James Blair Seaborn CM (March 18, 1924 – November 11, 2019) was a Canadian diplomat and civil servant best remembered for the Seaborn Mission of 1964–1965 in connection with the Vietnam War and for heading the "Seaborn Panel" of the 1990s that examined the subject of how to dispose of nuclear waste in Canada. Seaborn would ultimately become the best-known of all of Canada's ICC representatives, but the Canadian historian Victor Levant noted that "he did not gain this notoriety until long after his tour of duty." The Seaborn Mission is a controversial subject with opinions sharply divided to its purpose and morality.
Early life and career
Seaborn was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Reverend Richard Seaborn and Muriel Seaborn. His father was the rector at St. Cyprian's Anglican Church, and he had eight siblings. When he was six, his father died and his mother raised him on a clergyman's pension. An outstanding student, he was awarded the Dirkson Scholarship, which allowed him to attend university despite his family's poverty. After graduating from the University of Toronto Schools, he entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 1941, but he left his studies in 1943, when he joined the Canadian Army. Seaborn called his military service his "Khaki holiday" as he served in the Royal Canadian Artillery. After training in Canada and Britain, Seaborn's regiment took part in the liberation of the Netherlands in the spring of 1945.
After serving in the Canadian Army, he demobilised in 1946. He was awarded an MA in Political Science and History at the Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 1948. After graduation, Seaborn entered the Department of External Affairs in 1948 and served as a diplomat in The Hague, Paris, Moscow, and Saigon. Traditionally, the Canadian diplomatic corps was small, as the British Foreign Office represented Canada abroad, and Canada maintaining only high commissions in London and the other Commonwealth capitals and embassies in Washington, Paris, and Moscow. Successive Canadian prime ministers were content to have British diplomats represent Canada as a costsaving measure. After Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who favoured a quasi-isolationist foreign policy, retired in 1948, his successor, Louis St. Laurent, was prepared to spend far more money than King ever had done on expanding the Department of External Affairs.
The years after 1948 were years of rapid growth for the Canadian diplomatic corps, as St. Laurent's External Affairs Minister, Lester Pearson, had a very ambitious vision of Canadians playing a greater role in the world. The diplomatic corps became an elitist group, as one diplomat asserted: "It is the combination of remarkable men with appropriate national backgrounds and opportune circumstances that has made for effective middle powermanship." Precisely because Canada was not a great power, the diplomatic corps needed especially-effective diplomats to promote Canadian interests abroad, which caused an emphasis on elitism. For that reason, Canadian diplomats were often called the "mandarins." Seaborn excelled in the growing diplomatic corps and served as the Third Secretary at the embassy in The Hague, First Secretary at the embassy in Paris, and counselor at the embassy in Moscow. In 1950, he married Carol Trow and had two children: Geoffrey and Virginia.
During his time in Moscow, Seaborn passed on covert messages to and from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a senior officer in the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) who worked as a spy for the British MI6 and the American CIA. Unlike Penkovsky, who was executed after his arrest by the KGB, Seaborn enjoyed diplomatic immunity and so was never in danger. The worse that could have happened to him if his work for the CIA and MI6 were exposed was being declared persona non grata by the Soviets and expelled. His assistance to the CIA with Penkovsky, the top Anglo-American spy in the Soviet Union in 1961–1962, won him the trust of many in Washington.
International Control Commission and Seaborn Mission Seaborn served as the Canadian Commissioner to the International Control Commission (ICC), which was formed to supervise the Geneva Accords of 1954. The ICC had diplomats and officers from Canada, India, Poland. They were to present an annual report to the Soviet Foreign Minister and the British Foreign Secretary about how well North Vietnam and South Vietnam were observing the Geneva Accords. When the ICC was founded in 1954, it was believed that it would last for only two years since elections would be held to reunify Vietnam in 1956, but as they were never held, the ICC went on until 1973. As part of their monitoring duties, the Indian, Polish, and Canadian delegates of the ICC were entitled to go anywhere in North and South Vietnam and to speak to officials of either regime. That allowed the commissioners a unique access to the leaders of both of the rival Vietnamese regimes. Seaborn did not speak Vietnamese but was fluent in French, the colonial language spoken by the educated in both parts of Vietnam, which enabled him to make informal contacts with officials on both sides.
In 1964, Canadian External Affairs Minister Paul Martin Sr. called Seaborn one of Canada's "most ablest diplomats." Seaborn lived in Saigon and came to renew his friendship with the American ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., whom he had known since the 1950s, when Lodge was the American ambassador to the United Nations. Lodge advised US Secretary of State Dean Rusk that Seaborn, with his ability to go anywhere in the two Vietnams and his fluent French, would be the ideal emissary to North Vietnam. US president Lyndon Johnson selected Seaborn to be his "back channel" to Ho Chi Minh. Johnson successfully requested from Pearson, who had become Prime Minister in April 1963, permission to use Seaborn as his "back channel." On April 30, 1964, Rusk visited Ottawa to discuss with Martin and Pearson the plan to use Seaborn as Johnson's emissary. On May 28, 1964, Pearson visited New York to give a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, and during the same visit to New York, Pearson met Johnson to give his approval to what the Americans called Operation Bacon. Ho Chi Minh had a strong dislike of Westerners, and Seaborn was never allowed to meet him.
