Canada: The Munsinger Affair

It began with a taunt. Repeatedly accused by Tory Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker of mishandling national security matters, Justice Minister Lucien Cardin stood up in the House of Commons and fired back. “He is the very last person who can afford to give advice on the handling of security cases,” charged the peppery French Canadian. So saying, he challenged Diefenbaker to “tell about his participation in the ‘Monseignor case’ when he was Prime Minister.”

The Monseignor case? Rumors of something called a Munsinger case had been making the round of government cocktail parties for years, but no one had ever dared mention it in public before. Could this be what Cardin was referring to? Nonsense, said Diefenbaker, flying away for a fishing trip. But the Munsinger case it was, and last week it exploded through Canada with such fury that it threatened to topple Cardin and the whole Liberal government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson.

Echoes of Profumo. Central figure of the case, Cardin told a press conference, was an “East German” blonde who had lived in Canada from 1955 to 1961, then returned to Germany, where she had died. He gave her name as Olga Munsinger and said she had been a spy before moving to Canada. There, he asserted, she had become involved with some of Diefenbaker’s “Ministers—plural,” and when Dief had found out about the affairs he had done nothing to stop them. “This is worse than Profumo,” Cardin charged.

Since Cardin had named no Cabinet names, his accusations put all of Diefenbaker’s former Ministers under suspicion of hanky-panky. After a tea party for parliamentary wives, former Tory Defense Minister Douglas Harkness stormed into the House to demand that Cardin prove his “statements, insinuations and allegations” or resign. “Let him go home to his wife and family and endure what we have to endure,” chimed in another Tory, and only some fast political footwork headed off a no-confidence motion that might well have brought down Pearson’s minority government on the spot.

Then came another explosion. “The girl Canada calls Olga Munsinger is alive and well,” announced the Toronto Star in an exclusive story that covered most of its front page. “Her real name is Gerda Munsinger,” said the story, and she had fled Communist territory as a refugee when she was 19. Tracked down in Munich by Reporter Robert Reguly, Gerda was living in a “chintzy” apartment at Ainmillerstrasse I, working as the assistant manager of a go-go cabaret and at 36 was still “tall, blonde and shapely.”

Yes, said Gerda, she had known one of Diefenbaker’s Ministers “very well,” still wore the gold birthstone ring given to her by another, Associate Minister of National Defense Pierre Sevigny, whose “frequent companion” she had been from 1958 to 1960. She had visited Sevigny in his suite in Ottawa’s Beacon Arms Hotel, entertained him in her own apartment in Montreal, attended an election banquet with him, even flown in a government plane with him to Boston “for the races.” She had, she admitted, become involved with a “medium-time” Montreal racketeer. But had she been a spy? Never.

“If the Justice Minister wants any information, why doesn’t he call me?” Gerda asked Reporter Reguly. “If you can find me, surely he can.”

Denial & Dilemma. That was a question that Cardin found hard to answer, and it was followed by a formal statement from Gerda, printed the next day in the Toronto Star: “I want to return to Canada as soon as possible to clear my name of the slanderous accusations that I was ever a spy.” The spy charge was all that Gerda seemed concerned about. Back in Montreal, her friend Sevigny, a suave and successful Montreal businessman, had a lot more on his mind. He appeared at a press conference and, with his wife standing beside him, angrily denied more than a harmless “social relationship” with Gerda. Cardin, he said, was a “cheap, despicable little man who has brought this odious, erroneous nonsense in front of the public for petty political reasons.”

It was a serious dilemma for Pearson. With shouts of “Resign!” ringing through the House of Commons, he called for a judicial inquiry that he hoped would prove security was indeed involved in the case. If that could not be established, the government might well fall. At week’s end, Cardin, the man who had started it all, seemed gloomy about his own prospect. “I think I am at the end of an era which has not been very edifying,” he said. “I’ll be happy, very happy, to go home.”