The Mystery

Of the countless deaths of the Second War, the most destructive of history, each a profound mystery to those who lost a child, or mother or father, of many millions, there remain two major questions which, curiously, are rarely asked, perhaps to ensure we never come to know the answers.

Which takes us to Ottawa, and an early summer day, in 1961. When I happened to brush into the Pearl Harbor Problem

Along with my parents and two siblings, I had recently returned from Germany, and the Canadian RCAF fighter base where my father had been posted for four years. We had just returned to our home in Ottawa, at 363 Cunningham Avenue.

That day, I left home, , to see how the neighborhood, in the tranquil residential area of Alta Vista, had changed during our absence. Three blocks further, I stopped and reached to tie a loose shoelace. There was a sudden, joyful, shriek from across the street. I looked up to see two young girls, flower in hand, racing toward a car that had just entered the driveway. By the evidence, driven by the father of the girls. One girl was perhaps my age, 15 years. The other perhaps 18 years.

I had witnessed the scene, apparently a daily ritual, from a distance, a week earlier. Today, I saw the girls climb the front stairs and disappear and through the front door. I found myself in a state of confusion. The thought crossed my mind that I might not get the chance to see the young girl again. year before I would have thought, “Girls, girls, “Who cares about girls?” That day, driven by a new, mysterious animus, I cared. “Then came the thought, “Two times lucky, don’t count on a third.” I made a decision: “Just knock on the door. When doing so, I turned and glanced at the man by the car in the driveway, who looked on with an intense, penetrating, gaze.

The door opened and I was admitted me by the young girl. I saw your father”, I said to the young girl. “He works for NASA”, she said. Which made no sense at all, given it was an American government enterprise, quite far long way, of which I had no knowledge. Strangely, that did not concern me, distracted as I was by face, the lilt of her voice and her smile, and an intoxicating scent that wafted through the air. She obviously wished to conceal whatever her father did. Having been raised by an RCAF officer, and having just returned from four years in Germany, where the Germans had shown no desire to discuss their recent Second War enthusiasms and activities, it was immediately apparent to me that she had no wish to discuss her father. At that moment, her elder sister walked down the stairs from the upper floor and paused to look at me questiongly. Evidently, father had called and asked her to see what I was up to. It was all a bit odd, although I did not know why. I said my farewell to the girls and walked out the door.

Much later, I learned I had, in a manner of speaking, met the most important figure in the history of Canadian secret intelligence. A man of whom, appropriately, Canadians knew and even now know, nothing at all.

I later learned that Edward Michael Drake, as colonel in the Canadian Army, had been, successively, Director of two signals intelligence units, snaring from the ether the messages of the German and Japanese enemy. One was the Examination Unit, largely concerned with civilian targets. The other MI2, Military Intelligence 2, the Canadian Army’s signals intelligence unit, focused on Japanese military targets, particularly of the Japanese Imperial Navy, which became of particular importance during 1940 to 1941, from it headquarters at the south-east of the intersection of Bank Street and Somerset Street, in downtown Ottawa, a now abandoned and neglected building, ten blocks from Parliament Hill.

That day, when in a manner of speaking Drake and I met, he was Director of CBNRC, Communications Branch National Research Council, Canada’s postwar signals intelligence service, since 1975 known a CSEC, Communications Service Establishment. At the time, I had no knowledge of these services, what they did, and how they did it. They were, and now are, the most secret, and secretive, organizations in Canada, almost totally absent from public discourse. In particular, absent from any discussion of the Second War, the war in the Pacific, certainly from any discussion of Pearl Harbor, and what had happend there on that special  7 of December 1941, your would have known the deepest secret of the Second World War. And very much 

I you wish to about the true story of Pearl Harbor, and what had in fact happened there on that day, you might become acquainted with that building, which still stands.

It was only much later, and much research and effort, that this author learned the true story of Pearl Harbor, and the answer to the principal question.

Edward  Michael Drake

Edward Michael Drake