Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  He soon found a job with the A. McKim advertising agency in Montreal, took a lease on a large flat with friends on what is now Aylmer Avenue, and immersed himself in the city’s left-wing artistic community. The Quebec of Premier Maurice Duplessis was rigidly authoritarian, overtly Catholic, and rampantly anti-Semitic. This was the era of the infamous “padlock law” that allowed authorities to shutter the premises of suspected communist sympathizers.

  Lunan quickly turned from a left-leaning sympathizer into an activist with communist connections. He was part of a welcoming committee at Windsor Station for a trainload of veterans of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion when they returned in 1938 from the Spanish Civil War. Anticipating that the reception might get out of hand, the RCMP and the local press were out in force, and Lunan was snapped giving a clenched-fist salute.

  In the spring of 1939 he met Phyllis Newman, a Polish émigré. Their family backgrounds could not have been more different, but they espoused similar political causes. They married right after Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939.

  In January 1943, Lunan enlisted in the Canadian Army as a private. He earned a commission as a lieutenant in November 1944 and was seconded to the Wartime Information Board (later the Canadian Information Service). He was posted to Ottawa, where he edited a military journal, Canadian Affairs, which supplied a summary of Canadian news and editorials for troops stationed abroad and in Canada.

  While in Ottawa he met frequently with Fred Rose, a union organizer, politician, and Communist Party member. The two men had known each other since the late 1930s in Montreal. While Lunan never joined the Communist Party, which had been banned early in the war, he was a member of its close affiliate the Labour Progressive Party. He also hung around with known Communists such as Rose and offered them space in his apartment for meetings. Lunan’s sympathies for the Soviets were well known, and Rose persuaded him to keep up the good work by befriending Soviets working at the embassy in Ottawa.

  As Lunan wrote in his 1995 autobiography, The Making of a Spy: A Political Odyssey, “I admired the Soviet Union for what I believed then to be its enlightened world view . . . but like most of my comrades, I suspect, I would not have wanted to live there or to make Canada over in its likeness . . . the real glue that bound me to my comrades and them to me was the shared desire for a more humane society, a fairer distribution of wealth.”

  One morning, as Lunan later testified to the Kellock-Taschereau Royal Commission on Espionage, he arrived at his office on Sparks Street and found an anonymous note on his desk inviting him to an assignation with an unidentified person. The mystery date turned out to be Vasili Rogov, an assistant to Nikolai Zabotin, the Soviet military attaché to Canada.

  Rogov recruited Lunan as a spy with the code name Back. His quasi-journalistic career was the perfect cover for organizing a coterie of informants, several of whom thought they were legitimately chatting to him in his capacity as editor of Canadian Affairs. Lunan passed along whatever information he was able to glean, even about the most inconsequential matters, and tried to enlist others in the cause. “Far from damaging Canada,” he wrote fifty years later in his self-serving memoirs, “my motive — and I assumed it must have been theirs also — was to help Canada by helping our most powerful and effective ally and thereby shortening the war.”

  Indeed, the Canadian Army thought Lunan was doing such a good job he was promoted to acting captain in June 1945 and sent to London by the Canadian Information Service. One of his supervisors described him as “a very ordinary, likeable chap with not too much imagination but very industrious.”

  The war was over in Europe and the first meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations was about to take place in Westminster Central Hall in London. Lunan was supposed to be helping with the publicity but ended up working as a pinch-hitting speechwriter for Paul Martin Sr., then secretary of state in Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Cabinet.

  Back home, his world had begun to collapse with Igor Gouzenko’s defection in September 1945. The Soviet cipher clerk brought documentation with him about an extensive Soviet espionage network linking Canada, the United States, and Britain that was directed at finding information about the U.S. atomic bomb program. Gouzenko implicated Lunan as a “recruiting agent” and the leader of a cell of three informants who were passing information to Soviet intelligence on trends in Canadian politics and military weapons.

  The alleged informants were Israel Halperin (for a fuller account of his life, please see Service), a mathematician on military leave from Queen’s University to work at the Canadian Army’s research and development establishment in Ottawa; Durnford Smith, an electrical engineer at the Canadian National Research Council; and Edward Mazerall, also an engineer at the NRC. None of them produced anything that was either secret or innovative, but everything, including Halperin’s personal address book, took on sinister overtones in the overheated atmosphere of the Cold War.

  Five months after Gouzenko’s defection, in February 1946, Lunan was summoned back to Ottawa for an “important assignment.” After his plane landed in Montreal, he was surrounded and restrained by three men in plain clothes, frisked, and taken to the RCMP barracks in Rockcliffe, a suburb of Ottawa. Two days later he was read a detailed surveillance record dating back to 1939 and a list of his alleged co-conspirators.

  Civil liberties were legally trampled in the roundups and detentions that followed, even though the War Measures Act had expired at the end of the Second World War. The Mackenzie King government had secretly extended one of its provisions a month after Gouzenko’s defection through special order-in-council PC 6444. It gave the prime minister and the justice minister the power to arrest and detain people suspected of passing secrets to the enemy.

