The newly released pages of Alti Rodal’s 1986 report have been read as a story of American deception and Canadian embarrassment. They support a narrower and more damning reading.

In 1953 and 1954 the United States had a path for legally admitting compromised intelligence assets. It chose, for a particular class of them, to move them into Canada under false identities instead. The records being released now explain what went into this decision. They also show Canada, once informed, objecting, tightening the channel, and then writing a screening doctrine that accommodated the practice that it had objected to.

The Maple reported the release of Chapter XII, Part 5 of Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present, which followed B’nai Brith Canada v Minister of Canadian Heritage, 2026 FC 1119. The newly visible material identifies George McManus, the CIA officer who asked Canadian screeners to accept American nominees without checks and who later served as the CIA’s representative in Ottawa; Oscar Holtz of the US Army’s Research and Resettlement Branch, which Rodal describes as a cover organisation for the CIA; and the figures of 39 men admitted and 52 rejected. Historian Jared McBride called it a ratline and asked where the American records are. Part of the answer has been in print since 1985, and the two sets of records read together describe a system rather than a scandal.

The legal option

Section 8 of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, referred to at the time as the 100 Persons Act, permitted the Director of Central Intelligence, the Attorney General and the Commissioner of Immigration, acting jointly, to admit up to one hundred aliens a year “without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws.” The provision existed precisely for people whose records barred them under ordinary law. It required a written determination by three named officials.

The General Accounting Office found it in use. In 1952 the CIA sought permanent residence for an asset convicted before the war of complicity in a political assassination. The request “included a justification which contained details about the subject’s background including his assassination conviction and the alleged terrorism acts,” and the three officials “agreed to admit the subject in the interest of national security without regard to his inadmissibility under any other laws.” GAO also described the CIA resettlement program established in the early 1950s for “some Soviet and East European defectors and some terminated CIA-employed aliens.” About thirty percent of its subjects were resettled in the United States, “and the majority of these were defectors.” The remainder went to other countries. For the American cases, GAO recorded that immigration law was observed and that State and Justice conducted a pre-immigration review.

The Canadian option

Rodal’s page 456 records what Holtz told Deputy Commissioner W.H. Kelly in 1954 when Canadian officials proposed that the Americans take their own nominees. The United States would decline because

the law of the country would not permit it, although there is now provision for them to take approximately 100 a year (The “100 Persons Act”), [one clause withheld under s. 13(1)(a)]

Holtz had already acknowledged that some of the men had “criminal records of which a number arose from cases involving moral turpitude — the category in which Nazi collaborators were included,” which was the statutory exclusion under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Kelly’s assessment was that “there is no desire to fill this quota if they can be disposed of elsewhere.” Rodal, on page 461, found that assessment plausible. Lester Pearson’s view at External Affairs was that the Americans “should take such people to the U.S., rather than unload them on others.”

The withheld clause is Holtz’s opinion of the Act. Justice Fothergill read it and described it as innocuous. Its absence changes little, because the structure is visible without it.

Each lawful channel attached an official’s name to an asset’s true record. The third channel attached nothing to anyone. The Americans used the first for assets they valued and the third for those they wished to be rid of, and Kelly identified the sorting rule at the time.

Why forgeries worked

Rodal’s finding on page 460 is that in the American zone “the only source of information consulted was the CIC, which was in fact working with USAREUR in the resettlement of former agents.” The RCMP regarded the Counter Intelligence Corps as “our best and only dependable source of information in the U.S. zone of Germany and Berlin,” and Kelly testified that no check on an Eastern European applicant was possible “apart from what was presented by the Americans, whether it was true or false.” An RCMP brief of April 1983, on page 447, set out the sequence: documentation arranged by the agency, a routine check referred to the same agency, a report of no adverse record, a visa. The screening system had a single upstream source, and the source had an interest.

The irregularities were detected outside that dependency. Visa officers in Stockholm reported falsified American documents to External Affairs in 1953, without consequence for a year. The Karlsruhe cases reached London after the death of the sergeant who had cleared them. The RCMP Commissioner wrote to Crean in September 1954 that men coming through the Research and Resettlement Branch “have obviously, in most instances, been supplied with false documentation,” that the RCMP was “not convinced that the figures which have been given to us in the first instance are in fact correct,” and that the same method had been used in other countries, “in some cases completely successful.” A request for the American files produced the reply that they had been destroyed, which Corporal Yetter of the RCMP, writing in 1983, considered unlikely for an agency that might want the men’s services again.

The method was already documented on the American side. The 1983 Department of Justice report on Klaus Barbie described the CIC’s employment of Barbie, its concealment of his whereabouts from France while extradition was sought, and his removal to Bolivia under a new name. Rodal opened her chapter with that case, and the 1983 RCMP report applied the same comparison to a Yugoslav CIC agent renamed in Austria in 1946 and landed in Canada in 1948.

The adjustment

The Canadian response, once the practice was understood, was procedural. Ottawa required that defector cases be presented by the CIA to External Affairs. It also recorded, on page 464, the principle on which such cases would thereafter be judged:

Obviously, the real purpose of resettlement arrangements would be defeated if the accepting country were to insist upon an unblemished past history. A person with such a history would not likely have been in the position to have rendered much service to the sponsoring agency.

For sponsored applicants whose agency was “not under the necessity of disposing of him quickly,” the Director for Security and Intelligence proposed that a clearance be issued so that the case would proceed “in the same manner as that of any ordinary applicant.” The Defectors Committee’s test for German ex-agents, set in April 1953, was that past Nazi connections “will not be of such a nature that disclosure here might prove embarrassing.” Washington made a parallel adjustment. GAO describes a mid-1950s CIA program under which the Agency itself conducted the background investigations “normally conducted by State Department visa personnel,” with the consent of State and INS. On both sides of the border the sponsoring agency became, by agreement, the vetting agency.

What the release shows

The Maple’s account treats the forgeries as the story. They are the symptom.

Two allied states maintained lawful procedures for admitting people their own laws excluded, procedures that produced signed records. A class of assets existed for whom neither state wished to produce such a record. Those assets traveled by the one route that left none, and when the route was discovered, the accepting state wrote a rule that spared future cases the inconvenience of a clean history. The single clause still withheld is one American officer’s remark about one American statute. Canada asked Washington in 2024 whether the remark could be released. Washington gave no answer, and the Canadian embassy treated that silence as a refusal.

The forest was published in 1985.

The Maple found a tree.