by Amy Knight
King apparently forgot that he had pushed all along for a quiet diplomatic solution to the Gouzenko affair instead of exposing the case publicly, and also that just two days before he had apologized to a key figure in the “Russian intrigue,” Mr. Pavlov. Why did King refer to the intrigue as being against the “Christian world”? As a subsequent diary entry makes clear, King, like Elizabeth Bentley, associated spying with Jews. Wondering to himself why American officials, Byrnes in particular, denied that the Gouzenko case had any connection to their country, King observed, “I am coming to feel that the democratic party [in the United States] have allowed themselves to be too greatly controlled by the Jews and Jewish influence and that Russia has sympathizers in high and influential places . . . I must say that the evidence is strong, not against all Jews, which is quite wrong, as one cannot indict a race any more than one can a nation, but that in a large percentage of the race there are tendencies and trends which are dangerous indeed.”37
King was stung by the harsh response of his erstwhile friends the Soviets. Thanks to Kim Philby, the Soviets had an advance copy of King's first official statement on the case, along with reports on how the allies planned to respond publicly to the Soviets. So their counterattack, which focused on King, was well prepared. On February 20, Moscow Radio acknowledged, much to the surprise of many in the West, that the Soviets had indeed been spying, but said the information they received was of little value. The Soviet military attaché to Ottawa “received from acquaintances among Canadian citizens certain information of a secret character which, however, did not present a special interest to Soviet authorities. These matters had already been published.” Technical expertise had reached such a high level in the Soviet Union, the radio broadcast went on to say, and so much information had already appeared in scientific journals, that “it would be ridiculous to assert that the communication of such insignificant secret data could create any danger whatsoever for the security of Canada.” In other words, Canada was making a mountain out of a molehill. The Soviets also said that the Canadian government's position was “not compatible with friendly relations between the two countries” and implied that King was acting as a lackey for the British.38
The Soviets did not let up on King. Pravda accused him of starting an anti-Soviet campaign to distract attention from British Foreign Minister Bevin's failure to undermine the Soviets in the United Nations. In late February, the Soviet magazine the New Times printed a scathing article that accused King of sympathizing with fascism. After King visited Hitler in 1937, the article said, the Canadian prime minister “advertised him [Hitler] as a ‘simple peasant who does not desire anything outside of Germany,’ an estimate which does not in the least honor the farsightedness of its author.”39
Had the Soviets known what King was saying about Jews in his diary, they could have made his views on Hitler look considerably worse. As it was, the maligned prime minister noted despondently in his diary, “The dispatches from Russia make clear that my name is now an anathema throughout the whole Russian empire.”40
King's reputation was also in danger at home, as he predicted it would be, now that his government was sanctioning the abuse of civil rights. Both the RCMP and the new Royal Commission went to extremes in interrogating the thirteen detainees, two of whom, Emma Woikin and Kathleen Willsher, were women. In fact, the entire process by which the spy suspects were detained, questioned, and later tried in court amounted to an egregious and, for Canada, unprecedented violation of civil liberties.