At the same time, the Polish Commissioner to the ICC, Mieczysław Maneli, was also working as a "back channel" to find a way to end the war and had the additional advantage over Seaborn of being allowed to meet Ho Chi Minh. Lodge was in contact with Maneli to whom he was introduced via the Italian ambassador, Giovanni d'Orlandi, but preferred to use Seaborn, whom he had known for some time, rather than Maneli, whom he did not know that well. Maneli disliked Lodge, found the snobbish manners of the Boston Brahmin Lodge off-putting, and later said that Lodge was one of the most arrogant men whom he had ever met.
Maneli defected to the United States in 1968 and in 1971 he published a book, The War of the Vanquished, which recounted his experiences on the ICC. He wrote that Seaborn and the rest of Canadian delegation tended to be very pro-American but that he was "struck" by its "loyal co-operation" in attempting to make the ICC work. The rules of the ICC required the chairman to be an Indian, and Seaborn often clashed with the Indian delegation, whom he accused of being very biased towards North Vietnam and against South Vietnam.
In 1964 and 1965, Seaborn was involved in what historians have called the "Seaborn Mission," a Canadian attempt to end the Vietnam War through shuttle diplomacy. Seaborn repeatedly flew back and forth from Washington to Hanoi. Seaborn was to deliver messages between Washington and Hanoi, but he was made responsible to Ottawa, which also had the right to amend the messages that he was asked to carry. Before leaving for Hanoi, Seaborn was briefed by William H. Sullivan, an aide to Assistant Secretary of State for Asia, William Bundy, on the American objectives in North Vietnam. Seaborn was to assess the state of public opinion in North Vietnam and to see if it was growing weary of the war that had been essentially continuous since 1945. He was also to assess the effects of the Sino-Soviet split on North Vietnam and to determine whether Ho favoured China or the Soviet Union. Finally, Seaborn was to assess whether there were any splits within the North Vietnamese Politburo. Seaborn flew into North Vietnam abroad a rickety Air France Stratoliner, whose two pilots had an alarming habit of drinking champagne on the job.
On 18 June 1964, Seaborn arrived in Hanoi to meet Premier Phạm Văn Đồng with an offer from Johnson promising billions of American economic aid and diplomatic recognition of North Vietnam in exchange for North Vietnam ending its attempts to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. Seaborn also warned that Johnson had told him that he was considering a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam if the offer was rejected. Seaborn stated that North Vietnam would suffer the "greatest devastation" from American bombing and that Johnson had both the power and willingness to turn North Vietnam into a wasteland. Đồng told Seaborn that the American terms were unacceptable and demanded the end of American assistance to South Vietnam, South Vietnam to become neutral in the Cold War, and the National Liberation Front (better known as the Viet Cong) to be allowed to take part in a coalition government in Saigon. Đồng told Seaborn that his nation did not want a war with the United States: "Our people will accept sacrifices whatever they may be. But the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] will not enter the war... we shall not provoke the U.S." The North Vietnamese did not see Seaborn as neutral and regarded him as being close to an American spy. Speaking in French, Đồng told Seaborn the war was "drame, national, fondamental" to his government. Afterwards, Seaborn reported to Martin, "We would be unwise at this stage to count on war weariness or factionalism within the leadership... to cause North Vietnam to jump at the chance of reaching accommodation with USA."
On August 13, 1964, Seaborn returned to Hanoi to meet Đồng again. The message that Johnson had asked Seaborn to deliver was felt in Ottawa to be too inflammatory, and the mandarins removed some of the blunter passages, but the message that Seaborn delivered was faithful to the spirit but not the content in which Johnson had drafted it. Seaborn told Đồng that recent meetings with Johnson made Seaborn understand that Johnson was seriously using the powers that he just gained from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to go to war, but Seaborn also stated that Johnson was willing to offer "economic and other benefits" if only North Vietnam would cease trying to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. Seaborn further stated that Johnson had told him that North Vietnam would "suffer the consequences" if it continued on its "present course."
Đồng rejected the offer and said that he would rather see the war engulf "the whole of Southeast Asia" than abandon his vision of one communist Vietnam. Đồng accused the United States of escalating the war and told Seaborn that North Vietnam would never give up. Seaborn's report that the North Vietnamese were not interested in compromise but were convinced of their eventual victory greatly encouraged the Johnson administration to favour the escalation of American involvement in the war. In December 1964, Seaborn again visited Hanoi, where he was met only by junior officials, as the North Vietnamese had lost interest in talking to him. Seaborn made six visits to North Vietnam and was uncertain if their purpose was really to prevent a war or merely to justify greater American involvement.