Lunch at the C

Prime Minister Lester Pearson last week temporarily put the lid back on what, after two weeks of national uproar, has been nicknamed "The Mudslinger Affair." Before a packed House of Commons, Liberal Pearson announced that he had appointed Supreme Court Justice Wishart Flett Spence, 62, to look into the possible security lapses resulting from the friendships of German Go-Go Girl Gerda Munsinger, 36, with "ministers-plural" of the previous Conservative government. Many of the hearings will be held in camera. Barring major new developments, this should put the whole case largely out of the public eye until the judge reports to Pearson later this spring.

Both Liberals and Tories were relieved. The Munsinger case had simply become too hot to handle. The Tories' fire-breathing chieftain John Diefenbaker sounded strangely subdued in Parliament when he damned Liberal Justice Minister Lucien Cardin, who started the fuss in the first place, for "smear, scuttlebutt, slander and smut." Diefenbaker did not even try for a vote of confidence. His style was undoubtedly cramped by the fact that his former Transport Minister, George Hees, a gregarious Torontonian who at first indignantly disclaimed any acquaintance with the blonde, now conceded that he might have lunched with her at Ottawa's Chateau Laurier after all. In any case, he added emphatically, what they discussed was no affair of state.

Long Blonde Pigtails. Hees was the second Diefenbaker minister to admit he knew Gerda. Though it looked as if the Liberals would nail her as a "security risk" for her various unsavory associations in the past, it seemed less and less likely that she would turn out to be any sort of Mata Hari, as Cardin had darkly suggested. The files of West German intelligence agencies turned up not the slightest shred of evidence that she had worked for the East. And in CBC radio and TV interviews, the heavily mascaraed East German refugee made it abundantly clear that there was no love lost between her and the Russians.

"They ruined my life," she said. "When the war was over, I was 16, a farmer's daughter-long blonde pigtails. And you know what was going on over there. The Russians did with me what they felt like for three years. Because of those three years I had to have some operations, quite a few of them. These people harmed me so much in my young life I would never even move just a little finger for them."

Had she ever talked politics with any Tory minister? "Never. No place and no time." Sure, she added, "I've been out with a man for dinner. Sure I've been out with a man to play golf. Well, why shouldn't I?" Why not indeed? At last report, she had sold one memoir to a Cologne magazine for $25,000 signed a contract with the Toronto Star for $7,000, earned $5,000 from the CBC, was negotiating for a $33,000 story with an English paper, and was asking $12,000 for other interviews. There was even talk of a movie.

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