How the Cold War Began

by Amy Knight

  King had no choice but to take action. On February 5, he reluctantly told his cabinet about the Gouzenko case and appointed a special commission, led by Supreme Court judges Robert Taschereau and R.L. Kellock, to investigate Gouzenko's accusations. Arrests, he told the cabinet, would follow shortly.16 King suspected the leak to Pearson was “inspired” by the Americans. “I may be wrong,” he wrote in his diary, “but I have a feeling there is a desire at [sic] Washington that this information should get out; that Canada should start the enquiry and that we should have the responsibility for beginning it and that the way should be paved for it being continued in the U.S. This may be all wrong, but I have that intuition very strongly. It is the way in which a certain kind of politics is played by a certain type of men.”17

  Admiral Leahy may not have been far from King's mind when he wrote this entry. As a military man with strongly anti-Soviet views, Leahy, after witnessing King's reluctance to move ahead on the Gouzenko case, had good reason to leak information about the defection.18 Both he and Truman were unhappy with Secretary of State James Byrnes, who they thought was too conciliatory with the Soviets, and they felt the State Department was lagging on the Gouzenko issue. Truman himself had changed his attitude toward the Russians over the past months, as it became obvious that the Soviets were untrustworthy and unwilling to go along with any American proposals. In a January 6, 1946, message to Byrnes, Truman had made his views clear: “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making . . . I am tired of babying the Russians.”19 But it is unlikely that Truman would have authorized a leak of top secret information to a journalist, and doubtful that Leahy would have done this on his own. Moreover, Pearson's subsequent articles on the Canadian case would cast the White House in a bad light.

  Hoover is the more likely suspect. The FBI and Hoover himself, a seasoned behind-the-scenes operator with a constant eye on the press, had a long history of cultivating journalists. Hoover corresponded frequently with Drew Pearson during the war years, mainly about persons in the United States who were sympathetic to the Nazis and about whom Pearson would inform Hoover directly. And in the post-war period, the FBI would make a habit of leaking information about communists to trusted journalists, including Pearson.20

  Another clue to Hoover's involvement was in a top secret telegram apparently from either Dwyer or William Stephenson, to MI6 on January 10, 1946. It included the following: “From information received from one of our representatives it appears to me that Drew Pearson is aware to some degree of both Corby and Speed [Bentley] cases. . . . Our representative was naturally unable and did not attempt to draw Pearson out on subject but is of opinion that information may have been obtained confidentially from Hoover himself in some general terms in hope of enlisting Pearson's support for dominant position both at home and abroad under present American Intelligence reshuffle.”21

  According to an internal FBI memorandum, Hoover spoke with Drew Pearson by telephone on the morning of February 3, the day of Pearson's evening broadcast. Later that morning, Pearson called FBI public relations chief Lou Nichols, who noted in a memorandum that Pearson “appeared to have complete knowledge of the case.”22

  As one of Hoover's deputies, Robert Lamphere, recalled, the FBI had been frustrated with the way its spy cases were going: “We were near and yet so far. Igor Gouzenko and Bentley had shown that Russians were operating all around us, but we were unable to counter their efforts.”23 Bentley's testimony had to be kept secret, so that she could be a witness before subsequent grand juries. But a public announcement of Gouzenko's revelations was just what Hoover and the FBI needed to create a climate in which to launch their spy hunt more aggressively. The Canadian intelligence attaché in Washington came to the same conclusion. After hearing from a journalist at Time magazine that Drew Pearson's source of information was almost certainly J. Edgar Hoover, his assessment in a message to Norman Robertson was that “Hoover wanted to force the issue.”24

  The pro-communist press, not surprisingly, also took the view that Hoover was behind the leak. A piece appearing some months later in the communist magazine New Masses claimed that one of Drew Pearson's employees had gone around Washington explaining why his boss broke the story: “It was like this, the Pearson scribe explained to many of his news sources in labor and progressive circles: J. Edgar Hoover asked Drew to use the story, and how could he turn him down? After all, the business works both ways.” This piece aroused such intense concern at the U.S. Embassy in London that an official there fired off a letter to Roger Hollis (with a copy to Philby) instructing him “to immediately call the . . . article to the attention of MI-5 and MI-6, at which time it should be unequivocally pointed out to these agencies that the above allegations are, of course, absolutely false and completely without any foundation.”25 The tone of the letter suggested that the Americans were protesting too much.

  For the next several days, there was remarkably little public reaction to the broadcast in either the United States or Canada. It was as if North America, still recovering from the trauma of war and struggling to come to terms with the atom bomb, was not ready for news of another crisis.

  But this was the quiet before the storm. In his next weekly broadcast, on February 10, Pearson again brought up the Canadian espionage case. Sensational public trials of Canadian government officials for spying would soon take place, he predicted. This prompted a decisive reaction from Ottawa. According to a message from Peter Dwyer to MI6 on February 13, “Royal Commissioners suddenly decided today to prevent any further damage by leaks from Drew Pearson by taking action before his next Sunday broadcast.”26 Two days later, during raids carried out in the early morning of February 15, 1946, the RCMP detained eleven individuals. That afternoon, Mackenzie King made his first public statement on the Gouzenko affair. Information had reached the Canadian government, he announced, that disclosures of secret information to a foreign country had occurred (he did not name the country in question) and that several persons had been detained. The next day, the RCMP detained two more suspects.

