EXCLUSIVE TO WWW.NOSNOWINMOSCOW.COM
I have obtained an authentic copy of an old draft article by noted journalist Peter Worthington (born February 16, 1927) which contains names of suspected Communists in the federal government of Canada, as revealed in the RCMP’s now-quashed “Featherbed File”.
Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau squelched the Featherbed file with an Order-in-Council before he left office. Trudeau himself was named in it as a suspected Communist subversive.
Many headlines could be drawn from this article. However, the one that comes to my mind first is that SOL SIMON REISMAN, who negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was a suspected Communist subversive. RCMP Featherbed investigators objected in vain to the renewal of Reisman’s high-level security clearance with the federal government of Canada.
In 1982, Trudeau ordered a royal commission convened: the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, known as the Macdonald Commission, and chaired by Trudeau’s friend and co-Bilderberger, Liberal Minister of Finance, Donald Stovel Macdonald.
The Macdonald Commission reported to Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1985. It recommended free trade with the USA, and the conversion of Canada to a socialist welfare state.
In May of 1986, Canadian and American negotiators began to work out a so-called trade deal, known as the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The Canadian team was led by former deputy Minister of Finance Simon Reisman and the American side by Peter O. Murphy, former deputy United States trade representative in Geneva.
The FTA was deepened by the coming into force on January 1, 1994 of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement involving Canada, the USA and Mexico, and spanning the continent.
A number of informed and well placed observers have identified the NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North American (SPP) which followed it on the pretext of so-called terrorist attacks of September 2001, as the building blocks of a North American Union modeled on the European Union. Today, The European Union is called both Marxist and “post-democratic” by some members of the press and intellectuals such as Professor John Fonte.
American Charlotte Iserbyt has warned of an impeding North American Soviet Union, citing Michail Gorbachev who in 2002 called the European Union the “New European Soviet”.
American-Lithuanian Vilius Bražėnas viewed the series of trade deals on the continent in a similar light. Bražėnas, a survivor of Communism, died on October 3, 2010 at the age of 97. In his final passionate articles he warned against the FTA, NAFTA, FTAA and related trade-zone accords as tantamount to a multiple coup-d’état which in the end would impose a Communist regional union in North America.
Former Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, who survived over a decade as a prisoner of Soviet mental hospitals, has warned on video and in print that the European Union is “the old Soviet model in western guise.”
Is anyone listening? I know I am.
In particular because U.S. Congressman Lawrence Patton McDonald in 1983 publicly warned America that the Marxist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Marxist Trilateral Commission and other related non-governmental entities were pushing for a Communist regional union through a series of apparently harmless trade deals.
In the words of Congressman McDonald himself on Crossfire, speaking of the CFR and related circles of elites:
“[T]heir objective is to try to bring about a gradual transition in our society – a dissolving of sovereignty – and a moving steadily to the left on the political spectrum.”
Canada’s FTA under Reisman certainly shifts Canada to the left while initiating the North American merger process.
Speaking specifically of the CFR during an interview with Larry McDonald on the television program Crossfire, McDonald said:
”[Y]ou are looking at a group (the CFR et als) that has worked to bring about a dissolution of national sovereignties on the road to world government.”
McDonald then quotes Arthur Schlesinger in the May-June 1947 issue of the Partisan Review:
”He [Schlesinger] said that the objective -– the secret policy of which we can’t tell the American public because they’re not sophisticated enough to see the value — is that through a steady result of erosion of NEW DEALS, we bring the American society steadily to the left, and through a signed concept of benign containment, we merge into the vital center of the socialist left. Those were his words, not mine.”
Congressman McDonald continues further on replying to Crossfire host Pat Buchanan’s question whether the concept of the UN as the basis of a world government is not passé:
”Well, I think there are those who realize that moving straight from a prototype of the United Nations into world government perhaps is tactically impossible. But phasing out increasingly national sovereignty into REGIONAL GOVERNMENT and phasing out sovereignties into international treaties ….” is the order of the day.
Today, with these warnings in mind, I now read Peter Worthington’s old draft article exposing the chief negotiator of the FTA — which forms the initial basis of the clearly incoming REGIONAL UNION — as someone the RCMP had warned the federal government not to trust because he was likely a Communist subversive.
However, the warnings fell on deaf ears, no doubt because the very Prime Minister’s Office the RCMP attempted to alert was itself already infested with one-world government types and suspected Communist subversives such as Lester B. Pearson, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
As a consequence, the very basis of Communist regional union in North America was negotiated by someone Canada’s national police and security apparatus long believed to be a Communist subversive.
