Special Operations Executive: “The Recruitment of Yugoslav Irregulars in Canada, 1942-43.”
"...brave and highly trained in the use of weapons and demolition technique."
I walked by 200 Bay Street this morning on my way to work. This is the site of the “Royal Bank Plaza,” and the current structure was built in 1976.
However, approximately 81 years ago, in February 1943, this very location was the setting for a series of secret interviews. A representative from British Security Co-ordination began interviewing men of Yugoslavian origin right here, aiming to recruit them for Special Operations Executive missions in Nazi-occupied Europe.
On February 7, 1943, R. F. “Bob” Lethbridge of BSC arrived at Union Station, presumably from New York City, where BSC had its headquarters in Rockefeller Center. (He had hoped to stay at the Royal York hotel, conveniently located right next to 200 Bay Street, but it was “full up.” He stayed at the King Edward hotel instead.)
The next day, February 8, Lethbridge established himself in Room 420 of 200 Bay Street, and at 10 a.m., he started interviewing potential candidates.
For some of the 11 men he interviewed that morning, this would be the first stage in a journey that would include training at “Camp X” and then dropping by parachute into Yugoslavia to link up with Partisan forces there.
Records related to the recruitment of men from Canada for SOE missions have been open at the National Archives of the United Kingdom for nearly thirty years. Michael Petrou has written an excellent article based on the British records. More recently, the UK’s records regarding the SOE, and a host of other intelligence material, have been digitized and are available through Gale’s Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence database. (This is a subscription database; the link to the University of Toronto access point is here.)
The UK records include extensive information about the Canadians, as well as Canadian documents. But for 80 years, the Canadian version of this story—that is, the related archival records held at Library and Archives Canada—has been restricted for secrecy reasons. Just last year, in 2023, Library and Archives Canada responded to my 2019 Access to Information Act request by releasing the Canadian documents.
Sam Eberlee, a PhD candidate at UofT, has been working in these BSC records. He’s already created a briefing book from these records on Herbert Norman’s wartime counterintelligence assignment.
Now, he’s done an excellent job pulling out some of the key records related to BSC’s recruitment of Yugoslav-Canadians. (And he has more work in development!)
Here’s the introduction to Sam’s briefing book, with links to some key documents. For the full briefing book, click here.
“The Recruitment of Yugoslav Irregulars in Canada, 1942-43.”
(Canada Declassified version here.)
During the Second World War, British Security Coordination (the Secret Intelligence Service’s proxy in North America) recruited Yugoslavs resident in Canada for special service with Tito’s partisans. These recruits became agents of the Special Operations Executive, which Winston Churchill famously tasked with setting Nazi-occupied Europe ablaze.
SOE files at the UK National Archives were an essential foundation for Michael Petrou’s excellent article on the “Recruitment of Yugoslav-Canadians for Special Operations Executive Missions during the Second World War.” Roy MacLaren’s book on Canadians Behind Enemy Lines also features a detailed chapter on SOE operatives in Yugoslavia. The documents in this briefing book complement these works and open British files. They reveal that Canadian diplomats and Canada’s General Staff helped identify/transfer “useful material” from Canada’s armed forces to the SOE (CDYS00037). These Canadians, most notably External Affairs officers Tommy Stone, George Glazebrook and Saul Rae, developed close working and personal relationships with their BSC counterparts.
Most of the recruits were illegal residents of Canada, rather than Canadian citizens. External Affairs arranged passports or naturalization certificates for them, even though few of the Yugoslav volunteers returned to Canada after the war (seven were killed, while others chose to stay in Yugoslavia). The true nature of the Yugoslavs’ service could not be disclosed to immigration inspectors, RCMP investigators or the Naturalization Branch of the Department of the Secretary of State. BSC officers appreciated the “dexterity” shown by their DEA counterparts, who secured residency/citizenship status for the recruits without compromising the secrecy of the program (CDYS00042).
These documents provide glimpses of how Canadian communists of Yugoslav heritage like Paul Phillips and Edward Yardas proved more effective recruiters than an official Yugoslav mission in Windsor. The British secret service hoped to recruit up to one hundred men, but the actual total was most likely around forty (CDYS00030 & CDYS00041). Petrou has compiled a list of over thirty Yugoslav special operations volunteers from Canada, and MacLaren confirms that at least twenty of them infiltrated Yugoslavia.[1]
The documents in this briefing book are part of a broader file on Canada's liaison with British Security Co-ordination during World War II. This file was requested by Timothy Sayle and released under Canada's Access to Information Act (Library and Archives Canada ATIP A-2019-03092).
[1] Michael Petrou, “‘Melancholy Courage and Peasant Shrewd Cunning:’ The Recruitment of Yugoslav-Canadians for Special Operations Executive Missions during the Second World War,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association Volume 29:1 (2018), 39-71 & Roy MacLaren, Canadians Behind Enemy Lines (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 151.