The suspects were held incommunicado at the Rockcliffe Barracks, an RCMP training establishment on the outskirts of Ottawa. Their accommodation was grim – spartan rooms with narrow, thin-mattressed beds. The windows were nailed shut. They were detained, without access to counsel, under a special Order-in-Council, P.C. 6444, which had been secretly passed in October 1945, when the RCMP was contemplating arrests in the case if the British arrested Alan Nunn May. The order was issued under the War Measures Act, which conferred emergency powers of arrest and detention upon the prime minister and the minister of justice. At the end of 1945, with the war over, the government had relinquished its emergency powers and the War Measures Act was no longer in force. However, when Justice Minister St. Laurent was asked at the time in Parliament if there were any orders outstanding under the act, St. Laurent said no. Later he claimed he forgot about P.C. 6444. 41
The detention of suspects by the RCMP under Order-in-Council P.C. 6444, while not technically illegal, was not in the spirit of the law. Although the order itself had never been formally revoked, it was issued “pursuant to the powers conferred by the War Measures Act,” which had expired. Furthermore, P.C. 6444 authorized only preventative detention, justified by the threat that the subject would communicate secret information to a foreign power if he or she was not detained. As the Royal Commission's report subsequently acknowledged, “the exercise of authority conferred by this Order will be seen to be purely preventative in its nature and not punitive with respect to past conduct. It is not concerned with and leaves untouched the question of accountability for such conduct under the general law.”42
Soviet espionage activities in Canada had all but ceased since Gouzenko's defection. The suspects who had actually been spying had long since ended contacts with the GRU, and they posed no threat to Canada's security. This was evident to the RCMP, who had been following them for months. They were simply going about their daily lives, unaware of the turmoil in the upper reaches of allied intelligence and governments. Without doubt, the detentions under P.C. 6444 were not preventative; they were carried out as the first stage of a criminal process.43
The detentions fueled a sense of danger and urgency among the Canadian public. A telegram from Ottawa to MI6 noted that “owing to lack of further official information, [the] Canadian press throughout [the] country is speculating wildly with every kind of sensationalism. Stress is continually laid on atomic aspect.”44 The spies were so dangerous, Canada's Globe and Mail reported on February 19, that “the police feared either an escape attempt on the part of suspects held in the espionage inquiry here or an organized attempt to deliver them from the well-patrolled barracks at Rockcliffe.” The barracks were “bathed in the glare of search-lights.” Security had been tightened, and the men on duty were issued live ammunition. For tranquil Ottawa, it amounted to a state of siege; the extraordinary guard detail was “not matched at any project involving top security during the war.” Inside the barracks, the dazed detainees were held under constant guard, lest they attempt escape or suicide.
Instructions for the guards, who had to take an oath of secrecy, were extensive:
The security of the persons detained is of the utmost importance and constant supervision by day and night is to be given to each and every one of them; particular care to be given to attempts to escape or possible suicide. There must be no conversation between the guards and the prisoners. The persons detained are not allowed to communicate with anyone outside. Should they write a letter this will be handed to the N.C.O. in charge. . . . The guards on duty on the grounds will be on the lookout for any possible signaling from the barracks’ windows or from neighboring houses or parked cars or any other place. . . . Detained persons must under no circumstances be allowed to speak with one another. As far as possible they should be prevented from seeing one another. Individual guards will keep a minute diary of their watch. . . . These reports are of the utmost importance and it will be necessary for the guards to keep their eyes and ears highly attuned and observe everything that goes on.45
RCMP criminal investigators Harvison and Anthony, who had by now spent close to three months gathering evidence in the case, handled the interrogations. Harvison, described by one of the accused spies as “a tall, thin, almost cadaverous man with a long bony face,” whose “eyebrows and unshaven tufts on his cheekbones gave him somewhat the appearance of a raccoon,” rose to the occasion.46 He was tough and ruthless in the face of what he saw unambiguously as communist
enemies. Having chased after Fred Rose for years, Harvison was anxious to finally lay hold of some of Rose's agents. (Rose himself was not apprehended at this time, presumably because he was a member of Parliament and the RCMP wanted first to gather evidence against him from his recruits. And Sam Carr, the other Communist Party official who had been running agents, had fled the country.)
