by Amy Knight
RCMP commissioner Stuart Wood was beside himself when he learned of King's new plan and immediately sent a letter to Minister of Justice St. Laurent expressing his concerns. First, Wood noted, since it would be impossible to conduct departmental inquiries on such short notice, the suspects, warned as a result of King's meeting with Zarubin, could not be taken by surprise. Second, there was no guarantee of success in terms of obtaining additional evidence or confessions. And finally, the inquiries might bring about uncontrollable publicity. Wood concluded that “I cannot state too strongly that the present suggested method of procedure by means of departmental enquiry is fraught with possibilities of the gravest danger to Canadian interests from a variety of angles.”60
The British (who had learned of the plan through Malcolm MacDonald) were no less dismayed. MI5 telegraphed the RCMP immediately: “We feel that from a strictly security angle action proposed will yield small results in Canada and will give minimum assistance to security authorities elsewhere. . . . We believe diplomatic protest unaccompanied by prosecution . . . will be taken by Russians as indicative of weakness of evidence on which protest is based.”61
King's diaries for the crucial period of November to December 1945 have unfortunately disappeared. Given that these are the only months missing out of the many years the diaries cover (1893– 1950), the disappearance is perhaps not a coincidence. The keepers of King's diaries after his death were also close aides to the prime minister, and the entries for November to December may have revealed too much information about the espionage case and also reflected badly on King's judgment.62 But the course of events is nonetheless clear from other papers in the Canadian archives.
An eleventh-hour scheme was hatched among King's advisers, with a hurried meeting to discuss King's new plan on December 3, the day before King's scheduled meeting with the Soviet ambassador. Wood, St. Laurent, Norman Robertson, and Hume Wrong were in attendance. At this meeting, according to a report from Wrong, Wood told King that the Americans had just learned grave information about the “Miss Corby” case, involving Soviet penetration among senior officials in the Treasury, the United States Intelligence Services, and the White House. Wood noted that “if the accusations are true, there are most impelling reasons, from the point of view of security, for as prompt United States counter-action as possible” and added that “the revelation to Soviet authorities of our knowledge of the information brought by Corby would hamper the United States investigation and that Mr. Hoover, he was sure, would prefer postponement.” After hearing this, King, who would naturally be reluctant to displease the head of the FBI, decided to await the outcome of the United States’ investigation and not mention anything to the Soviet ambassador.63
Desperate to prevent King's heart-to-heart with the Soviet ambassador, Wood had lied to the prime minister by exaggerating the “Miss Corby” revelations, which did not include (at that point) espionage among senior officials at the White House. And he completely misrepresented the views of the FBI, which had given the Canadians permission to pursue the Gouzenko case just a few days earlier. Wood failed to anticipate that King would in fact stretch out the delay indefinitely, and much later he complained to the U.S. military attaché in Ottawa, “We very nearly missed the boat in the early days of the spy case. The Prime Minister kept it in his desk for 4 months, and when I needled him about it, he wanted to turn it over to the courts. That would have been fatal, as legal procedure would have rendered inadmissible most of the essential evidence.” But, as one Canadian historian pointed out, Wood himself was partly responsible for this dilemma: “The Commissioner's suggestion that King was in charge of the spy case and ‘kept it in his desk’ was misleading. The Gouzenko case was seized upon, manipulated and controlled by turns by diplomats and intelligence agencies in Ottawa, Washington and London.”64 At this point, the plans of both Hoover and Wood for the Gouzenko case, namely that the RCMP would round up the Canadian suspects and interrogate them under the emergency law, had backfired.
