by Amy Knight
In notes written to his family and to the Department of External Affairs before he died, Norman did not say specifically why he decided to take his own life, but he did assert his innocence and express doubts that he would ever be exonerated. Norman had been terribly overworked and was suffering from depression, so there were doubtless several factors behind his suicide. But the timing suggests that, at the very least, the SISS publicity was the last straw.
SISS did not see it that way. An in-house memorandum, probably written by Robert Morris, read, “Just about everybody except Norman is holding us responsible for Norman's death. He never charged us with that. He did not say in his suicide notes, so far as we know, that the Internal Security Subcommittee had anything to do with his suicide. . . . Why should everyone jump to the conclusion that the Internal Security Subcommittee was responsible for the suicide? The Subcommittee has been charged with ‘rehashing old charges.’ Why would a man commit suicide over the rehashing of old charges with respect to which he had been cleared by his government six years earlier, and after the reaffirmation of that government's confidence in him?”63
The unremorseful and defensive tone of this note is hardly surprising. Five years earlier, Senator McCarran had learned of the suicide of Abraham Feller, general counsel at the un, who was caught in the middle of an SISS campaign against communists in his organization. McCarran's response: “If Feller's conscience was clear, he had no reason to suffer from what he expected of our committee.”64
But McCarran and his colleagues knew full well that a clear conscience could not put rumors to rest. Once allegations were in the public domain they took on a life of their own. Even Elizabeth Bentley's blatantly false statements about Lester Pearson were repeated enough times that they gained some credibility. It may be true that if Pearson had been more forthcoming when the allegations about Norman began surfacing he would have quelled further accusations. It is hard to say what SISS would have done had the Canadian government said outright in 1951 that, yes, Norman had been a communist but was one no longer and that therefore the matter was closed. The committee members in the U.S. Senate would probably have been satisfied in that case with a ritual public recantation from Norman and asked him to name names, as several of his former associates did. However, this is doubtless a route Norman would have been highly reluctant to take.
In Pearson's defense, Norman did a lot of hedging on the extent of his communist associations during his student days. In fact, it never was clear whether Norman had a formal relationship with the Communist Party or was simply a student member of the pro-communist Socialist Society at Cambridge. For Pearson to have made a definitive statement about Norman in 1951, he would have needed an accurate picture of his involvement with communism, which Norman never gave.
Near the end of his life, Norman reportedly told a colleague that he thought Alger Hiss had been framed, and “that his only mistake had been that he said he didn't know Whittaker Chambers and he couldn't go back on that statement.”65 In fact, Hiss did go back on the statement in an indirect way, admitting before the Grand Jury in 1948 that he had known Chambers, but under a different name. Similarly, Norman retreated from his initial statements about his student days and, by the end of his interviews with the RCMP and External Affairs in 1952, had all but confessed that he was a communist at Cambridge. For both Hiss and Norman, their admissions came too late and too reluctantly.
Chapter 10
TRAITORS AND SPIES
Defect, v.: To desert a cause, country, etc., esp. in order to adopt another
Traitor, n.: A person who betrays his country by violating his allegiance
Spy, n.: A person employed by a government to obtain secret information on intelligence about another country
Random House Dictionary of the English Language
Igor Gouzenko did not like being called a defector. It implied that he was a traitor. Instead, he insisted, he should be called an “escaper.” As he saw it, someone who had run away from the Soviets was not a traitor or a defector because the Soviet Union was an evil state. A traitor was someone who betrayed trust or violated an allegiance. How could one be accused of betraying a country where there was no freedom and whose government did nothing but lie to its citizens and make their lives miserable? He had a point. Who would consider the generals who plotted to kill Hitler in 1943 traitors to their country? Without such people, how would democracies ever defeat tyrannies?
Following this logic, when Newsweek magazine published an article in February 1964 that referred to him as a defector, Gouzenko went straight to a lawyer. As a journalist who was acquainted with Gouzenko remarked, he felt that defector “was not a nice word. . . . Mr. Gouzenko felt that from our side – our side being Canada, the Allies, the United States – we should not be looking at him as a bad man, as a traitor, which the Russians might want to look at him as, but in effect as a hero.” Gouzenko also objected to Newsweek's suggestion that defectors were psychologically troubled. He refused to settle when the magazine offered him one thousand dollars in damages and ended up getting nothing.1
Gouzenko was even more outraged when he was referred to as a spy. In March 1966, he appeared on a nationwide Canadian television show, This Hour Has Seven Days, with his trademark pillowcase over his head. The topic was Soviet spying techniques, an issue on which Gouzenko was a professed expert. He was anxious and defensive from the moment he appeared, objecting when he saw someone taking still photographs of him. Then, one of the hosts, Laurier LaPierre, asked in the course of the discussion, “Is that part of your experience as a spy?” Gouzenko bristled: “Don't use such horrible words. Don't forget, I exposed Soviet spy ring. Don't call me that.”2 After the taping of the program, Gouzenko threatened to sue the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for libel. It was a good thing for him that he did not. As the person at the Soviet Embassy responsible for encoding GRU messages sent to Moscow, he had been a key participant in Soviet espionage operations. In other words, he had been a spy.
