Toronto stockbroker T.G. “Tommy” Drew-Brook served as the representative of British Security Coordination in Canada during the Second World War. The BSC was a wartime proxy for the British security and intelligence community in the Western Hemisphere, notably the Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and Special Operations Executive (SOE). A.F. Hart of Canada’s Department of External Affairs interviewed Drew-Brook on his “wartime intelligence & security” work on January 12, 1977. The full text of the interview follows with minor editorial interventions. It is held as file 11-1 of the Department of External Affairs Special Registry (INSR Consolidated Inventory) and was released under the Access to Information Act as Global Affairs Canada ATIP A-2024-02595. A copy of the original trancript can be downloaded by clicking on the file cover on this webpage.

AFH: This interview is taking place in the residence of Mr. Drew-Brook in Toronto on January 12, 1977. The conversation will deal with certain matters of intelligence and security interest from the wartime period. The contents of this recording are classified “secret”. Mr. Drew-Brook would you like to begin by just giving me an idea what your position was during the war, the activity in which you were engaged, what its official nature was, and where you were located when you carried out your activities?

D-B: Would it be better if I began by giving you a short resumé of the year 1940.

ATH: Yes, that would be useful to set the stage.

D-B: Because in 1940 Bill Stephenson, now Sir William Stephenson, came over here on direct orders from Churchill, who was not in power at the time. I think I’m right in this. I don’t think he had become Prime Minister. When did he become Prime Minister?

AFH: That was after the fall of France… no, shortly before, a couple of months before wasn’t it? 

D-B: I’m not quite sure. He came over here as the direct representative of Winston Churchill with the main objective of establishing a secret contact with President Roosevelt as Churchill realized that France would collapse and that the United States would be the only salvation of the whole West. Bill landed in New York and all during 1940 he seldom left New York except to go backwards and forwards between New York, Washington and London, And at that time, largely by boat. He was extremely successful in establishing a very unusual confidential contact with Churchill… with Roosevelt and during this period there was no need whatever to get him in touch with Canada because his job was simply to contact Roosevelt. As this contact progressed, it became more and more obvious that in order to do a real good job, particularly after the fall of France, that he must establish some sort of contact with Canada. Canada was in the war, the United States was not. And American public opinion being as it was at that time, it was essential to have a base where there was some freedom of action. Bill Stephenson had two very old friends. I met him in the first place during the first war in the same squadron and before the war I had introduced Charles Vining to him and he and Vining became great friends, so that the two of us were his only real contacts in Canada. Both of us saw quite a bit of him and during 1940 he never told us what he was up to. Both of us made the same guess and both of us proved right. So that by the end of 1940 it was pretty obvious that he must have some sort of contact with Canada. And at that time, Charlie Vining was seeing much more of him than I was. He was going to and fro from New York all the time Bill told him that he was going to need a contact with Canada and of course the Canadian Government. So Bill asked Charlie if he could help him advise him on it. And Charlie said, I think the first thing we should do is have a word with Ralston.

AFH: Mr. Vining was in Ottawa at the time? Was he living in Ottawa? 

D-B: No, he hadn’t come to Ottawa, he was living in Montreal but in Ottawa a great deal, because Mackenzie King had asked him to do a survey of a method to project information into the Americans, because the American public opinion was you might almost say, 90% against any sort of involvement, and probably 40 or 50% was almost pro-German. American people were extremely impressed with Hitler’s successes and on the military aspects, but the main point was that they were strongly against any involvement, which makes Bill Stephenson’s achievement all the more remarkable. Because as things progressed, I suppose Roosevelt [sanitized] impeachable offences. But he was so convinced that if England fell the whole world would be threatened, even including the United States. So Charlie Vining undertook to establish some sort of contact with the Canadian Government. Charlie knew Mackenzie King very well and was sort of frightened of him and realized that if he went to the Prime Minister chances are he would be turned down flat, and if he wasn’t turned down Mackenzie King would want to dominate the scene and have it under his control completely. So he discussed these aspects with Ralston. Ralston agreed that it would be a mistake to discuss this with the Prime Minister at all because there would be too much interference and he would want to every detail of everything that was done and that was undesirable in every aspect. So Charlie said to Ralston what do you suggest? And he said, I don’t think we will have any difficulty. I’ll advise the heads of the various depart-ments who may be approached from time to time and I ask you….I suggest that you favourably consider supporting and doing whatever they ask you to do. I don’t want to be informed, but I will give my undertaking that if anything blows, or if there is trouble anyway it would be entirely my responsibility. That was the basis of the contact with the Canadian Government, because from then on it was easy. And as far as the Department of External Affairs was concerned, Norman Robertson was advised of this approach and the terms of Ralston’s support. And on that basis, entirely verbal, everything was done. January 1940… 1941 things had begun to develop very, very rapidly. France had fallen and we were going to need all kinds of assistance from Canada, so it was necessary for somebody to be on the job in Canada full time. And that’s when I came into the scene – that was in January 1940 [Editors: 1941?].

