How the Cold War Began

by Amy Knight

  May's attorney, not surprisingly, tried to downplay the value of the material May passed on to the Russians, claiming that at most May might have enabled the Russians to speed up their atomic research slightly. In fact, May's contribution to Soviet knowledge of the atomic bomb was minimal, if not completely without value. Shortly after the spy case broke, May's superior in Montreal, John Cockcroft, was asked to assess the possible damage that he caused to the allies’ national security, particularly concerning the atomic bomb. In addition to having access to samples of uranium, Cockcroft said, May had knowledge of experiments with isotopes of uranium, which could have helped the Soviets in developing a chemical separation process. May also had knowledge of the design of the experimental plant at Chalk River, but that was not of major importance, and even May's visits to American atomic facilities would not have been all that useful for his reports. Cockcroft also said that May could have given the Russians information of far greater value had he chosen to.61

  Somewhat later, in September 1946, the Americans asked the Canadians to assess for them the military information disclosed as a result of the Gouzenko case. In response, G.J. Mackenzie, president of the National Research Council, came up with a detailed reply. With regard to atomic energy, nothing was disclosed beyond what was already published in the famous Smyth Report issued by the U.S. government on August 12, 1945, and entitled “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes.” Furthermore, noted Mackenzie, “It is possible that a minute quantity of plutonium may have been obtained, but we have no definite knowledge. There has never been at any time any information about the bomb in Canada, and no information could possibly have been obtained from this country.”62

  Alan Nunn May was sentenced on May 1, 1946, to ten years’ hard labor. Had he given evidence to MI5 on other Soviet agents, either in Canada or Great Britain, his sentence would probably have been lighter. But May, like Raymond Boyer, had acted out of political conviction, which he presumably held on to.

  May was released from prison in 1952, after six years. During his incarceration, his scientific colleagues continued their association with him and saw to it that his research work was published. After his release, May returned to Cambridge and married Hilde Broda, a young doctor. He was blacklisted from university faculties, but he apparently was able to catch up on the field of theoretical physics and to conduct research in a private scientific laboratory. Form 1961 to 1978, he worked as a researcher in solid-state physics in Ghana, where his wife started a new career in medicine. May then moved with his family back to Cambridge, where he lived a very private life. He died in 2003.

  Shortly before his death, May taped an extraordinary confession, which a family member relayed to the British press.63 He had never spoken out about his spying before and evidently wanted to set the record straight. He revealed that, in 1942, while conducting his military- related research, he had received a U.S. report stating that the Nazis were about to produce radioactive “dirty bombs” (which turned out to be false). Worried about the consequences for Britain's ally, the Soviet Union, which was under heavy attack by the Nazis, he decided to warn the Soviets through his contacts in the British Communist Party. Henceforth, he was considered a Soviet recruit and was later approached for information on the atomic bomb while he was in Canada. In his words, “It seemed to me that [the Soviets] ought to be informed, so I decided to provide information.”

  A simple enough decision, but a fatal one. May's spying did more than ruin his promising career. It contributed to the deepening rift between the Soviets and the West and to the defeat of the movement to internationalize control of atomic secrets. Had it not been for him, the only atomic scientist among the GRU recruits in Canada, the Gouzenko case might never have caused the sensation it did.

  With May's sentencing, and the conviction of Kathleen Willsher, who had been in British employ in Ottawa, the formal involvement of the British in the Gouzenko case was pretty much over. But that did not stop MI5 and MI6 from closely following the hearings and trials in Canada. New information and important revelations continued to flow from the testimony by Gouzenko, the defendants, and other witnesses. And there was still the question of the spy Gouzenko had said was in the British secret service. This issue had been shelved at MI5 and MI6 when all the attention turned to Alan Nunn May and the arrests in Canada. But it would eventually resurface.

  Chapter 6

  ANTI-COMMUNIST AGENDAS

  I had no intention to skip. Whatever the consequences, I meant to go through with it, having enough faith that the good people of Canada will in the days to come get a much better insight into the politics behind the spy trials.