Although not only diplomats and intelligence officials, but also political leaders from all three countries were preoccupied with what to do about the Gouzenko case for the last three months of 1945, by the end of the year nothing was resolved. The defection remained unpublicized, nothing had been said to the Soviets, and the suspects were still at large. More important, efforts to establish international control over atomic research, under the shadow of the revelations about Soviet espionage, had achieved few results. Liberals in the Truman administration might have seen the espionage case as an additional argument for ending the U.S. nuclear monopoly, on the grounds that the Soviets spied only because they had been excluded from the West's atomic research. But members of the military, including Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves, who was informed of Gouzenko's allegations within days of his defection (before U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes was informed), doubtless felt differently. Why should the United States share its atomic research with a country that engaged in such deception? The whole idea of international cooperation was based on trust, and the Soviets were clearly untrustworthy. As for the Soviets, they had made it increasingly clear that they were not going to be intimidated by America's nuclear monopoly into making concessions to the West. The fact that they had been caught red-handed in atomic espionage and that, as the NKVD learned from Philby, the allies might try to use this as a bargaining chip while the case was still secret, inclined them even more in this direction. As Byrnes put it, the Russians were “stubborn, obstinate, and they don't scare.”65
Chapter 4
RED STORM CLOUDS
We are now up against an ideological conflict without parallel since Elizabethan times. The communists today are the papists of the last half of the seventeenth-century.
Escott Reid, Canadian diplomat
The Gouzenkos celebrated their first Christmas in Canada at Camp X in the company of Mountie George Mackay and his wife. Mackay recalled that “we had a turkey and did the whole thing up in a traditional Canadian Christmas. Presents were bought by the police and we had a Christmas tree with lights. Behind it all was to assimilate them into the Canadian way of life.” Anna, always resourceful, made the decorations for the tree out of papier-mâché.1 It cannot have been much of a celebration for any of them, despite the fact that it was also Anna's twenty-second birthday. The Mackays were eager to get away to spend New Year's with family and friends. And Anna and Igor were probably trying hard not to wonder about their families, or about their own uncertain fate.
Anna was also tied up with her new baby daughter. According to Mackay, “when the second baby came, she almost cut herself off from the whole works. She devoted her entire time to the little girl. . . . He [Andrei] didn't come in for the same attention. She would spend hours with the little girl upstairs in her room. So it became an impossible thing to do anything with her in teaching her [English]. She wasn't interested.”2 Igor was still being questioned occasionally, but the RCMP had obtained about as much as they could get from him, and he had a lot of time on his hands. One can only imagine what it must have been like for them, cooped up with a restless toddler and an infant in a small house in the middle of a cold and snowy nowhere, terrified that the Soviets would find them. Anna still barely spoke a word of English, and they were totally dependent on the RCMP for all their needs. The authorities in Ottawa had been told that Gouzenko's mental state was still fragile. A report on the legal aspects of the case, written in early December, observed, “There is always the question of what Corby might do and the possibility that, if this matter dragged on indefinitely, he would commit suicide or suffer a mental breakdown.”3
Gouzenko repeatedly expressed concern about what the Canadians would do with his GRU colleagues. Would they try to recruit some of them and persuade them to defect, or would they simply expel them as spies? As it turned out, the GRU ordered most of its officers in Ottawa, including Nikolai Zabotin, back home in December. Colonel and Mrs. Zabotin had departed on the S.S. Alexan
der Suvarov bound for Murmansk, a dismal frigid city in the far north of Russia. It was a nonstop trip; there would be no opportunity for those aboard to change their minds about returning to their home country. The Zabotins’ fellow passengers included the Soviet vice-consul in New York and the GRU chief rezident in the United States, Pavel Mikhailov, who had been recalled because Gouzenko's evidence compromised him.4 Mikhailov, code-named “Molière,” had been in the United States since 1941, actively engaged both in his diplomatic role and in coordinating the Soviet espionage effort in North America. He had maintained close contact with the Ottawa-based GRU staff, furnishing them with a radio transmitter to communicate with New York and arranging their occasional visits to the United States. The Gouzenko defection was a huge blow for Mikhailov, just as it was for NKVD rezident Pavlov, who remained in Ottawa, awaiting a decision from Moscow about his fate. Soviet intelligence officers and their agents in North America were all lying low.5
However much damage Gouzenko had caused the Soviets, he was not in the danger that he and the RCMP assumed he was, at least not immediately. According to the memoirs of former GRU officer Col. Mil'shtein, GRU headquarters in Moscow had a special, top secret section called Isk (meaning, “reprisal”), which carried out punishments, presumably murder, of so-called traitors. But any such acts required the permission of Stalin. After being informed of Gouzenko's defection, Stalin had requested a detailed report and a plan for responding. He then forbade the GRU to kill him. “The war has ended successfully,” Stalin is reported as saying. “Everyone is admiring the Soviet Union. What would they say about us if we did that? It is necessary to investigate everything and to designate a special authoritative commission, which Malenkov [the deputy prime minister] should chair.”6
