The Gouzenko affair

The Second World War had been over for three days. On the night of 5 September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, the cipher clerk on the staff of the Soviet military attaché in Ottawa, left the embassy with a bundle of documents taken from his own office: telegrams to and from Moscow that he had enciphered and deciphered, and papers written by Soviet officers and by Canadians working for them¹. He had arrived in June 1943 with the title "civilian employee" and had learned in 1944 that he was to be recalled^1,6.

Thirty-six hours

Defecting proved harder than walking out. Gouzenko tried the Ottawa Journal and the Department of Justice that night and again the next morning, and was turned away or put off⁶. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, told on 6 September, at first wanted nothing to do with him, fearing a rupture with a wartime ally⁶. That night men from the Soviet embassy broke into Gouzenko's apartment on Somerset Street while he and his family hid with a neighbor; the Ottawa police arrived, and the next day the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took Gouzenko and his documents into protection⁶. Accounts put the number of documents at 109⁶.

The papers were explosive. They described a network run by the military attaché, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin (covername GRANT), for the Red Army's intelligence directorate, the GRU, parallel to and separate from the NKVD's own networks¹. Its targets included radar, explosives and, above all, the atomic bomb.

Washington and London are told

J. Edgar Hoover reported the defection to the White House on 12 September 1945. His letter, declassified decades later, passes on the RCMP's account:

The Soviets have made the obtaining of complete information regarding the atomic bomb the Number One project of Soviet espionage and these data must be obtained before the end of this year.³

The letter named "Dr. Allen May", a British scientist at the McGill University laboratory, as "a paid Soviet spy of long standing" and reported that an assistant to an Assistant Secretary of State was said to be a paid Soviet agent³. MI5 and the FBI interviewed Gouzenko in Canada⁶. The British physicist Alan Nunn May, who had worked on the Anglo-Canadian atomic project in Montreal, was arrested in London on 4 March 1946, pleaded guilty and on 1 May 1946 was sentenced to ten years' hard labor⁵.

The Royal Commission

For five months the government said nothing. On 5 February 1946 an order in council, P.C. 411, appointed two Supreme Court justices, Robert Taschereau and Roy Kellock, as a Royal Commission^1,2. Before they sat, they studied "the original documents brought by Igor Gouzenko from the Russian Embassy"¹. They began hearing evidence on 13 February 1946 and heard their last witness on 27 June; they examined 116 witnesses and about 1,000 exhibits¹.

On 15 February the RCMP detained suspects in dawn raids. Under an earlier wartime order, P.C. 6444, they were held incommunicado at the RCMP barracks in Rockcliffe and questioned by the commission before seeing lawyers⁵. The commission published three interim reports in March 1946, the first on 4 March, each naming detainees, who were then formally charged^1,5. Its final report, published in July 1946, concluded that the Soviet effort was "the result of a long preparation by trained and experienced men" and not the work of "over-zealous Soviet employees"^1,4.

Trials and verdicts

The prosecutions ran into 1949. Fred Rose, the only Communist member of the House of Commons, was convicted in June 1946 and sentenced to six years; he later lost his seat⁵. Others convicted included the National Research Council engineer Philip Durnford Smith, the chemist Raymond Boyer, the Wartime Information Board editor Gordon Lunan and the party organizer Sam Carr, who fled to the United States and was not arrested until 1949⁵. Several defendants were acquitted, among them the economist Agatha Chapman. By one count, 21 people were arrested; ten of the twenty Canadians among them were convicted⁵.

Consequences

Gouzenko gave Western governments their first documentary proof of Soviet espionage against an ally in wartime. The CIA and NSA history of Venona notes that his information, together with Elizabeth Bentley's statements to the FBI a few weeks later, galvanized American counterintelligence, and that the Canadian report of July 1946 "gave the Western public its first official account of the extent of the problem"⁴. He helped Western analysts understand Soviet communications procedures, but he brought out no codebooks or one-time pads and did not contribute directly to the Venona breakthrough⁴.

Gouzenko and his family were resettled under a new identity. He wrote a memoir and a prize-winning novel, appeared on television with a hood over his head, and died in 1982⁶.

Read next

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