Gouzenko's lawsuit against Newsweek was one of a string of libel cases that he initiated over the years. Because of Canada's stringent libel laws, which favored the plaintiff, he was often successful. In Canada, it was, and still is, possible to be sued for writing anything that damages a person's reputation. It is not necessary for the plaintiff to demonstrate malicious intent, and the onus is on the defendant to prove that what he or she wrote is true.3 Shortly after Gouzenko sued Newsweek, his lawyer filed a suit against Maclean's magazine for an article in which Gouzenko was discussed. Gouzenko was particularly offended by a passage that suggested he was no longer in danger of retaliation from the Soviets and was using the threat as a way of getting the Mounties to do household chores for him: “The Mounties soon noticed (or thought they did) that Gouzenko's fears for his own safety became particularly acute when it was time to put on the storm windows or the roof needed mending.” After a lengthy and costly legal battle, Maclean's paid Gouzenko seventy-five hundred dollars in damages.4
Gouzenko also initiated litigation against several authors, including Frank Rasky, who wrote a 1958 book called Gay Canadian Rogues. The book (published before “gay” meant homosexual) contained eleven “true crime” stories. One featured the cipher clerk Gouzenko, who was depicted as a hero. Gouzenko nonetheless took offense at the lighthearted references to him and the implication that he was a rogue. He managed not only to get fifteen thousand dollars from the publishers, but also to have the book withdrawn from stores.5
Another successful libel suit was against David Martin, who wrote Wilderness of Mirrors, a book about the CIA and defectors, which appeared in 1980. Martin's skepticism toward defectors in general and Gouzenko in particular offended Gouzenko. Martin, echoing the Newsweek article, suggested that defectors tended to have psychological troubles and, using Gouzenko as an example, drinking problems. Martin also questioned Gouzenko's motives for defecting. As a result, Harper & Row, Martin's publishers, had to buy space in the Globe and Mail to apologi
ze “for one short passage which Mr. Gouzenko has found objectionable.” Gouzenko received ten thousand dollars in damages.6
Gouzenko later sued well-known author and journalist June Callwood over a book called Portrait of Canada, a social history, which contained only a couple of paragraphs about him. He didn't like it that Callwood referred to his behavior when he was seeking asylum as erratic and unstable. Callwood's publishers were forced to withhold the paperback edition of her book. Fortunately for Callwood, Gouzenko died before the case went to court. A dead person cannot be libeled, so the case was dropped.7
Journalist John Sawatsky was another target, for a book about the RCMP called Men in the Shadows, published in 1980 by Doubleday. The book, which included a chapter on the Gouzenko case, was selling well until Gouzenko registered his legal complaint: Sawatsky had defamed him. The planned paperback edition of Sawatsky's book was immediately canceled and Sawatsky, a freelancer, had to spend all his time on his defense. “Win or lose,” Sawatsky said at the time, “any thought of having any semblance of economic viability to maintain myself as an author is out the window.”8
In fairness to Gouzenko, impartial observers would likely conclude that what Sawatsky wrote about him was defamatory. He portrayed Gouzenko as a cold-blooded opportunist who sought celebrity status by exploiting people. And he included quotes like this one from a disgruntled Mountie: “‘Gouzenko was not a true lover of liberty. He was a thoroughly ignorant Russian peasant who had no connection with the Russian Intelligence Service except as a cipher clerk. I have known him for some time and feel he is an unsavory character.’” Gouzenko had a good case, and if he had not died before it went to trial, he probably would have won.9
Sawatsky meanwhile, as part of his defense, set about interviewing everyone he could find who knew Gouzenko. As he delved deeper into the Gouzenko story, he began to realize that what the public knew about Gouzenko was more legend than fact. Sawatsky also came to understand that he had misjudged Gouzenko, that he had not sued for the money or publicity but because he wanted to maintain his standing in history. He wanted people to think of him as a hero. What emerged from Sawatsky's interviews with close to 150 people, published as an oral history, was that Gouzenko could not easily be summed up. He was a complex man, a blend of admirable qualities and deep faults, a person who was revered and scorned. He was both a victim of his fate and an engineer of his own demise. There were no easy answers to unravel the mystery of who he was.10
After Gouzenko's 1954 testimony before senators Jenner and McCarran, and his subsequent television interview with American journalist Drew Pearson, he had said virtually all he could say about Soviet espionage in the West. But Gouzenko managed to remain in the limelight: he became a best-selling author. Gouzenko's success as a novelist came as a surprise to everyone. His 1948 autobiography, a workman-like, uninspiring, and largely ghostwritten account of his life before his defection, had not sold well, although it ended up being profitable because it was made into a movie. Initially, Gouzenko had trouble finding an American publisher for his lengthy novel, The Fall of a Titan, which was translated from Russian by Mervyn Black. But after revisions and cuts, the manuscript was accepted by W.W. Norton and published in the spring of 1954. The book was a huge success and was translated into more than forty languages. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for months. The Toronto Daily Star called The Fall of a Titan a “panoramic novel . . . Tolstoyan in its sweep,” and it received the Governor General's Award in Canada for the best novel of 1954. 11
