Ronna Syed, “A Tale of Two Traitors” (Fifth Estate, March 2018)
In the wake of the recent incident in the UK concerning a suspected poisoning of a Russian double agent and his daughter, and their continued incarceration in a small general hospital while the official account of how they were poisoned and what they were poisoned with continues to change from one week to the next, the Canadian investigative news documentary series The Fifth Estate revisited Canada’s own answer to Sergei Skripal, a KGB spy codenamed Gideon. In the early 1950s, Gideon was posted to Ottawa where he fell in love with the wife of a soldier and was persuaded by her to spy for Canada. Gideon apparently gave much valuable information about the Soviets to his new masters in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Surprisingly, an RCMP employee, James Morrison, was spying for the Soviets at the same time and revealed to his masters that Gideon had betrayed his country. In 1955, Gideon was recalled back to the Soviet Union and the Canadians presumed that he would be executed. In 1982, James Morrison spoke to The Fifth Estate and admitted having betrayed Gideon to the USSR. For his betrayal, Morrison was arrested, tried and convicted, and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
In 1992, after the downfall of the Soviet Union, a former security officer, Don Mahar, received a phone call advising him that a man had appeared at the British embassy in Lithuania claiming to be Gideon. After interrogating the man with questions that only Gideon knew the answers to, Mahar was satisfied that the man in Vilnius was indeed Gideon. Gideon was brought back to Canada. The news that Gideon was still alive and moreover safe in Canada brought relief to James Morrison and his lawyer Peter Cronin, and to investigative reporter John Sawadski who had been following the story for several years. Morrison died and was buried in an unmarked common grave in 2001 with no eulogy and few people in attendance. Gideon died in 2009, having never tried to re-establish contact with the woman he fell in love with and who had encouraged him to turn traitor.
The nature of what Gideon gave to the Canadians, that was apparently so serious that when he returned to the Soviet Union he was presumed to be going to an early grave as a traitor, is not revealed in this short report. The fact that the Canadian security services were so sure that Gideon had been executed for treason that they considered his survival a miracle might say more about their prejudices about the KGB and the Soviet Union, than about the Soviets themselves – but the program does not inquire into this angle as its focus is narrow and extends no further than exploring the shenanigans of two double agents. (The Canadians do not consider the possibility that the Soviets might have regarded Gideon so beneath contempt for betraying his country that execution would have been too good for him, and career and social ostracism would be judged a more fitting punishment.) On the other hand, the report does not go into much detail as to why Gideon and Morrison decided to betray their countries for selfish and quite trivial personal reasons: Gideon’s romance with another man’s wife must have turned out a short-lived fling and Morrison betrayed Gideon for a small sum of money. For such short-lived thrills, the consequences of what these men did stuck to them, millstone-like, for the rest of their lives. Morrison died in disgrace as well.
I’d have liked to know more about how and why agents turn traitor, and why they would betray their countries for often superficial and not well thought-out reasons, or small amounts of money, when surely they would know that doing this would jeopardise their lives and the lives of their families back home, and bring public condemnation on themselves that will last the rest of their lives. The program can viewed at this link.