John Leopold

One of the early heroes of the Canadian Cold War looked miscast. John Leopold was a balding and jowly Eastern European who spoke accented English, the exact opposite of the image of a Mountie held in a heavily-prejudiced nation. Leopold’s ethnicity was trumped by his career in the ultimate Canadian symbol of pride, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Under ordinary circumstances, a career with the world’s most famous police force would have been out of the question. The RCMP spied on Eastern Europeans, they did not hire them as policemen. What’s more, Leopold did not meet height requirements, nor was he even a Canadian citizen when he signed on with the Mounted Police at the end of the First World War. What he did possess were skills that state security demanded in the early Cold War when ethnicity was openly equated with radicalism. Fluent in several languages, the new Mountie’s unique appearance allowed him to infiltrate groups deemed subversive. He looked so unlike a policeman that he later would be regularly challenged by the guards at the RCMP’s headquarters in Ottawa to provide identification before he could enter the building.

Johan (John) Leopold was born in 1890 in rural Bohemia (today part of the Czech Republic). His chosen career in the old country, which might explain the roots of his strong anti-communism, had been that of an agriculturist and forester, and he had spent time, after graduating from college, managing an estate. His pre-Mountie career in Canada, which he emigrated to in 1912 or 1913, also involved agriculture. In 1914 he took out a homestead in a region of Alberta that was not conducive to farming success.

Leopold first attained nation-wide fame in 1931 when he emerged from the shadows to testify in his full RCMP uniform in front of a packed Toronto courtroom. His testimony would be pivotal in helping to convict several senior members of the Communist Party of Canada, including party leader Tim Buck, who had been arrested on sedition charges under Section 98 of the Criminal Code. Leopold recounted in detail his secret life in the 1920s when under the guise of a Regina housepainter named Jack Esselwein he had spent years infiltrating and reporting to the police on the fledgling Communist Party of Canada. This undercover work ended in 1928 when the Communist Party expelled him after being supplied evidence of his real identity by a Eastern European friend of Leopold’s.

After his public exposure as a Mounted Police spy, Leopold’s career and life went awry. Drinking binges, a case of syphilis, and a demotion in rank plagued him in the 1930s. Only the fear of providing the Communists with a public relations victory saved him from being fired. From the mess he rebuilt his reputation, and he quickly became the force’s expert on communism offering analysis on whether a diverse list of groups and associations across the nation were being manipulated by Communists.

These skills positioned him perfectly for the post-World War Two era and the emergence of the modern Cold War. As head of the RCMP’s fledgling intelligence wing between 1945 and 1947, the now veteran Mounted Policeman dealt with the defection of Soviet Embassy clerk Igor Gouzenko and implications of his documents and testimony for Canadian security. When in 1947 the RCMP’s intelligence service expanded, Leopold, now a senior member of the police, remained the point man on any matters related to research into Communist subversion. Memos and reports on communism from Mounties across Canada were directed to him at headquarters in Ottawa. In turn, Leopold continued to offer the definitive word on Communist intentions while at the same time issuing his own instructions directed at professionalizing the RCMP’s domestic spy operations.

By 1952, the old spy’s career was at an end. That retirement ended six years later with his death from heart failure. A few lines from the Ottawa Journal served as a fitting epitaph for one of Canada’s original Cold Warriors:

He looked neither like a Mountie nor an undercover agent ... [H]e regarded life with eternal good cheer except when communism was mentioned. On that he was deadly serious. It was a menace to which he dedicated his life.