Harvison later claimed that he and Anthony carefully explained to the suspects the reasons for their detentions and the authority under which they had been detained. Also, that they told the detainees “it was their right, if they so wished, to refuse to answer questions or provide information.”47 The prisoners’ accounts were much different. Gordon Lunan, who had been detained at Montreal's Dorval Airport on his return from a tour of duty in England, recalled Harvison telling him on their first encounter, “Well, we've tangled with you reds before and you scream your heads off but there is no way you're going to wiggle out of this one. You know why you're here. Are you ready to tell us what you know?” (Harvison later fell back on anti-Semitism, apparently unaware that Lunan's wife was Jewish. “Are you going to stand by,” he asked Lunan, “and let people with names like Rosenberg, Kogan, Mazerall, Rabinovitch, and Halperin sell Canada down the river?”) When Lunan told Harvison he wanted to see his lawyer, Harvison simply told him he had no rights and was obliged to answer all questions.48
Lunan, it will be recalled, had for a few months in 1945 acted as a go-between for GRU colonel Rogov and three of the other accused: Edward Mazerall, Durnford Smith, and Israel Halperin. Because Gouzenko had considerable paper evidence linking Lunan to Soviet espionage, Lunan was considered a key figure in the case. Lunan would say later that he was not an enthusiastic (or effective) participant in this spying venture, which is probably true. He had emigrated from Scotland to Montreal in 1938, when he was in his early twenties, and became active in political movements, such as the leftist Quebec Committee for Allied Victory, before joining the communist Labour Progressive Party. The party then was legal, and Fred Rose, the LPP member of Parliament, was popular and influential. Lunan remembered it as “a period of innocent euphoria during which iron curtains or cold wars would have been laughed off as the ravings of the hard-core right.” In 1945, after Lunan moved to Ottawa to edit a publication for servicemen called Canadian Affairs, Fred Rose invited himself to Lunan's home for dinner one night and asked if he would like to help out the Russians. It had seemed natural to say yes. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to Rogov by Rose's mistress, Freda Linton, who by the time of the commission hearings had left the country and was living in Washington, D.C., under the watchful eye of the FBI (which had not considered the evidence against her sufficient to justify extradition to Canada).49
Lunan had been hoping to get to know the Russians and tell them all about Canadian politics. He was not prepared for the abrupt and secretive manner of Colonel Rogov, who sped around with Lunan in a chauffeur-driven car before giving him his instructions in a white envelope and dumping him out in the street. Rogov was no charmer like Zabotin or Pavlov. He was “shabbily and rather oddly dressed,” thought Lunan, “he certainly did not look like a military man. His un-Canadian pants, wide enough and long enough to hide his shoes, made me think of a New Yorker report that you could easily pick out the Russian secret servicemen in a crowd because they wore their fedoras undented.” Lunan was especially taken aback when Rogov (who called himself Jan) offered him money, which he refused. Lunan would later claim, “Fred Rose screwed me in the whole thing.” He would have backed out of it, he said, except that it would have meant that he had broken a commitment to the party.50
According to Harvison, Lunan readily confessed: “The ‘martyr’ welcomed the opportunity to give a statement and filled a notebook with details of his work for the Soviets.”51 In fact, Lunan at first denied any involvement in spying. Then Harvison confronted him with documents that seemed to incriminate him and told him that others had implicated him (indeed, Mazerall had). According to a report from Ottawa to MI6, “Unfortunately for him [Lunan] he colours easily under shock. He did so when his cover name was quoted to him and when shown Photostat of his first instruction from Grant [Zabotin].”52 After a few days Lunan broke down.
On February 20, another message arrived at MI6 from Ottawa: “After long and delicate interrogation, during which was told of overwhelming evidence against him, LUNAN was finally brought to point where he stated he might be prepared to assist Canadian government and that he could be of great help. He has gone far enough to make retraction difficult and with luck he will make statement tomorrow.” Lunan wrote his confession in the notebook he had been given. By this time he was terrified that, because he was a serviceman, he might even be shot. He felt he had no choice but to confess, and name his sources, if he wanted to see his wife and a lawyer. The next day Ottawa reported success: “LUNAN has confessed completely . . . and has implicated fully SMITH, MAZERALL and HALPERIN.”53
The Royal Commission was supposed to inquire into the extent and nature of the espionage and then hand over a report to the government, which would decide whether to prosecute specific individuals. In other words, the commission was to be a fact-finding body, not a court of law or a punitive agency. Yet it was the commission's lawyers who had written to the Minister of Justice on February 14 requesting that the minister activate the orders for detention and interrogation of the suspects.
