How the Cold War Began
Page 4
The problem for Gouzenko was that the GRU recruits in Canada had not managed to steal any earth-shaking secrets, especially regarding atomic research, which was the Kremlin's top priority. Contrary to what the Soviets apparently assumed, Canada's participation in the American atomic-bomb project was limited. Although Canada was an important supplier of uranium to the Americans, Canadian scientists, and all but a few British ones, were excluded from the highly secret research conducted as part of the Manhattan Project. Canadian work on an experimental heavy-water reactor in Montreal, which would be used for a full-scale reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, after the war, was peripheral to the atomic research being carried out in the United States.29 In comparison with Klaus Fuchs, who was passing valuable information about the American bomb project to the Soviets, the Canadian recruits had much less to offer.
Also, as Gouzenko's memoirs reveal, the GRU station in Ottawa during the 1943–45 period was not exactly a model of efficiency-driven productivity. GRU employees wanted to make the most of their stay in the West and enjoy the “good life” while they could. But at the same time they were anxious to please their bosses back home.
Intelligence output was often exaggerated as a result and low-grade information was presented as being much more significant than it actually was. According to Gouzenko, “Everybody on the Military Attaché staff began to find reasons for remaining after hours so that their check-out signature would appear frequently in the ‘overtime’ section of the time journal which was always mailed to Moscow. This developed into something of a competition typical of most Soviet institutions. We faked our work to see who could stay longest.” Even Zabotin, constantly prodded by his bosses to produce information, was “eager as a schoolboy to be praised for good work.”30
But Zabotin was distracted by other matters. According to a subsequent British MI6 report, Zabotin began an affair in early 1944 with a Russian émigré, Nina Farmer, who was separated from her American husband and living in Montreal. The “buoyant and attractive” Mrs. Farmer first glimpsed Colonel Zabotin sitting in full uniform with other Soviet officers at a gala performance of the symphony in Montreal. After seeing Zabotin again, this time at a ballet, in early January 1944, she returned with him and his retinue of officers to the lavish Prince of Wales Suite at Montreal's Ritz Hotel, where the group was staying while in town. They danced and feasted until 4 a.m., whereupon Zabotin accompanied Mrs. Farmer to her apartment. According to the report, based on a long interview with Mrs. Farmer in 1946, several months after the spy scandal broke,
A month later, at the hour of midnight, Mrs. FARMER was rung up by Colonel ZABOTIN apparently in a mood of gay irresponsibility – he was at that time paying a visit of inspection to the ORVIDA war plant and was in good spirits as he had roistered with some Russian engineers whom he had found on the spot. After that, the ice was thoroughly broken and Colonel ZABOTIN would quite often ring her when visiting war plants in the vicinity. He also got in touch with her in Montreal whenever he passed through, and used to take her out, dine and dance with her, and entertain her.31
The MI6 report, commissioned when Nina Farmer gained employment in Berlin after the war at the Allied Control Commission for Germany, noted that other witnesses confirmed that Mrs. Farmer was probably Zabotin's mistress. But the report went on to point out that Farmer had no idea her lover was engaged in espionage. The only hint he gave her was when he asked, in a moment of frivolity, what she thought of the name “Grant,” his code name for communications with Moscow. Of course, Nina Farmer had no idea what Zabotin was talking about.32
Why should Zabotin's infidelity be particularly noteworthy? For someone in his position, his behavior was highly reckless. Not only was his wife just two hours away in Ottawa, Zabotin was cavorting in Montreal with Mrs. Farmer with little attempt at secrecy, even from his colleagues at the embassy, several of whom Mrs. Farmer met. As a Russian who had fled her homeland, she would have been considered an enemy to the Soviets. If the NKVD had learned of Zabotin's liaison (not to mention the money he squandered on her entertainment), he would have been sent back to the Soviet Union on the next boat.
