by Amy Knight
Lasky, in a speech to the Women's National Republican Club in November 1953, launched a scathing attack on the former Canadian ambassador to the United States.25 He accused Lester Pearson “of consistently sabotaging United States efforts to unravel the skein of Soviet intrigue in Washington and Ottawa” by making a “determined effort to prevent accredited American investigators from following up Canadian angles to Soviet espionage, which might help destroy the many Red spy centers still flourishing in this country.” Incredibly, Lasky cited the Harry Dexter White case as the first item on the agenda for SISS in its requested interview of Gouzenko. White had been dead for five years. “In effect,” said Lasky, Pearson “rang down an iron curtain on Gouzenko, who, I understand, is not only full of information, but is anxious to spill it.”
Lasky went on to discuss the “strange career of Lester Pearson,” who had “effectively squelched any investigations into alleged Soviet ties of not only his closest aide [a reference to Herbert Norman, who was never Pearson's closest aide], but of himself.” Lasky cited Bentley's testimony that Pearson transmitted vital information to her spy ring through “a wealthy Canadian communist.” According to Lasky, Bentley, “whose credibility has never been shattered, despite vicious smears . . . stated flatly and unequivocally that he [Pearson] was one of her best sources of information.” This was a far cry from what Bentley had told the FBI.
In a press conference a few days later, Pearson called Lasky's comments “false to the point of absurdity.” He went on, “Information which has never been made available to Canadian official sources, to my knowledge, apparently has been made available to somebody called Lasky. Find out who the counsel of the committee [on internal security] was at the time and draw your own conclusions. . . .”26 Pearson was not naive. He had spent a lot of time in Washington and had many contacts. He knew that the man who had become his arch enemy was Robert Morris.
Pearson also must have known that Hazen Sise was the wealthy Canadian communist Lasky was referring to. Sise had been asked to appear before a U.S. federal Grand Jury in 1948, presumably in connection with Bentley's secret remarks to the FBI about him. He refused the Grand Jury's request, apparently on the advice of Pearson, noting in a letter to Pearson that he was “enormously puzzled – though I have at the same time an uneasy feeling that it might be better to remain puzzled if clarification also means a lot of unpleasantness.” When Bentley made a public reference to Sise in June 1949 “as one of several who were on the relay team that passed information to the Russians,” he immediately denied that he knew her. Clearly, Bentley had met Sise and, judging from some of the details she provided, she had lunched with him on one or more occasions. But the rest of her allegations were more fantasy than fact. Sise was not in a position to offer anything remotely important to Soviet intelligence. Indeed, if the NKVD was as ambitious in intelligence gathering as it was reputed to be, Hazen Sise would not have merited its attention.27
SISS kept up the pressure on Ottawa. Following the Lasky speech, a persistent Senator Jenner sent another request to the Canadian government for an interview with Gouzenko. Although the State Department transmitted the request to Canada, Assistant Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, a close friend of President Eisenhower, made it clear to Arnold Heeney, the Canadian ambassador to Washington, that he disapproved strongly of Jenner's tactics. As Heeney wrote to Pearson, “I explained pretty emphatically to Bedell Smith our dislike of this procedure and the unpleasant repercussions which it was having, not only with the government, but also in Canadian public opinion. He seemed fully to appreciate this, and indeed expressed personal views of Jenner and his cohort which might well have been your own.”28
However much the Canadians abhorred SISS tactics, they realized they had to reach some form of compromise with this powerful and influential Senate committee. On November 24, Heeney sent a note to the U.S. State Department reiterating that Gouzenko had given all the information he had to the FBI and, in 1949, to the Immigration Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Gouzenko was free to go to Washington if he chose to do so, the note said, but “he naturally must consider the effect of his action on the special measures that we have taken in his interest and at his request to protect his security and conceal his identity.” (This presumably meant that the RCMP would stop guarding him if he went on his own to be interviewed by Jenner's committee.) If Gouzenko was willing to testify again, Heeney allowed, the Canadian government would make arrangements similar to those made in 1949. The Americans could interview the defector in Canada, but only with the stipulation that, as before, the substance of the interview not be published without permission from the Canadian government.29
While the Canadian offer was in the pipeline, the right-wing elements of the American press, fed by tips from the FBI and SISS, was having a field day with the accusations against Lester Pearson and the Canadian government. According to the Washington Times-Herald, Pearson and his followers in the Canadian “pinko set” were “dangerous and untruthful” in obstructing the proposed SISS interview with Gouzenko.30 On November 27, 1953, a widely distributed anticommunist newsletter for American business executives reiterated Bentley's charges about Pearson and noted that the major reason for Canada's reluctance to allow Gouzenko to testify was “the anti-anti- Communist feeling of top officials such as lester b. pearson, who believes the U.S. is somewhat hysterical about Communism and taking too intransigent a stand against it both at home and abroad.”31 Americans could still be convinced that Gouzenko, having defected more than eight years earlier, had valuable secrets to tell about Soviet espionage in their country.
