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It’s true the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had caught 13 of his country’s diplomats in an espionage plot, but Yakovlev was a personal friend of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and he knew Trudeau didn’t want to cause any ripples in the relationship between the two nations.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago Trudeau had told Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin on his visit to Canada that the prime minister wanted to build up his country’s relationship with Moscow to help counterbalance the influence of the United States on Canada!
Prior to becoming prime minister, Trudeau had been banned from travelling to the U.S. because of suspected Communist sympathies and acquaintances. Two of Trudeau’s heroes were Communist dictators Mao Tse-tung of China and Fidel Castro of Cuba.
But Yakolev’s quiet confidence that afternoon in February, 1978, was about to be shattered by a youthful journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, Paul Jackson.
Several years earlier the Soviets had tried to co-opt Jackson after he reluctantly went to a cocktail party at the embassy and met a vodka-swilling diplomat, Dmitri Ivanov.
Jackson had pretended to play along with Invanov, but unbeknownst to the embassy, Jackson was reporting everything back to the RCMP Security Service.
Meanwhile, he, Invanov, and Ivanov’s wife, Olga, who Jackson now jokes was as fat as her husband, drank as much vodka as her husband, and had a mustache just like her husband, went to bars, restaurants and picnics together as Jackson built an image as an anti-American journalist.
No one knew Jackson had also been using his journalistic credentials to ingratiate himself to officials at all the East Bloc embassies in Ottawa, and reporting all he learned in those embassies back to the Mounties, too.
In those early days of February, 1978, the Mounties had told Trudeau that in an outrageous plot the Soviets had actually tried to infiltrate the RCMP counterespionage service itself. Their aim: To know all the inside workings of the service, and make it ineffectual. Any information passed to the Mounties from the FBI counterespionage service would be a bonus.
When the Mounties “blew” the plot it sent shudders through the Soviet Embassy on Range Road in Ottawa.  But the frazzled nerves were quickly soothed when Yakolev learned Trudeau had informed the RCMP that not only would the 13 Soviet diplomats not be expelled, but he ordered the Mounties not to make the case public. Not a word was to be whispered about the betrayal. It wasn’t, Trudeau told the top echelon of the Mounties, worth damaging relations between the two nations over a childish antic.
But again, few knew that Jackson was about to enter the scenario in a dramatic way.
At 34, Jackson hadn’t acquired the reputation he later would as a crusading conservative and anti-communist journalist. Seemingly, he was just one of more than 100 reporters who covered events on Parliament Hill. He routinely listened to speeches in the House of Commons and digested press releases.
If he was known for anything amongst his journalist colleagues it was for being a ladies man. He liked to joke that politics was his passion, dating pretty women his hobby.
Dating pretty women is a lot more fun than playing golf,” he’d say, “if at times somewhat more dangerous.”
Two of his more interesting “conquests’ had been a stunning senorita at the Mexican Embassy in Ottawa, and an equally gorgeous Afrikaner lady at the South African Embassy.
He tended to fit his romantic liaisons in-between his work as a political reporter, and, of course, his rather special liaisons with the East Bloc embassies — and the RCMP Security Service.
The top echelon of the RCMP were furious at Trudeau’s duplicity. How could he be so blasé about the attempted infiltration of the security service which would have resulted in all its secrets and battle plans ending up in Moscow.
Yet how to force Trudeau into a corner without any officers being accused of breaking faith with their political masters — and losing their careers?
Then came the answer: Feed the story to Jackson.
On February 7th., the day before Jackson’s birthday, he had been celebrating far into the night with some friends and had just packed off one of his latest feminine acquaintance in a taxi to her home when the phone rang.
An urgent voice told Jackson to quickly take down some notes. He did — all five scribbled lines of them which he has today on a piece of paper he snatched out of a note book.
Jackson was told the situation, told he was being repaid for years of quiet service, and told to make some errors in his expose so as not to make anyone think it came directly from the RCMP.
He quickly put together a story, one error being that 12 diplomats, not 13 had been caught in the spy ring, and that Yakolev had already been called into the office of External Affairs Minister Don Jamieson and told him the jig was up.
It surely would be when Jackson’s story appeared.
Early on the 8th, he phoned his story in, first to his main newspaper, the Edmonton Journal.
Shaken, Andrew Snaddon the Editor-in-Chief, and Don Smith, the Managing Editor, weren’t sure what to do. It seemed incredible a likable, but hardly formidable, reporter like Jackson could come up with an expose like this.
But how could they check it out?
To try and check it out would obviously both be met with an instant denial, but also The Journal would have blown the biggest espionage scoop since Igor Gouzenko walked out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa in 1945 with 100 files under his arms and exposed a worldwide spynet operating in a dozen western democratic nations being orchestrated by dictator Josef Stalin.
Yet, if The Journal ran the story and it turned out to be false, The Journal would have egg all over its face and Snaddon and Smith might well lose their jobs.
They had to act quickly, the newspaper’s deadlines were closing in — and so was the possibility that if the story were true, other journalists might soon be onto it.
