US-Canada relations sour

Before we look at Mr Reagan's visit last weekend to a fascinating, unknown country, I ought to add a footnote – head note would perhaps be better – to last week's talk about our progress over 40 years from innocence to cynicism about wire tapping, secret microphones, hidden cameras and all the other paraphernalia of what modern governments call electronic surveillance and which they insist is essential to preserving the privacy or security of their own policies, but also to probe the secrets of the other fellows' policies.

The talk was mainly, some of you may recall, about the dreadful disclosure that two of the American marines who serve as guards at the American embassy in Moscow, as other marines do at every other American embassy, had been charged with espionage having fallen victim to the wiles of two Russian women who seduced them and recruited them. And a few days after the story broke, an American senator said he had very good authority for believing that at least two other marines had also fallen by the wayside.

Among the horrors that the story implied was that perhaps the two ladies and their accomplices had planted secret listening devices in both the public and private rooms of the embassy so that, as I reported, there was a fear that Secretary of State Shultz, on his visit to Moscow this coming weekend, might not be able to hold conversations safe from eavesdropping inside the building. This did seem a little far-fetched in its first version, suggesting that the two Mata Haris had gone to work in shifts, like coal miners, in planting a whole nervous system of devices in the walls and ceilings of the embassy.

Well, it turns out that that's not the worst that the American mission in Moscow has to fear. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has just released a report by two of its staff members – which I ought to say, in any country with something like an Official Secrets Act would not be released for 30 years – and this report is, according to one's sense of melodrama or humour, either hair-raising or hilarious. It sounds like something out of one of those old Boulting brothers' movies.

It has to do not with the present American embassy building, but with a huge, new United States embassy building which is under construction and has been since the early 1970s. It was decided way back then that much of the building would be assembled from prefabricated modules manufactured by Russians at a factory site which American were not allowed to inspect.

As you might guess, the huge complex is now well along and if the Americans have misgivings about electronic eavesdropping devices, the last place they'd think of looking, or be able to look, would be in the foundations, the concrete, the steel beams and so on. Well, that's exactly where many strands of such things have been found. The buildings were designed by an American but the man in charge of construction was a Soviet engineer and when the staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tried to track him down, they were told he'd died of a heart attack.

If there's one thing Washington has no lack of it's congressional sub committees that spring into action whenever their parent committee smells a rat or a secret microphone. So the House has a sub-committee of its Foreign Affairs Committee whose job is precisely to monitor security at American embassies. The chairman of this sub-committee has looked into the Moscow problem and finds the foundations of the new building riddled with all sorts of listening and relaying and communications devices.

'What you have,' he says, 'in Moscow, is a brand new facility that you can't move into and an embassy you can't whisper in.' Technical experts he's consulted think it might cost between 20 and 40 million dollars to purge or de-gut the new building of what it calls security flaws. The chairman says the cost of purifying the building is debatable, according to whether you believe that the gadgets that have been found are all there is to find or whether they were planted prominently by the Russians and constitute only what they wanted us to find.

I suppose that most of us moviegoers and readers of spy novels keep a picture in our minds of microphones in chandeliers or little button microphones under the lapel, raised eyebrows at street corners and, in more expansive moments, one of those James Bond motorcars that emit fire and smoke or turn at the throw of a switch into a submarine. I doubt we think of skyscrapers whose foundations and rafters are huge amplifiers.

The Russian genius is for more microscopic ingenuity as well. Some of the American officials who've been making these studies grudgingly credit the Russians with what they call 'remarkable expertise' in, for instance, planting devices that pick up and transmit signals every time an American's typewriter or coding machine is struck, the signals go out through the power cord at frequencies calibrated to the width of a television band.

That being so, the question for the American government to solve about its great new embassy building is whether to spend millions on trying to trace and eliminate all the devices from the foundations up or whether to scrap the whole thing as a white elephant. And by 'scrap', many intelligence students mean exactly that. Senator Leahy of Vermont who was the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has concluded that the only honest approach is to tear it down and start all over again. There is no possible way to make that embassy secure.

This argument will, I expect, go on for some time. The new building was estimated to cost $90 million and to be finished in 1983. As with almost all federal projects, or for that matter your new suburban house, it's a victim of cost overrun. It has some way to go before it's christened but so far has cost $190 millions. So we can now see why all the worst fears about the security of the new building have passed over to the present lumbering embassy and the probability that it, too, is bristling with microphones and signals and whatnot.

So, in the meantime, Mr Shultz is going to Moscow and all what they're calling 'sensitive' conversations with the staff inside the embassy will be held outside the embassy in a fiendishly well-guarded house trailer or caravan. It doesn't seem exactly the most propitious home base from which to emerge from one of those conversations with the Soviet foreign secretary or Mr Gorbachev which, when they're over, will no doubt be described as frank and cordial.

Now, I said at the beginning that last weekend Mr Reagan visited a fascinating, unknown country. It's called Canada. Of all the countries, the friendly countries, with which travelling Americans are familiar – Britain, France, Italy, certainly the island countries of the Bahamas and the Caribbean – I think Canada is the least well known. Stop an American in the street, in the office, in an airport, in many a government office and ask him/her about Canada's system of government or to call off the names of the provinces, or even take a guess at the size of the country, I doubt that one in ten could offer correct answers.

A few weeks ago, a poll did ask a cross-section of Americans who is the United States' biggest trading partner? Something like 70 per cent said Japan. A thoughtful minority preferred to say West Germany. Well, the answer, as you'll have guessed, is overwhelmingly Canada. And, trade, the steady tidal wave of American goods flowing into Canada against the stream of Canadian goods coming south, trade has long been a Canadian grievance and a wound to national pride.

On that score, however, quite apart from any odious comparisons between the range of productivity in both countries, there is the incurable fact that while Canada is larger than the United States, its four million square miles lie far to the north, much of them bleak and unproductive.

The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville remarked 150 years ago that the three million square miles of the United States are more varied on the surface and better suited for the habitation of man. The prime natural asset of the United States is that it lies between the parallels of 26 and 55 north and spans the whole range of climates that people can comfortably live and work in. Hence, the 24 million Canadians and the 240 million Americans.

Canadians have always protested, and will go on protesting, that the flood of cheaper American goods goes on costing Canadians tens of thousands of jobs. Last year, the two countries committed themselves to free trade, but since then Washington put a tariff on cedar shingles as a protest against Canada's subsidising of its softwood products. Ottawa promptly slapped an export tax on timber products.

The big, burning Canadian grievance, though, against the United States is that of acid rain – the alarming free flow of polluted air caused by the sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that moves north from America's industrial Midwest over the whole of Eastern Canada. Canada's economy depends greatly on timber, on water power, on fishing, not to mention the syrup tapped from maple trees.

The Canadian government says that 14,000 lakes in Eastern Canada and 13 rivers, normally leaping with salmon, are now acid dead and the vast forests of maple trees are dying so fast that, as one reporter put it, 'In 20 years time, the only maple leaf left in Canada might be on the national flag'.

Last year, Mr Reagan put up $1.7 billion to study ways of discovering clean burning coal. The Canadians don't want a study. They want much more money to be spent on compulsory control of industrial emissions on the American side and, until that's done, the Canadians understandably will retain very mixed feelings about the giant to the south and continue to be little moved by the old American boast that the American-Canadian border is the longest undefended frontier in the world.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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