Watching the Bear
Canadian Intelligence Assessments of the Soviet Threat to North America, 1946–1964
As the Soviet threat to North America evolved in the early Cold War, the world was watching. What was the view from Ottawa? The role that intelligence played in Canadian foreign policy and defence decisions has been largely ignored to date. Watching the Bear begins to tell that story. Alan Barnes, a twenty-five-year veteran of the Canadian intelligence community, draws on recently declassified archival sources to offer a wholly new perspective on Canada’s policies for the defence of North America from 1946 to 1964.
After the Second World War, Canada created an independent capacity to produce strategic intelligence assessments, and Canadian analysts worked with their American counterparts to prepare joint appraisals of the looming Soviet menace to the continent. The fact that Canadian conclusions often differed in important ways from American views at times complicated relations with Washington. Canada’s success in negotiating these tensions was instrumental in ensuring that the two countries developed a common basis for defence planning.
By bringing little-known intelligence documentation to light and assessing the accuracy of Western conclusions about Soviet capabilities, Watching the Bear makes a groundbreaking contribution to the history of Canadian intelligence, defence, and foreign relations.
This deep, unparalleled exploration of the historical record on Canadian postwar intelligence will be invaluable to researchers in Canadian foreign and defence studies, as well as to practitioners in and scholars of the Canadian intelligence community, and to general readers interested in Canadian intelligence and military history.
Barnes’s unrivalled archival research and his grasp of the content of three decades of strategic analysis of the Soviet threat ensure Watching the Bear will remain a unique and invaluable resource for years to come.
It is difficult to overstate the original contribution made by Watching the Bear. This book not only adds to scholarly debate but has the potential to jumpstart a new field of intelligence history in Canada.
Alan Barnes worked for over two decades in the Canadian intelligence community and is currently a senior fellow of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. He served as a military intelligence officer in the Political Intelligence Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and as director of the Intelligence Assessment Secretariat, Middle East and Africa Division. He is now a co-leader of the Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project, which seeks to encourage the study of historical Canadian records on intelligence.
