CANADIAN SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE• 85tawa headed by Superintendent Charles Rivett-Carnac and a Czech
immigrant, John Leopold, who had been successful as an undercover
agent penetrating radical movements for eight years from March
1920 and had risen to be a senior Communist party official. The In-
telligence Branch field inquiries were conducted by plainclothes
Mounties of the normal Criminal Investigation Branch.
During World War II, the Intelligence Branch was enhanced to deal
with two Nazi spies dropped onto the coast by U-boats, Werner Ja-
nowski and Alfred Langbein, and to handle a couple ofdouble agent
cases supervised by the MI5security liaison officer,Cyril Mills.
Following thedefectionofIgor Gouzenkoin September 1945,
the Intelligence Branch was transformed into the RCMP Special
Branch in 1950, headed at first by Rivett-Carnac. He was replaced in
1947 by Superintendent George McClellan, the first RCMP officer to
be trained by the British. Under his direction, Inspector Terry Guern-
sey and Sergeant Owen Jones were sent to England to be trained by
MI5, andJim Skardonflew to Ottawa to initiate acounterespio-
nagecourse. As a result of British influence, the Special Branch was
structured on MI5’s model.
In November 1949 theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) station
commander in Washington, D.C.,Peter Dwyer, who had partici-
pated in the debriefing of Gouzenko, left SIS to take up a post with
the Communications Branch of the National Research Council. Three
years later, he switched to the Privy Council Office in Ottawa, where
he exercised influence over Canada’s fledgling security apparatus.
In November 1956 the RCMP Special Branch was redesignated
the Directorate of Security and Intelligence, and then in 1970 it was
established as the RCMP Security Service, led by John Starnes, a
civilian of deputy commissioner rank. In July 1984, following the
1981 McDonald Inquiry into allegations of illegal operations con-
ducted by the Mounties against the Que ́becois Liberation Front, the
Canadian Security Intelligence Service was created as an entirely ci-
vilian organization without police powers. Although CSIS officially
does not gather intelligence overseas, it does post liaison officers in
foreign countries, attached to Canadian diplomatic missions.
Themolehunts of the 1960s that had afflicted British intelligence
did not leave the RCMP Security Service uncontaminated. A lengthy
investigation codenamedlongkniferesulted in the conviction of a