  Fred Rose, letter to Canadian justice minister Louis St. Laurent, July 1946

  At 11 p.m. on March 14, 1946, just hours after Fred Rose appeared in the Canadian Parliament for the first session of the new year, the RCMP arrived at his Beechwood Avenue apartment in Ottawa. Rose was on the telephone with a correspondent from the Toronto Daily Star who had called to ask him about rumors that he was about to be arrested: “Well, I haven't been,” said Rose. “Here I am.” Then he interrupted himself: “Oh, oh. Two men have just come in.” “Police?” asked the reporter. “Of course.” According to Rose's wife, Fanny, who had arrived earlier that day from Montreal to watch the Parliament's opening session, there was “never so much as a knock. . . . They just came in and took Fred away.”1

  The Star reporter hurried over to the Rose apartment to talk to Fanny. After dabbing her red eyes and accepting a cigarette, she told the reporter, “He was an ideal father to our daughter Laura, who is nine and a half. She was so excited about my trip here to Parliament. She kept asking me what I was going to wear . . . and now look what has happened.” There was a bottle of wine sitting on the table; the Roses had been about to open it in celebration of Fanny's visit. “He is a very good man, Fred is,” she continued. “I have been married to him for 18 years and I know.”2

  At 4 a.m. the next morning, thirty-eight-year-old Rose was arraigned by a magistrate in a Montreal court and bail was set at ten thousand dollars. The prosecutor claimed that a car bearing a Michigan license plate was parked outside Rose's apartment at the time of the arrest and suggested that a plan was afoot to whisk him across the border. According to the Star, “Rose, short and dapper in gray suit and gabardine coat, appeared calm, but not unconscious of the excitement which seemed to pervade the small, crowded courtroom. He looked straight ahead as photographers’ flash-bulbs popped on every side, but as the flashes continued from unexpected corners, he broke into an embarrassed laugh and shrugged appealingly to the photographers.”3

  Mackenzie King was relieved when he heard about Rose. He and his advisers had been concerned that Rose would not leave the parliamentary grounds, where, as an mp, he was immune from arrest. Rose (code-named “Debouz” by the GRU) had not been detained in mid-February along with the other spy suspects; if the RCMP, and the King government, were seen to be detaining a member of Parliament without a formal charge in an effort to coerce him into confessing, it would have caused a public uproar. In fact just a couple of weeks earlier, both Norman Robertson and commission counsel Williams had expressed the view to the RCMP's Charles Rivett-Carnac that it would be better if Rose were to disappear altogether. As Williams said, “It would relieve a very embarrassing situation.” Rivett-Carnac and his colleagues had been strongly disapproving. Given that Rose was one of the chief instigators of the spying, they felt he should be made to account for his crime.4

  The RCMP got its way. Without a confession, the initial evidence against Rose from Gouzenko was weak, but once the other GRU recruits incriminated him there seemed to be ample evidence to justify an arrest. The arrest was carefully planned to coincide with the tabling in Parliament of the Royal Commission's second interim report on the espionage case. Raymond Boyer had given testimony before the commission that deeply implicated Rose in the GRU spying effort, although the report itself did not mention Rose by name.

  Thi
s latest drama in the Canadian spy case aroused tremendous reaction south of the border. The Canadian Embassy in Washington reported that in the United States the “press from every region front-paged the arrest of Fred Rose and charges against the four scientists.” The Rose case was an all-time first in the West. Never before had a publicly elected official been charged with spying for the Soviets. And the fact that the official in question was a prominent leader of the Canadian Communist Party made the case even more significant; it confirmed the direct connection between indigenous communist parties and the Soviet intelligence services. As for the four scientists added by the Royal Commission to its public list of spy suspects, although the interim report mentioned only that they had passed military information to the Soviets, the impression conveyed in the American press was that the atomic secret was out.5

  The American press was quick to draw inferences from the unfolding spy case. The New York Journal-American, under a caption “How Many of These Are in the U.S.?” printed a large picture of Fred Rose accompanied by the statement in the interim report that some suspects “holding strategic positions” admitted that “they had a loyalty which took priority over the loyalty owed by them to their own country.” According to a message to Ottawa from the Canadian Embassy in Washington, the statement about loyalty “was seized upon” by members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) and the Military Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate “to reinforce their demands for a thorough housecleaning of the State Department.”6

