by Amy Knight
When he finally left the Soviet Embassy on Charlotte Street for the last time, Gouzenko was nearly overcome with fear. One slight hitch, one unforeseen circumstance, and he would have been thrown into the clutches of the NKVD. This may explain why his behavior that night was not entirely rational. After he left the embassy, Gouzenko did not go to the RCMP with his documents. Instead he headed for the offices of a local paper, the Ottawa Journal, intending to spill out his story just as Viktor Kravchenko had done a year earlier at the New York Times. He lost his nerve, however, when he reached the top floor of the building, where the editor's office was located, and fled home to Somerset Street, shaken and sweating. Anna urged him to go back. His colleagues at the embassy would not realize the documents were missing until the next day, she reassured him. He still had time.
But when Gouzenko arrived at the offices of the Ottawa Journal at nine o’clock in the evening and started to explain himself in what was at best broken English, the response was not what he had imagined. The night editor on duty recalled that Gouzenko was unable to answer any of his questions, that he just stood there and repeated, “It's war. It's war. It's Russia.” As one eyewitness later remarked, “Nobody could figure out what the hell the guy wanted.”51 Finally the editor suggested to Gouzenko that he go to the RCMP offices, which were in the building of the ministry of justice, not far from the Journal. Gouzenko went to the Justice Building, but he did not try to contact the RCMP. Instead he asked the policeman on duty if he could see the minister of justice. He was told to come back the next morning.52 Gouzenko cannot have been thinking straight. He had been living in Ottawa for over two years; surely he must have known that government offices were closed in the evenings and that the justice minister was unlikely to be there.
Gouzenko returned home to a frantic Anna. Somehow they got through the night and the next morning the two of them, Anna heavily pregnant with their second child, trudged back to the Justice Building with little Andrei in tow. Gouzenko asked again to see Mr. Louis St. Laurent, the minister of justice, but after waiting two hours he was turned away. Another visit to the Ottawa Journal, where Gouzenko was understandably “utterly agitated and almost incoherent,” produced no better results. The editors decided that since the story was unsubstantiated and might cause a problem with Canada's ally the Soviet Union, they could not run it. They advised Gouzenko to go to the RCMP's Bureau of Naturalization, where Gouzenko asked for protection and was refused.
By this time Andrei was tired and hungry, so Igor and Anna deposited him at the home of an English neighbor, a Mrs. Bourke, who lived in a house nearby. The couple then took a streetcar to the offices of the Canadian Crown Attorney, where a secretary named Fernande Coulson was receptive to their plight. Interviewed some years later, Coulson recalled that she telephoned the RCMP and a Mountie came over to talk to Gouzenko but told him in the end there was nothing he could do. A desperate telephone call to John Leopold, assistant chief for intelligence at the RCMP, produced mixed results. According to Coulson, Leopold at first said “we can't touch him,” but he finally agreed to see Gouzenko the next morning.53
Igor and Anna were beside themselves. Time had just about run out. Gouzenko's colleagues at the embassy would have noted his absence by now, and once documents were seen to be missing, their lives would be in danger. After they retrieved Andrei from their neighbor and were back in their own apartment, a driver from the Soviet Embassy arrived and began pounding at their door and shouting. Several minutes went by before he left. A terrified Gouzenko went out on his balcony and pleaded with his neighbor on the adjoining balcony, Harold Main, for help. Main decided he should contact the police and went off on his bicycle to the station. Meanwhile, another neighbor, Mrs. Frances Elliott, heard all the commotion and offered her apartment as a refuge for the pitiful family.54
The city police were just as unhelpful as the RCMP. Main said later that the police “seemed to know about it. . . . The Ottawa police were working with the RCMP. I think they already made contact with the RCMP.”55 They agreed to cruise by 511 Somerset, but said they could not do anything more because Gouzenko's apartment was Russian property.
It was not until a group from the Soviet Embassy, led by NKVD rezident Pavlov, broke into the Gouzenkos’ apartment around midnight and began ransacking it, apparently looking for the stolen documents, that the police intervened. It was like a game of cops and robbers, with the hapless Ottawa police confronting belligerent Russians desperate to find their missing cipher clerk and his documents. The Gouzenkos peered out at the scene through their neighbor's keyhole across the hall. Eventually the Russians gave in to the police and GRUdgingly departed. One policeman then remained at the Elliott apartment until the next morning, September 7, when Gouzenko was escorted to the RCMP. No one had much sleep at 511 Somerset Street that night.56
The RCMP hesitated to give Gouzenko asylum in large part because Prime Minister King did not want Canada to become embroiled in an unpleasant diplomatic incident with the Soviets. King first learned about the defection on the morning of Thursday, September 6, while Gouzenko was waiting desperately for an audience with the Canadian justice minister, Mr. St. Laurent. The prime minister arrived at his office in Ottawa's Parliament Buildings shortly before the House of Commons was scheduled to convene its new session. Judging from what he wrote in his meticulously kept private diary, King was not in a good mood on this particular morning. Although he had been prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party on and off for almost twenty years, he was nervous about meeting the new members of Parliament, which had a considerably larger number from opposition parties than in previous sessions. And he was weary from the long, painstaking hours spent preparing the government's Speech from the Throne, to be delivered that day by Canada's governor general.
