Canadian Foreign Service Communicators

The Canadian Foreign Service Communicators served in the telecommunications division of the Canadian Department of External Affairs, at headquarters in Ottawa and at Canadian Embassies and Missions abroad.

Many of its staff had a military communications background. As civilians they became responsible for preparation and transmission of an uncountable number of telegrams. They worked with several different types of telex machines and communications were of course protected with the appropriate encryption systems such as BID 610, KL-7, KW-7 or the manual One-Time Letter Pads and One-Time Figure Pads .

Those were the days when secure communications were an art and a craft. In the early 1990s the communicators were largely replaced by new technology. An interesting history of the Foreign Service Communicators, including images of their equipment, is published on the AFFSC website. which also host the COMWEB Museum with an Exhibits section.that includes photos of the teletype and crypto equipment.

I found an interesting photo gallery on the Old Foreign Affairs Retired Technicians website www.ofarts.ca. My kind of tradecraft stuff! Another related website is the Military Communications and Electronics Museum with Virtual Exhibits.