Wesley Wark

Spy … Russians … secrets … sold … These jumbled linguistic fragments now define the life of ex–sub-lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle, recently sentenced to a 20-year jail term. Delisle was the first Canadian spy case of the new century, joining a short list of major cases from the previous one, headlined by the defection of Igor…

Here are two books with provenance issues—volumes whose very existence is surrounded by an aura of the unexpected, both with a whiff of unreality. One, The Soviet Ambassador: The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika, is an account by Canadian journalist Christopher Shulgan of the life and times of a Soviet apparatchik who may or may not have been the invisible pilot of the good ship…

Once upon a time, Canada had a code was invented by minions of Stalin’s spy service and was redolent of minor, faraway countries, but ones still worthy of intrigue. Stalin’s spies arrived in Canada in bulk as soon as the Soviet Union was invited to establish diplomatic relations in 1942, a Canadian gesture to a wartime ally and courageous anti-Nazi…

The trouble with spy fiction is that it gets no respect. There were no birthday celebrations on its hundredth anniversary (count from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim published in 1901, or Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands in 1903— take your pick). Mordecai Richler took two of spy fiction’s great popularizers, John Buchan (our Governor General!) and Ian…