AFH: You were living in Toronto at that time? 

D-B: Yes, I was in Toronto. I was a stockbroker. I had an office, people would be coming and going all the time. If more people than usual came, it would not attract attention. In fact it was an ideal cover for a secret operation. So I became Bill Stephenson’s representative in Canada full time. Charlie Vining who was very much involved himself, principally in Ottawa was always available to me for advice and whatever came up. I usually… not always, but particularly if it was tricky, consult with him, but that really didn’t prove to be necessary very often because the Mounted Police, for instance, were notified and I think I started my tour of Ottawa by seeing first of all Norman Robertson, and then the Commissioner of the Mounted Police and it grew from there.

AFH: Did you actually move to Ottawa? 

D-B: No, I stayed in Toronto. But that was roughly the beginning.

AFH: What did you do about channels of communication between Toronto and Ottawa and between Toronto and New York? At the outset by telephone or I would go to Ottawa. In fact in nearly every instance certainly in the early stages, very little was done over the telephone until we got things really running. So I would go to Ottawa and see Norman Robertson for instance and tell him what we were hoping to do and how we were going to do it and get his approval. In any operation of any size was cleared first through Norman Robertson.

AFH: You always dealt with him? Was there any….

D-B: At the outset, only with Norman Robertson. Later of course Mike Pearson came over for not very long, but he helped me tremendously and so did Hume Wrong and then a little later Tommy Stone sort of took over and it became not necessary to go to Norman first, I could just go to Tommy Stone and clear with him. George Glazebrook, of course, later in the war took over that function.

AFH: One of our particular interests in this exercise is to look at the role of Norman Robertson at that time and his role, particularly on intelligence and security matters. It would be interesting if you could offer any comments on how you found the liaison with him on matters of this kind.

D-B: It was the most miraculous operation really, Not just of Norman Robertson, but of every department of the Canadian Government. The cooperation was immediate and fantastic. I couldn’t have been more helped in any way. There was only one point on which there was any hesitation and that was the… when it was decided quite early to establish the camp and that, when I told Norman about it, he was pretty hesitant. He felt this was pretty venturesome after all it was a fairly large scale operation – 200 acres of land minimum, a lot of extraordinary people, some being brought into the country for training and so on and he really hesitated and he said you better go over to see the Commissioner of the Mounted Police he may be a bit upset about this. And I did. And to my discomfort, he was really quite upset. 

AFH: That was Commissioner Wood?

D-B: Wood, S.T. Wood.

AFH: He saw problems, did he?

D-B: He saw problems, not only the general security problems but he hated the idea of a lot of people being trained in not very polite methods of doing one thing or another and kept wondering how they were going to handle all these people after the war, they’ld know too much.

AFH: Were there going to be many Canadians involved in the camp?

D-B: Oh yes, there would be Canadians, but there would be other people too from outside. Some from South America and so on. In fact at that point it was difficult to see how wide a range this thing might have. So I think their reservations were legitimate. However, I asked them to think it over and I’ld come back in a couple of days which I did. And this time they had thought it over further and couldn’t help feeling the operation was clearly worthwhile, and- that it should be done. So I was given the green light That’s the only operation that I remember in which there was any hesitation at all, on the Canadian side.

AFH: I suppose the choice of Canada was because of our remote-ness, during the wartime period? 

D-B: We were in the war and since we were in the war we could do far more than you could hope to do in any other part of this hemisphere. It had to be Canada.

AFH: Any particular reason for choosing Oshawa locality?

