integrated commands. And of course the other thing that was negotiable, and this was worked out not just between Canada and France but between all of us, was that France would remain in the North Atlantic Council; that in leaving the integrated commands, the President had not specifically mentioned leaving the Alliance, and he was persuaded that it was in his interest, particularly in relation to Germany, to remain in the Alliance.

 

[HILL] So, in effect, the other allies did not react in a confrontational fashion really towards the French. It was rather a matter of ....

 

[IGNATIEFF] Of trying to hold their hands. They were practically in hysterics and they did not know what to do. I was in sympathy too, and I remember Admiral Dennison coming to see me and because I had got this direct from a French Minister, he wanted to have it explained, he was absolutely non-plussed and thunderstruck at what had happened. And I explained to him in terms of my experience with the reaction of Mr. Diefenbaker, that this was irreversible and is one of the things that we have to watch, this business of decision-making under an integrated command. How exactly you take care of political sovereignty.

 

[HILL] I wonder if I might ask two more questions about NATO and then one final wrap-up question. Your period in NATO was also a period of detente in Europe, and NATO was working on questions to do with, "The Future Tasks of the Alliance", which eventually, I think, turned into the Harmel Exercise. How do you see that phase? I think Canada was already keen on moving NATO in that direction. Was that the case?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, Canada's role in this, of course, is directly tied to Pearson's role in non- military or political co-operation in the Three Wise Men exercise, contained in the Report of the Committee of Three of 1956. I had been his political advisor in that exercise, and knew what was behind it. That had also been tied to his visit with Khrushchev which I had also been associated with, and since I had reported to NATO I was very much in the discussions, even during the Diefenbaker years, because Howard Green was very much for detente. There was no opposition to detente. Both Sidney Smith and Howard Green were thorough detentists and so in the political consultations about detente, one can truly say that Canada played a leading role in feeding views in, and reports about our appreciation of what was going on in Moscow in the Khrushchev period, and the other leading figures. This is something which is still important in NATO, that Canada can have special relationships with certain allies to stress the non-military obligations of the Alliance. For instance, the Dean of the North Atlantic Council was De Staercke, the Ambassador of Belgium, who has served longest on the Council and has influence. He was also a close friend of Mr. Spaak the former Prime Minister of Belgium, later Secretary General. We were in a very strong position in urging the discussion of detente. In other words, while the United States may have not been as keen about detente as the European allies at the time, we had more than our opportunity to press this in relation to dealing with the German question. I mentioned in my book that when the military came up with the business of shooting a nuclear weapon across the Soviet bows to frighten them, the Ambassadors of Norway, Belgium and myself shot that idea down so quickly that it was not raised again. The other thing, I may say, is that the quality of the representation on the North Atlantic Council had a great deal to do with it. The representative of the United States had been Secretary of Defence under Truman and I had known him in Washington and he was Tom Finletter and our relationship was very close. If I had an embarrassing situation, as I did over the Cuban Missile Crisis, I simply used to go privately to Tom and tell him what the situation was, and he never sort of put me on the spot throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, knowing that I had no instructions and knowing that indeed our two chiefs of governments were at loggenheads. But there was never an attempt to isolate me or to make me uncomfortable, and that had a great deal of importance in the North Atlantic Council. And I urged that NORAD somehow or other be like all other commands be put under the North Atlantic Council, because the North Atlantic Council representatives are of that caliber of people, they are not just passive, they ask questions, they discuss things in political, diplomatic terms, they are not just militarists and the particular trio in my days, as I say, that sort of led the detente discussions was De Staercke, the Belgian representative, Halvard Lange of Norway, and myself. And Spaak also, of course, was very keen on detente. He himself had been several times to the Soviet Union and the only difficulty that really arose in my recollection, during the Diefenbaker period over political consultations, was over the UN and its role in the Congo. Howard Green was a passionate supporter of the UN; and while Spaak was all for detente with the Soviet Union, he could not help but, as a former Foreign Minister of Belgium's, take a very direct interest in trying to salvage whatever of Belgium's very considerable interests remained in the Congo, particularly the Union Miniere, the supply of **uranium and the whole uranium industry. He therefore wanted NATO to regard it similarly, since this was still claimed by Belgium at the time of the Congo crisis. He wanted support from the Allies, in support of Belgium. And Howard Green would not have any of this kind of militarism. He was supporting Hammarskjold over the Congo crisis, and insisted that Belgium had to get out lot, stock and barrel; and there was to be no NATO fiddling with "volunteers". There was some talk of sending parachute troops to save the European population and that sort of thing. Well, this did really create trouble with Spaak, who, as NATO's Secretary General, threatened to resign over Howard Green's position in support of the UN exercise. This was something that I did inherit, because most of that Congo crisis took place more under Leger, and for that reason Leger was uncompromisingly hostile to Howard Green. He said he was quite mad; he did not know what was possible and not possible because he created great friction and distress in the North Atlantic Council. By the time I arrived the Congo business had simmered down considerably, but Spaak was still agitated whenever Howard Green's name was mentioned. But, as I say, Howard Green never did anything but support the policy of detente, and the effort not only to deal with the Berlin Wall crisis, without resort to military action, but also to try and understand exactly what was possible and not possible in relation to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. That was very fully examined and discussed in my time.