  Even before these alarming new developments, the spy scare in the United States – which had begun with the announcement of the Canadian case in mid-February 1946 – had been growing in intensity, giving impetus to a wave of anti-communist measures. HUAC began investigating possible leaks of information at the U.S. military's atomic research complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the U.S. Army ordered that all officers with “subversive” views be moved out of positions of trust. Most significant of all, especially for the future of East-West relations, the movement for civilian control of the bomb and for international cooperation in atomic research suffered a new and devastating setback. Until early 1946, the so-called McMahon Bill, which placed atomic energy under the control of a civilian Atomic Energy Commission, had enjoyed strong public support and stood a good chance of being passed by the U.S. Senate. Once news of the Canadian espionage case came out, support for the bill plummeted. In March, General Leslie Groves testified before the Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, and “used the spy scandal to cast doubt upon the wisdom of giving sole control over atomic energy to civilians.” The committee voted six to one in favor of an amendment giving the military jurisdiction over almost all phases of atomic energy research.7 The newly formed Federation of Atomic Scientists, which had lobbied strongly for the McMahon Bill, voiced strenuous opposition to the amendment, but to no avail. In the words of one historian, “Despite the scientists’ insistence that there were no real atomic secrets to be lost, the news from Canada revived barely submerged beliefs that espionage posed the most serious threat to the U.S. atomic monopoly.”8

  That several of those named by Gouzenko, including Boyer and Nunn May, were prominent scholars who had been active in the left-wing Canadian Association of Scientific Workers (which also advocated international control of the bomb) made a deep impression in official Washington. Henceforth their colleagues in the United States would no longer be trusted. Scientists who advocated an internationalist approach were automatically considered secret friends of the Soviets.9

  In Canada, the Royal Commission's claim that some of the spy suspects had admitted allegiance to the Soviet Union gave the concern about internal subversion a new urgency. Canadian-based New York Times reporter P.J. Philip reported that the “alien loyalty” issue had “profoundly moved this country, in which national consciousness and loyalty are relatively new developments.” It was only recently, Philip pointed out, that a single Canadian patriotism had emerged from conflicting allegiances. “Now suddenly and alarmingly there has developed evidence of a loyalty to a political doctrine and foreign national system that has nothing in common with Canadian liberty.”10

  In fact, as the spy case demonstrated, most Canadians did not have a single, undivided allegiance to their country. Canada had not gained independence from Britain until 1867, almost one hundred years after the U.S., and it was still a member of the Commonwealth. The Anglo-Canadians, who predominated in the government, were often far-removed in cultural, economic, and political terms from the mainly Catholic French Canadians of Quebec. Indeed, French Canadians had their own sense of national identity, and many wanted Quebec to have more autonomy. (Significantly, the French-language media paid scant attention to the espionage affair. In one of the rare articles on the subject, a Catholic newspaper drew the conclusion that, since the spies were mainly English-speaking Canadians, it showed that the French were morally superior.)11 As for the Canadian West, its sense of Canadian patriotism was so weak that successive prime ministers up to the time of Mackenzie King had worried that the region might try to secede and join the United States.

  Canada was a huge, sparsely populated, polyglot country composed of different ethnic groups, many of them comprising recent immigrants without strong feelings of patriotism. In Montreal, where several of the spy suspects lived, linguistic, ethnic, and religious divisions were deeply aggravated by rising labor discontent and the growth of urban slums. Widespread anti-Semitism, in a city with a large population of Jews from Eastern Europe, added an additional dimension to the prevailing social disharmony, drawing members of the Jewish intellectual, cultural, and scientific elite, and also working-class Jews, toward radical leftist politics.

