Philippe Gigantes (Globe and Mail)
marilyn...@aol.com
Saturday, December 11, 2004 - Page S9
A man with more lives than most people have overcoats, Philippe Deane
Gigantes was a Second World War veteran, a journalist, a prisoner of
war, a British spy catcher and a Canadian senator. His friend Jacques
Hébert and long-time seatmate in the Senate paid tribute to him
yesterday saying, "He is a man of courage, a man of culture and a man
of passion. These three elements put together make a very interesting
personality, one who has done a lot of things in a long life -- in his
first country, which was Greece, during the last war for the Allies and
then in Canada in many, many ways."
Gerassimos Theodoros Christodoulos Comninos-Svoronos-Gigantes was born
in Salonica, Greece, and christened on a battlefield by his father, a
much-decorated war hero, who named his son after a whole cadre of
fellow officers. At the ceremony, the baby's sponsors, who were still
mourning the loss of Constantinople in 1453, got thoroughly bombed,
according to a story told later by Mr. Gigantes.
Anyone knowing the courtly Mr. Gigantes in his years on Parliament Hill
would be surprised to learn how violent his early life was. Growing up
in Greece in the political instability following the First World War,
he killed a man during a right-wing coup in Athens when he was only 12.
His father had been bound and gagged, smeared with excrement and pushed
into a mob. Mr. Gigantes pursued one of the attackers and hit him so
hard on the head with a rock that he died.
Five years later, during the German occupation, he stabbed a German
soldier who had shot a young Greek boy in the street for stealing
bread. He was 17. Somehow, he managed to escape Greece, joined his
father's commando unit in Egypt and, with the help of his commanding
officer, enrolled in the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth.
He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, sailing on the
Murmansk run from England to the Soviet Union and protecting merchant
convoys from German ships and submarines. Later in the war, according
to an account he gave to the Canadian Press in 2003, he escorted the
landing craft carrying the Royal Winnipeg Regiment during the Allied
invasion of Italy in 1943. "I remembered when I arrived with the first
bunch of landing craft that the surf turned red," he said. "And then I
went back and fetched some more and I was crying. Back and forth,
because until about the fourth batch, when our soldiers eliminated the
German machine-gun posts, it was a massacre. I still have nightmares
about this."
Decades later, he told The Hill Times in Ottawa that he decided to
become a Canadian citizen because the Canadians he met during the war
were "a special bunch." They were not "tortured by the British social
system, not tortured by French narcissism, not offensively patriotic
like the Americans who, at the drop of a hat, would squeeze their left
boob and recite the pledge of allegiance."
After the war, Mr. Gigantes worked as a journalist and in 1950 was sent
by the London Observer to cover the Korean War, using the byline Philip
Deane. Unbeknownst to the newspaper, he had another mission from the
British government: unmask British turncoat Kim Philby. According to
interviews he gave late in his life, Mr. Gigantes was enlisted as a
spycatcher in 1947 and worked as a British counter-intelligence spy
until 1963, the same year that Mr. Philby defected to the Soviet Union.
Mr. Gigantes always believed that it was Mr. Philby who betrayed him to
the Communists. He was wounded, captured and interrogated under torture
in a North Korean prison camp for 33 months. On at least one occasion
his captors tied him naked to a chair and made him sit in his own
excrement for 17 days and nights. He said he survived by behaving like
"a snarling animal." He was released after the armistice in 1953 and
married his first wife, a British nurse.
Still in the employ of the British government, Mr. Gigantes went to
Washington in 1956 where he again reported for the London Observer
until 1961. Along the way, he also served as a Globe and Mail special
correspondent at the United Nations. After that, he worked for the UN
for three years, during which time he finally quit the spy business in
1963. While he was in Washington, the tri-lingual Mr. Gigantes met a
francophone journalist named René Lévesque who frequently invited him
to Montreal to be a guest on his radio show. It was Mr. Lévesque who
first introduced Mr. Gigantes to his friend Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who
would become a life-long friend and eventually appoint him to the
Senate.
Mr. Gigantes had a few more adventures ahead of him before joining our
august upper chamber. He returned to Greece in 1964, after the
ascension of King Constantine to the throne, and served as his
secretary-general and then as Minister of Culture to the Greek
government. With another military coup fomenting in Greece, Mr.
Gigantes immigrated to Canada where he found jobs hosting and writing
for such programs as CBC's The Public Eye and various television
specials, and writing journalism for the Thomson newspapers. He also
attended the University of Toronto, earning both a masters and a
doctorate in very quick order and then served briefly as a professor
and Dean at Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Que.
He entered the public service in Ottawa in the early 1970s, eventually
accepting a position as a speech writer and adviser in the Prime
Minister's Office under Mr. Trudeau, before leaving to return to
journalism as an editorial writer for the Ottawa Journal and then The
Gazette in Montreal. In 1974, his first marriage long over, he married
Sylvie Bedard, who has predeceased him.
He tried to enter the political arena, running unsuccessfully for the
Liberals against Bob Rae in the Toronto riding of Broadview-Greenwood
in 1980. Four years later, Mr. Trudeau appointed him to the Senate,
where he served for 14 years until his obligatory retirement at 75 in
1998.
He is most famous as the senator who filibustered the debate over the
passage of the GST in 1990. He talked for 17 hours and 45 minutes about
a range of topics from take-out pizza to Machiavelli to taxes. Outside
the Senate he said: "My vocal cords are at the peak of their beautiful
maturity." His friend, Mr. Hébert, who had joined him in opposing the
GST, said they were also protesting against the way then-Prime Minister
Brian Mulroney had shifted the balance in the Senate by appointing a
raft of Conservative senators to vote for the GST.
Besides getting up to political mischief with his seatmate and friend
Mr. Hébert, Mr. Gigantes was writing books. He published 14 in all, on
topics as varied as urban planning, the United Nations, travel and the
history of the world. His last book, Power and Greed: A Short History
of the World, was sold in eight countries, including England where it
was a bestseller.
Thinking he was still constrained by the Official Secrets Act in
Britain from revealing his spying activities for the British, he tried
to turn the story of his life into fiction with the help of Jamie Lamb,
the son of a family friend. The problem, though, was his life had such
an excess of plot that it didn't work as a novel.
In the end, he decided to tell it all and tell it straight in a
unpublished memoir that is tentatively titled Sailor, Spy, Senator,
Scribe. He wrote it after being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer
in 2000 and finished it before his final illness.
Senator Philippe Deane Gigantes
was born in Salonica, Greece,
on Aug. 16, 1923. He died of
prostate cancer at the veteran's
hospital in St. Anne de Belleville
Que., on Dec. 9. He was 81. He is
survived by three daughters and
three grandchildren. His final
request was that he be cremated
and his ashes scattered in the
Mediterranean near Greece.
A memorial service is being
planned for a later date.