 

[HILL] In fact that was what led on eventually to the Harmel Report

 

[IGNATIEFF] To the Harmel Report, and also to the Ostpolitik of Germany, which was encouraged by NATO.

 

[HILL] There was a lot of discussion about it, and a lot of work done on it while you were there.

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, I would only emphasize, as I say, that the Harmel and all those developments hinged on the Report on Political Co-operation, of the Three, that Pearson issued in 1955.

 

[HILL] The second question on NATO is this: NATO's way of dealing with the nuclear issue was not in the end to set up a Multilateral Nuclear Force (the MLF) or Harold Wilson's Atlantic Nuclear Force (ANF) - which always seemed to me to be a magnificent smokescreen - or even De Gaulle's Three Power Directorate. In the end what NATO came out with was two committees, which were the Nuclear Defence Affairs Committee and the Nuclear Planning Group. What was the Canadian position on this question, and what role did Canada play in finding this eventual solution?

 

[IGNATIEFF] I would not say that the Canadian role was very active, because we had hang-ups both in the Conservative Government and the Liberal Government. I was under instruction to have no part whatsoever in MLF or ANF. I did not attend any of the meetings. I was kept informed through the friendships I had with the British representative at the time, but we were of course in support of the nuclear planning device, the committee, as a means of hopefully trying to get some kind of agreement and consensus again on strategy. There was the shift from the massive retaliation schemes of Foster Dulles to the strategy of flexible response under MacNamara, but we were never happy then, nor happy now, with really what the basic strategy of NATO is, namely the forward strategy to have a thin red line which would trigger a nuclear response. The fact that the Canadian brigade, while I was there, quite often covered the forward positions of several British divisions, which were not there, did not help. We felt attached in a way to the British Army of the Rhine, and we were substituting as I say, for several British divisions which were either one time or another somewhere else whether it was Suez, or wherever in Ireland, and we did not feel that it was a viable consensus. Also at the time that I was there, Mountbatten was the head of defence and Lord Zuckerman was his scientific advisor. One of the interesting things was that, while the Americans talked about flexible response and forward defence and triggering this kind of nuclear response, Zuckerman, both in NATO and in visits to Ottawa, was saying that it was totally unrealistic, that the use of nuclear weapons on a tactical level would create such havoc in the battlefield as well as resulting in massive casualties in the civil population in the areas in which the fighting took place, that it would not be feasible to conduct a "limited" nuclear battle. That had a very considerable effect I think. It certainly did, because in the nuclear exercises which took place from time to time, I remember I took part in them when I was at the defence college in London, Zuckerman's theories were pretty well confirmed.

 

Part VII - Ambassador to the United Nations and the ENDC - late 1960s and early 1970s

 

