UPDATE to Series 1. When A Spy Goes Rogue. Pt 7: Censorship, Greta Goede, CSIS and Shameless Hypocrisy
In the article, Censorship, Greta Goede, CSIS and Shameless Hypocrisy, I ask the following question:
“1958 to 1962 are years John Kennett Starnes activities are unaccounted for. Where was he? What was he up to? He left Paris in 1958: 1956-58 he was Deputy Executive Secretary to the North Atlantic Council in Paris”
I have read the early part of Starnes biography which covers these years quite a while ago, and either I missed it, forgot it, or he didn’t provide the details given in this Globe and Mail article published in January 2015, updated in May 2018:
Spy master John Starnes helped nurture Canada’s Cold War intelligence system
“Intelligence work called him back to Ottawa in 1958 when he was made head of something called DL2 (Defence Liaison Two) at External. The title gave away little of the manifold duties of the job, which included security screening of Canadian diplomats, counterintelligence against Soviet efforts at penetration and chairmanship of the Joint Intelligence Community, which tried to integrate the activities of the small band of Canadian agencies then involved in intelligence work, including External, the RCMP and the military, and was responsible for producing what Canada could generate in the way of strategic intelligence assessments about trends in the Cold War contest. Thanks to a successful bureaucratic battle after 1945, External, and specifically the official in charge of DL2, also had policy oversight of the activities of Canada's fledgling signals intelligence agency, which was building up a capacity against Soviet military communications based on intercept stations located in the North. Mr. Starnes was also the lead Canadian official in terms of maintaining contacts with Canada's close allied intelligence partners. It was a big job and won Mr. Starnes lasting kudos in his department.
Little in detail can be said about Mr. Starnes's successes (or failures) at this apex of the Canadian intelligence community during the late 1950s and early 1960s, owing to the fact that the official records remain classified. But in his own memoir, published in 1998 by University of Toronto Press, with the apt (and no doubt consciously wry) title of Closely Guarded: A Life in Canadian Security and Intelligence, Mr. Starnes touched on some of the highlights. These included the unsavoury task of handling personnel security issues, trying to sniff out U.S. plans for what proved to be the CIA invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and, probably most important, arranging for Canadian access to some of the holiest of intelligence secrets of the Cold War – namely the overhead imagery produced by the first generation of U.S. spy planes and spy satellites.”
I apologize for my omission, whatever the reason. I’m human. I make mistakes. They’re not intentional or an attempt to mislead/deceive, and I’m happy to publicly acknowledge and correct them when they occur, as I’m doing now. Anyway, the article doesn’t sound like an “Opinion” piece to me but more like something produced by a professional PR firm.
This “Opinion” explains a lot and provides context for what Starnes, Cyril Reitman and Ewen Cameron did to Greta Goede since he held that position, Head of Defense Liaison Two, during the time period that Greta was targeted, framed and convicted for the alleged “kidnapping” of then two-year old Joel Reitman: 1958 (conviction) to 1962 (scheduled prison release and deportation to Germany). In 1962, he was conveniently assigned to the position of Acting Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs. Later in 1962-66 he became Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany and Head of the Canadian Military Mission in Berlin, returning to Canada in 1967 in the position of Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs.
All of which makes me wonder where his priorities lay. In the government positions he was entrusted with? Or stalking an innocent woman he was busy persecuting?
Was he abusing his powers with dirty tricks even then and doing so by using Canadian government resources?
This: “also had policy oversight of the activities of Canada's fledgling signals intelligence agency” provides the connection between George Bedard who was an ex-SigInt specialist and later member of CPC(ML). He helped set the stage for Starnes to threaten me at a protest by insisting I film him. His ex-GF, Terri Rohde was the Reitman connection.
Note that another unexplained period in Starnes career is 1945 to 1948. This was the period that both the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes trials were occurring and while Operation Paperclip was in full swing.
Operation Paperclip is the reason why thousands of Nazis were brought into the US.
What is less commonly known is that thousands of Nazis were also brought into Canada around the same time.
