Diplomatic Salon Breakfast: Secret Intelligence and the Public Good

Join us in the Private Dining Room over a continental breakfast. Dr. Jack Cunningham (Munk School), Quadrangle Society Member Patrick Crean, and Dr. Jason Bell (University of New Brunswick) will talk about how intelligence can become less siloed today, so it can inform the public good.

In 1919, a Canadian secret agent, Winthrop Bell, agent A12, was the first to warn about the Nazi plot for a war of revenge. In 1939, he was the first to warn about their plans for the Holocaust.

The Nazis were eventually defeated, but violent racism is resurgent today. We are seeing how powerful people, who want to protect their privilege, make a scapegoat of minority populations and direct attacks against them. A12’s recently declassified papers show this happening in 1919 Germany at the origin of the Nazi party, and it also suggests ways of formulating post-conflict peace so as to weaken the hand of the bad actors.  

What can intelligence do to help secure stable post-war peace? We are now celebrating the 75th of the Marshall Plan, which is one of the few times in human history where we got the post-war peace right. From 1947 forward in Europe, western politicians heeded good intelligence, which showed that the business life of a vanquished adversary needed to be supported in order to gain a stable peace. But yet Marshall has been taken as a ‘once-off’ instead of a standard model, which is a major mistake. That mistake has been repeated in our more recent wars because politicians tend to think that militaries can, all by themselves, secure post-war peace, and that “secret” intelligence is most powerful as perpetually secret, when in fact very little needs to remain secret–the real power of intelligence is its becoming public so it can inform democratic deliberation.  That was a big difference between the report that informed the Marshall Plan, which was published, and Winthrop Bell’s plan to defeat the Nazis in 1919, which was classified (over his objections). 

Read about Dr. Jason Bell’s book here: Cracking the Nazi Code by Jason Bell | CBC Books

Jack Cunningham has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto and is Program Coordinator at Trinity College’s Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History. He teaches courses on Canadian defence policy; nuclear weapons in international politics; and war and its theorists.

Patrick Crean, most recently the Publisher and Editor of Patrick Crean Editions at HarperCollins Canada, retired in 2022 after 50 years in Canadian book publishing during which time he edited and published hundreds of Canadian authors. Patrick’s focus over the years was to publish both new and established voices in Canadian fiction, memoir, history, and current events, as well as essential books about new ways of being in a world in transition.

Jason Bell is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick. He has taught in the graduate program at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universteit Leuven in Belgium, at Vanderbilt University, and at Mount Allison University. He has served at the University of Göttingen in Germany as Fulbright Professor, as scholar-in-residence at Boston University, as Onderzoeksfonds Research Fellow at the Husserl Archives-Leuven, and as d’Alzon Fellow at Assumption university. He was awarded the doctorate in philosophy at Vanderbilt University.