His Excellency, J.K. Starnes (John Kennett Starnes), Canadian Ambassador to West Germany receives instructions in the cockpit of a CF-104 from W/C O.B. Philp, of Victoria, B.C. and CO of 434 Squadron, stationed at 3(F) Wing, Zweibrucken, Germany, April 23, 1963.
John Starnes was destined to be part of the "greatest generation" – the men and women whose fortunes would be shaped by the Second World War. Fortune treated him well, if unexpectedly, leading him down two parallel career paths, one that would bring a distinguished public career in Canada's diplomatic service; the other, more secretive, would mark Mr. Starnes as one of a pioneering generation of Canadian officials who created and nurtured Canada's Cold War intelligence system.
Following the Second World War, he went back and forth between diplomatic and intelligence roles, serving in France and Germany, as well as the Middle East during the Six-Day War. He returned to Canada to become the first civilian director of the RCMP's Security Service just in time for the October Crisis of 1970. In retirement, he became a spy novelist, attracting the attention of fellow writer John le Carré. Mr. Starnes died last month at the age of 96.
John Kennett Starnes was born in Montreal in 1918, to Henry Kennett Starnes and his wife, Altha Ella (née McCrea). He was part of a prosperous Montreal business family with political careers on both sides of the family tree.
Mr. Starnes was educated at Montreal's Selwyn House and Trinity College School, in Port Hope, Ont., followed by studies at L'Institut Sillig in Switzerland, the University of Munich and Bishop's University.
Thanks to his rudimentary German and knowledge of the continent, which he picked up during his schooling, when Mr. Starnes joined the Black Watch regiment he was inducted into the Canadian army's intelligence corps and assigned to duties in London in 1941.
This would be his entrée into the top secret world of intelligence, a war-winner for the allies, though an enterprise that the young Mr. Starnes could have had no inkling of when he first reported for duty and was assigned to the task of clipping news stories.
It would eventually give him responsibilities for liaising with British secret intelligence organizations, allied governments in exile (a diplomatic job if ever there was one) and the British special operations executive (SOE), which attempted to aid resistance movements in occupied Europe by dropping agents, weapons and communications gear to them.
Mr. Starnes tried to enlist as an SOE agent himself, but was not accepted. Whatever his personal disappointment, fortune again treated him well, as the survival rate of SOE operatives was not high – the Gestapo ran a very effective and ferocious security operation against them.
Mr. Starnes instead served out his "secret" war in London and transferred from the military into Canada's very small and elite diplomatic service, run by what was then called the Department of External Affairs (now the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development).
After four years in wartime London, Mr. Starnes reunited with his bride, Helen, a fellow Montrealer, back in Ottawa. In the early postwar years, it was the diplomatic career that kept him busy. He and his wife and young family hit the road on diplomatic service starting in 1953 with postings to the Canadian embassy in Bonn, and then the NATO secretariat in Paris.
Intelligence work called him back to Ottawa in 1958 when he was made head of something called DL2 (Defence Liaison Two) at External. The title gave away little of the manifold duties of the job, which included security screening of Canadian diplomats, counterintelligence against Soviet efforts at penetration and chairmanship of the Joint Intelligence Community, which tried to integrate the activities of the small band of Canadian agencies then involved in intelligence work, including External, the RCMP and the military, and was responsible for producing what Canada could generate in the way of strategic intelligence assessments about trends in the Cold War contest. Thanks to a successful bureaucratic battle after 1945, External, and specifically the official in charge of DL2, also had policy oversight of the activities of Canada's fledgling signals intelligence agency, which was building up a capacity against Soviet military communications based on intercept stations located in the North. Mr. Starnes was also the lead Canadian official in terms of maintaining contacts with Canada's close allied intelligence partners. It was a big job and won Mr. Starnes lasting kudos in his department.