The story centers around the figure of Mikhail Gorin, a famous Soviet writer who bears close resemblance to the real-life Maksim Gorky. Stalin and his men decide that Gorin has become a threat, and they engage the NKVD, though a professor at the University of Rostov, to bring about his downfall. Gouzenko's three-hundred-thousand- word epic, rich with engaging characters, plots, and counterplots, was a remarkable achievement. As Granville Hicks observed in the New York Times, the author was exceptionally skillful at handling a complicated narrative: “Involved as the story is, the reader never loses its thread, but goes on, always more and more absorbed, to the explosive climax.”12
One might ask how a young man in his early thirties, with no experience at writing and little formal education in the arts, could have produced such a remarkable work. Some people even suggested that Gouzenko did not write the book himself. But according to the recollections of Gouzenko's American editor, George Brockway, this was clearly not the case. When Brockway met with Gouzenko to go over the final manuscript, Anna, “an extraordinarily pretty young woman,” came along. She, it turns out, had been working alongside her husband, helping to transcribe the drafts. According to Brockway, Anna brought several suitcases that contained the manuscript in all its stages, “from germinal idea and several false starts, through several longhand drafts in Russian and two drafts of the English translation by Mervyn Black, to the final revised, corrected and re-corrected translation. It made a lot of manuscript – probably two million words from first to last – and the sheer physical labor of putting them down on paper is staggering. Mrs. Gouzenko remarked that she often had difficulty in getting to take time out to mow the lawn.”13
In The Fall of a Titan, Gouzenko managed to portray for a Western audience the essence of the corrupt and immoral Soviet society in a literary form that was not only readable, but gripping. As Granville Hicks observed, “It is Mr. Gouzenko's ability to create this atmosphere – the anguish of the masses, the ruthlessness of the privileged few, the universal terror – that gives his book its overwhelming plausibility.”14 Where did this striking talent come from? In a subsequent article for the Times, Gouzenko explained that his creativity and his love of literature came from his grandmother, even though she could not read or write. As a young boy he listened to the poetry she composed aloud, and to the Russian folktales she narrated for him, “putting her whole soul into them.” Gouzenko became an avid reader and devoured the Russian classics. “The public library became my favorite resort,” he recalled. “I used to run there with palpitating heart and came away loaded with books.” He learned to write by following the examples of his favorite authors, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov.15
Gouzenko's description of Soviet life under Stalin during the purges was so realistic that it almost seemed autobiographical. Yet he had been only in his teens at the time the story took place. His memory of this period and his ability to recreate it for the reader was nothing short of astonishing. As Brockway expressed it, “The most startling thing about [Gouzenko] is his youth. I was prepared with the knowledge that he was born in 1919, but still I was startled . . . his novel, all the action of which takes place in 1937 or earlier, has such exceptional ‘presence’ that one feels the author must have been a participant in the scene he describes, and so one expects him to be fifteen or twenty years older than he is.”16 In sum, The Fall of a Titan was the work of a young genius, a writer with great promise.
Shortly after the book appeared, Tania Long of the New York Times interviewed Gouzenko. Long was struck by “his intensity, and the restless energy which impels him to keep moving, even if only within the confines of a living room. . . . His face, his hands, his body are constantly in motion. . . . The question arises – how can a man of this type devote himself so painstakingly for four years to a book like ‘The Fall of a Titan’? . . . Obviously beneath all this restlessness and nervous energy there is a drive as steady and unwavering as the powerful motors of a six-engine bomber.”17
When Long asked him about his future plans, Gouzenko said that he wanted, above all, to be a good writer: “My immediate ambition you might say is to write my next book in half the time I took on my first. I think I have learned a lot, and what is most important is that I now have confidence in myself. Can you imagine how it was for four years, writing away day after day, with the feeling that maybe I was completely wrong and no one to encourage me?” Perhaps Gouzenko's se
lf doubts during these four years were not just about his ability to write a great novel. He seems also to have been questioning his decision to abandon his homeland. That he was struggling with this issue is clear from the topic of his next book. Gouzenko told Long it would be about the impact of the West on a Soviet man who left his country, “his struggle with his conscience as he begins to break away from his beliefs, and the terrible choice he is faced with in the end – to flee to freedom and thus cause the death of a close relative held as a hostage in Russia or forever to submit to a regime he has learned to detest.”18
Gouzenko and his wife had made exactly that terrible choice, and it was a decision they had to live with for the rest of their lives. It cannot have been easy. Anna recalled later that, when her husband first broached the idea of defecting, she asked him, “What would happen to all our relatives?” Gouzenko, who feared he was already in trouble with Soviet authorities, replied, “Have you got a guarantee that when we come back we will see our relatives? We could be sent right away to Siberia and . . . our relatives will [be] sent on the other side of Siberia and we would never meet.” Anna attempted to convince herself that her family had escaped punishment because, as she said, her father was a valuable scientist, and he met Igor only twice: “His guilt is nil and his association with Igor is very short. He didn't marry me off, I did it all myself. So to Igor my father is . . . no relation.”19 But at some point she learned that the Soviet government thought otherwise.