[HILL] Well, if I might move on to the very last question, which I will make sort of a very comprehensive, overview one. After you left NATO, you went to be Ambassador to the United Nations, and then you were Ambassador in Geneva, where amongst other things you had responsibility for Canada's role in the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC). Looking back on that period, and linking to that the fact that while you were at NATO that was the time in which the Cyprus crisis arose and Canada sent troops to Cyprus, could you say what value do you think NATO has to Canada, as a mechanism for promoting international peace and security, relative to the role of the United Nations, amongst other things, and the roles of groups like the disarmament conference?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Well, my view is that one of the mistaken assumptions is that somehow or other Canada's role in NATO is measured only in terms of the quantity or the extent of its military contribution. Because of the extraordinary lack of consensus about strategy, about the nature of the military contribution, it was my experience, that I was sort of "marked" on the number of troops that we could muster up on a certain day - What is overlooked is the fact that the quality of the volunteer forces that Canada sends to Europe is much higher than that of most of the conscript armies that the others produced, and the fact that we are there in Europe has political significance. I was told that many, many times what is important is that the representation of Canada on the North Atlantic Council should be taken very seriously. I was, I think, the first person to go to the Council that had not been Under-Secretary. I do not think that that was particularly a good precedent, I think the very highest officials in the Canadian Government should be sent to the North Atlantic Council, because you do have an opportunity to consult and be consulted, and the representation that Canada has had has been of a very high order, and I found that in dealing with the kind of crisis that you mentioned, the Cyprus one. It happened, as I said before, that my relations with both Tom Finletter and his successor were very close. I do not know what they are now, under Reagan’s representation, but in those days we worked very closely with the US. Finletter would say: "George, look, do you mind taking the lead in the discussions on the Greek-Turkish crisis, you know we are committed directly to both sides and whatever I say I am going to be in terrible trouble with the others". And indeed I found that there was quite a pressure to take the lead because in fact, at one point, I remember the issue in the discussion in the Council, was that Greece had secretly sent many more troops in support of the Greek-Cypriot side than they admitted. Since Tom would not bell the cat, I had to do that in the Council and say that the information given by my friend Ambassador Palamas, who later became Foreign Minister of Greece, did not coincide with the intelligence information available to our government. Of course the intelligence information made available to our Government was given to me by Tom Finletter and the CIA. Palamas flew into a fury, and walked out of the Council chamber, and then I had to go and see him privately and urge him to check with his own government. I said: "All right, I am prepared to say that this is allied information, but you may not have had the latest information from your government. I often find myself without having the latest information from my government. Don’t let’s say that I'm saying you are a liar. I am simply saying that the latest information is of reinforcements and that this has to be taken account of if we are to try and resolve what is threatening, because the Turks will react -to the figures which the alliance has." And we had to work on this and in the end we managed to get both sides to reduce. That was of course before they went to war, but they did not actually go to war while I was in NATO. But there was an irony, that I got involved as I say, very directly, in the Cyprus issue in NATO because of the circumstances which I mentioned, that is the United States was supporting both and did not want to take the leading part and asked us to do so. But I found that this was on our plate when I came to be Canada's representative on the Security Council.

 

