Code-breaker Sonja Sinclair kept her wartime work a secret for nearly 75 years

During the Second World War, Sonja Morawetz , was part of a secret code-breaking group, connected to Bletchley Park in England, which operated out of a mansion in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill district, next door to the prime minister’s residence. Known as the Examination Unit, it was so secret that she never told her husband, even though he was a military man, and he died in 2006 without learning what his wife did in the war.

At first Richard Morawetz said he was a patriot and would stay to support the Czech government. But he was eventually convinced to leave. Just before the war started, he and his wife, Frida Morawetz, left everything behind and took a train from Prague through Nazi Germany to France. “It was that combination that mattered for her code-breaking work,” her daughter Helen Sinclair said.

The British government ran the secretive Bletchley Park, where teams of clever men and women worked at breaking German codes. They were helped by knowing about Germany’s Enigma Machine, which was used to send out coded messages. A group of men and women in Ottawa were a subsection of the Bletchley Park operation, connected through the British Security Coordination in New York, run by the Canadian Sir William Stephenson, the man code-named Intrepid.

“Throughout the Second World War, Lester B. Pearson was very closely involved with the organization of and, at times, the daily operations of the Examination Unit,” Ms. Pepall wrote in the pamphlet. Even before she finished her degree, she started what became a successful freelance writing career. Before classes she would head to the CBC Radio offices in the Chateau Laurier. She was never without work at a long list of publications.

“I met her when she was ghost-writing my father’s memoirs in the 1980s,” Mr. Ignatieff wrote to The Globe from Budapest. “My Dad was very fond of her: sympathetic, smart and understanding.” After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, Mrs. Sinclair went to her native Czechoslovakia, where she interviewed Vaclav Havel, the writer who had become the country’s president.

Noastack

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