D-B: Oh dear knows. The Oshawa locality was first thought that Bill Stephenson had was that it should be on the sea, on the sea coast. And I hot footed it out to Halifax and began searching for suitable property which was a tough thing to do and the Airforce helped me, they gave me a plane so that I could look at a lot of ground from the air. And then, Bill changed his mind and decided that it must somewhere much handier than that. Halifax was hard to get to, to and fro and so on. So, I enlisted the help of a man whom I hoped I could use as a nominee if I bought any land and it was he that found the site on which the camp was built, all of which was passed on to Bill and I was given the go ahead. I bought the land through a nominee and then proceeded to build the buildings. I used a Toronto architect, Roper Govinlock and plans were drawn and sent down to Bill for approval and away we went. That was the beginning of the operation, but previous to this, coming back to your original point, by January 1941 it was clear that Bill’s organization was going to be big and he had to have help, clerical help, again Canada was the place to get that help. You see, when he first came out, when Bill first came out he had of course no office. I think he had some sort of official aspect as Passport Control Officer or some innocuous thing such as that. And he had an office in the, what would it be in New York. Consul General?

AFH: Consulate General or Trade Office.

D-B:  No, I think it was the Consulate General. My memory is getting very bad and that was a very small office and by this time one or two men had been brought out from England to help him, but the pressure was really on us. We had to have a lot of clerical help so the help was recruited in Toronto. I put one ad in the pages of the Toronto Telegram and that resulted in such a flow of enquiries and so on that I never had to do anything again. There was never any difficulty about getting help. 

AFH: You weren’t able to be very specific…

D-B: I should have a copy of the ad. You can find one., Where is it, I’ve got it in one of my books, You see I have no papers, I have no records of any sort.

AFH: It wasn’t the thing to keep records. 

D-B: No. And any little thing, the ones I had to keep everything was destroyed. 

AFH: What did you do about the security background of the possible recruits?

D-B: There was the routine RCMP check. But after the first ad from then on extra help as it was needed was very simple to maintain just from the girls you had already sent. They all got their own friends on, people of that sort. 

AFH: The financing of this whole project was British? 

D-B: Oh yes, under Bill. 

AFH: Bill Stephenson. And control of its implementation was under Bill Stephenson.

D-B: Oh, entirely, entirely.

AFH: The people were brought out from Britain to as instructors and trainers? 

D-B: Oh, you mean back to the camp? Ah, yes, the instructors were all British, who had considerable experience in schools that already existed in England. 

AFH: And the general aim was preparation for special exercises and operations? Special operations in enemy countries?

DB: Ah yes. Nearly everything that went through there was for the special operations executive SOE. We had the odd person who ended up perhaps in an MI-6 operation, but I think most of then were under the SOE and dropped into Europe or landed by submarine or French fishing smack or something like that. Now have I covered….

AFH: Yes, I think that deals with that particular question. I don’t know whether the other one which I mentioned to you earlier is related to some extent. That’s the question Hydra Wireless Station.

D-B: That came quite a bit later. I think in the first instance the cable traffic had got to such a volume that our own wireless station was economically profitable. I think that was the beginning of Hydra and the station was established with sufficient range to reach England, then there was the interception traffic which got bigger and bigger … the wireless interception traffic. That developed more and more and Hydra was used twenty-four hours a day on that aspect.

AFH: The, that was one way of ensuring that your traffic got priority, otherwise I suppose that it would have been greatly delayed. And these… the Hydra arrangement was worked out in cooperation with people in Ottawa. But the running of it was purely British?

D-B: Purely British at the outset then Canada itself got involved in interception traffic and the Hydra Unit, I think was an important unit in terms of that… I had very little to do with that. Practically nothing.

AFH: Perhaps more a matter for the communications experts. But your linkage then was from Oshawa to New York and London through Hydra. 

D-B: As far as New York was concerned, it wasn’t very long before we had a teletype, do they call them? Teletype communications going right into External Affairs. One at my office and of course emanating to and fro from the various centres.

AFH: Your office in Toronto?

D-B: Toronto, yes, in the old Bank of Commerce Building. I don’t think that anyone ever suspected that anything funny going on. 

AFH: You had very good security… 

D-B: You know, it was all out in the open. You don’t get curious about things you see.

AFH: But a lot of your traffic would have been in cypher, I suppose and you would have had to make arrangements for….

D-B: All machines had scramblers on them. I think very little had actual cypher, I had no cypher as far as my office was) concerned, it was just scrambled and unscrambled at the other end. 

AFH: Was that very secure?

D-B: I think it was then. I am sure it wouldn’t be now. I am sure that there wasn’t a single instance where that traffic was penetrated, On looking back on it, it amazes me how little enemy activity there was – I think the Mounted Police did an absolutely superlative job in their pick up of Italians and Germans, and I think the same is true of the United States. Their organization there was darn good.