  King was so twitchy about this potential national and international crisis that he didn’t tell his full Cabinet about Gouzenko’s defection until February 5, 1946, according to historian Amy Knight in her book How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies. That was five months after the fact and, more important, two days after American journalist Drew Pearson had broken the news on a national radio broadcast of a “gigantic espionage network inside the United States and Canada.” At the same time, King appointed the Royal Commission on Espionage, headed by two Supreme Court justices, R. L. Kellock and Robert Taschereau. Within days the RCMP had started rounding up suspects and detaining them without access to legal counsel or to their families.

  Under heavy interrogation, and fearing that as a member of the Armed Forces he might be shot as a traitor, Lunan crumpled and agreed to co-­operate with the espionage commission on February 20, 1946. Lunan implicated Smith, Mazerall, and Halperin, although not his pal Fred Rose, the Communist MP who had recruited him as a spy in the first place. Late in March 1946, he was jailed for contempt after refusing to answer questions at Rose’s preliminary hearing.

  At trial, Lunan was brought before Judge James McRuer, whose outrageous rulings set the precedents for later accused. McRuer allowed transcripts of the espionage commission to be admitted into court, even though the accused had been interrogated without benefit of counsel. Ignorance of the law was not a defence, he argued, and the accused should have demanded protection under the Canada Evidence Act to avoid incriminating themselves.

  Lunan was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Official Secrets Act in November 1946. Before his sentence was handed down, he told the judge: “I do not consider myself guilty of the charge either in law or in fact.” Nevertheless, he spent the next five years in Kingston Penitentiary, with extra time tacked on for refusing to testify in court about some of the colleagues he had implicated earlier.

  His marriage with Newman, the mother of his daughter, held together while he was in prison but fell apart quickly thereafter. He met his second wife, Miriam Magee, at a party thrown to celebrate his release. They were married in Montreal, where Lunan wa
s again working in the advertising business.

  He eventually opened his own agency and retired with his wife to the countryside near Ottawa in 1975. He spent the rest of his life growing strawberries, cooking gourmet meals, espousing social justice principles to his step-grandchildren, and writing two memoirs, The Making of a Spy and, a decade later, Redhanded: Inside the Spy Ring That Changed the World (2005). The major difference between the two books is an epilogue in the second one in which Lunan explains, more explicitly than ever before, that he acted “naively, stupidly and admittedly outside the law” in the “best interests of winning the war against Nazism.” He also acknowledged that the Gouzenko affair helped trigger the Cold War and expressed regret that he “played a part in making it happen so soon.” By that time the Soviet Union had collapsed and all most Canadians could remember about Gouzenko were his bizarre appearances with a paper bag or a pillowcase over his head on the popular current affairs show, Front Page Challenge.

  Not a huge mea culpa, by most definitions. Still, Lunan did serve his time for betraying his country, however ineffectually and naively. In researching his second memoir, he made a freedom-of-information request for his RCMP dossier and learned that the security force had been keeping tabs on him until the mid-1970s — when he was in his sixties.

  Shortly after finishing the manuscript, he suffered a bad fall and died two weeks later in hospital in Hawkesbury, Ontario, on October 3, 2005. He was ninety.

  Scott Symons

  Writer

  July 13, 1933 – February 23, 2009

  SHORT, WITH A dark complexion, smouldering brown eyes, and a thick helmet of black hair, Scott Symons had a chunky wrestler’s body and a magnetic but quixotic personality. He could energize a gathering simply by being there; just as easily, though, his voracious narcissism could suck all the oxygen out of a room.

  Born into a prosperous, well-connected Toronto family, he had all the presumed attributes for a charmed life, along with a fierce intelligence, a passionate curiosity, and the literary ambition to write the great Canadian novel. He was driven by a messianic vision, one that hearkened back to the homoerotic and whacky beliefs of Aleister Crowley, the early twentieth century oculist, mystic, alleged spy, and founder of the religious cult of Thelema.

  Symons wrote three novels, including Place d’Armes, arguably CanLit’s first openly gay novel, but he will be remembered most for his outrageous lifestyle, which began in scandal and ended in poverty and illness. After several years of declining health, he died in a publicly subsidized Toronto nursing home at seventy-five, on February 23, 2009.

  In his zeal to destroy the puritanical establishment that had cradled him, Symons affronted family, alienated friends and lovers, and destroyed relationships. He wantonly inflicted pain in the most flagrant and public ways without any semblance of remorse. At thirty-four he abandoned his wife and small son to run away with a seventeen-year-old boy at a time when homosexual acts between consenting adults were a criminal offence. Vicious in print, he attacked the character and writings of a coterie of friends that included Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Bill Glassco, and Robertson Davies.

  His closest and oldest friend, the late journalist and essayist Charles Taylor, supported him emotionally, intellectually, and financially. Back in 1977, in Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, Taylor wrote what remains the most perceptive profile of Symons, a biographical essay that is empathetic, knowing, and revealing.

  Taylor was not his only champion. The late Jack McClelland, his publisher, believed Symons was “one of Canada’s most important writers.” And he was — as a non-fiction writer. His political and cultural journalism in La Presse about post-Duplessis Quebec and the stirrings of the Quiet Revolution in the early 1960s was lucid and perceptive, while his lavishly illustrated book Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture was an imaginative and culturally provocative treatise with photographs by John de Visser and a preface by George Grant.

