Stealing the identities of Canadian citizens was a common Russian spy stunt during the Cold War, but making deep-cover Soviet agent Konon Trofimovich Molody double as deceased Canadian Gordon Lonsdale turned out to be a fatal oversight by the KGB, and one the RCMP helped expose in 1961.
The RCMP played a “crucial role,” says Trevor Barnes, the author of a new book on what became known as the Portland Spy Ring, in an interview with Global News.
In Dead Doubles, Barnes mines newly declassified MI-5 case files to unravel the story of what the British call one of their “most significant post-war counter-espionage cases.”
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. It extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres (3.85 million square miles), making it the world’s second-largest country by total area.
Its southern and western border with the United States, stretching 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi), is the world’s longest bi-national land border. Canada’s capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Various Indigenous peoples inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years before European colonization. The Canada Act 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British Parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with a monarch and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the Cabinet and head of government.
As a highly developed country, Canada has the seventeenth-highest nominal per-capita income globally as well as the thirteenth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index. Its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks.