Spy Story

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 350, 8 March 1946, Page 5

Spy Story

NTIL the Royal Commission announces its findings, we shall not know the real story of the Canadian spy scare. In the meantime the story which we have been told sounds rather like a radio serial or a Hollywood thriller. And it is really not surprising that it should sound like this, for a considerable portion of the human race has become so used to radio serials and Hollywood thrillers that it expects nothing less from real life and would be disappointed if it did not get them. News stories must be made exciting or many people will be disinclined to believe them. In the present case, however, a more level-headed and more sceptical section of the public will probably recall such uneasy names as Arcos and Zinoviev; will reflect on a number of discrepancies in the accounts we have been given; will notice that it is only the Canadian Press which "learns authoritatively," the Montreal Gazette which "reports," and the Ottawa Journal which adds another speculative dash of colour to the already lurid picture, whereas in fact the only official details released at the time of writing are notably sober and meagre. If this is scepticism it is sensible scepticism. Such people may also pay some attention to the implications of the article by the American scientist reprinted on Page 14, as well as to the statement by Joseph Davies, former Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. to the effect that if the Russians are involved in Canada they are only playing the game of power politics according to the rules. Coupled with all this will go a feeling of dull anger and frustration that the nations should still apparently be playing the same old game; and a feeling, too, that although the Canadian authorities are fully justified in protecting the secret of the atomic bomb as long as it is a secret, the sooner it ceases to be one and is brought under international control the less chance there

will be for recurrent spy scares to make the nations jumpy. When the facts from Canada are finally released they may, of course, turn out to be quite as sensational as some newspapers have suggested: but until then the wise course is to suspend judgment, remembering that while there is always a possibility that truth will be stranger than fiction, the probability is that it won’t be,