News editor Steve Hume, who later became publisher of The Journal as well as an acclaimed poet, added his voice, “Jackson may be many things but he is not suicidal.”
Snaddon and Smith decided to take a chance.
The story was edited, laid-out as the banner story on page one, and as The Journal presses began to roll, The Journal sent the story to Canadian Press (CP), as it was obligated to do under a news-sharing agreement.
John Duaphnee, general manager and secretary of The Canadian Press later wrote to Edmonton Journal publisher J. Patrick O’Cullighan “we have heard about the outstanding co-operation by The Journal in providing us with Paul Jackson’s niffy story Thursday on the Russian spies. Please give our congratulation to Paul for breaking the yarn.
In the Parliamentary Press Gallery that morning the usual desultory chatter was picking up as journalists prepared for what they thought would be another routine day.
Suddenly, the bells on the teletype machines that signalled a fast-breaking story or an emergency started ringing — and the keys from CP’s head office started to pound out Jackson’s story.
All hell, as they say, broke lose.
It was a sensational story, and every other journalist on Parliament Hill knew their bosses at their home papers would be phoning to get them to match it.
But who could they phone?
Only one or two journalists in all of Canada had any contacts with Canada’s intelligence services — and none were in Ottawa. They included Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, and Tom Hazlitt of the Toronto Star.
Jackson, knowing he would soon be surrounded by his frantic colleagues, quietly slipped away.
There was an expectant air on the Commons floor at 2 p.m. as the business of the day started.
It started, incidentally, with Jamieson saying he would be making a statement at 3 p.m.
For the next hour MPs and journalists waited impatiently.
The CP story was now on Page One of every newspaper in Canada — and much of the world with Jackson’s name on it. He was already getting calls from television and radio stations in Canada, the United States and Europe to verify his coup.
At 3 p.m. a ruffled Jamieson stood up and announced to the Commons that Jackson’s story was true — the Mounties had caught 13 diplomats in a spy ring, and they were being expelled that day.
Trudeau, though, was quietly furious.
His plan to keep the affair silent and secret had been foiled.
He ordered the criminal investigation branch of the RCMP to question Jackson as to how he came upon the story.
Trudeau wanted to know who had told Jackson — and he wanted their names.
Warned against going down to RCMP headquarters where he might have been browbeaten, Jackson offered to meet two officers of the RCMP criminal investigation branch in his own office.
He stonewalled as much as he could, but he guessed the two Mounties who came to see him had a good idea as to how he got the story — although the two RCMP branches were entirely separate — and the criminal investigation branch officers hadn’t much time for Trudeau themselves.
They went away without getting the information they had been told to get, and didn’t seem particularly upset about their failure.
Outside, journalists were now trying to build their own stories on the expose, and cars and vans were appearing at the Soviet Embassy to pick up the expelled diplomats and their families and personal belongings.
They were going home, but not to a heroes’ welcome.
Jackson, meanwhile, was already writing follow-up stories and making TV and radio appearances — including one on the top-rated Jimmy Young BBC morning show in Britain that shook his parents, who, of course, couldn’t imagine their son being involved in an international espionage scandal.
With that, Jackson’s life had changed.
Political columnist Douglas Fisher, a former Member of Parliament and now considered to be the Dean of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, would write admiringly in 1982, following another of Jackson’s sensational exposes, that Jackson has a reputation among peers for several ‘scoops’ on intelligence matters.
Both the Soviets and all the other East Bloc embassies in Ottawa now guessed he had duped them.
He was quickly dropped from their cocktail party lists, and received odd anonymous warnings over the telephone that he might want to leave Ottawa. Without call display or any method of tracking phone calls in those days it was impossible to find out who the callers were.
Jackson could only guess.
Yakolev survived the espionage scandal and, years later, strangely became one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s strongest supporters in his glasnost and perestroika reform movements.
For the next four years Jackson ‘broke’ several other stories on Communist espionage in Canada, but at the end his nerves were frayed.
He left Ottawa to escape his past and went to Saskatchewan, which he once described in a speech to an American audience as “like Alaska without the scenery.”
Trudeau never forgot his rancour towards Jackson, and, incidentally later Trudeau took his three sons to the Soviet Union, stood on a hilltop in Siberia overlooking a city and declared to his sons, “This is where the future is being built.” The city had been built entirely by slave labour.
Notably, when Trudeau died one of his honorary pallbearers was Communist dictator and close friend Fidel Castro.
Jackson later became Editor of the Calgary Sun, covered the civil war in Yugoslavia, got attacked by a Palestinian mob on the West Bank in Israel, and continued his favourite hobby of “dating pretty women”.
His mementos from his espionage days still includes the scribbled notes that broke the story, a letter from John Dauphinee, the head of Canadian Press praising him for his outstanding work, and a plaque from the Mounties which says, “Paul Jackson, A Quiet Canadian Hero, RCMP Security Service.”
He now spends much of his time at his home near Guadalajara, Mexico, where he has what friends say is one of the finest libraries they have ever seen — of, you guessed it, books on espionage.
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