CANADA `Worse than Profumo' From DILLON O'LEARY
OTTAWA
frEIE so-called Munsinger sex-and-security case I is the odorous climax of vendetta politics between the Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, and his Conservative predecessor, John Diefenbaker, now leader of the official oppo- sition. Its reverberations could yet topple Pear- son's minority Liberal government. Or, as the Liberals hope, it could blacken Diefenbaker's name as a prime minister who risked the nation's security for the sake of hushing-up a messy political scandal.
The blonde who could rock the Canadian Par- liament was born Gerda Hessler in 1929 in Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad), East Prussia. She arrived in West Germany in 1948, where she married an American ex-serviceman, Michael Munsinger, who is now a New York policeman. They were soon divorced when, in 1953, the United States refused her entry as, Munsinger recalls, a security risk. In 1955, however, she was allowed into Canada. As a hostess and habitué in Montreal night-clubs, her looks and personality soon made her a striking companion of a fast-travelling, café society crowd. She re- turned to Germany of her own accord in 1961.
Mr. Justice W. F. Spence of the Supreme Court of Canada will conduct a judicial inquiry into the charges voiced by the Liberal Justice Minister, Lucien Cardin : that in 1960, while Prime Minister, Mr. Diefenbaker was shown a Royal Canadian Mounted Police file which indi- cated that two or more of his ministers (whom Cardin refused to name) were involved with Gerda Munsinger, a reported security risk; and that Diefenbaker blocked a reference of the file to the law officers of the Department of Justice, while allowing the implicated ministers to remain in office.
It was typical of current Canadian politics that Cardin exploded the Munsinger affair in Parliament as a stink bomb in counter-attack when Diefenbaker was pressing the minister to the wall over his handling of another security case. It ended with Diefenbaker's triumph, and Cardin's humiliation, when Mr. Pearson countermanded his minister's stand and agreed to Diefenbaker's demand for a judicial inquiry into Cardin's handling of the- Spencer affair. Cardin offered his resignation, but was per- suaded to withdraw it. It was then that Cardin moved to even the score with his enemy by brandishing the Munsinger case in public view.
The gist of Cardin's charges was that Gerda Munsinger had engaged in espionage in Ger- many; that more than one Conservative cabinet minister had known her well, at a risk to national security; that the case was worse, in some respects, than the Profumo affair; that the girl had returned to East Germany in 1961, where she had died of leukaemia; and that he himself had not seen the RCMP file in question, but had heard of it after he became Associate Minister of National Defence in 1963. As a back- drop for his story, some newspaper accounts said the Munsinger file contained infra-red photo- graphs of a former minister naked in bed with the girl.
Cardin's requiem for Munsinger was scarcely sung when she arose from the dead in Munich, alive and talkative. Yes, she had known the Associate Defence Minister, Pierre Sevigny, but never more than socially. And yes, she had lunched twice with the Trade Minister, George Hees. She denied ever having been a spy, and said she wanted to return to Canada to clear her name. The two ex-ministers tried to brush off the mud as best they could, protesting their acquaintance with her had never involved any- thing resembling a security risk. Meanwhile, back at the House of Commons, normal debate gave way to screaming chaos for two days. Conser- vatives demanded that Cardin repeat in the House the charges he had fired from ambush outside; that he end his mass smear against the twenty-two ex-ministers of the time by naming those whom he accused, and stake his seat on proving those charges. Cardin, however, sat silent.
The moral rot of Canadian politics was on display. In two months' sitting since the 1965 election, Parliament has passed only one minor Bill, obsessed as it was with the personal combat between Diefenbaker and Pearson. In the elec- tion, and since, Diefenbaker and his rising young aide, Erik Nielsen, the Member for Yukon, had never ceased their attacks on a government that seemed so prone to scandal. Now Pearson took an unyielding stand alongside Cardin. The shoe was now on the other foot, and Pearson obviously relished it. The one-time statesman of the United Nations, the Nobel Prize winner, had left the high road for the low road to pursue the politics of revenge.
Though 3,000 people swarmed one day to Par- liament Hill for the Munsinger debate, the mounting public disgust alarmed many MPs. The Liberal Montreal Star ran a plague-on-both- your-houses editorial, 'They Do Things Better in Ghana.' Parliament finally accepted Pearson's plan for a judicial inquiry. But not before E. Davie Fulton, Minister of Justice in 1960, offered his measured rebuttal of Cardin's charges. The Munsinger file had come first to him, and he had shown it to Diefenbaker. He said the file did not suggest Gerda Munsinger was ever an espionage agent, or had Sought or obtained security information. It did not suggest, he said, that any minister was guilty of an offence against security, or any other offence. Nor did the file contain any photographs. But if it was not a security file, what was it? Fulton and Diefen- baker did not say. A possible hint came from Quebec's crusading Attorney-General, Claude Wagner, who said he wants to question Gerda Munsinger about organised crime in Montreal.
Should the inquiry uphold Cardin, it would mean an ignominious end to Diefenbaker's setting career, smirching the memory of his six years as Prime Minister. It would ruin the political hopes of Fulton and Hees, both aspirants to succeed the seventy-year-old Diefen- baker as party leader, both aiming at the office of Prime Minister.
But whatever the outcome, Cardin and Pear- son seem certain losers. If the charges are proven serious enough to warrant public exposure, they will be asked why they waited three years, and only produced them as ammunition for political mud-slinging. If the charges are false, they will be notorious for their precedent in Canada of snooping into police files to raise witch-hunts and slander against political opponents. Parliamen- tary speculation multiplies that Pearson may retire once arrangements are made for a national Liberal convention to replace him as leader this autumn.
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