How the Cold War Began
Page 32
Despite this cloud over their lives, Gouzenko was full of optimism about his writing career when Long interviewed him. He had already completed the first chapter of his new book, he told her, and perhaps he might get to the point where he could write one book each year. But his plans never came to fruition. He worked on Ocean of Time for over twenty years, producing enough pages, as Anna said, to fill three books. He would often get up to write in the middle of the night. Igor developed diabetes, started to go blind in the 1960s, and eventually he lost his sight completely. He then wrote on a braille typewriter or dictated the novel to Anna. Anna became increasingly frustrated. They were desperate for the money from his book. The manuscript was far too long and needed to be cut. Yet her husband just kept writing and writing. He never managed to finish.20
Anna put much store in Igor's next book. After all, reviewers of The Fall of a Titan had compared its author with Tolstoy. He was certainly similar to Tolstoy in temperament. Like Tolstoy, he had a tremendous ego, was driven by a sense of mission, and tormented by the need to find meaning in his life. Both were obsessed with an idea – Tolstoy with Christianity, and Gouzenko with the struggle against communism. Both gambled with their money and both, by all accounts, were difficult to live with. Their wives were long-suffering.
Although Igor adored Anna and she worshipped him, Anna's life with her husband – as attested to by her lengthy interview with John Sawatsky in 1984 – was a struggle. Gouzenko, who was at home most of the time, was volatile and authoritarian. He had frequent outbursts of violence, which began shortly after his defection. Sometimes he would lose his temper over something small and strike Anna. At least twice, Anna went to the RCMP with bruises on her body. She allowed that he did this a lot: “When he would get mad, he would slap me real well.” But he would always feel guilty and apologize, and she would always forgive him. The only time Anna considered divorce was when her husband had a fling with a young office worker, but she apparently put a stop to it.21
In addition to acting as her husband's secretary, copyist, and chauffeur, Anna gave birth to eight children, made all their clothes, ran the household (or tried to), and engaged in several entrepreneurial ventures, none of which, including the purchase of the farm and some butcher shops, proved profitable. Life in the Gouzenko home was chaotic. According to a former Mountie, at mealtime “everybody helped themselves. . . . If they opened a can of stuff they didn't like they would just leave it there. So you would see on the table several opened cans sitting around. There seemed to be no regular mealtime. There was an awful lot of waste. A great deal of stuff must have been thrown out that way. She did try. She did try. It got out of control as far as she was concerned.”22 Anna simply had too much going on in her life to maintain order in the household, let alone cut the grass, which was always too long. Overextended as she was, there was the occasional mishap. One occurred when Anna was out doing errands one day: “She had a pack of her kids in the car and left them in there while she went shopping. The kids released the brake and the car went rolling down the hill and banged into a couple of cars and finally came to a stop. Fortunately nobody was hurt.”23
Money problems got worse and worse. The Gouzenkos continued their pattern of falling into debt and borrowing. In 1959, Igor and Anna went to see the Canadian editor of The Fall of a Titan. They were so broke, they said, that they could not even buy groceries. She gave them forty dollars, without asking what had happened to the approximately fifty thousand dollars he had received in royalties. (Much to his disappointment, his novel was not made into a movie.) The fifty thousand dollars had disappeared within just a few years. The Gouzenkos’ car was repossessed on numerous occasions. They went into arrears on their mortgage and came close to losing their house. Not long after their twins were born, in 1961, they had no money for heating-oil or food. They had to go out borrowing again.24
Around this time the Gouzenkos got some help with their finances. A wealthy Toronto attorney named B.B. Osler offered to consolidate Gouzenko's debts, which amounted to over $150,000, and raised money to pay some of them off, particularly the smaller loans to people who badly needed repayment. The other creditors agreed to an indefinite postponement. Osler thought Gouzenko had done a service to Canada and deserved to be compensated, but after working (pro bono) with Gouzenko on his finances for a year and a half, he ended up being disgusted with the defector and refused to see him any more. He reached the conclusion that Gouzenko was an opportunist and a cheat. What really bothered Osler was how disingenuous Gouzenko was when he borrowed money: “He got a lot of his money . . . on the undertaking that within 30 days he would have money from our government to compensate him for what he'd done for the country . . . and because they felt he'd been useful to the country they'd advance, some of them, all they had to him. And he took it and he had no intention of paying it back.”25
In 1962, the Canadian government awarded the Gouzenkos a pension of five hundred dollars a month, but this was not enough for the family to live on, even with the small annuity they had been receiving since 1947. A year or two later, a desperate Anna went to the House of Commons in tears and asked to see former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, back in Opposition after his Conservative Party had lost the elections of 1963. They were starving on the pension, she told him, and they had to have more. Her husband was not able to provide for them and she was worried about the children. The Liberal government, she said, was not responsive to the problem.26 It is not clear whether Diefenbaker helped the Gouzenkos or not. But sometime in the late 1960s Gouzenko started receiving annual increases in his pension, and the Canadian government hired an accountant to help straighten the family's finances out yet again. Gouzenko had said they were around $20,000 in debt, but it turned out to be close to $140,000. The government had to initiate the same process of negotiating with the creditors that B.B. Osler had gone through.27
Had Gouzenko invested wisely, or simply saved some of the money he had received, he would not have been in these dire straits. As more than one observer has pointed out, however, this was probably too much to expect of someone with no experience in a capitalist system. He had grown up in a society where there was little concept of earning a wage or being rewarded for hard work. The vast proletariat in the Soviet Union was essentially slave labor in the service of Stalin's all-powerful, greedy bureaucracy. Entrepreneurship did not exist. To improve one's lot economically one had to learn the way of bribes, payoffs, and cheating, some of which Gouzenko had witnessed at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa.
