How the cold war began
You're a spy called back to Moscow. The bosses don't trust you anymore. They might even purge you. What do you do? If you're Igor Gouzenko, you trigger the Cold War.
O Canada
The second world war had just ended on 15 August 1945 after Japan announced its intention to surrender. Hitler was dead, and Nazi Germany had surrendered unconditionally a few months earlier. The occupation and division of Berlin by the four powers had been ratified at the Potsdam conference. The leaders of the allies — Soviet Russia, the United States, Britain, Canada, and France — were scheduled to meet soon, and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada, was looking forward to peace.
Mackenzie King looking ready to sit back and enjoy world peace.
The tenure of a clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada was coming to an end. But he did not look forward to returning with his family to the motherland. Life in Canada had been comfortable, luxurious by Soviet standards. Disillusioned with the drab communist life that awaited him back home, Igor Gouzenko found himself thinking about staying back. But there was no question of petitioning his superiors. He would have to take matters into his own hands.
Gouzenko was not, despite appearances, a member of the KKK
Cypher Clerk
Gouzenko wasn’t an ordinary embassy staffer, though. He had worked in the Second Directorate of the GRU — the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Union — as a cypher clerk. He was posted to the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in 1943. As cypher clerk, Igor’s job was to take documents and messages from embassy personnel including the KGB rezidentura and encrypt them, using suitable methods, for transmission to Moscow or other Soviet embassies around the world. The job also required Gouzenko to decrypt transmissions received by the embassy. In short, almost every cable transmitted or received by the Soviet embassy in Ottawa passed his desk in unencrypted form. He had access to everything, read everything, knew everything.
As a matter of fact, Gouzenko had discovered that he would be headed back to Russia quite by chance. The military attaché at the embassy had got him to decrypt a cable because he didn’t feel like doing the work himself. That cable contained instructions for Gouzenko to be sent back to Moscow. The bosses in Moscow didn’t trust him anymore. He worried that upon arrival he might be purged: killed or sent to the Gulag. When he discussed this with his wife later, Svetlana suggested that they defect, and told him what to do.
Sometime in July or August, Gouzenko began identifying valuable cables, focusing on those that would expose Soviet operatives. Instead of taking them out of the embassy one by one, he kept them in their usual storage but marked them by subtly bending one of the corners. He continued doing this for more than a month. Then, on the evening of 5 September 1945, Igor gathered 109 documents he had marked this way, stuffed them under his shirt, and casually walked out of the embassy. Security did not notice that his waist appeared to have grown an inch in girth.
Defector in the wind
Since Canada didn’t even have a dedicated espionage or counter-intelligence organisation, Gouzenko first went to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) but, foreshadowing what Adolf Tolkachev (the Billion Dollar Spy) would later go through, the officers on duty did not believe his story. So he then went to the Ottawa Journal, a daily broadsheet newspaper. He met the night editor, Chester Frowde and, in his excitement blurted out:
It’s war. It’s Russia.
The war had just ended. Russia had been an ally, still was. A confused Frowde thought he was dealing with a crackpot, and asked him to go to the police. But Gouzenko went to the Department of Justice which, since it was late in the evening by then, was closed. Disappointed, Gouzenko went home. The next morning he went back to the Journal and spoke to Elizabeth Fraser, a reporter. No joy.
This is the KGB
Gouzenko’s home, first floor, right
That night, anticipating the worst, Gouzenko and his family sought shelter with the neighbour across the corridor. He called Ottawa police and asked for protection. Two constables were assigned to the task. They waited in a park across the street, waiting for his signal.
Gouzenko’s fears were well-founded. The Soviets had by now become aware of his attempted defection and just before midnight, as Gouzenko watched through the keyhole with his gun drawn, four men from the embassy broke into Gouzenko’s apartment.
Gouzenko’s pistol
The men from the embassy began rummaging through Gouzenko’s house looking for the documents he had stolen. After Gouzenko had confirmed that the Soviets had broken in, he switched off the neighbour’s bathroom light. This was the signal the constables were waiting for, and they entered the building, found the Soviet agents and, since they enjoyed diplomatic immunity, told them to buzz off.
Diplomatic spanner in the works
Gouzenko took the documents to the Ministry of Justice the next day, and in doing so he ignited a bit of a crisis for the Canadian government after Prime Minister King (hehe) was informed that a Soviet defector was seeking political asylum. King was, at that moment, polishing a speech he was scheduled to give the next day in parliament. The speech praised the wartime sacrifice of the allies, including Soviet Russia. Canada, Soviet Russia, Britain, and the United States were also scheduled to meet to discuss arrangements for post-war peace. King was worried that accepting this defector would damage relations, and he was extremely wary of ticking off the Russian Bear.