Following is an exclusive typed transcript made by me from Worthington’s own typed, draft article, which he hand-edited.
For ease of reading, i am retyping the draft clean, without indicating Mr. Worthington’s deletions and insertions.
TRANSCRIPT – DRAFT – THE FEATHERBED FILE
by Peter Worthington (circa 1979)
(Scan of actual draft article embedded below)
But the governments of John Diefenbaker, Lester Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau dismissed the Featherbed warnings as unsubstantiated Communist witch-hunting.
Besides, it would have been too embarrassing to repudiate people their governments had promoted to positions of influence.
Featherebed suspected that Communist infiltration of the federal bureaucracy had been set in train in 1923 with the co-option of O.D. Skelton, renowned as the “father of the civil service”.
The Featherbed analysts concluded that over the years, any promising “agents of influence” were talent-spotted at Communist study clubs in universities and brought into the civil service.
Inside, a shadowy network promoted “birds of a feather,” which gave the operation its code-name.
Among the more prominent (civil servant) subjects of Featherbed investigation were Robert Bryce, who rose from the Finance Ministry to the top post as cabinet secretary; his successor as deputy minister of finance, Sol Simon Reisman; and the husband-and-wife team of Bernard and Sylvia Ostry.
Bernard Ostry became deputy minister of communications despite RCMP objections. He was recently appoint(ed) at $65,000 a year as government special adviser on culture and communications based in Paris.
Sylvia Ostry, former chief of Statistics Canada, the Economic Council of Canada, and deputy minister of consumer and corporate affairs, was appointed last fall to head the economics and statistics branch of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.
Operation Featherbed also plumbed the pasts of prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau — Trudeau for his travels to Warsaw, Moscow, Peking and Havana, Pearson for allegedly having supplied information while a diplomat, that was transmitted to Moscow by a U.S. spy ring.
(Trudeau once called for his Featherbed file, “chuckled” as he read the report about his travels, associations and indiscretions, and sent it back to RCMP files).
Featherbed began as a search for suspected Communist subversives in the hierarchy of the civil service, branched out delving into university professors, lawyers, the media and trade unions.
It involved extensive surveillance, wiretapping and bugging under the code-name Operation Mercury (Featherbed was the analytical side). The winnowed-down conclusions were summarized in a thick, black-edged book that held the names of 245 “professional” people as members of the Communist Party secret underground in Canada.
Not all the subjects of initial investigation found their way into the wrap-up black book.
Featherbed opened files on 87 CBC staffers as suspected subversives but there was no evidence of any operating network and only a handful were named in the final summation.
And Featherbed never learned the identity of “our agent in Canadian Press” that Communist Party of Canada chief Tim Buck frequently boasted about to his mistress, Bess Nascolo. A bug in Nascolo’s house on Jones Ave., Toronto, picked up the drunken boasts after a shipment of Russian embassy vodka.
Featherbed believed that Lewis Rasminsky, former governor of the Bank of Canada, was only flirting with Communism when he attended party cell meetings in the Depression, as many disillusioned people did, and that he had rejected the ideology.
After a Featherbed investigation, the RCMP Security Service blocked the intended 1969 appointment of Grace Hartman to the government’s national commission on the status of women. She became head of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
Featherbed also conducted an investigation of Shirley Carr, vice-president of the Canadian Labor Congress.
What prompted Featherbed’s start in 1958 was an accusation by the U.S. Senate Internal Sub-Committee that Robert Bryce had been a member of a Communist closed party cell at Harvard university in 1935-37.
The subcommittee the previous year had cited Herbert Norman, then ambassador to Cairo, as a Communist.
Norman leaped to his death in Cairo a day after he told his doctor that if he were called to testify in a royal commission, he would to identify 60 to 70 Canadians as Communists.
Norman was a good friend of Lester Pearson and Robert Bryce and Pearson’s denunciation of U.S. interference in Canadian affairs caused the jittery RCMP brass to sever relations with the FBI.
When they were resumed, the FBI handed the information about the Silvermaster spy ring to the RCMP. The ring’s courier, Elizabeth Bentley, told the FBI that Norman was a source of information sent to Moscow.
She also said that she had reported to her Soviet at spy handlers that Pearson also had been a source of information, along with John Grierson, head of the National Film Board, and his secretary, Freda Linton.
Featherbed was launched with the concept that the Silvermaster ring — which led to the indictments of Alger Hiss, assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State, and Harry Dexter White, a senior official in the U.S. Treasury Department — had its counterpart in Ottawa.
