by Amy Knight
Meanwhile, with much fanfare, the Royal Commission released its final report in July 1946. It was distributed throughout the world. Whatever judicial verdicts were forthcoming, they did not deter the commission from coming to its own conclusions about the guilt of the spy suspects. And the report, which read like a spy thriller, with code names and Russian documents and testimony from Gouzenko, left the impression that the pronouncements of the Royal Commission were definitive.
Writing for the Saturday Evening Post, Sidney Shallet called the report “one of the most remarkable documents of its kind ever made public.” It “clearly established the methodical intent of the Russians to pry out every bit of private information the western allies possessed, including the facts on the bomb.” The widespread conclusion in Washington, according to Shallet, was that the Soviets were similarly spying in the United States, but on a much larger scale. “Canada,” pointed out Shallet, “is a country of 12,000,000 whose war secrets were infinitesimal compared with ours. The Russian diplomatic corps and other representatives there numbered about 190. The United States is a country of more than 130,000,000, center of the atomic-bomb development and other of the war's greatest secrets, and the Russians have more than 1,000 diplomatic and other representatives here.”9
A British diplomat at the High Commission in Ottawa, in an unsigned message to London, was more discerning. He described the report as “a brilliant study . . . a most readable document and misses no point in the drama of the story.” Nonetheless, “One cannot avoid the impression that the attempt to give dramatic effect has led at times to unjustifiably extravagant language; the search for brilliance has not necessarily always led to an impartial judicial conclusion. Indeed, on close examination it appears remarkable at times that the document should have been issued over the signatures of two judges of the Supreme Court.”10
By way of illustration, the diplomat noted that the judges inappropriately used epithets (such as “undeniably,” “unhesitatingly,” “extremely”) throughout the report. Secondly, their personal views came through. They wrote of Gouzenko, “We have been impressed with the sincerity of the man and with the manner in which he gave his evidence which we have no hesitation in accepting.” By contrast, David Shugar, for example, was an “evasive witness . . . he exhibited that same concealment and air of furtiveness shown by other witnesses.” And thirdly, the British diplomat noted, “the report states as facts what can, on the evidence, only be regarded as inferences drawn from them.” The library of Eric Adams, ransacked by the RCMP, was reported to be “literally full of Communist books.” Adams also had materials on civil liberties, which led the commissioners to conclude that “Adams was interested in civil liberties, but solely from the Communist point of view.”
The British diplomat also had doubts about Gouzenko: “The point still remains that the whole story hangs on the single thread of Gouzenko's evidence and on the documents which he produced. . . . But he was merely a subordinate official who was probably very far from knowing anything like all the story and yet the Commissioners tended to see the whole matter through Gouzenko's eyes. . . . This criticism might perhaps not have been so valid had not the Commissioners themselves fallen into the trap of writing their report in such a manner as to give the appearance that they regarded Gouzenko's evidence as statements of fact.”
As for the judicial aspects of the Royal Commission Report, again the diplomat had strong reservations, noting, as had others, that the commission constituted itself as a judicial tribunal, trying people suspected of illegal activities, but without charging them with a crime. The comments that the commissioners made in their report, a public document, would inevitably be prejudicial to the suspects in formal judicial proceedings.
What about the longer term consequences of the Gouzenko affair? The diplomat observed that Canadians felt pride that their country had taken such a strong and independent line in an internationally important matter, but “this feeling was mingled to some extent with an uneasiness that, if this was the price of being a great power, then many Canadians would prefer [Canada] to remain as she was.” What was the price? The disquieting abuses of civil liberties in a country that considered itself a democracy. The shock and scare of learning that their erstwhile ally, the Soviets, were plotting against them. And the worry that the deepening rift with the Soviet Union would make Canada a focal point of Soviet aggression – that Canada, lacking the military resources of a great power and with a huge expanse of open borders, would be in the line of first attack.
Mackenzie King was still trying to handle the whole Gouzenko matter as delicately as possible, but once the Royal Commission's final report came out, his task became especially difficult. When he received the report on July 12, 1946, King confided in his diary, “It is a huge volume. I am sorry for this. I am afraid it will be made use of by Russia as an effort on the part of Canada to destroy Communism and may hinder rather than further the object we have in mind.”11
Not only did the report discuss Vitalii Pavlov's role as head of the NKVD at the embassy, it also named five others who were still employed there and had allegedly engaged in espionage. Clearly these individuals could not remain in Canada after being publicly identified as spies, but King wanted to avoid a formal request that they leave. Instead, he asked for an interview with the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Nikolai Belokhvostikov, to suggest that the embassy employees return to the Soviet Union before the report was released three days later. According to King's diary, Belokhvostikov “coloured up quite a bit” when King mentioned the additional names. Belokhvostikov said that it would be up to Moscow to decide if they should be recalled.12
Pavlov, who was still at his post in Ottawa, was incensed: “It was not enough that the authorities could not accuse me of anything. They also wanted to deprive me of the possibility of packing my things calmly.” He says that he insisted to Belokhvostikov that they be given a week and this was conveyed to King.13 Pavlov and his colleagues then packed their bags and departed for New York, where they boarded a ship bound for Leningrad. The group included GRU colonel Boris Sokolov, who had successfully lured Emma Woikin into the GRU's espionage net, and A.N. Farafontov, who had participated in the midnight raid of Gouzenko's apartment on September 5. Sent ignominiously back to their homeland, the hapless Russian envoys at least had the chance to do some last-minute shopping. A porter in Montreal who helped carry some of their bags onto the train bound for New York mopped his brow and declared they were the “heaviest he had handled in months.” One of the Russian wives, laden with the results of a buying spree in Montreal, could not resist a friendly glance at photographers as they boarded the train. But in general they were a grim and nervous bunch, far from the “cheery chaps” they had been before the defection. According to the Montreal Star, the Russians answered questions from the press with GRUnts and glares as they passed through the railway station.14 It was a sorry end to the warm bond of goodwill that had developed between Canadians and Russians during the war years.
No wonder the Russians were glum. Their future in Stalinist Russia was far from certain. Pavlov, whose fate had been hanging by a thread for months, was especially anxious. “The return trip from Canada to the Soviet Union is deeply entrenched in my memory,” he recalled in his memoirs. “I was in a sort of enfeebled state. Evidently, this was a result of the constant strain I had been under since Gouzenko's betrayal. I had borne a heavy burden of responsibility for the security of the diplomatic mission, its employees and their family members. So during the trip I rested emotionally and physically, although thoughts about ‘the Gouzenko affair’ continued to trouble me: what would be the reaction of the Center to this whole story?”15
The “Center” gave him a cool welcome home. As Pavlov expected, when he and his wife, Klavdia, arrived in Moscow with their Canadian-born toddler, they were not assigned an apartment (Pavlov, like all Soviet citizens, was at the mercy of the Communist bureaucracy for his housing). The three of them had to live for the n
ext year with Klavdia's sister and her husband – five people in a single twelve-square- meter room that was part of a communal apartment. At work no one seemed interested in Pavlov's opinions about the Gouzenko affair, although there was a lot of whispering about it. Pavlov knew that the leaders of the foreign intelligence service deliberately shielded themselves from officers who returned after long periods of service abroad. They had their own views of what was going on outside the Soviet Union, and they looked upon the returnees, with all their practical experience, as an unwelcome disruption.16
