7 May 1946: Letter from Norman Robertson to Charles Foulkes

Robertson forwarded his letter to Sir Edward Travis to General Charles Foulkes (Chief of the General Staff) for approval, and as a means to open a discussion as to how and where communication links to various Services-operated intercept stations should be terminated.

As in his letter to Travis, Robertson fits HYDRA into a greater postwar intelligence scheme. However, here, Robertson's suggestions are directed towards shaping the organization of signals intelligence within Canada.

Robertson notes that while he and Foulkes had previously discussed terminating communication lines from service-run intercept facilities at the Service Signals Office, he now suggests a model more in line with London and Washington. In this model, the services would administer and foot the bill for intercept facilities, but the intercept facilities would be operationally controlled by a signals centre, where all traffic was to be sent to be decrypted, sorted, and retransmitted by a carefully vetted staff. Robertson proposed that the Communications Research Centre should serve in this capacity. Created by order-in-council only a month previously, many of the former wartime Examination Unit staff had been folded into this new organization, which was administered by the National Research Council, and directed by a member of External Affairs. CRC would eventually become the Communications Branch of the National Research Centre – the CBNRC.