340-341 COMRADE KON RECRUITS OSCAR SKELTON

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Louis Kon, while a student in his native Russia, had participated in the abortive 1905 uprising led by Leon Trotsky. His father owned one of the largest textile factories in Czarist Russia but Louis (like most of the other future Bolshevik leaders) became infected with the Marxist virus and a cell member of the underground social democratic revolutionaries which became the short-lived 'Petersburg Soviet.'

Louis Kon escaped from prison in Russia and finally made his way to New York and then to Montreal around 1916. He managed to be hired as a translator, and later as an engineer for the old Montreal Light, Heat & Power Company when he returned from the ill-fated Vladivostok expedition in 1919.

He then took over the Soviet AMTORG trading office in Montreal and set up the Maxim Gorky clubs across Canada with the help of Bella Gauld, Annie Buller and other Communists active in the Labour College in Montreal. It was during a meeting of young students at Queen's University in Kingston that Louis Kon was able to recruit Oscar D. Skelton and to successfully infiltrate him into the federal civil service, where Skelton later launched the External Affairs Department.

When the NKVD (known as 'The Neighbours' in Soviet spy lingo - now the KGB) under Comrade Norman Freed succeeded in setting up a network of translators/interpreters from Halifax to Vancouver, the first step had been taken to start a massive penetration of the federal and provincial civil services, the law courts and the universities. Some of the older translators/interpreters were too well known as Bolshevik sympathizers to be able to participate in this 'colonizing' of the federal civil service. They included Louis Kon, Albert Saint-Martin and David Horwetz. The latter was the official interpreter (Russian) for the City of Halifax, and it was in Horwetz's Market Street home that Mrs. Leon Trotsky (Natalia Sedova) and her children lived during Trotsky's incarceration at the Amherst internment camp in April 1917.

The NKVD-Comintern, in close cooperation with the 'AngloAmerican Secretariat', had been carefully recruiting young Canadian university students in British and Canadian universities. Undoubtedly one of their best recruits was O.D. Skelton who later became known as the revered 'father of the Canadian civil service.' In his best-seller, The Canadian Establishment, Peter C. Newman gives only a superficial thumbnail sketch of comrade Oscar Skelton: 'During the next 16 years, Skelton founded and built up Canada's External Affairs department and as MacKenzie King's closest adviser became the most important civil servant in Ottawa.' In an Appendix dealing with Ottawa's Mandarins, there is only a mere mention of Skelton's belonging to the Rideau Club and having taught at Queen's University, and no mention of his membership in the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society and how he also enticed MacKenzie King to join!

Skelton was careful to groom only pro-Soviet civil servants in the External Affairs Department. Most of them were being briefed by the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA), the Canadian branch of the notorious pro-Soviet Institute of Pacific Relations. Many of them (including Lester B. Pearson) saw service in Washington and London where their counterparts were also members of Soviet espionage rings.