This explanation appears on the Reddit group r/AskHistorians
“Operation Matchbox, which you referenced, certainly existed — and it absolutely involved the relocation of German scientists and engineers to the UK and its colonies (likely as a reward for information-sharing, and to keep them out of the hands of the Soviets.) But its scope and execution are rather poorly documented — the National Archives in London apparently have a bunch of Ministry of Aviation and Ministry of Defence documents on Matchbox, but they haven't been digitised.”
“From the report of the Deschênes Commission, a 1987 Canadian public inquiry into war criminals in Canada:
In the course of time, the Commission was apprised of operation "Matchbox" aimed at securing for the Allies the greatest number of top-notch German scientists. The operation presented a serious security problem inasmuch as those scientists might well have been involved in the Nazi war effort. Fresh in everybody's mind must then have been the discussions which would eventually lead to the trial at Nuremberg of the I.G. Farben directors.
[...]
The security screenings were conducted by two distinct panels established by the British Board of Trade. The DARWIN panel was assigned the responsibility of recruiting and screening of scientists for industry while the other panel, under the Deputy Chiefs of Staff Committee, dealt with scientists destined for military research. In both situations the panel was to verify if the applicant was a member of the Nazi Party and whether he was sufficiently qualified to contribute something worthwhile in his field of endeavour in the host country.”
Note that every German scientist was required to be a member of the Nazi party according to Werner von Braun, an Operation Paperclip recruit to NASA.
Was Starnes in Nuremberg from 1945-46? Was he one of the people charged with identifying Nazis to be brought in to Canada? Is this what laid the foundation for him being appointed Head of DL2?
Whether he was or wasn’t responsible for bringing the Nazis here, he and his cohorts had to have known there were 2000 real, proven Nazis in Canada that he could have targeted for the bizarre “experiment”, I believe he, Reitman and Cameron conducted.
Instead, they chose to target an innocent German woman who didn’t come to Canada until 1956, did so on her own, and not as part of Canada’s Nazi recruitment program.
Greta was a much easier target than a real Nazi endorsed and brought into Canada by the Canadian government.
The “experiment” targeting Greta was based on Starnes/Reitman/Cameron’s eugenics beliefs regarding Germans:
Eugenics: “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.” -Oxford Languages Dictionary
“If we can succeed in inventing means of changing their attitudes and beliefs, we shall find ourselves in possession of measures which, if wisely used, may be employed in freeing ourselves from their attitudes and beliefs in other fields which have greatly contributed to the instability of our period by their propensity for holding up progress” — Cameron on the Germans, in Life is For Living — Wikipedia
“In Cameron's book Life is For Living, published in 1948, he expressed a concern for the German race in general. Just as Sigrid Schultz stated in Germany will try it again, Cameron fostered a fear for Germans and their genetic determination. Those Germans affected by the events that led to World War II were of utmost concern. Cameron's concerns extended to his policies determining who should have children and advance to positions of authority. According to Cameron's psychiatric analysis of the German people, they were not suitable to have children or hold positions of authority because of a genetic tendency to organize society in a way that fostered fearsome aggression and would lead to war rather than peace; he would repeatedly use the German as the archetypal character structure on which to ground the most psychologically deviant humans.” — Wikipedia
Ironically, Cameron’s own stated eugenics beliefs are the same as the Nazi eugenics beliefs he claims he wants to eliminate. Their hypocrisy is astounding.
And note that like Greta, I never played any significant or influential role in CPC (ML) or out of it. You can ask any of their long-term members and I’m sure they will verify this.
The only reason I was and am known at all is because of the Starnes/Reitman cult of perverts’ constant and ongoing smear and propaganda campaigns targeting me from the time I was a teenager to date.
Psychopaths, including the Puppet Master and Serial Killer types are weak, little men who always look for easy targets so that they can flaunt their “brilliant successes”.
The reality is that Starnes had no proven history that we know of, where he succeeded at anything using skilled spy craft. He was skilled at getting himself into the positions he wanted. How he accomplished that is anybody’s guess. Coercion? Bribery?