  The detentions created a sensation. Almost immediately, the press reported that the unnamed country was the Soviet Union and that the spying involved atomic secrets. The story made the front pages in the West for the next several weeks, with wild speculation about the defector, the spies, and the extent of the espionage. The already fragile post-war peace had now been destroyed by a new threat: the Allies’ erstwhile friend had been stealing their atom-bomb secrets. Both the White House and the State Department insisted that the Canadian case had nothing to do with Americans in the U.S. government, but it was inevitable that the trail would lead the press in that direction.

  And it was inevitable that Drew Pearson, the recipient of inside information on the case, would be among the first to make the connection between espionage in Canada and in the United States. The day after the arrests, Pearson, in his nationally syndicated newspaper column, claimed that “the Russian agent taken by the Canadians has given the names and locations of about 1,700 other Soviet agents operating not only in Canada, but also in the United States. He has put the finger on certain officials inside both the American and Canadian governments,” and “photostats showing payments made to United States and Canadian officials have even come to light.” Most significant of all, Pearson made a point of noting that the White House and the State Department (considered widely to be bastions of liberal sentiment) had opposed going after these spies in America, but that the Justice Department (that is, the FBI) was “anxious to arrest and prosecute.”27

  Pearson's story must have pleased Hoover and his colleagues. Of course, the number of Soviet agents cited by Pearson was outlandish, and of course Gouzenko had not produced photostats showing Soviet payments to U.S. officials. But such exaggerations didn't hurt. Far from it. The suggestion that the Truman administration was preventing the FBI from fighting espionage effectively gave Hoover a clear advantage in the court of public opinion. He at la
st had the momentum he needed to pursue his anti-communist agenda more rigorously, an agenda that included forcing both Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss out of the U.S. administration.

  Significantly, the day after Drew Pearson initially broke the story, Hoover had sent a letter (dated three days earlier) to the White House warning President Truman against confirming Harry White's nomination as a member of the governing board of the International Monetary Fund (imf) and reiterating Bentley's claims about him.28 As part of the argument against White, Hoover cited a source “high placed in the Canadian government” who pointed out the danger of appointing someone like White, whose loyalty could not be assured. Moreover, Hoover claimed, his Canadian source expressed fear that “facts might come to light in the future throwing some sinister accusations at White and thereby jeopardize the successful operation of these important international financial institutions.”

  Contrary to what has long been assumed, Igor Gouzenko, in the words of one scholar, “did not possess a shred of evidence, documentary or otherwise, that implicated Harry Dexter White in the Soviet conspiracy.”29 Indeed, Gouzenko never mentioned White in his initial debriefings and would later, under intense grilling by American interrogators, persistently deny that he had any information on him. Hoover of course knew this, so he did not specifically mention Gouzenko as a source. But by citing a high-level Canadian official as saying that sinister accusations about White might be made in the future, he seemed to imply that evidence against White would emerge in the Canadian case. In fact the unnamed source from Canada was not a Canadian. As a top secret file from the Canadian archives reveals, the warning about White came from MI6's Peter Dwyer, who had been based in Washington to liaise with the FBI before being seconded to Ottawa to work on the Gouzenko case.

  On January 28, 1946, Dwyer sent the following telegram to his office in Washington with the request that it be shown personally to Lish Whitson of the FBI (who had been in Ottawa for the Gouzenko case earlier):

  For your most private information only we have learned from an informed diplomatic source something which would seem of grave concern. . . . [T]he two British and two Canadian delegates [to the imf] will nominate and support White. . . . With this backing we gather that White's nomination to this important post would be a more or less forgone conclusion. . . . If we allow Canadian and British delegates to carry out their present plan, we allow them to place a Soviet agent in a position of utmost importance in international relations. On the other hand we should not wish to warn our delegates without your complete agreement. . . . We would appreciate your earliest advice in this as our delegates arrive on Friday.30

  This telegram makes clear that not only was Hoover misleading about the source of his information against White (it was not a Canadian official), he also misrepresented what this source said. Dwyer's message was simple: he had heard that the British and Canadian delegates would support White's nomination and he wondered if these delegates should be told the information (gleaned from Bentley and transmitted in secret FBI reports which Dwyer would have seen) that White was a Soviet agent. Dwyer did not say anything about “sinister accusations” against White coming to light in the future.

