An Immigration Inspector with an "Unreliable Tongue"

In November 1943, a "garrulous" Toronto immigration inspector with an "unreliable tongue" started asking inconvenient questions about Janez Smrke, Nikola Kombol and Marco Pavičić’s passport applications. The BSC preferred not to reveal the circumstances of their departure from Canada, "the nature of the work they were destined to abroad" or "by whom they are engaged" (CDYS00042). Canada’s top diplomat, Undersecretary of State for External Affairs Norman Robertson, put a stop to the questions by informing Canada’s Director of Immigration that they were overseas performing "important and very secret work" (CDYS00043). 

None of these men required Canadian passports/returned to Canada after the war. Smrke and Pavičić were killed in action. Kombol, a lumberjack recruited in Vancouver, infiltrated Yugoslavia twice by parachute in 1943-44, and once by boat in 1945. He was a committed communist who stayed in Yugoslavia when Tito’s Partisans transitioned from guerilla force to governing party.[1]

[1] MacLaren, Behind Enemy Lines, 150.