J. Blair Seaborn
Seaborn would ultimately become the best-known of all of Canada's ICC representatives, but the Canadian historian Victor Levant noted that "he did not gain this notoriety until long after his tour of duty.
[2] During his time in Moscow, Seaborn passed on covert messages to and from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a senior officer in the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) who worked as a spy for the British MI6 and the American CIA.
As part of their monitoring duties, the Indian, Polish, and Canadian delegates of the ICC were entitled to go anywhere in North and South Vietnam and to speak to officials of either regime.
[3] Seaborn did not speak Vietnamese but was fluent in French, the colonial language spoken by the educated in both parts of Vietnam, which enabled him to make informal contacts with officials on both sides.
[12] At the same time, the Polish Commissioner to the ICC, Mieczysław Maneli, was also working as a "back channel" to find a way to end the war and had the additional advantage over Seaborn of being allowed to meet Ho Chi Minh.
[18] Seaborn flew into North Vietnam abroad a rickety Air France Stratoliner, whose two pilots had an alarming habit of drinking champagne on the job.
But the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] will not enter the war... we shall not provoke the U.S."[20] The North Vietnamese did not see Seaborn as neutral and regarded him as being close to an American spy.
[21] Afterwards, Seaborn reported to Martin, "We would be unwise at this stage to count on war weariness or factionalism within the leadership... to cause North Vietnam to jump at the chance of reaching accommodation with USA.
[25] Seaborn's report that the North Vietnamese were not interested in compromise but were convinced of their eventual victory greatly encourage d the Johnson administration to favour the escalation of American involvement in the war.
[28] The Americans also stopped sharing information with the Canadians about their Vietnam policy, which caused Pearson to feel that Seaborn was placed in an impossible situation of trying to negotiate without knowing everything that was happening.
[28] In June 1965, Johnson revealed the Canadian back channel to North Vietnam in a television press conference and caused Seaborn when he heard the news to exclaim, "My God!
The journalist Terrance Robertson wrote:"While two giants, the United States and China, wrestle —if unofficially— across the killing grounds of Vietnam, a 41-year-old Canadian, James Blair Seaborn, moves quietly behind both fronts in a frustrating, vital search for a formula for peace....
Mid all the brutal violence, the harsh insulting language and the shrill cacophony of war which makes Vietnam the most explosive trouble spot on earth, a man you have probably forgotten (if you had ever heard of him) is officially charged with keeping the peace.
He is, in this nightmare environment, still vainly attempting to do what he came here to do nearly eighteen months ago — maintain a paper peace between North and South Vietnam, whose once-furtive hostilities now involve semi-confrontation between Red China (and a lukewarm Russia) on the one side, and the United States (backed by somewhat reluctant allies) on the other.
"[12] Seaborn told Robertson: "Frustrating as it is, it may be that if this commission can stand and wait long enough it will be able to play a worthwhile role in the future.... Our function was drawn up when this was a local civil war so we proceed as if it were still true.
Once we have the evidence we take it up with the North Vietnamese military authorities, asking them to explain how weapons made in the Soviet Union or Red China, for instance, happened to find their way into the hands of the Viet Cong.
Seaborn spoke of how the Saigon police tended to execute on the spot people caught violating the nightly curfew and how the Viet Cong frequently threw bombs at restaurants popular with Westerners.
[30] Sharp listed Seaborn together with Marcel Cadieux, Edgar Ritchie, Klaus Goldschlag, John G. H. Halstead, and James "Si" Taylor as a team of "very able" diplomats that he had working for him, many of whom he was sorry to lose to other departments in the 1970s.
[31] The Austrian-born Canadian journalist Peter C. Newman wrote in 1971 about the Seaborn Mission, "There was something particularly distasteful about the fact that in the ugly deceptions that led to the United States' escalation of the Vietnam war — as revealed to the world by the New York Times earlier this summer — Canada's role was to act as an American messenger boy.
The Pentagon's dispatch of J. Blair Seaborn, then our representative on the International Control Commission, to carry its threats of bombing raids to North Vietnam, even though we were supposed to be neutrals, sums up in one telling incident just how seriously the Americans regard our valiantly 'independent' posture in foreign affairs.
Discreet, neat, dead from the neck down, deeply attached to the British tradition of muddling through, these old-fashioned mandarins (and there are exceptions) tend to view life as an intellectual tumbling exercise.
Substituting good manners for compassion, light on both feet and ready to move in any direction, they believe that the duty of the responsible public man is to exercise restraining influence on risk-taking.
"[32] In his bestselling 1974 book Snow Job, the journalist Charles P. B. Taylor accused Seaborn of being an "agent" for the United States who was attempting to intimidate Ho on behalf of Johnson.
[33] In his 1986 book Quiet Complicity, the Canadian historian Victor Levant entitled the chapter dealing with the mission as "J. Blair Seaborn: Choreboy for Moloch.
Environment Canada was a newly established ministry founded in 1971 and was foundering by 1975 under inexperienced leadership, which made to Trudeau in 1975 send in Seaborn to "fix" the department.
"[3] Seaborn, an active athlete and outdoorsman who excelled at hiking, skiing, and canoeing, was described as having a passion for environmental issues, having the ability of obtaining the trust of others, and inspiring his colleagues to work effectively.
[3] Art Collin, the chief science adviser to the government called Seaborn "a wise and gentle leader" who finally made Environment Canada work as an effective ministry.
"[39] The report concluded: "On the balance, we think the models the proponents used are sufficiently well developed to demonstrate that its concept of deep geological disposal can be used as a basis for designing a site-specific facility that is likely to meet regulatory requirements.
[57] Northwatch also pointed that the first chairwoman of the NWMO, Elizabeth Dowdeswell, was a former executive of the board of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor company and that she had often expressed support for more nuclear power plants.
[47] Rabe further wrote that the panel had taken nearly a decade to reach its conclusions "essentially advising the Canadian government to start from scratch, with new institutions and an extended process designed to win public trust.