Needless to say, Canadian authorities cannot have been happy with their prize defector for starting these unpleasant controversies by talking to the American press. But as the Americans had learned from their involvement with Elizabeth Bentley, it was difficult, if not impossible, to control what defectors did and said. Bentley was a loose cannon for the FBI, and for the Internal Security Subcommittee. She began leaning on the bureau for money and for legal help after some drunk-driving incidents and trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. If the public found out about her legal woes and her alcoholism, it would damage her credibility as a witness and throw into question her testimonies about spies. Bentley was well aware that this was a bargaining chip for her. In 1955, when the IRS “attached” her bank account for failure to pay taxes, Bentley appealed to Robert Morris, the SISS counsel who had elicited her testimony against Pearson, and also to the FBI. Bentley told the bureau that if it did not solve her tax problem she would “blow the lid off the Administration” and “blow up the works.” A personal intervention from Hoover with the Treasury Department finally got Bentley out of her scrape with the IRS.32
Gouzenko was now demonstrating that he, too, could be a loose cannon. His power to damage the credibility of the Canadian government was nothing like the power that Bentley wielded, and in contrast to Bentley, Gouzenko's life was not falling apart. But by the early 1950s he was causing the Canadian government significant headaches.
Like Bentley and a host of other defectors, Gouzenko had sold his personal story for publication. It was Mackenzie King who first suggested the idea. The day after the Royal Commission's full report on espionage was published, in July 1946, King asked to see Gouzenko, whom he had never met. The meeting went well. Gouzenko, described by King as youthful in appearance, clean cut, with steady eyes and a keen intellect, made a good impression. King told Gouzenko he was very pleased with the way the young man had conducted himself throughout “the period of great anxiety” and congratulated him on “his manliness, his courage and standing for the right.” They talked about Stalin and how he would treat King if the latter paid a visit to Moscow. King then asked him if he had read Kravchenko's book I Chose Freedom. Gouzenko said he had, and King wondered out loud whether Gouzenko had thought of writing himself. According to King's diary, “He said that he was writing something, bit by bit. I said to him I thought he ought to h
ave in mind not to do it too quickly but to begin with his own life: his ancestors and early bringing up. His ideas; his training; what caused him to change his views, etc. He told me afterwards he was very pleased to know I had thought well of his writing his life.”33
Thus Gouzenko, inspired by King and by fellow defector Kravchenko, embarked on his memoirs. Gouzenko's English was still far from perfect, and he had little experience in writing, so he needed a lot of help. He told his story to Mervyn Black, who then passed an English translation to two journalists hired to write a manuscript. The venture turned out to be a great success. Gouzenko's memoirs first appeared in February 1947 as a four-part series entitled “I Was Inside Stalin's Spy Ring” in the American magazine Cosmopolitan. Gouzenko received $50,000 for the series, a considerable sum. The magazine had originally offered $5,000, but Gouzenko refused, and kept refusing until he got what he wanted.
A different and longer version of his autobiography was published as a book in 1948. Called This Was My Choice in Canada and The Iron Curtain in the United States, the book did well, yielding about $6,000 in royalties for Gouzenko. More important, he signed a $75,000 movie contract for the book with Twentieth Century Fox.