For at least the first year after he defected, Gouzenko did not even handle money. All of his needs and those of his family were taken care of (albeit modestly) by the RCMP. Suddenly, with his 1947 article in Cosmopolitan, his first book, and the movie deal, Gouzenko struck it rich. The RCMP withdrew quickly, leaving him to his own devices, with the exception of the live-in guard. Gouzenko's instant fame brought him a sense of entitlement. He wanted to experience the good life and started taking people out to fancy Toronto restaurants, where he would often order the most expensive dish on the menu. According to Gouzenko's former trust officer at his bank, “If he took you out to lunch he made sure that you were well looked after. You didn't eat in greasy spoons. . . . He was very generous. Too generous. You've got to remember that somebody who is brought up in that particular culture who came to this culture – you're going from scrub boards to washing machines and I think he wanted to enjoy the best.”28 Anna, who some have said was the smarter of the two, or at least the more sensible, might have stepped in (as she did later in their marriage) and tried to prevent Igor from throwing away money and making careless investments, but she was burdened with small children and perhaps cowed by her husband's domineering ways.
Gouzenko took considerable interest in his children and was very proud of them. They were a close and devoted family. But the financial concerns, lawsuits, and feuds with the RCMP distracted both him and Anna. And then, of course, there was the strain of his false
identity. The children were not told until each reached the age of sixteen that Krysac was not their real name and that their parents came from Russia, not Czechoslovakia. Evelyn Wilson recalled that she once became suspicious when she saw a man on television with a hood over his head and heard him talking. He sounded exactly like her father. She was nonetheless shocked when she learned the truth at sixteen: “When you are always cheering for the Czech hockey team over the Russian one and then you find out you are a Russian, you feel bad.”29
Indeed, Evelyn was not only stunned, she was angry, as were her siblings when they learned the truth about their parents. “We rebelled,” recalled Evelyn, “that's what happened. My poor parents, on top of all the troubles they had, there were these unruly teenagers, who in their state of mind wanted to distance themselves from this, so we took on some of the popular criticisms of our father.” Evelyn recalls that she was particularly humiliated by the pillowcase her father wore when he appeared on television (her mother's idea). People said he looked like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. “For a long time,” Evelyn says, “all I felt was embarrassment.”30
One of Gouzenko's lawyers observed that “considering the circumstances of their upbringing, they were remarkably well-adjusted and personable young adults, which must be regarded as an enduring tribute to the character and example set by their parents.”31 But as their parents became obsessed with lawsuits and efforts to expose the sinister influence of the KGB, the job of raising eight children suffered. Evelyn, who was frequently saddled with taking care of her younger siblings in her parents’ absence, escaped. She got married, and had her first child at the age of seventeen. Evelyn eventually returned to the fold and embraced her parents as heroes, as did her sisters. But there was ambivalence among the four sons. The sons were conspicuously absent at a ceremony held in September 2002 to honor their parents, and at two subsequent public ceremonies, where plaques dedicated to Gouzenko were unveiled. Evidently, they chose to preserve their identity as Krysacs rather than acknowledge that they were the sons of the famous defector Gouzenko.32
Throughout his years in Canada, Gouzenko was obsessed with the idea that the KGB (as the Soviet secret police were called after 1954) wanted to kill him. When he was to meet someone, he never made an appointment beforehand. KGB assassins might be waiting for him. If he and Anna were driving someone to a Toronto restaurant, Anna would take a roundabout way to get there. Before long, Gouzenko decided that the RCMP, because it had been infiltrated by the KGB, was in on a plot against him. According to a journalist friend, “He was convinced his house was bugged by the Mounties. He said he in turn had put in a secret taping system that was voice-activated apparently. I have no idea where the tape was kept. I never pursued that with him because he was so paranoid that would have made him nervous. He said he taped his own house so that if anything should happen to him he or his family would have a record.33
On his way to Montebello to meet senators Jenner and McCarran in early 1954, Gouzenko became fixated with the idea that the RCMP was going to use the occasion to get rid of him. He thought they were planning to stage a car accident. When the Mounties circled around the town to make sure their two-car caravan was not being followed and suggested that Gouzenko ride separately from his lawyer, he became suspicious and upset.34 A journalist who knew Gouzenko once observed, “I would assume, since I've known an awful lot of psychiatrists, they could spend 10 minutes with him and decide he was a paranoid personality. He did strike me that way . . . I had a feeling he was crazy but had good reasons for being that way.”35
After several years of guarding Gouzenko from supposed Soviet assassins, the RCMP began to question whether their protection was really necessary. The simple fact that he had blown his cover on numerous occasions with no repercussions, and that journalists never seemed to have trouble finding him, made it doubtful that he was in danger of being murdered by the KGB. Frustrated by Gouzenko's carelessness and fed up with his demands, the RCMP gave up guarding him by the early 1960s.
But Gouzenko continued to insist he was a marked man. As one observer remarked, “Without this sense that there was some kind of physical danger attached to his existence a lot of the glamour surrounding him would have disappeared and he would have become like other defectors who, whether in art or science, were not as well known as Gouzenko and would live out fairly unremarkable lives.”36 Sometimes he even hinted to members of the media that an assassination attempt had been made against him. When asked for specifics, however, he would demur, claiming that what he had referred to was “character assassination.” Gouzenko at some point convinced himself that before the Soviets killed him they would try to destroy his credibility. How would the KGB go about doing this? By using certain elements of the Canadian media that were controlled by communists. He once told an interviewer that one of the editors of the Toronto Daily Star, which Gouzenko sued more than once, was pro- Russian and followed the communist line. The same was true, in Gouzenko's view, of certain broadcasters at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Protecting his reputation, then, was not only a personal matter, it was a fight against communists and the KGB.37
Gouzenko also developed the theory that the Canadian government had covered up many of the facts about his case, pointing out that the GRU documents he had produced were still not publicly available. He claimed that the documents contained the names of individuals receiving government protection. In a cbc television interview in the spring of 1981, Gouzenko stated flatly that the persons named were in high positions and that it would be embarrassing for the government to reveal them. Gouzenko added, “I have a feeling that if, say, I die, they would be published, you know, and the reason [is] it would be easy to clean them, to white wash and to purge them and nobody would be able to say they were [not] the same as before or the same number of them and so on. While I’m alive, I can say . . . ‘just a moment, where is that document which I brought with me?’ or ‘just a moment, that document didn't read the way it used to be.’”38
Ironically, just a few months later, in October of 1981, the Canadian government declassified the testimony taken by the Royal Commission on Espionage (more than six thousand pages). Copies of the documents Gouzenko brought out, and also a substantial portion of the vast number of exhibits that were part of its inquiry, were declassified three years later. Although the RCMP and Canadian government files on the case remained closed, it could not be said that the commission had covered up evidence about spies that had cropped up in the course of its investigation. It is true that many names appeared in Israel Halperin's infectious address book, which the RCMP confiscated after his arrest and which to this day is still classified as secret. But these individuals, many of whom were not Canadians, were beyond the commission's purview. Besides, the RCMP had dutifully sent a copy of the address book to both the FBI and MI5.
Gouzenko's allegation that the Canadian government was shielding people who had been involved in spying was not true. Of all people, he should have known better. With his razor-sharp mind and his near-photographic memory, he knew by heart the details of all the documents he took from the Soviet Embassy and all that he said to his interrogators. Yes, several of those whose names had come up were suspected of involvement with the Russians and were never prosecuted. This had nothing to do with a cover-up. The evidence in those instances turned out to be too flimsy for Canadian authorities to even consider taking legal action.
Gouzenko's growing paranoia was partly the Canadian government's fault. Despite their initial efforts to cast him as a hero, Canadian authorities, particularly the RCMP, had never trusted his motives. (Indeed, the RCMP made this clear in giving Gouzenko his unflattering surname.) And they did not know what to do with him once the spy trials had ended. Instead of hiring him as a consultant to analyze unfolding events in the Soviet Union, or to develop a program of asylum for other defectors, they put Gouzenko out to pasture. He was not even thirty years old. As one of Gouzenko's many lawyers recalled, “Here is a superbly
intelligent human being who really understands the Russian system, their mentality, their training, their approach. Why they wouldn't have made more use of him I’ll never know. This really bothered him. I think he kind of hoped to be treated as an expert or a consultant. He felt they didn't get 10 per cent of what they could have out of him. . . . He might not have always had the answer but it would have been a very interesting sounding board because he was a very, very bright man.”39
But the Canadian government, the RCMP in particular, had its reasons not to continue to seek Gouzenko's advice. Because Gouzenko had come to the West at a young age and been out of touch with the Soviet Union ever since, it was thought he had little to offer. Also, while it is true that in the United States defectors from the Soviet Union were eventually used as contract advisers to the CIA, and some were considered quite valuable, when Gouzenko was offered asylum the Cold War was just beginning, and there were no policies or programs for dealing with defectors.40
Furthermore, Gouzenko, like many defectors, was convinced the Soviets had managed to put their spies everywhere, which prompted him to make questionable claims. Just after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, in October 1957, throwing Americans into a panic, he wrote a letter to U.S. president Eisenhower, reproduced in part in the New York Times. It read as follows: “The fact that the United States, with its advanced scientific and material resources, was not able to launch the first earth satellite should be the subject of serious thought and investigation. In my opinion, it indicates the work of well-organized spy rings in the United States missile production system. These rings on the one hand are pumping out of the United States valuable scientific and other information and on the other hand are sabotaging and delaying the United States missile effort under all kinds of seemingly logical excuses.”41