Keith William MacLellan

Keith William MacLellan (30 November 1920 – 29 September 1998) was a Canadian soldier, scholar, and diplomat who championed the cause of a federal, united Canada. He served as Ambassador to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, Jordan, and Syria.

Personal life and education

MacLellan was born on 30 November 1920 in Aylmer, Quebec, the son of William David MacLellan and Edith Olmsted. He was a direct descendant of Philemon Wright, the founder of Hull, Quebec, which was later amalgamated into the municipality of Gatineau.

MacLellan grew up in Montreal, Quebec, where he studied political science and pre-law at McGill University. During his time as a student, he joined the Canadian Officers' Training Corps. In 1942, he helped John Sutherland and his sister found the First Statement, a Canadian literary magazine.

In 1942 MacLellan put his studies on hold to join the army, and shortly after he was sent overseas to the United Kingdom. During his deployment in Belgium in 1944 he met Countess Marie Antoinette LeGrelle, whom he married on 11 September 1946. Marie Antoinette belonged to the Le Grelle family, a line of nobles from Antwerp, Belgium. She was the daughter of Count Adelin Le Grelle and Rosalie de Swert; the niece of Count Jacques Legrelle, who helped organise the Comet Line; and the aunt of Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, who was briefly the First Lady of France in 2007.

Post-war, MacLellan studied philosophy, politics and economics at New College, Oxford, obtaining a Master's of Arts in 1947. The group's ethos of "multilateralism" successfully defined Canada's separate identity while enabling it to exert influence through institutions such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

MacLellan's career dealt with political instability in a number of countries, most notably: Laos in 1965–1966, which was in turmoil throughout the 1960s due to the conflict in neighbouring Vietnam and the resulting Laotian Civil War; Afghanistan in 1974–1977, where a series of coups in the 1970s eventually led to the Soviet invasion of 1979; and Pakistan, also from 1974–1977, during the deposition of then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Finally, he witnessed the onset of Yugoslavia's disintegration when President Josip Broz Tito's illness in 1979, and subsequent death in 1980, created the power vacuum that would ultimately end in civil war.

Negotiating a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Pakistan

It was however in Pakistan that Keith MacLellan faced his greatest diplomatic challenge, namely to try to get Pakistan and its then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and abandon its aim of manufacturing a nuclear bomb in response to India having exploded their own device, Smiling Buddha, on 18 May 1974.

Canada had what was believed at the time to be a trump card in the international effort to curb Pakistan's ambitions; namely the supply of uranium and technical support to Pakistan's Canadian manufactured KANUPP nuclear power plant. KANUPP was believed at the time to be Pakistan's only source of fissile material from which a bomb could be made. At the same time, matters were complicated by France agreeing to sell Pakistan a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant and technical expertise which would have the capability of turning the "spent fuel" from KANUPP into large quantities of weapons grade plutonium.

The task of bringing Prime Minister Bhutto to the negotiating table and obtaining an agreement fell on Keith MacLellan as Canada's representative in Pakistan.

Unfortunately, both Canada and the West had seriously underestimated Bhutto's determination to develop Pakistan's own bomb and the sacrifices that it was prepared to pay in order to do so. In fact, unknown to them, Bhutto had formally launched Pakistan's nuclear programme within 3 months of being elected Prime Minister in 1972 and subsequently accelerated the programme in 1974 by launching Project-706, which was later described by Time Magazine as "Pakistan's equivalent of the U.S.'s Manhattan Project" . Part of this project involved developing the technology and expertise to produce and refine uranium from other sources than Canada. This action however only resulted in a delay rather than a cessation of Pakistan's nuclear programme.

While accounts vary as to the length of the delay before Canadian uranium and expertise were replaced by domestic product, with some sources stating that the impact as little as two years, prior to the sanction Pakistan had initially projected having a working device by the early-mid 1980s, whereas it actually only detonated its first device in 1998.

Postings abroad MacLellan represented Canada in the following roles:

Politics In 1979, MacLellan requested a leave of absence from the Department of External Affairs in order to run for Parliament and contribute to the federalist cause during the 1980 Quebec Referendum. When his request was denied, he resigned.

He subsequently rejoined the Department of External Affairs, where he was posted as Ambassador first to Jordan and then to Syria.

Despite not being elected to parliament, MacLellan continued to be involved in politics, devoting his later years to Canadian-Quebecois unity and the Scottish Clan MacLellan history. He was first elected as President of the St. Andrew's Society of Montreal, and later President of the St Andrew's Society of Ottawa. He also stood as the director of Clan MacLellan of America, and a convenor of the Franco-Scottish Society of Québec.