Dean Beeby, Ottawa (Canadian Press) – This year marks a half-century since the grim night John Wendell Holmes was driven to an RCMP interrogation room to be grilled about his homosexuality.
Holmes, gripped by fear, had known for months he was on the RCMP’s list of suspected homosexuals working in the Department of External Affairs. The net was now being pulled tight.
Under intense questioning, Holmes acknowledged his sexual orientation but denied ever having been blackmailed by the Russian intelligence service.
No matter. The RCMP reported to a cabinet panel that Holmes’ homosexuality was a “character defect” that in itself made him a national security risk. He had to be forced out for the good of Canada.
Holmes, a brilliant diplomat, had many admirers – including then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker – but none could save him.
Within weeks, he checked himself into a Woodstock, Ont., hospital with a nervous breakdown, his career in ruins and prospects uncertain for employment outside government.
Holmes was among hundreds of federal civil servants who were targeted in an RCMP homosexual witch hunt that intensified in 1959 and continued through the 1960s, destroying lives, careers and families.
Most victims of the odious gay purge today remain faceless and voiceless, their ordeals unrecorded. But Holmes’ tragic story has been recounted in excruciating detail by author Adam Chapnick in a new book, Canada’s Voice: The Public Life of John Wendell Holmes (UBC Press).
Chapnick’s prodigious research focuses largely on Holmes’ professional life as a scholar and diplomat, whose views on international relations still resonate for a new generation.
But Holmes’ personal life, which he guarded closely, necessarily comes under scrutiny to explain the abrupt end of a meteoric rise at External Affairs and an awkward transition to a career in academia. He eventually became president of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, in Toronto.
Chapnick finds evidence Holmes engaged in a brief tryst with a Russian man while posted as a Canadian diplomat in Moscow in 1947-48. But he suggests the Russian intelligence service never learned of it. Holmes “would never have put his country’s security at risk in any way,” Chapnick says.
Other Canadians later posted to Moscow were targeted with homosexual traps set by Russian spies, notably ambassador John Watkins, who died of a heart attack near the end of an RCMP interrogation in 1964.
And it was the growing realization among Western Allies in the 1950s that sexual blackmail was increasingly preferred by Moscow that helped trigger the RCMP’s gay purge.
A cabinet directive of 1952 cited “character defects-” such as homosexuality – as a security risk. The subsequent purge, launched in 1955, continued through the 1960s, eventually ensnaring almost 9,000 people.
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