John Watkins (diplomat)

John Watkins (1902 – 1964-10-12) Canadian Ambassador to the USSR (1954–1956).

First posted to the USSR in 1948, Watkins learned Russian and developed a wide circle of Russian friends. He was allowed to travel to places barred to other foreigners, and in 1955 he organized an historic meeting between Canadian External Affairs Minister Lester B. Pearson and Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1964 he was secretly detained in a Montreal hotel by the RCMP and the CIA for questioning concerning weather he was an agent of influence. Several days into the interrogation he died. The official obituary claimed that he suffered a heart attack in the company of friends during a farewell supper celebrating his illustrious career.

The events of his death were exposed by Ian Adams in 1980, and further detailed in his book, Agent of Influence (1999). The Parti Quebecois government swiftly ordered an inquest into Watkins’ death. The RCMP refused to hand over the full report, claiming it would damage national security, but finally admitted Watkins had died under police interrogation in the Montreal hotel room and that he had not given into Soviet blackmailing tactics and was not a traitor.

Adams’ book suggests that the CIA was out to get, then Prime Minister, Pearson, and tried to get Watkins to implicate him. The book was made into a Canadian government funded movie for television, also titled Agent of Influence in 2002.

After Adams published his initial findings in 1980,

External Links

• Moscow Dispatches: Inside Cold War Russia by John Watkins, (edited by Dean Beeby & William Kaplan)
• Agent of Influence {2002) at [IMDB]
• FrontPage.com — Site claiming Watkins was a homosexual and that this was used unsuccessfully by the KGB against him.