CDFB00305. 19 November 1979. Feather Bed Memorandum.

Amid continued public speculation about Feather Bed’s contents, this timeline traces the probe’s evolution. It began on 3 March 1958 when the Research section of the RCMP’s Security and Intelligence Branch was assigned the codeword assignment “Feather-Bed.” The task was to examine the infiltration of the Canadian government, using patterns reported in the United States as a starting point. While a general Feather Bed file was opened on 25 April 1962, it was moved to the backburner. In the meantime, information was kept in an inspector’s safe. It was reactivated on 20 March 1968, with a focus on reviewing files of the GRU agents identified by Igor Gouzenko, and the themes of penetration and disinformation by the RIS. Each investigative lead was investigated separately and had its own file separate from the Feather Bed file. Thus by 1969, Feather Bed was effectively an umbrella of these individual files, reducing the importance of the Feather Bed file itself. The file lay dormant after 1975, becoming essentially a repository only for clippings and questions related to House of Commons questions and media.