Georgii Malenkov's commission, which included NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria, GRU chief Fedor Kuznetsov, and several others, began meeting almost daily, from noon until late in the evening, in Beria's headquarters at Lubianka prison in Moscow. For the Soviets, the Gouzenko defection was a crisis that called into question the quality of their intelligence services, and heads were going to roll. Although Malenkov was the nominal head of the commission, Beria, who had several NKVD cronies on the committee, ran the show. Mil'shtein himself was called in for questioning repeatedly and grilled – without being permitted to take a seat – about his 1944 trip to North America and his suspicions of Gouzenko. In the end, Mil'shtein escaped punishment, presumably because he was on record as having warned his superiors about the young cipher clerk.7
As for Zabotin, he was rumored in the West to have either received a death sentence or committed suicide. In fact, his life was spared, but only barely. He was sent to a labor camp in Siberia, along with his wife and much-adored son, who had been attending the Soviet Embassy school in Washington, D.C., and was about to enrol in Zabotin's prestigious alma mater, the Frunze Military Academy. The Zabotins were not released until after Stalin died in 1953. Not surprisingly, Zabotin and his wife, who had a stormy marriage from early on, divorced. Zabotin got remarried to a simple country girl and left Moscow for the provinces. But he died just a few years later, his health ruined by his years in Stalin's brutal Gulag.8
As a decorated war hero with a promising career ahead of him, Zabotin paid a heavy price for his failure to suspect that Gouzenko was planning to defect and for the lax security that prevailed under his leadership of the GRU residency in Ottawa. But his subordinates in Ottawa were not punished, and continued with successful careers in military intelligence. Indeed, Col. Motinov, who carried the uranium to Moscow, was awarded the plum position of military attaché and chief of the GRU residency in Washington, D.C. Either the Americans did not realize that he had been part of the Ottawa spy ring, or they turned a blind eye.9
In keeping with Stalin's diplomatic ploy of not ordering Gouzenko's murder (he could be whimsically merciful at times), the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa issued a statement about Gouzenko, in April 1946, that avoided calling him a traitor. He had stolen money from the embassy, they claimed, and was “indictable for the committed crime in case of his return to the USSR [italics added].” But the Soviets had a long-standing policy of murdering defectors as a way of deterring others, and they would not let Gouzenko off the hook permanently. After Stalin died, the Soviet Supreme Court sentenced him, in absentia, to “the highest form of punishment,” namely death.10
Meanwhile, the NKVD had visited its wrath upon the families of both Gouzenko and his wife. Gouzenko's mother died under interrogation at the NKVD's Lubianka prison. He always assumed that his sister Irina, who had been working as an architectural designer the last time he saw her, also perished as a result of his defection. But Gouzenko's criminal file, dating from sometime after 1956, listed his sister as married and living at that time in the district of Cheliabinsk. Curiously, although Gouzenko thought his brother Vsevolod had died during the Second World War, the file also notes that he was living in the same town as Irina. As for Anna's family, her mother, father, and sister Alia were imprisoned for five years, while Alia's daughter Tatiana was sent to an orphanage.11
Gouzenko recalled that one of his RCMP interrogators said he thought him “extraordinarily callous” when he knew his family would suffer dreadful consequences. In his 1948 book, Gouzenko rationalized his defection thus: “My decision was a harsh one but, believe me, it was the only way to break the vicious ‘hostage circle’ used by the Soviet to hold and muzzle those persons sent to foreign embassies. . . . Somebody had to break that circle, and I made the sacrifice in the hope that if I got away with it, others may be prompted to take the gamble, for the ultimate good of a new Russia. There is still another factor to be considered. Mother was getting old and in Russia today, people aren't permitted to grow very old.”12
Did Gouzenko really believe there were many others who would be similarly willing to sacrifice the lives of their parents (no matter how old) and siblings in that way? Enough to help create a “new Russia”? He told his interrogators on more than one occasion that he hoped some of his colleagues in Ottawa, Zabotin in particular, would follow his lead and defect. Zabotin, who had both his wife and son with him in North America, knew he faced serious punishment on his return. The three of them could have defected during the three months following Gouzenko's disappearance. But to destroy the lives of family back home was for Zabotin or any of the other GRU staff probably inconceivable. Things would change after Stalin died, and defections would increase as the draconian measures against family members gradually ended. But in 1945 the situation was very different: to defect meant death or severe reprisals for family remaining in Russia. It is no small wonder that Gouzenko was so agitated during these early months after he sought asylum. He had not only fear to contend with, but also guilt.
