History of the Examination Unit
Set up during the Second World War and housed in the National Research Council, the Examination Unit (XU) was Canada's first cryptanalytic agency.
The XU was shut down in the closing days of the war, but elements of it were combined with related armed services SIGINT units to create the Joint Discrimination Unit, which evolved in 1946 into Canada's post-war SIGINT agency, the Communications Branch of the NRC (CBNRC), now known as the Communications Security Establishment. The XU was thus a direct ancestor of today's CSE.
A classified internal history of the XU was compiled under the editorship of Gilbert de B. Robinson, a Canadian mathematician who helped to establish the unit, worked on its staff, and served as its final director.
That 222-page document has long sat available in full to researchers on the shelves of Library and Archives Canada, but the only copy accessible on the Internet (through this blog) was a highly redacted version released more than 30 years ago through an Access to Information request.
That sad state of affairs ends today. Here is the document in its entirety:
A History of the Examination Unit, 1941-1945 (61 MB PDF)
My thanks to the family of Examination Unit staff member David Hayne for sharing the hard copy with me.
posted by Bill Robinson at 4:03 pm
1 Comments:
Some log timer ago, I happened to begin exploring the possibility of a history of Canadian SIGINT for CBC Fifth Estate, following my successful story that I had brought to them, that of Leslie Jammes Bennett, the accused RCMP Security Intelligence civilian head of their Russian Section who was completely innocent. They, the Fifth Estate, asked if I could suggest a follow up story and I suggested the above mentioned history. "Go ahead", they said, "and it you find anything interesting, lat us know."
Well, I did find something interesting. I cannot now remember if I told them what it was, I was a bit upset for how the CBC treats outsiders who bring stories to them that perhaps I did not. This is what I found.
I began my exploration by accessing a CBNRC document that listed employees of the past, including persons who had been with the Examination Unit and MI2. One of the ex- MI2 members, who became quite important in the postwar CBNRC, who I interviewed, told me a story that has great historical importance regardin the attack on Pearl Harbor. Readers likely are aware of the great mystery regarding that event, which I define by two questions: What did Winston Churchill and FD Roosevelt know of the attack on Pearl Harbor?, and, When did they know it?
It so happened that the man I interviewed lead an MI2 team that tracked Kido Butai from Hitokappu-Wan to Pearl Harbor, and reported, several days before the attack, that if woujld take place and Pearl Harbor would be the target. "We told Winston Churchill. We were not told where it went from there.", he said. Mysrery, one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War, solved. I won't trouble you with the details, but will do so on my blog textmethod.net, or book if I can, but permit me to add that two decades of so later I discovered supporting ewvidence in documents a Library and Archives, Canada (LAC), photographed the documents several times with the camera on my two phones, and, fortunately, made a handwritten note of the contents. I say fortunately because several weeks after finding the documents I happened to ask and ex-CSE and ex-CSIS employee what he thought about the possible ramnifications of my discovery. Which, three weeks or so later, led to the documents disappearing from my LAC lockers where they were held. I compained to LAC, they feigned and investigation, I conducted myown investigation and quickly leaned that several CSIS operatives had arrived at LAC, gained access to my assigned lockers, retrieved the records within, in six volumes, searched them under the gaze of video security cameras, and several internal record systems, withdrew several, including the two of particular. importance. I consulted the Department of Justice and learned that no JUdicial Warrant, or any other judicial instrament, had been issued regarding the CSIS action, or any other acion in my life, which means that what occured, and the canivance of LAC, violated my Charter rights as defined by Section 8, Search and Seizure. The saga continues.
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