The three most serious crises in which I got directly involved were the Six Day War Crisis in the Middle East and working out resolution 242; the Cyprus crisis; and the crisis over North Korea and the Pueblo incident. But in each case, Canada took a very active part. In the Cyprus crisis, of course, Mr. Martin came down himself and took the initiative to set up a peace-keeping force by making personal appeals to heads of governments and prime ministers to contribute. We had to pay the money required to produce these peace-keeping forces and have had to ever since. But the fact was that, initially, it did keep the two sides from going to war, and while NATO can put pressure on both sides not to go to the point of war, the state of excitement domestically that is aroused by Greek or Turkish passions is such that it really requires both intervention in the United Nations and in NATO to keep such situations under control. One is not contradictory to the other, and the Canadian peace-keeping force, though it has been expensive and very difficult, has played a very important part in keeping the two communities from going at each other's throats. I had not realized the degree of passion which goes back to the memory of Turkish persecutions. I mean the Greeks feel about the Turks like the Armenians, they think in terms of what happened in the 19th Century and massacres and all this sort of thing, and their liberation fight and all the rest of it. So, all these historical, almost tribal, ideological passions, and religious, Christian against Moslem, are related to historical rivalries and things which now have to be dealt with on the basis of the interdependence of world communities, and through the United Nations and through NATO. The most serious thing that happened while I was on the Security Council of course, was the Middle East crisis, because it involved the direct confrontation between the United States supporting Israel, and the Soviet Union supporting both Egypt and Syria, which were in a state of federation at the time. And the climax came when the Israeli forces, having defeated Jordan and the Egyptians, were on the point of defeating the Syrians and that would have brought them to Damascus where the Soviet Middle East headquarters was, and all the alarm bells began to ring and immediate cease fires were negotiated and Kosygin came rushing over to see President Johnson, and most of the Soviet delegation was fired for having given poor advice about the possibilities of Egypt and Syria's scoring a diplomatic triumph over Israel, in the way they thought they might, by getting rid of UNEF. Then we got involved in negotiations, with Soviet participation, for about four months, to work out this resolution 242, which was unanimously adopted in the Council as the basis for agreement. This provided for withdrawal of Israeli forces virtually from all occupied territories, in exchange for the recognition of Israeli territory by its Arab neighbours. This would have to be negotiated by diplomacy, but apart from the peace agreement with Egypt, there have been no other agreements. We are still talking about an international peace conference based on 242, which would have to have the participation of the displaced Palestinians, which is the thing which is very difficult to accept for the Israelis. The Pueblo business was an instance where I was involved again at the request of the Americans, in personal diplomacy, quiet diplomacy. What happened there was of course, the Pueblo was an American spy ship keeping an eye on North Korean activities and was caught in North Korean waters, boarded, captured, and this was brought to the Security Council, each accusing the other of breaking territorial water rights or coastal water rights and the rest of it. We were not getting anywhere, and the Americans then asked me to see what I could do quietly to find out whether the North Koreans would negotiate the release of the crew, that was what they really worried about. The North Koreans obviously had captured the equipment. I managed to get hold (through a Hungarian contact) of the North Koreans, and establish the negotiations that took place in Panmunjom. The crew of the Pueblo was in fact released, and that particular crisis resolved. I was also asked to lead the western group in the debate over the Soviet seizure of Czechoslovakia and the expulsion of the Dubcek Government, and that was my last and only leadership role in the Security Council. That was because the Americans were changing their representative, after Goldberg, whom I worked very closely with. He was being replaced, and his replacement had not arrived, so they asked me to. This underlines the fact that while the United States can be, and is in some ways, a threat to Canadian sovereignty, we cannot in international affairs do other than work very closely with them, sharing the intelligence information and working on diplomacy. It is a state of relationship which is not unlike a marriage, and I do not see that we will ever quite get out of it. My only lesson that I learned was that, as in the case of a marriage you have to be absolutely frank and very firm. If one partner just gives in to the other, and allows itself to get into a sort of stooge relationship, the partnership does not really work. My experience was, that if I disagreed with my American partners, I said so very firmly and suggested some alternative, or some other way of doing it, or simply said no.

 

[HILL] So you would in effect say that continuing to participate in some kind of NATO organization is a good idea, although the form of the organization might change significantly?

 

[IGNATIEFF] I think so, and as I said, in NATO, what is still important is the provisions of the North Atlantic Treaty, which are still there, and particularly Article 4, where it says "parties will consult whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened". There is an obligation to consult, and there is the machinery to consult and Canada does not have to find itself, or assume that it will be, isolated with the United States, and particularly I advocate participation in the Alliance for the following reasons, that the alternative seems to me that we will simply, through NORAD, drift into a fortress-America situation, in which in fact all the positions will be taken without consultation, by the Pentagon. Or, the alternative is to try neutrality, which would cost Canada infinitely more, indeed be beyond our ability, because we have to assure both the Soviet Union and the United States that our territory, our air and our sea would not be used in threats or aggression against the other. So I do not see any feasible alternative; and the other factor, as I say, is that we can form our own groups within the alliance around common interests, but the interests are not always all uniform. And the other is that out of the dialogue between East and West, particularly in view of the new leadership in the Soviet Union that is seeking some kind of accommodation for internal reasons, it is only through the dialogue between the Alliance and the Warsaw Pact that I see some possible new more comprehensive security arrangements being worked out, with guarantees, such as was arrived at at the Stockholm Conference on European Security, with confidence building measures, inspection and all the rest of it, and reductions of nuclear weapons. I do not see it being completely devoid of nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons can always be re-created after they are destroyed. But they can be reduced, to a minimum deterrent, and we still need to have a strategy which is not subordinated to any one weapon system, but related to some agreed function between the allies.

 

[HILL] Can I ask you a couple more short questions, then we are finished.

 

When you were Ambassador in Geneva to the Disarmament Conference there, you sometimes had to make reports to the NATO Council. In fact I attended one NATO Council myself where you were the Ambassador from Geneva. What do you think is the utility of that exercise?