While the Soviets were doing what they could to limit the damage of Gouzenko's defection, the British and the Americans were voicing concern about what was happening, or not happening, in Canada. As long as King was firm in his decision not to permit arrests in Canada without simultaneous American arrests, little could be done to force the issue, short of, as the British pointed out, a leak to the press. King was biding his time waiting for the Americans, but after a month, the FBI had come up with nothing against the suspects in the Bentley case. As time wore on, the likelihood of obtaining hard evidence against those actually involved in spying would become even smaller. Hoover clearly realized this and was frustrated that the Canadians were taking no further action against their spies in anticipation of FBI arrests. In early December 1945, he scribbled at the bottom of an internal FBI memorandum on the Gouzenko case (the contents of which are blacked out in the declassified copies): “They [the Canadians] should ‘expect’ no startling developments from here. It is their own decision & responsibility.” Two days later, at the bottom of another message about Gouzenko, Hoover observed, “Same spineless policy as pursued here.”13
During the month of January 1946, the Gouzenko case fell off King's radar screen. He did not mention
it once in his January 1946 daily diary entries, although he met with Malcolm MacDonald on more than one occasion. King was preoccupied with domestic politics, as well as by the visit to Ottawa in mid-January of General Dwight Eisenhower and his wife. And his subordinates, including Justice Minister St. Laurent, Norman Robertson, Hume Wrong, and Lester Pearson, spent much of January in Moscow for discussions about the creation of a un Atomic Energy Commission.
It was a visit to Ottawa on February 1 by another prominent American, President Truman's personal adviser Admiral William Leahy, that forced King to return to the vexed Gouzenko problem. Leahy, a career navy officer in his seventies who had been Roosevelt's White House chief of staff, had apparently come with the specific purpose of finding out Canadian plans for the case. But King did not have the matter on his agenda for conversation. According to King's diary, he and Leahy discussed several other issues before they “talked a little of the Corby case. He [Leahy] felt that we ought to go on with our enquiry if it involved our own civil servants.” If Leahy's purpose was to persuade King to take action on the Gouzenko case, he made a crucial error. According to King, Leahy “agreed that it might have far-reaching repercussions. . . . He also felt that another world war would be between Russia and other parts, particularly the U.S. and the U.K., but that Canada would in all probability be the battlefield.”14
Leahy's observation doubtless put the fear of God into King, who might have delayed acting on the Gouzenko case even further had it not been for the revelations of American journalist Drew Pearson.
On February 3, 1946, Pearson stunned his nationwide radio audience by announcing that a Soviet spy had surrendered himself to the Canadian government and confessed to a “gigantic Russian espionage network inside the United States and Canada.” According to Pearson, “this Russian told Canadian authorities about a series of agents planted inside the American and Canadian governments who were working with the Soviets.” Pearson seemed unaware that the defection had occurred more than five months earlier, but he did tell his audience that Prime Minister Mackenzie King had made a special trip to Washington to inform President Truman of the details.15