  Turning his back on what he did best, Symons wrote fiction that was overblown and rambling. As literature it was forgettable; as sexual polemic it was revolutionary. His goal was to empower readers to embrace hedonistic experience and shrug off the complacent shackles of postwar Canadian society.

  He could craft visually charged scenes as though he were wielding a paintbrush instead of a pen, but he had profound difficulties in stepping back from his material and establishing a distance between himself — the author — and the characters he manipulated to espouse his homoerotic views about the “lived life.” As for absorbed experience, the bedrock of all fiction, he paraded it raw. Perhaps his biggest mistake as a writer was his obsessive journal-­keeping, an addiction that began in his mid-twenties. He recorded everything in his “combat journal,” as he called his diary, which then became, seemingly without transformative editing, the sprawling stuff of his fiction. His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece.

  HUGH BRENNAN SCOTT Symons was born on July 13, 1933, in Toronto, the fifth of seven children of Major Harry and Dorothy (née Bull) Symons. (One of his older brothers, Tom Symons, was the founding president of Trent University and author of the Symons Report on Canadian studies.)

  His father, a fighter pilot in the First World War, made his living in real estate and won the inaugural Stephen Leacock Award in 1947. His British-born grandfather, William Limberry Symons, designed the Old Union Station and many of the houses in the exclusive Rosedale enclave where the Symons family lived; he was also a president of the Ontario Society of Architects. On his mother’s side, the Bulls were United Empire Loyalists. His maternal grandfather was William Perkins Bull, a lawyer, financier, art patron, and writer who was known as the “Duke of Rosedale.”

  Symons grew up surrounded by books, traditions, and culture and “thinking highly of himself,” according to his youngest brother, Bart Symons. After attending Rosedale Elementary School, he was, according to his friend Charles Taylor’s profile, “already showing signs of a moody truculence,” a rebelliousness that his parents hoped to curb by sending him to board at Trinity College School, a private boys’ school in Port Hope, Ontario. That’s where the two met, the shy and diffident son of industrialist E. P. Taylor and the self-assured and authoritative scion of old money. Despite their disparate personalities, they were equally dismissive about an inherited life of privilege and social status.

  Although Symons hated everything about the school — except his pal Charles — he was an excellent student. At TCS he fell in love with another student, a love he repressed by becoming a gymnast, “a form of athletics which suited him because it was solitary and ritualistic, with a touch of grace,” Taylor wrote. He practised obsessively, and one night, alone in the gym, he fell off the high bar and broke his back. He was immobilized in a body cast for several months.

  While it is tempting to speculate that being trapped in a body cast is symbolic of the way Symons felt encased by society, what we know for certain is that he moved back into the cocoon of his parents’ home after the accident and spent his final year of high school at the University of Toronto Schools, an academically elite boys’ school in the centre of the city. That fall he entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he enlisted as a naval cadet, served in the student government, and excelled academically, earning a slew of scholarships and medals along with a bachelor’s degree in modern history in 1955.

  Instead of revelling in his triumph, he skipped the ceremony and spent the day working at a part-time job at Woodbine Racetrack — perhaps a sign that he wouldn’t be going easily into the dark establishment night. Nevertheless, he went up to Cambridge that fall as a student of F. R. Leavis at King’s College, although later he said he received his real education at evensong and in the Fitzwilliam Museum. About this time he became engaged to Judith Morrow, a childhood friend and a bank president’s daughter, and returned to Toronto to take up a short-lived job on the editorial page of the Telegram.
After being asked to write a report surveying the paper’s editorial policy over the previous fifty years, he said it had deteriorated miserably, and he was soon shown the door.

  He and Morrow were married on March 1, 1958. At the reception, both the groom and his best man, Charles Taylor, made well-lubricated speeches denigrating the guests and everything they represented. Two months later the newlyweds settled in Quebec City. Symons took a job with the Chronicle-Telegraph, improved his French, and moved so easily in Québécois intellectual circles — then dominated by André Laurendeau and Jean-Louis Gagnon — that he was invited to join the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, becoming the first non-francophone and non-Catholic member, as he liked to boast.

  By the autumn of 1959 Symons and his wife were in Paris, studying French literature and grammar at the Sorbonne, exploring the countryside, and helping to harvest grapes in a Bordeaux vineyard. They returned to Canada a year later with their newborn son, Graham, because Symons had been offered a reporting job at La Presse. The end of the Duplessis era — the autocratic premier had died the previous year — was a propitious time for a bilingual outsider to sniff out political and intellectual ferment, and Symons made the most of it with a National Newspaper Award–winning series of twenty-five articles in 1960–61 that presaged the coming Quiet Revolution. Indeed, he said later that he had coined the term.

  Although his family and his wife’s had frowned upon his career choice, Symons had considerable prowess as a journalist. But success frightened him. With his customary restlessness he “backed into what seemed more respectable,” as he later wrote. He quit La Presse, moved back to Toronto with his family, and took a job as an assistant curator in the Canadiana department of the Royal Ontario Museum.