 

[IGNATIEFF] There were two defects in it. One was that the standard of security was one thing for NATO and quite a different one for the Geneva delegation. It was a ridiculous state of affairs, that we did not in Geneva have access to information about the SALT negotiations, in any shape or form, while we were negotiating parallel things about biological weapons, chemical weapons, restraints on nuclear testing, but we did not have any information about what was happening in SALT. We had to go down to NATO to get that information.

 

[HILL] So, it was useful in that sense?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Well, it was useful in one sense but it was NATO policy to say that the standard of security governing the bilateral talks must be set on NATO's standards, and if a mission did not fulfill the standards and therefore it meant that all personnel had to be up to top secret or whatever it was, and the safes had to be this way, the safe houses and all the rest. And yet, as I pointed out, the Soviet military knew where the Americans were, the state of their nuclear balance, and so on. Who was kidding who, why should these people who were negotiating parallel things be excluded? I went down to NATO, I remember, in connection with the Seabed Treaty. The NATO Council was not tuned in to what was going on in Geneva, any more than the Geneva Conference was clued up to what was going on in NATO, because of the security situation, and therefore when you went down to report to the North Atlantic Council, as was the case in the seabed, all it required was that the American representative said we do not favour the Canadian position on this, and that was that.

 

[HILL] End of discussion.

 

[IGNATIEFF] End of discussion. You did not persuade anybody. In the case of the seabed, I pointed out that there were submarines doing the same job; and how, first of all, did submarines relate : to these things being prohibited, if at all? and how was inspection to be carried out without interfering with the rights of the coastal state to continental shelf mineral and oil resources, and so on? The Americans simply said they did not want to discuss those questions, either question. I learned later, from an admiral in the Pentagon, that they thought that I was questioning something which is now under current discussion, namely the American access by submarines to our northwest passage - to the Arctic and coastal waters of Canada. I did not directly raise that question, but I said that here we were prohibiting something, creepy crawlies, which nobody seemed to think were practical, but we were not tackling in any way the restrictions of submarine operations, which were the real way of conducting underwater nuclear operations.

 

[HILL] So, in effect, that reporting to NATO sounds like a fairly loose liaison; and that is about as far as it got.

 

[IGNATIEFF] It was a loose liaison, and it was a very definite restriction, as I say, because neither side was clued in on what the others were doing.

 

[HILL] One last question, and it is in the period while you were at NATO and at the United Nations. This was also the period of the Vietnam War. I know that in NATO there were some consultations on this question, although for NATO this was an "out of area" problem or it was if you look at NATO in geographic terms. What was the nature of those discussions? I believe George Ball came on a number of occasions to high level meetings in NATO, and one report I heard on them was that the Americans would present their case and this was met by "embarrassed silences" for the most part. I wonder if that was how you saw it?

 

[IGNATIEFF] Yes, that was the case. And I may say there was an embarrassed silence when Vietnam was discussed in NATO, there were questions about the diplomacy related to trying to find a peaceful settlement, in which Canada participated to some extent, but there was no discussion about the Vietnam War as such. When I was on the Security Council, Arthur Goldberg wanted - indeed he was very keen - to bring Vietnam before the UN, to try and stop the war and bring about some multilateral intervention to that end, but he was prohibited from doing so by President Johnson, and that was one of the reasons why he nearly came to resign, he was very upset, he told me that himself. No, there was no multilateral intervention allowed over the Vietnam War. It was the classic example of unilateral action, and of course the whole background of our involvement included the fact that our advice was ignored at the time of the withdrawal of the French from Indo China. When we were asked to take part as the Western representatives on the commission, we strongly advised against military advisors and military intervention on the part of the United States to replace the French. We said, you know, that would make it almost impossible to get any kind of settlement in Indo China, as provided for under the Geneva Agreement. China and the Soviet Union both were against it. The Chinese were willing, as we discovered, when I accompanied Howard Green to meetings in Geneva on Vietnam and Laos and so on, to settle for neutralization in their area. The United States thought in terms of driving out both the North Koreans and the Chinese.

 

[HILL] Well, I think we have taken up a lot of your time, and I think we will close at this point. I would just like to say that I am very grateful to you for having participated in this project.