The final commission report, issued in the summer of 1946, stated that the commission had no jurisdiction over the interrogation carried out by the RCMP. The report also stated that “the transcription of whatever interrogation took place . . . was not made available to us, nor was it referred to by Counsel, except that in a very few instances in connection with certain points which arose, the witness was referred to statements made by the witness during interrogation.”54
What this meant was that, if suspects denied their guilt before the Royal Commission, they would be reminded of statements they had made to the RCMP, statements supplied in many cases after weeks spent in solitary confinement, with little sleep and no access to lawyers who could advise them on their rights. Thus they frequently broke down and confessed. Confessions, not the prevention of further acts of espionage, were the purpose of the detainment. As one cabinet minister put it, “If we had let them see a lawyer, he would have told them not to talk.”55
If this strategy worked well with Lunan, it worked even better with twenty-five-year-old Emma Woikin. The young woman was hauled out of bed by the RCMP on the morning of February 15. Code-named “Nora” by the GRU, she was by all accounts a pitiful spy. Sobbing her way through Harvison's interrogations, she confessed to everything she was accused of and never even mentioned a lawyer. A former cipher clerk at the Canadian Department of External Affairs, Woikin had come to Ottawa from Saskatchewan two years earlier, after the suicide of her husband and the subsequent death of her baby. Her parents were Russian Doukhobors, and she herself spoke Russian. Alone in the “big city” of Ottawa, anxious to find friends, and still emotionally overwrought over her personal tragedies, she had gravitated to the Federation of Russian Canadians, where Soviet Embassy employees maintained an active presence. According to an official at the Department of External Affairs who rented a room to Woikin, she was “a highly emotional, maladjusted and unstable person, with a naïve and child-like sense of values and in need of a simple, direct object of admiration and devotion.”56
Woikin found that object of admiration when she became acquainted with Major Vsevolod Sokolov from the Soviet Embassy, whose charms won her over. Sokolov, described as “an attractive man with an intelligent face, an easy manner, and a look of coiled energy that suggested sexuality,” invited Woikin to his house, where he lived with his wife, Lida. With the sanction of Zabotin, they met frequently. Sokolov gave the young woman expensive perfume and made her feel important. He also told her about how wonderful life was in the Soviet Union, where poverty, he said, did not exist. Before long Sokolov asked Woikin if she w
ould like to help the Russians, which she enthusiastically agreed to do. She was enamored with everything Russian (including Major Sokolov) and happy to help.57
Woikin memorized the contents of telegrams she was instructed to decipher at External Affairs and then made written summaries. Lida Sokolov, who began meeting Woikin for coffee, passed these on to her husband. On one occasion, however, the arrangements were more elaborate. Woikin was instructed to go to a washroom next to a suite of dentists’ offices. She taped her documents to the underside of a porcelain toilet-tank cover, where they were later retrieved by an embassy chauffeur.58 Canadian authorities refused, on grounds of national security, to release the contents of four of these “top-secret reports” (in Woikin's handwriting), which Gouzenko had stolen from the Soviet Embassy. When Woikin's summaries were finally declassified almost forty years later, it emerged that none of the information she transmitted to the Sokolovs could have been of any value to the Soviets. Based on communications between Canada's Department of External Affairs and the British Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in London, the four reports summarized brief discussions of political conditions in Austria and Eastern Europe (which could have been read in any newspaper) and a discussion on Spain between the Soviet ambassador to Britain and the British foreign minister. This was hardly the stuff of serious espionage. But the information was secret, and Woikin therefore had violated the law in revealing it to her Russian friends.59
Lida Sokolov told Woikin in mid-September 1945 that they could not meet anymore because there was “some trouble.” A week or so later Woikin was transferred from the cipher division. Nonetheless, when the RCMP rousted her out of bed on the morning of February 15, it came as a complete shock. Just three days after Woikin's arrest, the RCMP was able to report that she had confessed and dictated a statement. She even admitted to having accepted a present of fifty dollars from Lida Sokolov. The RCMP, in a secret telegram sent to MI6, clearly understood that Woikin was more a victim than a spy: “This is a pathetic case. Canadian of Russian parentage, she lived in considerable poverty. Her newborn child apparently died of lack of medical care and her husband committed suicide. In resultant nervous condition she was therefore fair game to diplomatic representatives of Soviet Union – particularly after she had found employment in cipher room of External Affairs. Conscious of her origins and vaguely believing she might assist political system, under which she was led to believe poverty did not exist, she agreed to work for them.”60 This understanding of Woikin's extenuating circumstances did not prevent the RCMP from giving her a good working-over at the Rockcliffe Barracks. Like Lunan, she was led to believe she might be executed for her crimes.