The initial investigation turned up 12 suspected equivalents in the Ottawa civil service hierarchy. The files on the dozen were taken away by W. H. Kelly, director of RCMP Security and Intelligence, and never returned to Featherbed investigators.
After the U.S. subcommittees naming Bryce, he voluntarily went to RCMP headquarters to explain.
He admitted having attended Communist party study cells at Harvard and contended to his RCMP questioners that “you’re making too much of it. I was only flirting with the Communists.”
Featherbed with the help of the FBI investigated his claim but concluded that Bryce had played a greater role in the study cells than he owned up to.
The delving also turned up a class parade photo taken at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the early 1930s. [Sitting] in the front row were Bryce, Lester Pearson, Herbert Norman and Kim Philby.
Philby went on to penetrate and sell out British Intelligence as a Soviet KGB master agent and now lives in Moscow. The picture raised questions but answered none.
RCMP of Operation Mercury put Bryce under surveillance for many months but found nothing incriminating.
The Mercury Mounties wiretapped Simon Reisman for a long time and intercepted phone calls from a Russian embassy military attache identified as “A. Lobatchev.”
The RCMP Watching Service glued on to Reisman but never found him meeting with Lobatchev. However, Featherbed found that Reisman’s wife had attended a Communist party training school in Port Hope, Ont., in 1954.
When Reisman’s top security clearance came up for renewal, the RCMP put in a report that it shouldn’t be renewed. But the government’s security screening panel disagreed.
Bernard Ostry was the subject of RCMP surveillance under the code-name “Apache.” That came after British Intelligence reported in 1962 that Ostry had attended a meeting of the Communist Party of Britain.
The Watching Service reported that Ostry had met Russian Intelligence Service agent Rem Krassilnikov at the Green Gables restaurant in Ottawa.
The RCMP took Bernard Ostry’s file to Trudeau but he dismissed their objections to his promotion to deputy minister of communications, the department that includes intercepting Soviet communications and bugging of embassies.
“I don’t want to hear any more about the Ostrys,” Trudeau said. “I would work with the devil if necessary. Don’t bother me any more about the Ostrys.”
The RCMP had filed objections to Sylvia Ostry’s promotions on the basis of her Communist associations. Trudeau dismissed that, too.
The RCMP could never reveal, even to Trudeau, the source for their objections to the Ostrys.
With Trudeau’s disinterest, Featherbed ground to a listless effort in 1972 and died completely by 1975.
A stroke of luck had uncovered secret Communist party memberships of several higher-ups in the trade union movement and in the civil service.
An RCMP “garbage patrol” picked up the membership list of secret section number seven of the United Jewish People’s Order in Montreal. Section seven was the UJPO’s underground party apparatus for professional people.
The subject of one Featherbed file, Tom Kent, complained to Pearson that it was unfair. Kent was a policy advisor to the prime minister and assistant deputy minister of immigration.
Featherbed’s file on Kent outlined his connections with Communist front groups while he was managing editor of the Winnipeg Free Press.
Of the many university professors in Featherbed’s files, the most important was deemed to be Prof. C. B. MacPherson of University of Toronto.
The RCMP bugged MacPherson’s island cottage near Gananoque for the regular visits by two Russian Intelligence Service officers from the Ottawa embassy.
MacPherson’s wife, Kay, was leader of the Voice of Women movement that paraded for rejection of nuclear weapons by Canada.
Twenty years after Igor Gouzenko defected, Featherbed analysts got around to poring through the neglected kit-bags full of papers seized in the spy-ring roundup.
In the yellowing notebooks and memo pads, they found names and phone numbers of calls made in wartime. Tracing the numbers back to wartime government phone books, they traced calls made to civil servants who by then (1965) had risen high in the bureaucracy.
They also found evidence implicating a wartime RCAF wing commander and an army colonel in the Soviet spy rings. But by then, the trail had gotten too cold. Ironically, the colonel was by then dealing with Soviet trade missions for the government.
Another trail too late to pick up was a curious coincidence that went unexplained.
That was the belated discovery that Col. Nicolai Zabotin’s spy ring had used an electronics shop in Rideau St., Ottawa, as a “live letter drop.”
A card was put in the shop window to signal that a letter was waiting to be picked up. The card’s appearance usually coincided with the visit to the manager’s office at the rear by two middle-rank civil servants.
The pair rose high in the bureaucracy and retired with honors and indexed pensions.
Operation Featherbed folded for lack of government interest.
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the above transcript was prepared:
