How the Cold War Began

by Amy Knight

  Lunan seems to have regretted his statements incriminating Smith, which were elicited at the Rockcliffe Barracks when he was under extreme duress and in fear of being executed for treason.

  Indeed, according to one source, he was “sickened” to discover that he had implicated Smith, along with his other two recruits, Mazerall and Halperin. Lunan refused to testify at Smith's trial, but by then it was too late. The prosecution was able to use his earlier statements as evidence.61

  As before, it was not clear whether the information Smith gave to the Soviets was particularly valuable, despite the fact that much of it was classified as secret. Apparently the GRU photographed it and sent it to Moscow, but this does not necessarily mean it was important. Zabotin and his colleagues were not scientists and would not have been able to evaluate the significance of what they got from Smith. And they seem to have been unclear about what Smith did, asking him at one point to supply them with uranium-235, when his research had nothing to do with uranium or the atomic bomb. But Smith did violate the Official Secrets Act, and for that he paid dearly, spending the next five years in prison. After serving his sentence, he eventually gained his doctorate and taught physics at the University of New Brunswick.

  Israel Halperin, described in an MI6 telegram as “shaken but slippery,” also refused to talk, thus making it especially difficult for the RCMP and the Royal Commission because they had very little evidence against him. As noted earlier, Halperin had never provided documents to Gordon Lunan and was shocked when he was asked for a sample of uranium-235. (Again, the request was pointless, because Halperin was a professor of mathematics, not a physicist.) The documents from Gouzenko showed that, as was so often the case, the GRU had an extensive shopping list and had earmarked Halperin, whom they code-named “Bacon,” as one of the sources of information. But it is clear that there was a huge gap between what the GRU wanted and what it got.

  From Halperin, they obtained nothing beyond verbal information about Canadian Army research on explosives, which Halperin furnished to Lunan in April 1945. Lunan wrote up the information in a one-and-a-half-page report.62 The Royal Commissioners observed “we have been told that this information conveyed to Lunan by Halperin was of a highly secret nature.” But Halperin did not consider it secret and even advised Lunan (who edited a magazine for the armed services) to go directly to his chief and ask for the information. Lunan, however, demurred: “I advised him that this was not wise as I do not wish to show any official interest in this field until and unless we decide to do an article on it. He claims there is no particular secrecy about the set-up, but I persuaded him to give me the whole report on the matter.”63

  Lunan continued to press Halperin for written information, but Halperin consistently refused. As Lunan reported to his GRU controllers: “It is impossible to get anything from him except . . . verbal descriptions, and I am not in a position to understand everything fully where it concerns technical details.” In his memoirs, Lunan was more explicit about where Halperin stood: “I soon came to realize that he was an unwitting victim who had no intention of becoming involved in what after all could be construed as technically illegal even if he was in general supportive of the Russians as allies and in favor of the sharing of scientific knowledge.”64 In the end, Halperin begged off entirely.

  The Royal Commission had ordered Halperin's arrest simply because his name appeared in the Russian documents. Lunan's subsequent admission that he had met with Halperin, though no proof that Halperin had violated the Official Secrets Act, was taken as additional evidence against him. Halperin had returned to teaching at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, when the RCMP arrested him at dawn on February 15, 1946. Married and the father of three small children, Halperin, whose parents were Russian Jews, had already achieved considerable prominence in the field of mathematics. Born in Montreal in 1911, he had received his doctorate in 1936 from Princeton, a renowned center for mathematics that attracted scholars from all over the world.

  As Halperin later described his years at Princeton: “It seemed to me we were all monks in a monastery, all working with the purest motives to discover mathematics and to share it with others. . . . Those were the days when refugees were coming out of Europe, and those in mathematics seemed to head first for Princeton, because the Institute and the University's math department were both there. It was a tremendous concentration of talent. There was hardly a day that in the common room we wouldn't see a new face and ask who that was, and the answer would be some mathematician we'd heard of, who was a great researcher.”65 In the course of a distinguished teaching career at Queen's and later the University of Toronto, Halperin would publish more than one hundred scientific papers.

  Like Smith, Halperin insisted upon having a lawyer present when he was brought before the Royal Commission and refused to be sworn in. When told by the commissioners that they could force him to testify, he asked, “Does that include physical intimidation?” Halperin finally was allowed to have counsel, but he nonetheless refused to answer the commissioners’ questions, declaring after six days, “I will not open my mouth here again.” According to an MI6 report, he “attempted to leave [the] room and was restrained.”66 The commissioners deemed him guilty, and he was charged in court with conspiracy to violate the Official Secrets Act.

  Halperin's arrest shocked the scientific community in North America, which launched a campaign on his behalf. In Canada, theoretical physicist Leopold Infeld, a professor at the University of Toronto and a firm opponent of keeping atomic research secret, spearheaded the movement for the acquittal and release of Halperin, along with that of David Shugar. In the United States, a group of physicists from Princeton and mit, including Albert Einstein, addressed a petition to Prime Minister King asking for a fair trial for Halperin: “Professor Halperin is known to the undersigned, not only as a mathematician of high standing, but also as a man of the greatest integrity. We find it impossible to believe that he is guilty of any real breach of trust or honor.” The petition went on to say that, even if Halperin had given general information to a fellow army officer about a weapon already in wide battle use, it would be only a technical violation of security regulations: “Such ‘violations’ were common occurrences among civilian scientists and army officers alike, in the normal process of cutting red tape. If such formal matters are considered crimes then almost every Army officer or scientist engaged in war research is guilty of crime.”67

  Although Halperin was acquitted in March 1947, this was not enough to clear his name. Once he and the others had been deemed guilty by the commission, which published its final report in July 1946, they would always be under a shadow of suspicion. The commission eventually printed an addendum to the published copies of its final report, noting in June 1947 that nine of the people accused of passing secrets had been acquitted by the courts. But the commissioners left the impression that this was because the court was constrained by legal technicalities that excluded valid evidence against the suspects: “It should not be assumed that in any case the evidence before the Royal Commission and that adduced in the criminal proceedings were the same.”68

  The FBI apparently concurred. In March 1947, FBI agents interviewed Halperin's former roommate at Princeton, John Blewett, and his wife, Hilda, both American physicists who had been offered positions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and were waiting for security clearances. John Blewett recalled that the FBI agents were “vividly” interested in Halperin: “The thing I remember most is they said, ‘What do you think of your friend Halperin now’ And I said, ‘I don't think he's guilty.’” The Blewetts’ clearance was held up for months.69

  Meanwhile, Halperin had had to fight for his job at Queen's University, where members of the board of trustees tried, unsuccessfully, to have him dismissed for “impropriety.” After this baptism of fire as one of the first victims of the Red Scare, Halperin not only went on to earn his reputation as one of Canada's most prominent mathematicians, he also became a tireless
human rights advocate for scientists, and in 1999 received an award from the New York Academy of Sciences for his decades-long work to achieve freedom for repressed scientists around the world.70

  Lunan's refusal to testify at Halperin's trial was of course a great help to the defense because it obliged the prosecution to rely on the Royal Commission transcripts, where Halperin had refused to implicate himself. But the incriminating testimonies of others before the commission were used at their trials. The defense lawyers in several of the spy cases tried to have the Royal Commission transcripts disallowed as evidence in court, because the defendants had been without counsel and had not been warned about self-incrimination. In addition, as attorney Joseph Cohen pointed out, the commission had free use of RCMP interrogation transcripts and counseled repeatedly with the RCMP throughout the hearings. No cross-examinations were permitted. While all these factors caused outrage among civil liberties advocates, the courts allowed the transcripts to be used as evidence in all cases.

  Why did the courts favor the prosecution on these issues? First, the motions were without precedent, having never before been confronted in a Canadian court, and the judges were reluctant to question the legality of actions of the federal government under the authority of an Order-in-Council. Second, the judges seemed to think that since the nation was in jeopardy and the security of Canada was at stake, the normal judicial process could be ignored. In the words of one scholar, “The judges who presided over the spy trials were unanimous in their belief that an emergency justified circumventing certain aspects of the legal process. While this was consistent with the court's practice during the war, it is significant that they chose to extend the same principle to a commission that had elicited confessions from suspects detained by the government in peacetime.”71

  Thanks to the public debate over civil liberties that arose in Canada in response to the spy trials, the government was challenged in its claim that a threat to national security justified the abrogation of certain fundamental legal rights. And civil liberties advocates launched a broad movement for the creation of a Canadian Bill of Rights to avoid such violations in the future. Canada was forced to face, head-on, the crucial problem of balancing national security with individual rights. Nonetheless, as a result of the whole chain reaction Gouzenko's defection had unleashed, innocent lives had crumbled, brilliant careers were destroyed, and Canada had been thrown into a spy frenzy. While the excesses began with the RCMP roundup and Royal Commission hearings, they would soon take on a more sinister aspect as they spilled over to Canada's southern neighbor.

  Chapter 7

  THE RIGHT WING UNLEASHED

  My loyalties, emotional and intellectual, are for my country, but my training as a scientist and as an American impose upon me the necessity to weigh and to question actions. This I have done and will continue to do.

  Dr. Arthur Steinberg, responding to questions by the International Organizations Loyalty Review Board, 1964

  Unlike some defectors, Gouzenko did not disappear into obscurity after he told his secrets. Following Rose's pretrial hearings, he appeared as the key witness in the Canadian spy trials of 1946 and 1947 and later testified twice before U.S. Senate subcommittees. Gouzenko's allegations in 1945 took on a life of their own, implicating many people who were not directly connected with the Ottawa GRU net and arousing suspicions against many more. Every time Gouzenko spoke up, the list of possible spies got longer, especially in the United States. The repercussions would be felt for more than a decade.

  Because the documents Gouzenko produced were confusing and complex, as well as being questionable as evidence, the prosecution in the Canadian spy trials needed Gouzenko to explain them and provide background. As he testified, Gouzenko was steady and composed, even when cross-examined for two days by the formidable defense attorney Joseph Cohen in the Fred Rose trial, which took place in June 1946. According to one observer at that trial, where guards were positioned around the courtroom to take on would-be assassins, he “was an exceedingly good witness and stood up very well under cross-examination.”1

  Gouzenko went over yet again the dramatic details of his efforts to defect, and testified at great length about the evils of the Stalinist system and the intention of the Soviet Union to wage war against the West. All this was meant to give credibility to Gouzenko and divert the jury's attention from the awkward fact that he had transmitted information from Rose's recruits to the GRU in Moscow. Gouzenko was, technically speaking, a co-conspirator with those tried for passing secrets, but one who had changed sides and become an ardent foe of the country he had spied for.

  Cohen, who had declined to question Gouzenko at Fred Rose's preliminary hearing, had since been able to study all Gouzenko's statements. He set about attacking the star witness's credibility. Cohen made a special effort to trip up Gouzenko on the question of why he did not approach the RCMP after he decided to defect. He began by asking Gouzenko if he had known about the RCMP before he came to Canada. The witness responded that indeed he had been interested in the RCMP since boyhood and had even bought books about them here in Canada. Asked why he had not gone directly to the RCMP for asylum, Gouzenko replied, as Cohen expected, that he thought the RCMP might have been infiltrated by spies. Cohen professed to find this incredible: “You have told us that you knew the high reputation of the Mounted Police. You claim that you were in great fear for your safety and for that of your family. . . . And you expect us to believe that you avoided the police because you thought there might be a spy in their ranks?” While Cohen paused for breath Gouzenko seized the moment: “He nodded toward the accused, Fred Rose, and said in a loud, clear voice, ‘Why not? There was one in Parliament.’ There were no further questions from the defense.”2

  Fred Rose was found guilty after the jury deliberated only thirty minutes. His sentence was six years in prison. In a bitter letter written the next month to Justice Minister St. Laurent, protesting the fact that he was not allowed bail pending his appeal, Rose claimed that the RCMP's Harvison, a key behind-the-scenes player for the prosecution, had a vendetta against him because he campaigned throughout the war to expose Harvison's “vicious anti-Sovietism.” And then there was the fact that Rose was Jewish. According to Rose, although a dozen or so Jews were among the panel of over one hundred persons called for jury service at his trial, “hardly was a Jewish name called when Mr. Brais [the prosecutor] said ‘stand aside.’” Rose claimed that “Mr. Brais, in a manner that could hardly add dignity to a Canadian court, played around with the name Rose- Rosenberg. And this hardly a year after the victory over the Nazi barbarians who murdered six million Jews!”3

  Making matters worse for Rose, the Canadian Communist Party (the LPP), on orders from the Soviets, made it clear he was on his own and was not to implicate the party in his defense. Rose, a loyal communist who believed the party came first, was out in the cold. Not surprisingly, his appeal was rejected at the end of 1946 and he was sent to a penitentiary. In 1951, after serving his term, Rose returned to Montreal and his family. But he was an outcast, unwelcome in the Communist Party and shunned by old friends. His attempt at reviving his former trade as an electrician failed. After two years he left Canada for his native Poland, never to set foot on Canadian soil again.4

  By the time Gordon Lunan came up for trial in November 1946, Gouzenko was indomitable. Cohen, again, was the defense lawyer, but Lunan thought he did poorly: “J.L. [Cohen] barely cross-examined the key witness, who, of course was Gouzenko. Igor was in better shape physically and emotionally than J.L. and had had ten months of coaching and rehearsal.”5 Cohen put forth several arguments in defense of his client, including that the documents in evidence against Lunan had been stolen and belonged to the Soviets, which made them inadmissible. Also, Lunan was charged with conspiracy to violate the Official Secrets Act, but the individuals he was alleged to have conspired with, Colonels Zabotin and Rogov, were beyond the geographical and legal jurisdiction of the court. Finally, Cohen noted in a pointed ref
erence to Gouzenko, “the Crown [has] no right to proceed with [a] charge of conspiracy against Lunan if some person or persons known to the Crown to have been associated with the conspiracy, are not being proceeded against.”6 But Lunan had confessed early on that he was an agent of the GRU, so he had already sealed his fate – a five-year prison sentence.

  As successful as the prosecution was at using Gouzenko, the result in terms of convictions was unimpressive. Only seven of the original thirteen suspects arrested were found guilty in the courts, receiving sentences ranging from two and a half to five years. In addition, a doctor named Samuel Soboloff received a fine for helping to procure a false passport for Ignacy Witczak. But three others – Henry Harris, William Pappin, and Agatha Chapman – who were rounded up after mid-February by the RCMP were acquitted.

  An acquittal, of course, did not mean that life was back to normal. As one journalist observed, “They were held and questioned without knowing what the charges were or able to see lawyers. By the time they came to trial their names and pictures and what they had allegedly done were published as truth in Canada and around the world.”7 For many, the trauma and humiliation were difficult to bear. This was particularly true for Chapman, a talented and successful young economist who had received a master's degree from the University of Toronto and was working at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Her name did not come up in the Gouzenko documents, but she knew several of the accused spies, who participated in Marxist study groups held at her home on Somerset Street in Ottawa, just a few blocks from where the Gouzenkos lived. In her testimony before the Royal Commission, Kathleen Willsher, who belonged to one of the study groups, claimed Chapman was a secret GRU contact, so the RCMP arrested her. Despite her eventual acquittal, Chapman lost her job, and the publicity was such that she felt compelled to leave Canada for several years. In the early 1960s, she took her own life.8