Interpretation of the Herbert Norman Mystery

By Stephen Schwartz
Independent Scholar
Washington, DC, USA

September 10, 2007

The suicide of Egerton Herbert Norman in Cairo in 1957, when he was serving as Canadian ambassador to Egypt, remains a mystery unlikely to be soon resolved. It occurred after his name had emerged in an investigation by the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) of Soviet espionage.

I was a friend of the late James Barros, author of the book No Sense of Evil, who argued for the guilt of Norman as a Soviet agent, but found no conclusive proof of it; and I agreed with his assessment of the case. At this time – 50 years after Norman’s death – the most troubling aspect of such an investigation remains the continued closure of archives in the former Soviet Union that could definitively determine how far Norman did or did not proceed as a clandestine operative. Both the Barros volume and a counter-opinion, Innocence is Not Enough, by Roger Bowen, admit that Norman had joined the Stalinist Communist movement in the 1930s.

Norman’s name was brought up in a Canadian security investigation in 1951 and he had been cleared, although it is now understood that he had lied when questioned. Unfortunately, however, Norman fit a pattern with which American investigators were deeply and, I think, partially correct to be concerned. I consider it a waste of time to agonize over the so-called “McCarthy era” in discussing these cases. In reality, the Soviet Union pursued an aggressive strategy of espionage, subversion, and terrorism throughout the world, and nearly all the allegations about Soviet misconduct that were considered outlandish and expressions of fanatical right-wing thinking from the 1950s to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 have now been shown to have been true.

Canadians already knew the accuracy of many of these accusations because of the revelations in the Igor Gouzenko case. That affair began in 1945 when a cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa defected, revealing the existence of a major Soviet secret intelligence network in Canada, that was involved in nuclear espionage among other tasks, and included Member of Parliament Fred Rose.

Norman’s misfortune was, I believe, separate from any ideological loyalty to the Communist Party. He had the bad luck to resemble the “China experts” who were investigated by the U.S. Senate while examining an organization called the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR). IPR published a journal, Pacific Affairs, that is now issued by the University of British Columbia. Many individuals among the China experts were, like Norman, born in Asia (in his case, Japan) of missionary parents. They understood Asian political issues more directly and, finally, more accurately, than their peers (and often their employers) in the Western governments. And many of them were sympathetic to the Chinese Communists.

But I believe the issue of Communist membership and that of apparent sympathy for the Asian Communist movements – however much real support for them Norman felt – may be separated. I do not argue this because I believe association with the Stalinist Communists was a matter of innocent solidarity with the downtrodden; rather I no longer think Communist ideology per se was the driving force for the “China experts” and others who perceived the weakness of the Nationalist regime in that country and predicted the triumph of the Communists.

To report on the strength of the Communists was not the same as to laud them for their alleged good qualities. Some of the “China experts” did enthuse over the leadership of Mao Zedong, who turned out to be one of the most brutal dictators in history. But others simply perceived that Mao’s rival, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) could not unify China. The reasons for Jiang’s failure are extremely complex and cannot be simplified in political terms. He left a legacy of bitterness over the anti-Communist massacres of the 1920s and did not have the capacity to assemble a disciplined body of talented subordinates and military leaders such as the Communists proved to possess. In the Chinese context, the guerrilla strategy of Mao was perhaps superior to the regular army strategy of Jiang.

So what is to be said about Egerton Herbert Norman? Some argue that the Norman case had more to do with U.S.-Canadian relations and with American resentment over the fall of Jiang than with legitimate or even exaggerated concerns about the reliability of experts on Asia. In my interpretation, Norman was wrong to join the Stalinists, wrong to lie in his security investigation, and a vulnerable figure from a security viewpoint because of those facts. In contrast, it was not wrong to perceive developments in Asia that other analysts failed to understand, such as the post-1945 appeal of leftist radicalism and the need for cultural and social flexibility in dealing with occupied Japan. In retrospect, however, Japan succeeded in becoming a democracy, and policy quarrels among leaders in the occupation personnel to do not now seem of much gravity to me.

Norman’s case seems to me that of an individual for whom events had lost their coherence. His career had begun at a time when the radical left was in the ascendant; in Asia it long appeared such political attitudes would remain tenable. The collapse of moral credibility in the radical left with the post-war actions of Stalin, Mao, and the Korean, Malayan, and Philippine Communists was sudden and left many people confused and without solutions. He was caught in a historical undertow that, inexplicable and irresistible, dragged him to his death.