Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–1951 (review)

Reviewed by: Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–1951 Wesley Wark Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–1951. Kurt F. Jensen. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009. Pp. 240, $85.00 cloth, $32.95 paper The literature on Canadian intelligence, historical and contemporary, is stunningly impoverished. That puts any new entry under a special kind of lens, treated to an initial warm welcome, assessed with a mixture of hope and skepticism, scrutinized closely with a view to determining its relative value amid the dross. Above all, anyone who cares to know something about the evolution of Canadian intelligence and its impact on politics and society wants a new book on the subject, a rare thing in itself, to offer insights and to succeed. Kurt Jensen's book, Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–1951, represents a worthy project but has to be judged a failure. The book is worthy for a host of reasons. Jensen has focused on an interesting and important period in the history of Canadian intelligence – essentially its Second World War roots. He has done some useful archival digging, which may provide pointers for future research. Above all, he brings some special skills to the task of uncovering Canada's wartime intelligence endeavours and their postwar impact. Kurt Jensen was, until his retirement, a career foreign service officer with lengthy experience of Canadian intelligence as it is practised inside the walls of the Department of Foreign Affairs. In the latter part of his career, he undertook the ambitious project of completing a PhD at Carleton University. His thesis became the genesis of Cautious Beginnings. Practical, hands-on experience with intelligence work can be of great benefit when it comes to understanding how spy bureaucracies work and what the realities and limitations of intelligence truly are, as opposed to the popular culture fantasy that is often our stand-in for knowledge. Some very fine writing has been done by former intelligence professionals such as Michael Herman, Intelligence Power in Piece and War (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Ray Garthoff, Assessing the Adversary (Brookings Institution, 1991), David Murphy Battleground Berlin (Yale University Press, 1997) and What Stalin Knew (Yale University Press, 2005), Hal Ford, cia and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, [End Page 164] 1962–1968 (Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998) and more recently, Matthew Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). The pioneering figure who established the value of combining practical experience with academic insight was the one-time Yale historian and us intelligence analyst Sherman Kent, whose Strategic Intelligence (Princeton University Press, 1949) remains a classic text. No Canadian intelligence professional has previously attempted to join their ranks, and that is what made the Jensen book so potentially attractive. Jensen's history is fundamentally a study of a small Canadian intelligence bureaucracy at a time when that bureaucracy was lorded over by what was then called the Department of External Affairs. Getting the bureaucratic history right is important and worthwhile. Cautious Beginnings is not to be scorned for its chosen focus, even if the treatment is often of the trees, rather than the forest. The real problem is that Jensen brings no special insights to bear on the bureaucratic politics of intelligence or on the department that later employed him. Indeed he shies away from criticism. He offers no extended case studies of how intelligence was put together and used. He is, as befits his title, a cautious writer telling a tale of 'cautious beginnings.' His historian's instincts are tenuous and superficial. He repeatedly tells us that offering critical analysis is just a mask for inadequate documentation and is usually wrong-headed. It has been awhile since the view that the records speak for themselves was seriously offered, although this seems to be Jensen's outlook and one that several years in a history PhD program somehow failed to budge. His writing skills show their formation in years of government work. All this makes for an often dreary read. Yet when Kurt Jensen chooses to tell an unknown story, there is value in some of his chapters. His first chapter, which surveys the state of...

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