King was not keen to tackle his country's problems as a “middle-power” in the post-war world. Despite its small population (eleven and a half million, less than that of New York state), Canada had contributed in a major way to the war effort and sacrificed over forty-two thousand lives. At the war's end, it had one of the largest armies of United Nations countries. As one source observed, “Canada had fought abroad and produced at home as it had never fought and worked before – and her war record, at home and abroad, had gained her new stature in the world. Canada could no longer be classified simply as a promising young country; she had come of age.”57
But since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month earlier, the world had become much more complex. How the new weapon would be controlled, and how it would affect the foreign policy of the Western allies, were questions that now dominated Canada's agenda, an agenda complicated by the constant challenge of asserting Canada's role in its alliance with the far more powerful United States and Britain. Because King had chosen to retain the portfolio of minister of external affairs along with that of prime minister, he was deeply involved in Canada's foreign policy and, at seventy years old, beginning to feel the strain. “I really need a complete rest and a change,” King had written in his diary two weeks earlier.58
Unfortunately for the world-weary prime minister, he was about to be thrust into a political and diplomatic crisis that would test his mettle as never before. King found his close adviser Norman Robertson, undersecretary for external affairs, and Robertson's assistant, Hume Wrong, waiting for him in his office. Both men were looking grave. As King wrote in his diary that night, Robertson told him that a “terrible thing” had happened. “It was like a bomb on top of everything and one could not say how serious it might be or to what it might lead.”59 Just a half an hour or so earlier, Robertson said, a man from the Soviet Embassy had appeared with his wife at the office of Minister of Justice St. Laurent. The man had said that he worked with ciphers and that he had in his possession a number of documents showing that the Soviets had spies in Canada and the U.S., and that “some of these men were around Stettinius [the U.S. Secretary of State] in the States, and that one was in our own Research laboratories
here (assumedly seeking to get secret information with regard to the atomic bomb).” King observed further that “Robertson seemed to feel that the information might be so important both to the States . . . and to Britain that it would be in their interests to seize it no matter how it was obtained.”60
Robertson said the defector was threatening suicide and suggested that the RCMP offer him protection. But King was hesitant: “I said to both Robertson and Wrong that I thought we should be extremely careful in becoming a party to any course of action which would link the govt. of Canada up with this matter in a manner which might cause Russia to feel that we had performed an unfriendly act. That to seek to gather information in any underhanded way would make clear that we did not trust the Embassy.” After a talk with St. Laurent, King was adamant that his government not get involved, even if the man was apprehended by Soviet authorities or committed suicide: “My own feeling is that the individual has incurred the displeasure of the Embassy and is really seeking to shield himself.”61
King would later be criticized for not immediately grasping the importance of what the defector had to offer and for his naïveté in trusting the Soviets. But his reaction was understandable. Apart from wishing to avoid a diplomatic debacle, King also questioned the motives of the potential defector. The man was quite possibly lying to save his own skin, or because he wanted to live in Canada and needed a means to gain asylum. Whatever the case, King was not about to allow a Soviet code clerk to disrupt the cordial diplomacy that had characterized Ottawa's relations with Moscow.
One question that arises from King's diary entry for September 6 is how Robertson was able to give King details about Gouzenko's allegations as early as that morning. At that point Gouzenko had supposedly only mumbled incoherently to the night editor at the Ottawa Journal, “it's war, it's war,” and spoken briefly to a secretary of St. Laurent, requesting a meeting with the minister. Had someone perhaps been in contact with Gouzenko before he actually defected and been apprised of what he had to say about espionage? A number of other strange circumstances suggest that there was more to the defection story than what was eventually presented to the public.
Though Prime Minister King did not know it, the RCMP had been monitoring the movements of Gouzenko closely since the night before, when he had gone to the Ottawa Journal in his unsuccessful attempt to tell the world his story. On September 6 – the day King first learned about the cipher clerk – the chief of the RCMP intelligence branch, Charles Rivett-Carnac, had a secret meeting with Norman Robertson. By that night, as King slept at his Ottawa residence, RCMP officers were stationed outside Gouzenko's apartment building and Robertson was conferring at his home with an “eminent officer of the British Secret Service.”62
Who was this eminent British intelligence officer? The widely accepted theory, reinforced by what appears in the published (and edited) version of King's diary, is that it was British Security Coordination Chief William Stephenson, who had by some great coincidence (one historian calls it “miraculous”) made a rare visit from New York to Canada exactly at the time Gouzenko defected. Stephenson, according to this theory, was staying at Montebello, a luxurious rustic lodge about an hour's drive from Ottawa, just as the incident erupted. Once in Ottawa, he “argued strongly against King's view that Gouzenko should be ignored. The Russian, he said, would certainly have information valuable not merely to Canada but also to Britain, the United States, and other Allies. Furthermore, Gouzenko's life was almost certainly in danger. They should act, and do so immediately, by taking Gouzenko in.”63 Stephenson's arguments were reportedly what persuaded Robertson not to follow King's decision and instead to allow the RCMP to intervene officially in the Gouzenko case.