With the distractions of an extramarital affair, and continuous discord at the embassy between the GRU and the NKVD, it is no wonder that the reports Zabotin sent through Gouzenko to Moscow were not all that revelatory. Zabotin and his colleagues provided a lot of information, but judging from the documents Gouzenko brought out, much of it was already published, or too general to be considered valuable. As military attaché in a country that was a war ally, Zabotin was entitled to a certain amount of information pro forma from the Canadian government. Shortly before he had arrived in 1943, the Canadian Department of National Defence had set up an organization to liaise with foreign military attachés and supply them with technical information that they might request. Through this arrangement, Zabotin had visited several Canadian military training centers, installations, and munitions plants, and received publications on military weapons. He regularly informed Moscow of what he and his subordinates had learned. But this information came from Zabotin in his role as military attaché. He was also required to send Moscow secret military intelligence obtained in his capacity as GRU rezident.
Although the most urgent interest of the GRU was Western atomic research, as late as the summer of 1945 its Ottawa branch was still producing only rudimentary information on the subject. Thus, for example, one of Zabotin's assistants, Major Vasilii Rogov, drafted a telegram for Moscow based on supposedly secret information from Raymond Boyer, a prominent young professor of chemistry at McGill University: “As a result of experiments carried out with uranium, it has been found that uranium may be used for filling bombs, which is already in fact being done. The Americans have undertaken wide research work, having invested $660 million in this business.”33 And in March 1945, Gordon Lunan, recently recruited by Fred Rose, passed on information he had obtained from an electrical engineer, Durnford Smith (code-named “Badeau”): “Badeau informs me that most secret work at present is on nuclear physics (bombardment of radio-active substances to produce energy). This is more hush-hush than radar. . . . In general, he claims to know of no new developments in radar, except in minor improvements in its application.”34
Neither of these reports would have impressed the GRU leadership in Moscow, let alone Soviet scientists. (In fact the report citing Raymond Boyer stated wrongly that a new Canadian plant to produce uranium was under construction at Grand Mère, Quebec, when the plant was actually at Chalk River.) The Soviets had long been aware that the Americans were working on an atomic bomb, and, thanks to Klaus Fuchs, their scientists knew all about the fissionable material – uranium-235 or plutonium – used in making the bomb.
Another of Lunan's “informers” was Israel Halperin, a young professor of mathematics on leave from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in order to serve in the Canadian Artillery. The GRU in Ottawa wanted Halperin, whose assigned code name was “Bacon,” to give them information about explosives plants and “if possible to pass on the [formulas] of explosives and its samples.”35 They also sought to get uranium samples from him. But after several meetings with Halperin, all Lunan was able to produce was a report on the organization and capacity of Canadian explosives plants, which contained nothing that was not a matter of public record.
Halperin, who according to Lunan “made no secret of his liberal views,” was happy to help out the Russians by providing open-source information. But when pressed to go further, and when it became clear the Soviets were interested in atomic secrets, Halperin backed off. Thus, Lunan reported to his GRU controller, “It has become very difficult to work with him, especially after my request for Ur-235 (Uran 235). He said that as far as he knows, it is absolutely impossible to get it . . . Bacon explained to me the theory of nuclear energy which is probably known to you. He refuses to put down in writing anything and does not want to give a photograph or information on himself. I think that at present he has a fuller und
erstanding of the essence of my requests and he has a particular dislike for them. . . . He says that he does not know anything about matters that are not already known to you.”36 By early July 1945, Lunan was forced to explain to his controllers that “this fellow is a mathematician, and not a chemist or physicist, which may account for his remoteness from the details of explosive research.”37
The third individual assigned to Lunan was Edward Mazerall (alias “Bagley”), an engineer at the Canadian National Research Council. By all accounts, Mazerall was also a very reluctant player in the espionage game. It took weeks for Lunan to arrange a meeting with him and he continually begged off the tasks the GRU had set for him. “He lives in the country,” Lunan reported, “and his wife is antagonistic to his political participation.” Eventually, at the end of July 1945, Mazerall produced two rather innocuous Canadian research reports on air navigation, one of which was a research proposal and the other something that was to be presented at a forthcoming conference on civil aviation, which the Soviets would be attending.38
At this point, Lunan, whose wife was expecting a baby, decided to cease his work for the Soviets: “My judgment eventually led me to abdicate my role as intermediary. Rogov [Lunan's GRU controller] was not interested in my assessment of Canadian or international affairs and I was not qualified to appraise information of a scientific nature, or to discuss or evaluate any reciprocal information coming from Rogov. Nor, for that matter, was I prepared to pressure or influence the others to do anything against their own judgment.”39
As far as can be gleaned from the documents Gouzenko brought out, Durnford Smith was the most “productive” of Lunan's sources. But his information was so technical that the GRU decided to have Rogov deal with him directly. For the brief period of July and August 1945, Smith, an employee of the Canadian National Research Council, passed on a considerable amount of material on radar systems, radio tubes, and microwaves, the bulk of which was in secret scientific journals for the year 1945. But this was far from the secrets of American atomic research that the GRU was so anxious to obtain.