The movie, The Iron Curtain, starring Gene Tierney, playing Anna, and Dana Andrews, playing Igor, portrayed the dramatic story of their escape from the Soviets in 1945. As one reviewer assessed the film, “It is an anti-communist story without going overboard over what could be termed the ‘Red Menace,’ instead focusing in on Igor and his wife Anna . . . and the love they have for each other and their baby son.” Disappointingly for the Gouzenkos, The Iron Curtain was not a success at the box office. It lasted only three days at a movie theater in Montreal. Nonetheless, by 1948, Gouzenko had earned a great deal of money, somewhere in the range of $130,000 to $140,000. 34
Gouzenko also had another source of income. In early 1947, T.F. Ahearn, a wealthy Ottawa businessman, had provided an annuity of one hundred dollars a month for Gouzenko and his family. Ahearn, who was president of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, gave Gouzenko the annuity in recognition of the great service he had done: “His action has awakened all Canadians of undivided loyalty to a very grave threat to our national security.”35
The RCMP was, quite naturally, nervous about Gouzenko's publications. They worried he would be prompted to say things that were not true or would reveal something that would cast an unfavorable light on Canadian authorities. (The FBI had similar concerns when Bentley's book appeared, and pored over it anxiously to see if the details corresponded with her public testimonies, which they often did not.) Before Gouzenko's memoirs appeared in Cosmopolitan, RCMP commissioner Wood felt obliged to inform MI5 director Sir Percy Sillitoe and J. Edgar Hoover. Wood lamented in his letter to Sillitoe, “Igor Gouzenko is contracting directly with Cosmopolitan magazine and is, of course, a completely free agent in connection with any question relative to his private interests. Under the circumstances, we will of course not be in any position to exercise control over the particulars which appear.”36 As in Bentley's book, there were numerous inconsistencies between what Gouzenko initially told Canadian authorities and what appeared in his published memoirs, but no one seemed to notice. Gouzenko carefully avoided mentioning names like those of Alger Hiss, Arthur Steinberg, and the British spy code-named “Elli,” which would have made the FBI and MI5 highly uncomfortable.
On a positive note, Wood told Sillitoe that Gouzenko would now have the financial resources to take up residence in Canada on his own, implying that the Canadian government, aside from the costs of RCMP protection, would be relieved of the day-to-day expenses for Gouzenko and his family. What Wood did not anticipate was Gouzenko's inability to handle money.
By 1951, after investing in a farm that turned out to be a disastrous venture, the Gouzenkos, now with three children, were penniless and in debt. Their only source of income was the hundred-dollar- a-month annuity and the money Gouzenko received for press interviews. (Much to the chagrin of journalists, he always insisted on being paid before he would talk. According to one source, “Gouzenko's critics joked that if you wanted an interview with him, all you had to do was run a cheque up the flagpole.”37) Gouzenko was working on a novel, but it was a long way from being published. He appealed to a friend, who arranged for him to meet with a well-connected, fervently anti-communist Toronto journalist named Gladstone Murray. Accompanied by a Mountie and going by the name George Brown, Gouzenko told Murray he was in serious financial straits that would continue for at least six months, by which time he hoped to have some money from his next book. He needed three thousand dollars to tide him over until then.