  Fred Rose, a working-class Jew, was a direct product of this environment of political pluralism and ethnic ferment. Born Fred Rosenberg in Lublin, Poland, Rose had immigrated to Montreal with his Jewish parents in 1920, at age thirteen. He trained as an electrician, but soon was spending most of his time promoting international communism. After joining the Soviet-sponsored Young Communist League in 1925, Rose became an agitator and propagandist for the party. A 1928 RCMP dossier on twenty-one-year-old Rose (still known then as Rosenberg), described him as five feet four inches tall, with brown hair and dark blue eyes, “very talkative and inclined to speak quickly.” According to the dossier, his ability as an agitator was impressive: “Is a good speaker and commands the interest of his audiences. Also [a] good organizer. Has his whole heart in communism.”12

  In 1930, Rose was selected as a representative of the ycl of Canada for training in Moscow, where he spent six months. (He told Canadian authorities he was headed for Germany, along with two other Canadian students. But on the ship bound for Europe, one of them blurted out their secret plan to travel to the Soviet Union and the news got back to the RCMP.)13 The Soviets were skilled both at training and indoctrinating young foreign recruits, and at shielding them from the grim realities of Stalinist life. Rose doubtless saw little of the long bread lines, and never heard about the millions of peasants who were dying as a result of Moscow's efforts to force them into collective farms. His Soviet trainers would have filled his head with lofty notions about the ultimate goals of communism and convinced him of the evils of the capitalist system, which he was to convey to the proletariat back in Canada.

  After Rose's return to Montreal in late 1930, he became a paid party functionary and threw himself into his mission of spreading the communist word. It did not take long before he was arrested on charges of sedition (specifically, he was accused of trying to incite a crowd to revolt against the government) and sentenced to a year in prison. The ordeal did nothing to dampen Rose's commitment to the communist cause, despite the fact that he had a wife and small daughter to take care of. Upon his release in 1932, he resumed his public speaking and wrote and distributed pamphlets glorifying the Soviet Union and castigating the “imperialist” powers of the United States and Britain, along with their “junior partner,” Canada. Rose wen
t into hiding when the Canadian Communist Party was outlawed in June 1940 and an order was issued for his arrest. He reemerged in 1942 and that year reportedly approached Zabotin's predecessor in Ottawa, Major Sokolov, with a request to work for the GRU. Sokolov then contacted the GRU rezident in New York, Pavel Mikhailov, who oversaw GRU operations in North America. Mikhailov was able to provide Rose's bona fides, and Rose was put in charge of the GRU's Montreal group, which included Raymond Boyer and Harold Gerson. The next year, in August 1943, Rose ran for election to the Canadian Parliament and won. To Mikhailov, this was important news, and immediately he sent a telegram to the director of the GRU in Moscow: “Fred, our man in LESOVIA [code name for Canada], has been elected to the lesovian parliament.”14

  As a recruiter for the Soviets, Rose was one of the GRU's most important Canadian agents. But he was playing a dangerous game. What made him embark on the life of a spy when he was having such success as a leader of the Canadian Communist Party? That Rose was duped by the Soviets into thinking their country was a glorious utopia may not seem surprising if considered in light of his experience in Canada as a working-class Jew from Eastern Europe. But his decision to spy for the GRU is more difficult to fathom. Rose's participation in the GRU's espionage effort was to prove catastrophic for the Canadian Communist Party. When it became known that he and party organizer Sam Carr – two of the party's leaders – had been directly involved in spying, support for the party, not surprisingly, plummeted, and its political agenda was completely discredited. As one historian put it, “With their slavish loyalty to Moscow the Communists not only shot themselves in the foot as a party; they also harmed the entire Canadian Left, non-Communist as well as Communist.”15

  In fact, three years before Rose's arrest for spying for the GRU, Mikhailov sent a word of warning to Moscow that he wanted passed on to the GRU in Ottawa: they should be “increasing caution to the maximum” with regard to Rose. Mikhailov clearly saw the dangers of having a high-profile communist and a politician like Rose participate in the Soviets’ espionage operations. If Rose were to be exposed, it would damage not only the Communist Party, but also the GRU, including Mikhailov, who had helped his colleagues in Canada to organize their network.