Trials and Tribulations

Chair: Dr Aviva Guttman, Visiting Researcher in Intelligence and International Security, War Studies Department

Speaker: LCol (ret’d) Susan Beharriell, Former Officer

 

This is a Women’s Intelligence Network Brown Bag Lunch event

 

The talk will describe the various challenges Susan faced during her more than 35 years of service as the first woman to serve in Military Intelligence in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Many Allied women, including Canadians, served with distinction during WWII in a host of roles as codebreakers, translators, plotters, members of the resistance and propogandists, among others. However, this wartime service is not the same as serving with and commanding men as an equal member of the armed forces. Society, the system, and the men fought back every step of the way!

This is one of the first times that WIN will host a military intelligence practitioner. Her insights and experiences hope to advance and inspire academic debates on gender, security, and intelligence studies more generally.

Register via Zoom

 

Bio

LCol (ret’d) Susan Beharriell joined the Canadian Forces in 1973 and was one of the first women to complete the same Basic Officers' Training as the men. She was also the first woman accepted into the Security Branch and later the Intelligence Branch. She has extensive experience in Canada at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels, in Colorado with NORAD, in Germany with NATO, in Ottawa seconded to the Privy Council office writing intelligence assessments for the PM, Cabinet and our Allies.

She has supported numerous peacekeeping missions and run Intelligence for the entire Air Force. For her efforts improving Canadian/American Intelligence cooperation post-9/11, she was awarded the US Meritorious Service Medal. Finishing her career on the National Security and Strategic Studies staff at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto she retired in the fall of 2008 after more than 35 years of service. The Governor General inducted her as an Officer of the Order of Military Merit, the military version of the prestigious Order of Canada.

LCol Beharriell has an Honours Degree from Queen's University and is a graduate of Command and Staff Course 16, The National Security Studies Course and numerous Intelligence courses. She has written for the Canadian Military Journal, the Air Force Association Magazine, equestrian and travel magazines and has been a columnist for various Wing, Base and local newspapers for many years. Active with “The Memory Project” as a member of the Speakers’ Bureau of Historica Canada, LCol Beharriell is featured in a booklet that is used by Grade 10 students across the country in their studies of 20th century world events.