Murray, who knew Gouzenko's real identity, was taken aback: “All I could do myself was to give the fellow $50.00,” he wrote to Prime Minister St. Laurent a few days later. Murray told St. Laurent that he had agreed to try to find a wealthy individual who might be willing to help, but that the prospects were not good. He continued, “As Mr. Brown is presumably a kind of ward of the Government, I take this liberty of acquainting you with his predicament. I was uncomfortable at his manifestations of despair. The chances are the cause is bad management but the state of mind nevertheless should be noted.” St. Laurent wrote back that he had spoken to the minister of justice, who “tells me he is keeping close touch with this problem which all of us find very perplexing.”38
Apparently Murray was unable to solve Gouzenko's financial problems, because Gouzenko, for the first time since he defected, was forced to seek employment. He started working as a riveter for $1.47 an hour until sometime in 1952, when he managed to get a contract for the novel he was writing and received an advance of two thousand dollars on his royalties.39
Since 1947 Igor and Anna had been living in their own house, on two acres of land in Port Credit, Ontario, a small lakeside town west of Toronto. The Canadian government had provided them with a new identity and cover stories that accounted for their thickly accented, halting English. Now they were Czech immigrants, Stanley and Anna Krysac. Amazingly, krysac means rat, or mole, in the Czech language. It is not clear who decided on the Gouzenkos’ new surname, but it seems to have been a deliberate slur against Igor. It is possible that the idea for the name came from RCMP officer John Leopold, who was a Czech by birth and was accused by Gouzenko early on of being a spy. It is surprising that Gouzenko would not have realized what his new surname meant. The Russian word for rat, krysa, is almost identical.40
The Gouzenkos still had one RCMP guard living with them. Gouzenko continued to fear being killed by a Soviet hit man. He told a journalist friend that he had a movie camera at the front of the house and turned it on any car he saw passing by for the third or fourth time. Neither he nor Anna went anywhere without an RCMP guard, and they received all their mail through a lawyer in Toronto. But Gouzenko, for all his concerns about safety, could be reckless. The problems began early on, prompting RCMP commissioner Wood to write to the minister of justice in October 1947, complaining that “Gouzenko's disregard for advice and the manner in which he persisted in doing things his own way, regardless of security, were . . . bound to expose him within a short period of time.”41
By early 1948, the problem had become worse. In yet another letter to the minister of justice, Wood reported that Gouzenko had managed to get three of his paintings displayed in the window of a Montreal department store, against the wishes of the RCMP. Gouzenko had pushed some journalists to help arrange the display, and, as a result, it received wide attention. As Wood pointed out, Gouzenko's neighbors visited him often and could see his canvases spread all over the house. All it would take was for one of them to visit the display in Montreal and the Gouzenkos’ cover would be blown.42
To make matters worse, Wood reported, “several members of the Press hold a very low view of Gouzenko's business integrity.” It seems Gouzenko had become dissatisfied with his arrangement with the two journalists hired to write his autobiography and approached several other newspapermen with the offer to ta
ke over the work. When the original two contractors heard of this, they were incensed and discussed the matter at length with many of their colleagues. Wood warned in his letter, “It only would require one enterprising reporter to produce an article which would be most derogatory to Gouzenko.” The fact that Gouzenko was no longer submitting his correspondence to the RCMP for mailing added to the security problems.
Taking all these matters into consideration, Wood stated, it was only a matter of time before Gouzenko's whereabouts were exposed, despite the thousands of dollars the RCMP had spent on security measures for him and his family. Wood told the minister that it was time for a “show-down” with Gouzenko; he should be told he must move to a new location selected by the RCMP and observe all their security rules. Otherwise, the government would be relieved entirely of responsibility for his safety. Wood concluded,
Undoubtedly, we have been too indulgent to this man in the past. This was due, in part, to the great service that he has rendered this country, and to the natural sympathy which existed for a stranger in a new country who had burned all his bridges behind him. Apparently his personality changed with his affluence, and he mistook kindness for weakness. The continuance of the present conditions can only lead to his complete exposure, or, at the very least, a deadlock in our dealings with him.43
Wood wanted permission for the RCMP to withdraw its protection completely if Gouzenko refused to cooperate, but St. Laurent's government was not willing to go that far. If Gouzenko or his family were harmed by the Soviet secret police, it would create another international scandal. The Liberals had gone out of their way to present Gouzenko as a hero to the public; they could not now let a hero be thrown to the wolves. He had to be protected, no matter how badly he behaved.
The RCMP tried to persuade Gouzenko to move away from the area. Charles Rivett-Carnac, whom Gouzenko trusted, talked with him for an entire morning about it, but to no avail. Gouzenko refused flat out. By this time there was considerable animosity between the RCMP and Gouzenko. Mountie George Mackay, who had been one of his guards since the days at Camp X, was fed up with him: “He wanted to go against the grain in doing certain things where we felt he was only endangering himself. He was very ready to accuse you of doing something to interfere with his life or his ambitions. Then I left and had nothing more to do with him and said: ‘I don't want to hear any more of him.’” Other members of the force felt the same way. One Mountie went so far as to ask for a transfer to another part of the country to get out of guarding Gouzenko.44
