Shame of the Mountie who betrayed his man

Press, 11 February 1986, Page 21

Shame of the Mountie who betrayed his man

From

JOHN BIERMAN

in Toronto

At the height of the Cold War 31 years ago, Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman James Morrison committed a crime that has continued to haunt him.

Short of money to support his high-flying lifestyle, he betrayed a Russian double agent to the Kremlin for the equivalent of a year’s salary.

The double-agent — codenamed “Gideon” and described as the most important spy-turned-informer ever netted by the Canadians — was spirited back to Moscow and never heard of again.

Last week, in a court in Ottawa, Morrison’s betrayal caught up with him when he pleaded guilty to passing secrets to Moscow. Now aged 69 and employed as a construction superintendent in British Colum-

bia, Morrison will be sentenced in May. The story of Gideon and “Long Knife” — Morrison’s codename — reads like a script by John le Carre out of Dostoevsky. Morrison would not have been brought to justice but for a compulsion to confess his crime which overcame him three years ago. He did so on television. Thinlydisguised in a black wig and false moustache, he admitted on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s programme “Fifth Estate’” that he had sold out Gideon for $3500, roughly what he was then earning as a corporal in the Mounties. When asked if his betrayal had probably led to the death of

Gideon at the hands of the KGB, he replied: “It would appear to be the standard procedure.” Gideon’s real name was Breek. He was infiltrated into Canada shortly after World War Two and assumed the identity of a Canadian named David Soboloff.

He liked the Canadian way of life and offered to be a double agent for. the Mounties, then Canada’s counter-intelligence agency. He supplied them with the names of Soviet spies, cipher pads, times of Soviet spy transmission and other important information. He was volatile and wracked by bouts of self-hatred for having betrayed his country. “He’d get on the floor and cry and kick his

feet like a sad little child and call us curious names,” ex-Super-intendent Terence Guernsey said in evidence.

Morrison was engaged on surveillance duties. His colleagues knew him as flashy, smoking cigars, driving big cars and living beyond his salary. Eventually, after one of Gideon’s screaming fits, Morrison contacted a KGB man attached to the Soviet embassy in Ottawa and sold him the secret of Gideon.

Morrison was never suspected but not long afterwards lost his job for a minor offence.

He had “borrowed” $l4OO in police funds to pay a telephone bill incurred during a wire-tap-ping operation. He was banished to detachment duty in the prairies, where he spent the rest of his service.