AFH: I wonder if we could just go back again to the BSC itself as an organization, in New York. You mentioned that Bill Stephenson had been sent over by Winston Churchill when Mr. Churchill had become Prime Minister. 

D-B: I think he came over just a little before.

AFH: But did that link remain in that form, a link with Churchill…

D-B: The direct Roosevelt-Churchill conversations continued right through.

AFH: How did Bill Stephenson’s reporting responsibilities develop? He was acting on behalf of MI-6. 

D-B: MI-6, MI-5, SOE, everything, as the thing developed, Originally of course it was…

AFH:  So, he was reporting to many people.

D-B: Oh yes, that would be true, yes.

AFH: That is where the word “coordination” comes in, he had overall coordination.

D-B: I wish I could remember the story of how British Security Coordination… Bill was here two or three weeks ago and reminded me, and you know it has gone right out of my head. And it’s a damn good story. It was the initials then somebody thought BSC – British Security Coordination – very haphazard, But you see that wasn’t done until the United States was in the war. By which time Bill’s organization was completely in the open as far as US security and intelligence authorities were concerned. So we had to have a name, and that’s the name that it got. I even had the stationery that I used British Security Coordination. 

AFH: Well, we have mentioned two important projects which were basically MI-6, that is the camp at Oshawa and the Hydra.

D-B: The camp in Oshawa, I think you would have to have it under SOE.

AFH: And the Hydra would be BSC, generally speaking?

D-B: I think at the outset, and then of course it would be part of the general interception traffic and that came under the Bletchley Park operation, I think, I don’t know too much about that. All I know of the interception traffic was that I was asked to find a man who could run it and I found Pat Bailey [sic] who was on the staff at Toronto University. A very gifted… 

AFH: Mathematician?

D-B: Electronics… no physics stuff. The long-haired boys who did the decoding business I knew very, very few of them. I remember very early in the war, England sent out a man named Strachey, I think, and I was to have met him in Halifax.

AFH: Oliver Strachey? 

D-B: That’s right, an old man, elderly, older than I am.

AFH: I didn’t know him, but I have seen the name in the records. He came out and helped very much, I think in the set up of arrangements.

AFH:  Were there any other interesting projects sponsored by [sanitized] relying on Canadian cooperation.

D-B: [Sanitized]

AFH:  What I was getting at was you mentioned that you had raised a number of ideas or proposals with Norman Robertson and only one of them you found he had hesitations on and we have just referred to that. I wondered whether interesting ideas or proposals were successfully implemented.

D-B: You mean that were important… There were so many, some of them trivial and it was just routine for me to advise by this time Tommy Stone of whatever we were doing and what we were shooting at, and there were many, many operations, some successful, some unsuccessful – great many unsuccessful. I don’t suppose you want to know about any of the Canadian-made forgeries.

AFH: Well, just by way of embellishment it might be interesting to hear about one or two more successful ones.

D-B: I’ll never forget my first attempt at creating a forgery. The German Bund sprang up in the United States all over the place and they were very active and a great many people with not a trace of German heritage began joining these Bunds so someone in New York conceived the notion that we should have letterhead, of at least one of these bundtz so I was instructed to produce when I came up from New York with a sheet of this letterhead and I had it reproduced very successfully, the Mounted Police helped me an awful lot, telling me where to go and who to see. They knew everybody. So I produced this letterhead and I crossed the border – this was before the United States came into the war – it wasn’t always easy, because it is not very comfortable to go over the border with 500 sheets of blank German headed letter paper. But the Mounted Police had helped me a lot on that. Many of my trips I crossed the border in one of their cars and they would just greet each other and nobody asked any questions – it was wonderful . But I took this first forgery down and they all looked at it there were about five of them there and thought it was damned good – it was a real duplicate of the thing of the original. And then one of them picked up one sheet and walked over to the window , looked at it in the light and even from where I was sitting I could see Canada Bond. So that was my first and that was a failure. But there were one or two that were very successful. Do you want this sort of stuff?

AFH: It would be interesting I think. We have nothing on the record, you see.