But if we consult the unedited text of King's diary in the archives, it becomes clear that the above-mentioned intelligence officer could not have been Stephenson. On September 6, King wrote in his diary, “The head of the British Secret Service arrived at the Seigniory Club [Montebello] today. Robertson was going down to see him tonight. I told him he should stay and make this individual come to Ottawa to talk with him” [italics added]. On September 7, King noted that he had authorized Robertson to telephone Stephenson in New York. And on September 8, King records, “Robertson said that Stephenson and the FBI representatives would be here tonight.”
King's account in his diary was confirmed many years later by one of Robertson's deputies, who in an interview let it slip that in fact Stephenson was not in Ottawa when the defection occurred: “We wanted to get Stephenson [here] quickly and he was coming by commercial air. I was told to ask the Air Force to bring him up specially but it didn't work – because I couldn't tell them why. You had to pretend that anything you did was perfectly normal. Otherwise it suggested some kind of crisis, which is the last thing they [the government] wanted to do. So I remember talking to the Air Force and they weren't a bit convinced. But he [Stephenson] did turn up.”64
Some sources have hypothesized that the British intelligence officer referred to by King was none other than MI6 director Sir Stewart Menzies, “C.”65 But a more probable candidate is Peter Dwyer, the MI6 representative in Washington who had worked for William Stephenson during the war. Dwyer was, apart from Stephenson, the top British intelligence officer in North America, and he would play a leading role in the Gouzenko case. In a telegram to London on September 10, British High Commissioner to Canada Malcolm MacDonald referred to one of Stephenson's men “who has been here for the last three days and who knows all the facts.”66 But why would Dwyer have suddenly showed up at Montebello on September 6? Was it just a coincidence that Gouzenko defected the night before?
There are other puzzles about the defection story that remain unsolved. Whatever happened to the Gouzenkos’ English friend, Mrs. Bourke, who took care of Andrei and, according to Gouzenko, gave them tea when they went to retrieve him? Although the Royal Commission investigating the case later interviewed all of the other neighbors extensively, Mrs. Bourke was never heard from (or mentioned) after Gouzenko spoke about her in his initial statement to the RCMP.67 And why did Mr. Edwin Elliott, whose wife, Frances, allowed the Gouzenkos to spend the night in her apartment hiding from the NKVD, write to Mackenzie King months later (after the case was made public) asking for money in exchange for silence about certain aspects of the Gouzenko case? Did Mrs. Elliott know something that she did not reveal in her testimony before the Royal Commission? As it turned out, the RCMP ordered all the neighbors to keep quiet about the Gouzenkos, even after the story became public.68
It is also puzzling that as his first step in defecting, Gouzenko, who spoke only broken English and carried a bunch of documents in Russian (which no one at the Journal could read), approached a small city newspaper instead of going to the RCMP. He had, after all, placed himself and his family in a situation of real physical danger, which required police protection. Gouzenko later told the RCMP that he did not want to go directly to them, because he thought that someone there might be a Soviet agent: “I knew that the system of military intelligence [the GRU] had not its own agent on the staff of the R.C.M. Police in Ottawa, but I did not know whether or not the system of the NKVD had its own agent there. Therefor [sic] I considered that it was dangerous for the whole undertaking to turn to the R.C.M. Police at first as, under the worst circumstances, if there were a Soviet agent there and all this subject were turned over to him, he would be able to direct it into a channel favourable to the Soviet intelligence and to the benefit of the agent himself.”69 What apparently did not occur to Gouzenko was that, even if the Ottawa Journal had publicized his story immediately, he would still have had to seek protection from the RCMP and hand over his documents.
Of course, Gouzenko was in a state of high anxiety, so he may not have thought things out clearly. Also, he was mindful of the story of Kravchenko. He was unaware, however, that Kravchenko had been talking to the FBI prior to his defection and, in exchange for providing information about Soviet espionage, had set forth a number of d
emands, including physical protection, a change of identity, and monetary support.70 Apparently such a course of action did not occur to Gouzenko. Or did it? Is it possible, as some have suggested, that he had made contact with someone in the Canadian or British intelligence services before he defected but went to a newspaper in order to ensure that he would get asylum?
There is nothing to indicate such prior contact in the RCMP files that have been released, and two former RCMP officers have emphatically stated that Gouzenko was a complete unknown to their agency before September 5, 1945.71 As for prior communication with British intelligence, again, there is no indication in the MI5 files that have recently been declassified. Nonetheless, the possibility of such an encounter cannot be dismissed out of hand. The British were actively engaged in attempts to recruit Soviet spies, and they considered Canada legitimate territory for such attempts. It might be added that in a September 2001 interview in Moscow, NKVD rezident Vitalii Pavlov, although offering no evidence, said that Gouzenko had been induced to defect by a Western counterintelligence service.72
