John Watkins (diplomat)

John Benjamin Clark Watkins (3 December 1902 – 12 October 1964) was a Canadian diplomat and scholar who served as Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1956.

Describing Watkins as "sophisticated, erudite and fluent in Russian", Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post wrote that he was the "perfect ambassador" to Moscow.

He is credited with organizing a historic meeting between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Canadian External Affairs Minister Lester B. Pearson.

Born in Norval, Ontario, Watkins was the first child of John Watkins and Jane Clark.

He had two sisters, Elizabeth and Isabel.

In a trip to Europe in the late 1920s, he was a guide and companion to Heywood Hale Broun in France, Holland, and Denmark.

Watkins studied French, German, and Latin at the University of Toronto, and earned a master's degree by 1927.

He left Europe for the United States in 1930, where he attended Columbia University and joined the staff of the American-Scandinavian Foundation in New York City.

After Columbia, Watkins attended Cornell University in 1942 and earned a PhD there in 1944; his thesis was about the Danish writer Gustav Wied.

During World War II, he returned to Canada to teach at Queen's University at Kingston, then Guelph Agricultural College.

Watkins became an associate professor of English at the University of Manitoba in 1944.

In 1946, Watkins translated the complete works of Honore de Balzac into English.

Upon an invitation by Humphrey Hume Wrong, Watkins reluctantly agreed to take the Canadian Foreign Service Examination.

He was offered a position as a foreign service officer and left the University of Manitoba to join the Department of External Affairs (DEA).

Watkins rapidly advanced from first secretary of the European Division to head of section to chargé d'affaires in Moscow.

On 1 September 1948, Watkins officially replaced John Wendell Holmes as the chargé d'affaires ad interim.

He knew some Russian prior to arriving in Moscow, and set himself apart from other Western diplomats in the city by becoming fluent in the language.

There, Watkins befriended George Costakis, the long-time head of personnel at the Canadian embassy and collector of Soviet art.

While Stalin led the Soviet Union, there was limited opportunity for foreign diplomats like Watkins to travel and interact with Soviet society.

Near the end of his post in Moscow, Watkins began to develop health issues – heart and circulatory weaknesses that were not diagnosed at his medical examination upon entering the DEA – that would affect him for the remainder of his life.

The DEA announced in January 1951 that he was to return to Ottawa on sick leave, and he was replaced by Robert Ford.

By the end of 1951, Watkins was appointed to serve a diplomatic post in Oslo, Norway.

Canadian government records list him as envoy to Iceland and Norway from the summer of 1952 to 1954.

After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Georgy Malenkov expressed a willingness to resolve issues of conflict between the East and the West, and there was an apparent easing of tensions within Canada–Soviet Union relations when Dmitri Chuvakhin was appointed Soviet ambassador to Canada.

In February 1954, it was reported that Chester Ronning would replace Watkins as the minister to Norway.

In response, Watkins was officially made Canada's first peacetime ambassador to the Soviet Union on 1 January 1954.

Watkins found that the Soviet Union was more open under the leadership of First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev, and he had a fondness for befriending Soviet officials and was able to develop a large number of contacts.

To his detriment, this would prove costly and allow him to become a target of Soviet espionage.

In the fourth quarter of 1954, Watkins met a young man named Kamahl in a Muslim area of one of the southern republics of the Soviet Union and invited him back to his hotel room.

The hotel staff likely observed the pair entering Watkins' room.

A few months later, Watkins received a postcard from Kamahl who stated he would be visiting Moscow.

Watkins entertained Kamahl in Moscow, and the two men engaged in a brief romantic affair consummated in the younger man's hotel room.

As he did with every other encounter, Watkins dutifully reported to Quebec his encounters with Kamahl and described him as a young man who had doubts about the Soviet system.

The only thing he failed to report was the homosexual aspect of their relationship.

Unbeknownst to Watkins, Kamahl's visit was staged by the KGB and the two men were photographed together in Kamahl's room.

The KGB sought to exploit Watkins' indiscretion not by blackmailing him, but rather by manipulating him to become an agent of influence by enveloping him in a "debt of gratitude".

In contrast to his first post in Moscow, he found himself enjoying access to top officials within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and invitations to social events that other Western Bloc ambassadors could not get.

All of this was planned by the KGB.

In April 1955, Watkins met then befriended "Aloysha", who introduced himself as Alexei Mikhailovich Gorbunov, a historian and consultant to the Soviet foreign ministry.

Watkins also described him as his best Soviet informant.