But quite clearly there was more to Pavlov's situation than that. He was under a cloud at the foreign intelligence service. For the next two years he was not given a permanent assignment at headquarters. And his bosses “accidentally” demoted him from major to captain. A few months after Pavlov returned, he was indirectly denounced at a meeting of the Communist Party organizers for “doing nothing” during his time in Canada and allowing serious failures to occur. He weathered the storm, and eventually became head of the Foreign Intelligence “Illegals” Department (for agents abroad under deep cover). Then in 1961 he was appointed deputy chief of Foreign Intelligence in what was now called the KGB. From 1972 to 1984 Pavlov was the KGB's main representative in Poland. A few years after his return from Canada, Pavlov learned that Beria and the NKVD leadership had initially planned on arresting him as a punishment for the Gouzenko defection. Apparently both Pavlov's immediate boss and the head of the NKVD's foreign intelligence service intervened to prevent this from happening. But it was a close call.17
There were no winners in the Gouzenko affair, except perhaps Gouzenko himself, who seemed to be enjoying the limelight. Mackenzie King and his government became the focal point for the growing antagonism the Soviets felt toward the West as the spy scare took hold. The West would soon become accustomed to vitriolic attacks from Moscow, but this was 1946, and the chill of the Cold War arrived with a shock. In August 1946, after a long lull in public commentary by the Soviets, Pravda published an article by Soviet journalist David Zaslavsky entitled “A Sorry Finale to a Shameful Comedy.”18 The article, which would have been inspired and approved by the Kremlin, was a lengthy and scathing attack on the Canadian government and the Royal Commission for “engineering” the spy scandal in order to harm the Soviet Union. Instead of handling the incident through diplomatic channels, the Canadian government, according to Pravda, deliberately inflated it into a “major international event.” The “unbridled anti-Soviet campaign” that followed was intended to damage the Soviet Union politically.
According to Pravda, the Royal Commission Report was “733 pages of cheap gossip, stupid invention and manifest shameless lies. The judges, Taschereau and Kellock, who put their signatures to this bundle of nonsense, will not bequeath happy memories in the history of Canadian justice.” The article ridiculed the judges for accepting as authentic the documents of the “scoundrel” Gouzenko and claimed that Gouzenko had been bribed by a “secret organization in Canada” (presumably part of the RCMP) to steal secret documents from the Soviet Embassy and turn against his country. In Zaslavsky's words, “What has been done in Canada is a reproduction of another scale of Hitler's firing of the Reichstag, which was necessary for the fascist conspirators to do away with the German communists. The rounding up of the leaders of the Labour Progressive Party of Canada followed immediately the abduction of secret documents from the Soviet Embassy.”
Even for the Soviets this was aggressive language. What were they trying to accomplish? Or rather, what was Stalin trying to accomplish? Most historians agree that Stalin was at this point the sole architect of Soviet foreign policy. Molotov, Beria, and other members of Stalin's circle had only a limited influence on his decision- making. He had initially shown some willingness to cooperate with the West in the aftermath of the war, but Hiroshima changed his attitude irrevocably. As one source put it, “It was the atomic bombardment of Japan and the abrupt end of the war in the Pacific that convinced Stalin that his dream of a postwar partnership was not to be fulfilled. The old demons of insecurity were back. The bomb threw the Kremlin leader off balance – and eventually back into the curse of tyrants: neurotic solitude.”19
However irrational his thinking was, given that his country had yet to develop the atomic bomb, Stalin became convinced that the only approach to the West was one of confrontation. He had already signaled this change in attitude in February 1946, in an “election” speech at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Now, with this scathing denunciation of the United States’ atomic ally Canada, the Soviet counteroffensive went into high gear.
But Zaslavsky's Pravda article contained grains of truth. The Canadians had possessed the option of quiet diplomacy rather than publicly exposing the Gouzenko case. The Soviets knew, through Philby and through King's overtures to Stalin, that King had even pushed for such an approach. Secondly, as the Canadian press itself had reported, the Royal Commission had pursued such a heavy-handed approach that some critics made comparisons with Hitler's Gestapo. (Of course, considering more than a million Soviet citizens had perished in Stalin's purges, it was ridiculous for Pravda to lash out at another country for violations of legality.) Zaslavsky was also close to the mark in saying Gouzenko had accused people who were innocent and that the significance of the information handed over to the Soviets had been much exaggerated.