Little in detail can be said about Mr. Starnes's successes (or failures) at this apex of the Canadian intelligence community during the late 1950s and early 1960s, owing to the fact that the official records remain classified. But in his own memoir, published in 1998 by University of Toronto Press, with the apt (and no doubt consciously wry) title of Closely Guarded: A Life in Canadian Security and Intelligence, Mr. Starnes touched on some of the highlights. These included the unsavoury task of handling personnel security issues, trying to sniff out U.S. plans for what proved to be the CIA invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and, probably most important, arranging for Canadian access to some of the holiest of intelligence secrets of the Cold War – namely the overhead imagery produced by the first generation of U.S. spy planes and spy satellites.
Mr. Starnes's work at the intelligence coal face in DL2 produced a promotion to ambassador and a plum posting to Germany, where he served from 1962 to 1966. Even in Bonn, intelligence duties didn't leave him, as he was also made head of the allied military mission to Berlin, one of whose tasks was to use their mandated inspection capabilities in this Cold War capital, to collect intelligence on the Soviet military.
The German assignment was followed by a further posting as Canadian ambassador to Egypt, which landed him in the middle of a Middle East crisis and war (a crushing defeat suffered by the Egyptians in the Six-Day War in 1967), and Egyptian political turmoil surrounding the resignation of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Mr. Starnes returned to Ottawa in 1967 as assistant under-secretary of state for administration and personnel.
The final stage in his official career brought him back to intelligence duties as director of the RCMP's Security Service (the predecessor of today's Canadian Security Intelligence Service). Mr. Starnes knew this would be a tough assignment, but it proved harder than expected.
He faced resistance from within the RCMP, and the Trudeau government took a hands-off approach to change, leaving Mr. Starnes out on an administrative limb. He also had to cope with the outbreak of the FLQ crisis in October, 1970, in which the RCMP Security Service was made a scapegoat for the government's inability to predict the attack.
For Mr. Starnes personally, the FLQ crisis was a time of intense frustration, as he has bedridden with severe pneumonia and confined to his house (under RCMP protection) in Chelsea, Que. He had no influence on the outcome, but it seems fair to say that his experience must have been missed.
Mr. Starnes ended his tenure as RCMP Security Service director in 1973 and retired, only to have to face many hours of testimony before commissions of inquiry set up to investigate RCMP illegal activities in the aftermath of the FLQ crisis. While the McDonald Commission, in particular, did good work in ultimately recommending the creation of a new, civilian security intelligence agency – which became CSIS in 1984 – Mr. Starnes found the experience intensely disagreeable. In one of his less-guarded comments in his memoir, he recorded that he found Justice David McDonald to be a man who had "no discernible sense of humour and a well-developed sense of his own importance." As far as Mr. Starnes was concerned, Justice McDonald, whatever his legal experience, knew little of security and intelligence matters.
Following his retirement in 1973, and initially as a matter of "therapy" in response to his experience of being under the gun at the McDonald Commission, Mr. Starnes took to writing spy novels. His first, Deep Sleepers, was published in 1981. Four subsequent spy novels followed.
Perhaps it was this combination of intelligence officer, diplomat and spy novelist that brought Mr. Starnes to the attention of the famous British spy novelist (and onetime intelligence officer) John le Carré, who requested a meeting with Mr. Starnes while visiting Canada in the course of researching one of his books. The two, according to Mr. Starnes's memoir, hit it off, and Mr. le Carré assisted him in bringing what would be his final novel, Latonya, into print in 1994.
A close colleague and friend of Mr. Starnes, Blair Seaborn, who served alongside him in Paris in the 1950s, who shared a long career in External Affairs and who later came to serve as Canada's first intelligence and security co-ordinator, said of Mr. Starnes that he was highly regarded within the Department of External Affairs as a skillful diplomat and was especially known for his ability to handle sensitive intelligence issues and bring the department to a better understanding of the role of intelligence.
Was Mr. Starnes Canada's George Smiley (the fictional British spy chief at the heart of many of Mr. le Carré's novels)? Mr. Starnes would have answered the question with his famous laugh and dismissive wave.
Mr. Starnes worked in the shadows to create an intelligence capability that was little appreciated at the time but is one of the fundamental strengths of any democracy in a post-Cold War, post-9/11 age.
Mr. Starnes died in Halifax on Dec. 23. He leaves his wife of 73 years, Helen; sons, Colin and Patrick; two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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