Word: gerda
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...bitter personal contest-possibly to the political death-between Liberal Prime Minister Lester ("Mike") Pearson, 69, and former Tory Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, 70. If Pearson proves his point that Diefenbaker's onetime Associate Defense Minister jeopardized national security in his relationship with 36-year-old German Playgirl Gerda Munsinger, then Diefenbaker could find himself on the way out as opposition leader. If Pearson does not make his case, he might be the one to go. Last week, after five days of public hearings before Supreme Court Justice Wishart Spence, Diefenbaker was clearly the man on the spot...
...Strong Reprimand. One of the people who put him there was a fellow Tory and Diefenbaker's own former Minister of Justice, E. Davie Fulton. Fulton said he first got wind of the affair between Gerda and Associate Defense Minister Pierre Sévigny in December 1960, and informed Diefenbaker, who in turn "strongly reprimanded" Sévigny for his relationship with a "known prostitute with a doubtful security background...
...Diefenbaker's reproof adequate action? How much had he been told of the report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police which disclosed that in Germany in 1949 Gerda stole two border passes and sold them to a Russian intelligence agent in East Berlin? The same year she showed up in a U.S. Army maneuver area with a man who had crossed over illegally from East Germany, carrying "a camera purportedly to take pictures of the area." After entering Canada in 1955, Gerda moved into an apartment below some "known Soviet agents," turned to prostitution ($15 to $20 per customer...
Because of her background, the Mounties concluded, Gerda "was extremely vulnerable to further exploitation by the Russian intelligence service," and indeed "the opportunity existed for such communication...
...Munsinger's apartment," Harvison corrected. They had gone into other apartments in the building, which were occupied by members of the Soviet "intelligence service" in Montreal. Had anyone ever seen Gerda even talking to the Russians...