page_title: J. Blair Seaborn
section_title: Canadian Mandarin
hierarchical_section_title: J. Blair Seaborn / Canadian Mandarin
caption_attribution_description: English: Main building of Trinity College, southern facade on Hoskin Ave.
context_page_description: James Blair Seaborn was a Canadian diplomat and civil servant best remembered for the "Seaborn mission" of 1964–65 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.
context_section_description: Seaborn was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Reverend Richard Seaborn and Murial Seaborn. His father was the rector at St. Cyprian's Anglican Church and he had 8 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. In 1941, he entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto, but his 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 in 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 a 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 were small as the British Foreign Office represented Canada abroad with Canada maintaining only high commissions in London and the Commonwealth capitals plus embassies in Washington, Paris and Moscow. Successive Canadian Prime Ministers were content to have British diplomats represent Canada as a cost-saving measure. After Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King who favored a quasi-isolationist foreign policy retired in 1948, his successor Louis St. Laurent was prepared to spend far more money than King ever had 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 Canada 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, hence the emphasis on elitism. For this reason, the Canadian diplomats were often called the "mandarins". Seaborn excelled in the growing diplomatic corps, serving 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 enjoying diplomatic immunity was never in danger and the worse that could have happened to him if his work for the CIA and MI6 was exposed was being declared persona non grata by the Soviet Union. His assistance to the CIA with Penkovsky, the top Anglo-American spy in the Soviet Union in 1961–62, won him the trust of many in Washington.
caption: Trinity College, Seaborn's alma mater.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2016:12:12 12:27:31", "Image XPKeywords": "[112, 0, 97, 0, 110, 0, 111, 0, 114, 0, 97, 0, 109, 0, 97, 0, 44, 0, 115, 0, ... ]", "Image Padding": "[]", "Image ExifOffset": "2468", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4690", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4390", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "8000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3249", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}