Canada’s Black Chamber

Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939–51 is a history of the bureaucracy created by the Canadian government to acquire “foreign intelligence.” Kurt F. Jensen, an intelligence specialist in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade before joining Carleton University’s Department of History, rightly claims that his book, an outgrowth of his Carleton dissertation, is “the first comprehensive account, based on primary sources, of the birth and postwar reorganization of Canada’s foreign intelligence community.” As such, it is the first intensive history of the origins of Canada’s black chamber. Dr. Jensen avoids the term “black chamber” in his text, and we must learn from Wikipedia rather than from him that it is a generic term used to describe the agencies created by governments over the last five centuries to crack the secret code messages of their rivals and to devise undecipherable codes for themselves. Jensen justifies what...