D-B: Well, one of our chaps in Rio… you see by this, time Bill had established contacts all through South America and was in constant receipt of information and so on. But one of these chaps in Brazil managed to get hold a letterhead of the Italian airline which was still flying to Rio. Which was a real menace because Germans if they wanted to get to South America, all they had to do was to go down to Rome and get a plane to Rio. Well they got this letterhead and sent it up to me to make ah, wait a minute… the letter that the fellow in Rio got was an actual letter, it was by the general manager or whatever it was – it was an airline in Rio, including his signature. So there was the paper, the letterhead the typewriter and the man’s signature, all of which had to be …. 

[Tape change]

AFH: You were just saying…

D-B: We had the paper with its letterhead, we had the typewriter the typewritten words and the man’s signature. So I had to produce a sheet of paper that was identical, chemically, every other way. I had to produce a letterhead that was absolutely an exact duplication and the signature.

So I ‘phoned Charlie Vining and said … told him what I had ordered, the problem I had and I had to get the right paper. So he of course was President of the newsprint association and he arranged for me to take this paper down to Howard Smith Paper Mills in Cornwall and I left it with them and their cooperation was wonderful. I went at 11:00 o’clock at night and it took them about two weeks to get an absolutely exact chemically and every other way thing. This was straw paper.

AFH: What sort of paper?

D-B : Straw. They produced it, and to make a long story short they produced it…. Oh, I had to produce a typewriter that would absolutely exactly reproduce the typewriter with which this particular original letter was written. Apparently all typewriters have little kinks and gadgets that can show up under examination. And here again I went to the Mounted Police – where can I get a couple of old war veterans that really do this job for me? Oh, they said, that’s easy – we use so-and-so, and so-and-so in our work all the time, examining typewriters – they’re past-masters. I took it to them, they could tell what typewriter, what make of typewriter had originated the thing, if it was an Italian one they found one and they squiggled around with the adjustments on each letter and produced every kink that the original typewriter had had. And then the signature was a bit of a puzzle to me. and finally one of the girls in New York, and English girl who

had done a lot of work in opening envelopes and things like this, probably had done a little forgery too, she produced the exact copy of the signature. And there we had it. It was a very insulting letter about the President of Brazil. It was very sensitive though and it referred to his very fat stomach; then the problem was to get it into the hands of the Brazilians, and that was done through a fake burglary, I think and the police got this, picked up this letter among the other things and saw that it was addressed to the President of Brazil and he was furious, so furious that he refused landing rights to the El Italian airline, kicked them out of the country and fined them a million dollars, or something. And that source of entry was cut off. It was a long story, but demonstrated the sort of thing that Canada was capable of doing so quite openly. You couldn’t do that sort of thing anywhere else. Canada’s help was beyond description.

AFH:  Did you carry on in this capacity into the post-war period? 

D-B: No, only until … I didn’t get cleaned up until about the beginning of ’46, that would be about six months after the war was over. I had a lot of clean up to do, including turning over the camp and the hydro and the wireless station to the Canadian Government, which they still have. 

AFH: I suppose other interests you would have been dealing with would have been in connection with prisoners of war and the prisoner of war camps.

D-B: I didn’t come into any of that. I don’t think any of the BSC operation – that was done entirely by Canadians. You mean interviewing them in terms of possible…

AFH: Well, perhaps using them or their material or letters. 

D-B: That was entirely done by Canada. We didn’t interfere in that.

AFH: Mr. Drew-Brook, you mentioned that you were still carrying on at the end of ’45 and part of ’46 – this period would have overlapped with the Gouzenko case and I imagine you would have had some knowledge of it and some involvement in it with various questions of interest to the British authorities, would you like to recall some of the more significant ….

