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ABSTRACT
In 1949, Canadian and US officials crafted a signals intelligence sharing agreement called CANUSA. The history of CANUSA, and especially the Canadian record of its context and negotiation, has been covered by official secrecy until now. This article draws on newly released material from an official history account written by the author two decades ago. CANUSA was both a guarantor of the survival and independence of a postwar Canadian signals intelligence effort, and the beginning of an expansion of signals intelligence sharing in peacetime that would ultimately shape the modern ‘Five Eyes’ alliance.
Acknowledgements
A version of this article was presented to the 2019 Symposium on Cryptologic History, sponsored by the NSA/CSS Center on Cryptologic History. I would like to thank Sarah Parsons of the Center for her invitation. I am grateful for the comments on an earlier draft by Bill Robinson, an expert on the history of Canadian SIGINT, who maintains the very valuable blog site Lux ex Umbra. I would also like to acknowledge helpful comments received from anonymous CSE officials. The views expressed in this article are entirely my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Historical records for the 1946 BRUSA agreement were released by both the UK National Archives and the United States National Security Agency in 2010.
2. The Australian signals intelligence organization, now known as the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), has recently embarked on its own official history project. The author will be John Blaxland. There is a UK official history of GCHQ, to be written by John Ferris, which is reportedly nearing completion. A multivolume history of the National Security Agency during the Cold War was produced under the auspices of the NSA’s Center on Cryptologic History and is available on the NSA website.
3. Bryden, Best Kept Secret; Jensen, Cautious Beginnings; Wark, “Cryptographic Innocence”; Rudner, “Historical Evolution”.
4. See Note on Sources. For a copy of an earlier redacted version of the O’Neill, “History”, see the blog post Robinson, “History of CBNRC.” Lux ex Umbra, Saturday, August 24, 2019. https://luxexumbra.blogspot.com.
5. Appendix A, CANUSA.
6. Appendix A, CANUSA Section 6.
7. Appendix A, CANUSA Sections 7 and 9.
8. Appendix A, CANUSA Section 11.
9. Johnson, American Cryptology, 18.
10. Wark, “Cryptographic Innocence”.
11. Wark, History.
12. Ibid.
13. BRUSA records, TNA, HW 8; National Security Agency/Central Security Service, “UKUSA Agreement Release”.
14. Wark, History. Records on the 1946 Commonwealth Signals Intelligence Conference have not been released to The National Archives.
15. See note 10 above.
16. Ibid.
17. O’Neill, History; Wark, History.
18. Ibid.
19. USCIB, Copy Courtesy of Bill Robinson, 18th mtg., January 8, 1947.
20. Ibid.
21. O’Neill, History.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. See note 11 above.
25. Agee, “Memo,” Copy Courtesy of Bill Robinson (Original provenance, Jeffrey Richelson, National Security Archive).
26. Agee, “Memo”.
27. See note 5 above.
28. See note 21 above.
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Wesley Wark
Wesley Wark is a Visiting Professor at the Centre on Public Management and Policy at the University of Ottawa where he teaches courses to Canadian federal government officials on intelligence and security issues. He retired from the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, where he had taught since 1988, in 2015. His formative exposure to the study of intelligence came while studying for a master’s degree at Cambridge with Christopher Andrew and a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics with Donald Watt, from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.