Of all the Canadian scientists the GRU had cultivated, Professor Boyer was the most valuable. Boyer, who came from a wealthy and prominent Montreal family, was a committed communist. He had in fact been recruited by Canadian Communist Party organizer Fred Rose well before Zabotin arrived in Ottawa, and throughout 1943 and 1944 he passed on secret information about Canadian work on chemical explosives, in particular rdx. But he had nothing to offer on the atomic bomb.
The only GRU recruit in Canada in a position to provide information about atomic research was Alan Nunn May, a nuclear scientist from Britain who had been working at the National Research Council in Montreal since early 1943. Born in 1912 in Birmingham, England, May studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the mid-1930s, earning his doctorate in physics and going on to teach at King's College, London. Cambridge transformed May, as it did Kim Philby and others, into a radical. He joined the Communist Party and in 1935 even spent a few weeks in Leningrad with a group of Cambridge graduates.40
May, who had joined Britain's atomic-bomb research team, the so-called Tube Alloys project, in 1942, had already begun passing information about his work on uranium to the GRU when he was still in Britain. But for some reason GRU headquarters did not tell Zabotin about May until early 1945, almost two years after May had arrived in Canada. According to Gouzenko, after Zabotin was told about May, he “remained in a vile mood for some time. He had been working hard to contact somebody immediately involved with the atomic project, yet Moscow had kept quiet about an agent of Dr. May's qualifications who had been practically under Zabotin's nose all the time.”41
In May 1945, Zabotin sent GRU Lt. Pavel Angelov to contact May in Montreal. Angelov went straight to the scientist's home, catching him by surprise. May was unreceptive. He told Angelov that he did not want to resume contact with the GRU because he feared he was under RCMP surveillance. Angelov persisted, arguing that May was obliged to follow orders from Moscow, and the latter reluctantly agreed to cooperate.42
May eventually provided Zabotin's group with a report about atomic research, and, as the FBI pointed out in its initial message to the White House, he even produced a small quantity of radioactive uranium-233, which the Soviets eagerly sent off to Moscow with Zabotin's assistant, Lt.-Colonel Petr Motinov. Motinov, who, like Zabotin, had graduated from the Frunze Military Academy, was trusted with this highly sensitive – and physically harmful – job because he was an experienced GRU officer, having already served in China. As Motinov recalled much later, he was met at the airport by the GRU's chief director: “With great care I pulled the valuable ampoule out from under my waist-band and handed it to the director. He walked slowly to a black car, which stood on the tarmac and put the ampoule inside. I then asked the director ‘Who was in there?’ ‘That's Beria,’ whispered the director. Up to this day I still have from that uranium an agonizingly painful wound, and must get my blood changed several times a year.”43
Zabotin's bosses were not satisfied, probably because most of the information from May had already been published. After receiving May's reports and the uranium sample, the GRU director in Moscow cabled Zabotin in late-August 1945: “Take measures to organize acquisition of documentary materials on the atomic bomb! The technical process, drawings, calculations.”44 By this time May was scheduled to go back to Britain, and there appeared to be no other recruits of his stature on the Canadian horizon. Zabotin and his colleagues had fallen far short of the goal assigned to them two years earlier, to produce new facts about the American bomb that would speed up the Soviet research effort.