D-B: My only involvement in the Gouzenko affair was sheer good luck. Bill Stephenson and I were invited to Ottawa to have dinner with Norman Robertson at the golf club and Bill came up from New York. I had a car with a military driver, that was still available at the camp, so I picked up Bill and Tommy Stone and we drove to Ottawa and had dinner with Norman Robertson at the club, the golf club. Norman Robertson told us of the extraordinary events of the day. They were all well known, Gouzenko escaping from the Russian Embassy with his shirt stuffed with documents, spending a whole day trying to get somebody listen to him and the police believed he had something worthwhile. Everybody thought he was crazy. I won’t go into all that because it is well known, but the important point to remember at the beginning of any of this was that Gouzenko had finally returned to his apartment and his pregnant wife and his little son or daughter, I forget which it was, son I think and he realized that he was going to be kicked out that night and then he had a brainwave and he went across the alleyway of his apartment and asked his neighbour who was an RCAF sergeant, I think, if he could help him. And the sergeant listened to him, thought he was crazy, the way everyone else did, but he saw that he was so upset and felt he should do something about it, and he invitedGouzenko, his wife and little boy to spend the night in their apartment. They went to bed immediately exhausted. And the RCAF sergeant sat and thought, well, it might be something to all this, so he phoned Ottawa City Police and he got the desk sergeant and he told him what had happened during the day and of his neighbour Gouzenko who was on the staff of the Russian Embassy just arrived in dreadful state saying that he was going to be killed if somebody didn’t help him, and the desk sergeant said he was crazy. The RCAF sergeant said I know he is crazy, but we’ve got to do something about it. So the desk sergeant agreed. He said I will send over a policeman to spend the night in your apartment, to just keep an eye on things you know and go to sleep and stop worrying. Which he did. After dinner, Norman Robertson told us what had happened in Ottawa during the day and Norman said, I’m in a dreadful position, I don’t know what to do. Here are our noble allies, they were, everybody regarded them as our noble allies then you know, they really did. And this fellow may be crazy. I don’t know whether it was Bill or I that said you’ld like an independent opinion, would you like one of us to go down and see this man and report back to you what we think of him? Norman said, boy oh boy, that’s an idea, would you do it? So again we started off with our uniformed driver, Tommy Stone Bill Stephenson and me, And we stopped the car at the corner near the Gouzenko apartment. Bill and I went through our pockets to make sure we had no identification of any kind and we headed into the apartment. Went up the stairs to the Gouzenko apartment and here was the door split and both of us were shocked. Both of us were shoving away at the door trying to get it opened, all of a sudden one great big hand on each of us whipped us around and here was: the Ottawa City Policeman. and he wanted to know who we were and what we were up to. Both of us were really taken aback, I don’t know which one of us finally said we have no identification or papers whatever. Before you do anything, take us along the street and turn left and you will see a car with a military driver and someone in the back seat who can give you proper identification. The cop, thank God, agreed to do this. You see by this time five men, I think it was, from the Russian Embassy had come along and broken the door open and the cop intervened and they had shown their diplomatic passports and the cop had told them they’ld have to leave, that’s all he could do. We were the next to arrive. So the cop, holding us very firmly took us along the street, took the first, street up to the left and there was a car with a military driver and a man in the back seat, we all sort of piled into the back seat, explained to Tommy Stone what had happened. Tommy reached into his pocket. I never knew you fellows had so many official looking documents. He pulled out great big things with sort of seals on them and everything else and the cop was completely satisfied and we were released, So then we went back to Norman Robertson’s house and got him out of bed. By this time it was about half past two at night and we told him what had happened and Norman still hesitated.

AFH: Had you seen Gouzenko in the meantime? 

D-B: No, no. He was in the sergeant’s apartment. And it was Tommy Stone that said you still seem to be hesitating. Tommy and I will go down and have another look. So he and I went down, leaving Bill and Norman, Bill was trying to persuade him to take action. There really was enough evidence to go on. So Tommy Stone and I went and we went up the stairs and I think, I don’t know whether it was Tommy Stone or… I think I led and as we rounded the corner of the stairs, there was Gouzenko’s door over here and beside it a man from the Russian Embassy that I had never seen, but I had seen a photograph and he was the chauffeur I think the chauffeur of the Embassy and he was head of the NKVD in Canada. So I realized that both Tommy Stone and I and the Ottawa cop was holding him. I pretended to be drunk and I was looking for a woman. Tommy Stone backed me up or vice versa I forget which it was and the cop recognized us both and we turned around and went out and straight back to Norman. So we were able to report the second attempt just by sheer luck. And Norman said OK and gave the Mounted Police the goahead and they got the Gouzenko’s family out very skilfully and I think they took them directly to our camp. It still had a military guard around it. And they were there for I think five or six weeks before… it was longer, I’ve forgotten. But that’s the luck of the game. I think that’s the story you wanted. You know the rest? 

AFH: Have you any … I think we are coming perhaps now to the end of our time. I have taken up a lot of your time this afternoon. I don’t know whether you have any other comments you would like to make generally on the working relationship with Norman Robertson and with any other of his colleagues at that time.

D-B: Only to say that it was the most splendid cooperation that you could possibly imagine. And for the most part done by…there was mutual trust all the way through. It couldn’t have been better. 

AFH: Well, thank you very much.