‘P.S. Burn after Reading’: The Kellock-Taschereau Commission and Soviet Espionage in Canada

Tom Mitchell and Reinhold Kramer ‘P.S. Burn after Reading’: The Kellock-Taschereau Commission and Soviet Espionage in Canada, published with the University of Toronto Press.

In September 1945, Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected to Canada and revealed that Canadians were spying on their own country? P.S. Burn After Reading shows how, in one of the first clashes of the Cold War, Canada used the Kellock-Taschereau Commission – sometimes appropriately, sometimes inappropriately – to thwart these homegrown agents and defend Canada’s national security. Mitchell and Kramer show that, despite some human-rights missteps, the Canadian government was correct about guilt in almost all the cases. The authors bring forward the crucial details from legal and archival records, showing that Gouzenko’s stolen cache remains the West’s first and most revealing glimpse into the secret world of Soviet military intelligence.