Russian Bear, sourced from Sergey Zotov’s Pinterest
He also felt that Gouzenko was little more than a disgruntled embassy staffer:
I thought we should be extremely careful in becoming a party to any course of action which would link the government of Canada up with this matter in a manner which might cause Russia to feel that we had performed an unfriendly act.…My own feeling is that the individual has incurred the displeasure of the Embassy and is really seeking to shield himself.
But Norman Robertson, the Undersecretary of External Affairs, argued that the documents Gouzenko claimed to possess suggested that Soviet spies had infiltrated into key positions in Canada and the United States, and some of them were “around” the US Secretary of State. King was in favour of resolving the matter diplomatically, which would have been as good as a death sentence to Gouzenko.
Luckily for the Russian, William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination, found out about him from Robertson. He felt that the documents carried by Gouzenko were critical not just to Canada’s security but also to that of the United States and Britain. So Stephenson drove to Ottawa and arrested Gouzenko himself. Then he told King:
If you don't want to try him, we'll try him over in England. How would you like that?
King did not want that, so he ordered the RCMP to take Gouzenko and his wife into protective custody. From that point on, they were beyond the reach of the KGB and GRU who were rather keen on seeing Gouzenko dead. The couple was transferred to secret Special Training School No. 103, a Second World War British paramilitary installation on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. He was debriefed extensively by members of the RCMP, MI5, and the FBI.
Impact
The documents and intelligence he yielded led to the arrest of 39 suspects in Canada, out of which 18 were convicted including a member of parliament, a clerk in the External Affairs, a radar engineer, and an army officer. The Canadians also rolled up a spy ring of 20 people passing information to the Soviets.
He also alerted them to a British nuclear scientist working in Montreal who had spied for the Soviet Union. Alan Nunn May was, in addition to being a physicist, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In Canada, he was recruited by a GRU officer. He supplied the Soviets with samples of uranium-233 and 235, as well as copies of documents about nuclear power that he procured from the library of the Montreal Laboratory where he worked. He returned to London in September 1945 after his tenure in Canada ended. He was arrested in March 1946 while he waited for a rendezvous with his Soviet handler, who did not show up. May confessed and was sentenced to ten years hard labour in May.
Originally it was MI6 officer Jane Archer who was supposed to go debrief Gouzenko. Her boss, Soviet double agent Harold Adrian Russel “Kim” Philby, manoeuvred to send another officer in her stead, possibly because he was worried that the competent Archer would uncover Philby’s treachery.
Kim Philby
Philby was the head of counter-intelligence at MI6 at that time and, as a result, was in control of the information generated by Gouzenko’s material and debriefing. He used his position to downplay the explosive nature of the revelations as he sought to dampen MI5’s and MI6’s interest in pursuing the intelligence received from Gouzenko.
It would appear [that Gouzenko's information is] genuine though not necessarily accurate in all details.
—Kim Philby, in a memo on the case.
All the while he secretly reported on the progress made in the Gouzenko case by Canada and Britain. Philby’s warnings were also responsible for Alan Nunn May’s Soviet handler avoiding the rendezvous where May was arrested.
Gouzenko did later reveal that while he served in Moscow in the Central Code Section in 1942, he had heard about a Soviet agent — codenamed ‘Elli’ — in the heart of British counter-intelligence. This agent was considered so important that when his messages were decrypted they were often sent directly to Josef Stalin.
And despite Philby’s efforts, British intelligence did begin a hunt for Elli. But they were hampered because Gouzenko kept changing his story. At first, he said Elli worked in “Five of MI” which could easily have been Section 5 of MI6. This was Philby’s section. But then Gouzenko flipped and said Elli was definitely in MI5. As time went by he became less sure until eventually, he returned to the possibility that Elli worked in MI6. While Gouzenko wasn’t able to blow Philby’s cover, he did alert MI5 and MI6 to the fact that one of their senior officers was a Soviet mole.
Gouzenko’s revelations also alerted western governments to Soviet penetration of their nuclear weapons programmes beyond Alan Nunn May. The cables he provided helped cryptanalysts working on the Venona project, a counterintelligence program that sought to decrypt messages transmitted by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union and eventually enabled the apprehension of a Soviet network responsible for stealing nuclear weapons secrets for the Soviet Union.
But more than all this, his impact was in alerting the western world of the extent to which Soviet intelligence had penetrated their societies and governments. His revelations caused attitudes to transform, and is referred to by some as the start of the Cold War.
A new life
Igor Gouzenko, unmasked.
Later he and his wife were given new identities and resettled elsewhere (probably Toronto) in Canada. Gouzenko wrote two books and made multiple appearances on TV, his face always covered with a white hood. He died in 1982 at Mississauga, Ontario. His wife died in 2001.
Igor and Svetlana Gouzenko’s tombstone.
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You may also enjoy reading my spy novels: Let Bhutto Eat Grass & Let Bhutto Eat Grass: Part 2 deal with nuclear weapons espionage in 1970s India, Pakistan, and Europe.