  In 1953, when the whole matter of Hoover's warnings to Truman about White became public, Canadian officials would confront Dwyer (who by this time had left MI6 and joined the Canadian government) with the telegram he had sent to the FBI seven years earlier. Dwyer claimed that William Stephenson inspired it, which would not be surprising given that Stephenson was a quintessential behind-the-scenes operator. But Dwyer himself had intimate ties with the FBI. According to Robert Lamphere, Dwyer had such a close relation with Assistant Director Mickey Ladd that “Ladd gave Peter Dwyer permission to drop in at the various offices of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division and to talk freely with supervisors such as me. No other intelligence man, even from a U.S. agency, could do so; Dwyer's privilege was unique.”31 Lamphere goes on to say that he personally did not trust Dwyer, who was always engaging in “horse trading” with the FBI – giving out insignificant information while touting it as highly important in order to get a lot in return. Was Dwyer's letter to the FBI about White as straightforward as it seemed, or was it part of this “horse trading” game?

  With the help of Dwyer's letter, it soon became “common knowledge” in Washington circles that Gouzenko had implicated White, a rumor that Hoover did not attempt to quell. In a memorandum to his subordinates, written in February 1946, Hoover observed, “I told the Attorney General that I saw Drew Pearson the other day and he mentioned that he understood White was mixed up in the Canadian case. I told Pearson that I could make no comment.”32

  For all Hoover's efforts, Truman was not impressed, and the appointment of White to the imf went through as planned. Truman's decision not to prevent White's appointment would become the source of a bitter public controversy between him and Hoover in 1953, a controversy in which the Gouzenko case was again dragged up. Although Truman would later be widely criticized for his decision, at the time it was by no means unreasonable. In the report on White sent to Truman along with Hoover's letter on February 4, the FBI admitted that “it should be realized that to prove these charges at this time when they relate to activities occurring in 1942 and 1943 is practically impossible.” The report was based solely on what Bentley had said about White. Not only were the charges over three years old, Bentley had stated all along that she had never even met him.

  Mackenzie King's diary offers another example of how accusations against alleged spies were distorted and recycled. On February 5, right after Drew Pearson's exposé of the Canadian spy case, King wrote in his diary that he had had a “very confidential” talk with Norman Robertson about espionage: “He [Robertson] tells me that suspicions are directed right up to the top of the [U.S.] treasury, naming the person; also that it is directed against another person who was very close to Stettinius at San Francisco and who took a prominent part in matters there. . . . The lady Corby concerned had for two years been employed as liaison between the Soviet headquarters in New York and officials in different government departments, from whom she was securing documents.” [italics added]

  King quite obviously was receiving an update from Robertson on the allegations of Elizabeth Bentley, referred to by the Canadians as Lady Corby, which were reproduced in reports from the FBI. Robertson was not talking about anything Gouzenko, who by this time had finished his debriefing, had come up with. But this entry was changed in the published version of the diary.33 It reads, “The lady Corby [named] had for two years . . .” This gives the impression that King is referring to some woman Gouzenko named or identified as a spy and that Robertson was relating new information from Gouzenko. Not having consulted the original diary, numerous historians have added King's comments to their list of evidence against both White and Hiss.34

  The accusations of spying against White and other Americans were at this point still a secret. The center of public attention was Canada, where an unprecedented drama was taking place, a drama in which the prime minister was playing a leading role. King was surprised when, upon waking up on the morning of February 15, he heard about the detentions. He had been told that they would take place early that morning, but had forgotten. Although he was relieved to learn that the police had been deterred from rounding the suspects up at 3 a.m. and had waited until the more civilized hour of 7 a.m., he was concerned about criticisms of his government for using “star chamber” methods in handling the case and about being “held up [in] the world as the very opposite of a democrat.”35

  King had planned to give a public statement after the detentions, but he decided that the Russians should hear it privately first, even though the statement made no specific reference to the Soviet Union. So that afternoon King and Robertson met with the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Nikolai Belokhvostikov, and Vitalii Pavlov, who in addition to being the secret NKVD rezident was also second secretary at the Soviet Embassy. King read them the stat
ement, pointing out that the unnamed foreign mission referred to was theirs. He also informed them of an unpleasant incident in Toronto. The new Soviet military attaché in Ottawa, Grigorii Popov, had recently been arrested for drunkenness. Then King launched into a self-effacing apology: “The young men were about to rise when I stopped them for a moment to say how sorry Robertson and I were that it was necessary to speak of these matters at all; that we were all close friends, and that nothing should destroy that relationship.” Although Belokhvostikov “had his happy smile” when he shook hands, Pavlov, not surprisingly, was “quite indifferent.” He doubtless knew what was coming; the Soviets would not take the public announcement of the espionage case lightly.36

  King saw himself and his country at the center of an earthshaking crisis. The day after the roundup of spy suspects he wrote in his diary, “I have been somehow singled out as an instrument of the part of unseen forces to bring about the exposure that has now taken place. There has never been anything in the world's history more complete than what we will reveal of the Russian method to control the continent. . . . As Prime Minister I have had to take the responsibility. The world now knows that I went to see the President and that I also went to see [British Foreign Minister] Bevin.” And the next diary entry, on February 17, included this observation: “It can be honestly [said] that few more courageous acts have ever been performed by leaders of the government than my own in the Russian intrigue against the Christian world and the manner in which I have fearlessly taken up and have begun to expose the whole of it.”