Although Moscow was under no illusion it was getting valuable atomic secrets from Canada, the Soviets were nevertheless conducting espionage operations against an ally. Gouzenko planned to show Canadian authorities evidence of an active espionage network: the secret meetings that took place; the code names assigned to new or prospective recruits; the military information being passed to Moscow. Gouzenko was not entirely confident, however, that the materials he had would be enough to persuade the Canadians to grant him asylum. As Anna later recalled, he kept putting off his defection in the expectation that new materials would arrive from the Montreal group of GRU contacts, particularly documents on atomic research from Nunn May. Also, Gouzenko was hoping that something might happen to damage the image of the Soviet Union as an ally of Canada and cause friction between the governments of the two countries. He feared that otherwise Canadians might find it difficult to accept that the “heroic Soviets” were in fact enemies.45 As it turns out, Gouzenko's concerns were justified. He would have a terrible time convincing the Canadian authorities to take him seriously.
Even today, with many archival materials on the Gouzenko affair now declassified, it is difficult to separate fact from legend in the dramatic story of Igor Gouzenko's flight from the Soviet Embassy in September 1945 and his two-day effort to gain asylum. Once Gouzenko was safely in the hands of the RCMP, he worked with them in preparing an account of those events that was not entirely truthful. It was carefully geared to present him in the best possible light and to avoid controversy when the defection was later made public. Gouzenko embellished the story further in a 1947 article for Cosmopolitan magazine, which served as the basis for an autobiography published in 1948. Although his (and the RCMP's) version of the defection became accepted as truth, it contains obvious inconsistencies, as does the official story of what occurred behind the scenes in the Canadian government. As with many important events in history, the real story of Gouzenko's defection became blurred by popular myth.
Gouzenko arrived at his sudden decision to leave the Soviet Embassy for good on the night of Wednesday, September 5, 1945, when he learned he was to hand over his job to a new cipher clerk, Lt. Kulakov, the next day. Gouzenko was not scheduled to leave for Moscow until October, but he would no longer have access to the cipher section's secret documents after the sixth. He claimed initially that he had been
earmarking certain documents to take out with him, by folding over the upper right corners. (In later testimony, he talked about stashing papers in a wooden box in his office.) On the night of the fifth, he said, while his colleagues were at the movies, he stuffed the documents under his shirt and walked out of the Soviet Embassy.46
His account is implausible for several reasons. Zabotin and Kulakov both had access to Gouzenko's office and files. Had they noticed the folds at the top of certain documents (or come across papers stashed in a box), Gouzenko's plan to defect would have been discovered. Gouzenko, who had already been reprimanded for a security violation, was too intelligent to behave so recklessly. In addition, September 5 was a hot and sultry night in Ottawa and Gouzenko had come to work in his shirtsleeves. In the Cosmopolitan article, Gouzenko stated that “There were almost a hundred documents, some of them small scraps of paper and others covering several large sheets of stationery. . . . The documents felt like they weighed a ton and I imagined that they were bulging out from under my shirt.”47 So how did Gouzenko walk out of the embassy unnoticed?
Part of the Gouzenko legend is that he took 109 documents from the GRU. In fact that number refers to the sum of items on a mailing list Colonel Zabotin sent to Moscow in early 1945. Zabotin's list was one of the documents Gouzenko stole. The actual number of separate sheets of paper that ended up in the hands of the RCMP, including telegrams, letters, reports, dossiers on agents, and handwritten notes, was around 250, because, as Gouzenko said, some of the documents contained several pages.48 It would have been physically impossible for Gouzenko to contain all these papers underneath his shirt. Gouzenko later admitted, under questioning by a lawyer, that he had been taking documents home with him for some weeks. This was confirmed by a former RCMP deputy commissioner who worked on the Gouzenko case: “He was preparing for this for a long time and bringing papers home. . . . As soon as he thought there was a chance of returning [to Russia] he probably started collecting material.”49 Why did Gouzenko say otherwise? In order to be credible, he couldn't appear devious. That he had been stealing documents for some time conveyed an impression of calculation and dishonesty, so it had to be covered up.50