It no doubt infuriated the Soviets that the allies were distributing the espionage report in an effort to fight domestic communism. At a conference of foreign ministers in Paris in August 1946 (during which the Pravda article appeared), British foreign secretary Bevin told Mackenzie King that he planned to have copies of the report sent to every trade union in England. According to King, “He said he has had to fight that Communist business from the days before he was Minister of Labour in the trade unions. That that report would do more to help to save the situation among the labour element in Britain than anything he can think of.”20
The Gouzenko case revealed to MI5 something of the Soviet's extensive espionage efforts, but MI5 still was not responding forcefully to the threat. The fact that Alan Nunn May had been recruited by the GRU while he was at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, for example, did not lead MI5 to scrutinize others who had attended Trinity at the same time, such as Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Both were spying for the Soviets while working for the British Foreign Office. And MI5 gave scant attention to the fact that Klaus Fuchs, a leading atomic scientist and a British subject, was among the several hundred people listed in their copy of Israel Halperin's address book.21
The FBI also received copies of Halperin's address book, but because Fuchs, who had participated in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, had returned to Britain, and because the RCMP told the FBI that they had made the Halperin evidence available to the British, FBI officers assumed MI5 would be investigating Fuchs. But this did not happen. When Fuchs returned to England in 1946 to continue atomic research, MI5 gave him only a cursory vetting. Ironically, this was the one instance where “guilt by association” would have actually put the authorities on the trail of a genuine Soviet spy.22
In fairness to MI5, the connection between Halperin and Fuchs, who would later confess to passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, turned out to be meaningless as far as possible espionage went. Fuchs, a German-born Jew, had been interned in Quebec as an enemy alien at the beginning of the war, and Halperin, aware of the plight of this fellow scientist and anti-Nazi whom he had never met, had mailed him some magazines.23 It was not much of a connection, but MI5's failure to investigate Fuchs in 1946 would have enormous consequences and prove to be a huge political embarrassment for the British.
Although the FBI left the Fuchs matter for the British to deal with, the bureau took an active part in helping the Canadians go after one of their alleged spies, Sam Carr, who disappeared at the time the spy scandal broke in early 1946. Carr, a leading Communist Party organizer and propagandist in Canada, was a key figure in the Canadian espionage case. Born
Schmil Kogan in Ukraine in 1906, he had little formal education, leaving school when he was twelve because his father was killed in a pogrom. He immigrated to Canada in the 1920s and settled in Toronto, where as a young unskilled worker he was enlisted into the cause of the Canadian Communist Party. Carr, who at some point studied at the Lenin Institute in Moscow and spoke fluent Russian, became, in addition to an organizer, a prolific contributor to Communist Party journals and newspapers in Canada and the U.S. In 1945, he ran for a seat in the Canadian Parliament as a member of the LPP, but was defeated. Like Fred Rose, Carr was well known to the RCMP, which had arrested him twice for subversive activities over the years. Indeed, in the early 1930s, Carr served almost three years in Canada's Kingston Penitentiary. Yet the RCMP had never investigated him for involvement in espionage.24
In fact, as early as the 1920s Carr embarked on the same dangerous road taken by Rose. He was recruited by the forerunner of the NKVD, and then, in 1942 or 1943, was passed on to the GRU.25 According to documents smuggled out by Gouzenko, Carr recruited agents and helped in obtaining the false passport used by the GRU illegal Ignacy Witczak. In July 1946, the Canadian government issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of violating the Official Secrets Act. The RCMP plastered “Wanted” signs all over Canada, but Carr had disappeared. He had gone to Cuba for a Communist Party conference in January 1946 and entered the United States upon his return the next month. As the FBI learned much later, he had been booked on a train from New York to Toronto but heard through his Soviet contacts (doubtless using Philby's information) of the impending arrests in Canada. So he remained in the United States, living in New York City under the alias Jack Lewis while his wife and son remained in Toronto. When they arrested the other suspects, the RCMP asked the FBI to be on the alert for any information about Carr, and the bureau requested its branch offices to do a “discreet spot check” for his possible whereabouts. It took three years for the FBI to track him down.26
