Lessons Learned? UK Parliamentary Debates and a Privy Council Study
Handwritten annotations on documents in this briefing book suggest that the Canadian security and intelligence community’s fascination with the Burgess and Maclean affair may have been driven by curiosity as much as professional interest (CDMB00020). The Canadian High Commission in the UK continued to report on parliamentary debates and a bipartisan security review by privy councillors in 1955-56. Senior Canadian officials wondered if any lessons might be learned that could be applied in Ottawa as well as London. The British privy councillors, however, concluded that their security system was “basically sound,” and discussion of the Burgess and Maclean case stressed the contingent “lack of insight shown by their superiors in the Foreign Office when their behaviour had become known to them” (CDBM00028). Concerns about Soviet espionage in the UK were balanced against concerns about human rights, and the British government sought to discourage witch-hunting and spy mania.