On the other hand, he does have a proven history of corruption and abuse of power by selecting innocent women as prey, for abuse and pointless criminal harassment campaigns, using dirty tricks. He’s a proven sexual predator, whether he does it himself or prefers to watch.
It seems likely he was also using government resources, illegally, to do so.
In my opinion, putting Starnes in charge of DL2 and the RCMP SS was the same as putting Colonel Russell Williams (convicted serial killer and rapist) in charge of Canada’s largest Air Force military bases in Dubai (top secret base) and in Canada.
The only real difference between the two is that Williams got caught while Starnes, his cohorts like Cyril Reitman, and their now multi-generational cult of perverts, didn’t. Both are sexual predators.
Meanwhile, the Starnes/Reitman multigenerational cult of perverts continues Starnes abuses and works overtime to cover his and their tracks, like disappearing references to Jules Grajower, from the Internet.
“The Operation Checkmate scam that failed was Starnes attempt to get an alleged mentally ill schizophrenic, Jules Grajower, to sexually torture and murder me. Obviously, I managed to escape.
Grajower had been a member of the University of Waterloo organization, Anti-Imperialist Alliance, which later merged with CPC (ML). He joined the Toronto Student Movement, student branch of CPC (ML) along with Mitchell Bornstein, after the merger. My older brother and I were also members of the TSM. That is where I met Grajower.
The details of his attack on me are in my book, Persecution Games.” -The Puppet Master and the Psychopath, Pt 5.
What’s missing is often as damning and revealing as what’s there when doing the research.
Britain's most important signals intelligence partner, before and during WWII, was Sweden. Most people do not know this and Americans are usually completely unable to process the fact.
It would be interesting to know if Starnes had any awareness of the Swedish programme to read diplomatic cyphers.
Until the Blair government concentrated economic decision-making in Downing Street (no 10 & no11), the long-established post of "President of the Board of Trade" was a cabinet post of pretty much equal rank to Minister of Defence, which was pretty new in the post-war period, each armed service prior to WWII having its own ministry (and vote in cabinet!)
That was almost certainly why the Matchbox screening boards were set up by the Board of Trade. The emphasis on aviation was not an accident: this was the only field where British experts thought that German experts had anything of consequence to offer; their bioscientists and rocket scientists, eagerly sought by America and Russia, mostly being charlatans: none of the human experiments conducted in German and Japanese deaths camps (like camp 731, which was the worst place on Earth) yielded any scientific information which was not already known, published and in the public domain, from ethical trials and experiments conducted prior to WWII. Britain was the only major power to realise this truth!
NASA depended more on General Dornberger (whom the British thought, rather deeply, about hanging) than on Von Braun, whose record wasn't quite so dire. And the Space Shuttle was Dornberger's COPY of the original British "MUSTARD" concept. The only "NAZI" scientist who was NOT a con-artist turned out to be Gustav Lachman, whom the Board of Trade snaffled to work at Handley Page on what became the Victor Bomber: by a long way the most aerodynamically efficient of all cold war military aircraft; Lachman and his assistant started by designing a wing, every part of which had the same critical mach number, and then tweaked the rest of the airframe to that number, resulting in an aircraft that needed an automatic throttle-puller to stop it accidentally exceeding the speed of sound as it levelled out from a climb. (This had happened over Watford Town Centre on a market day, which added a bit of impetus to efforts to address the issue!)
Not only was Dornberger thought a war-criminal by virtue of the purpose of the V-weapons programme: he and Von Braun were responsible for the massive use of slave labour to produce those weapons and create some of the V-weapons production and launch sites. Forced labour under NAZI rule was a form of execution, because people were deliberately worked to death, on Himmler's orders, which Dornberger put into action with Von Braun's help.
If the history of Camp 731 in Manchuria were ever to be researched and publicised with the same energy as that of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the world would be amazed and appalled. Both the US government and the Chinese Communist Party have a vested interest in burying the truth, however. Even the Soviets ignored the use of Russian women and children in experiments at Camp 731 (Japan hadn't even been at war with the USSR at the time!) for the sake of getting access to the meaningless results of the completely unscientific experiments.