How the Cold War Began

by Amy Knight

  Another important lesson from the Gouzenko case is that when a name was mentioned in Soviet intelligence traffic it did not necessarily mean that the individual in question was a spy. Soviet intelligence officers passed on to Moscow names of persons they wanted to enlist, like Steinberg and Halperin, but were unsuccessful in doing so. It might be tempting to see a code name in a Soviet telegram and assume that person behind it was a full-fledged spy, but in many cases the “spy” was unsuspecting. Even in the case of Harry Dexter White, who is shown by Venona decryptions to have met with Soviet agents and passed information, there is no evidence that he was doing this with the intention of subverting American policies.13

  GRU and NKVD officers also may have exaggerated the importance of what they received from their recruits. Indeed, it is difficult to know how useful the intelligence actually was to the Kremlin. The Soviet Union was a closed society, where all information, beyond what was disseminated in the official press, was secret. And what appeared in that press was a highly sanitized version of reality, excluding any news that reflected what was actually happening in the country. The public heard mainly about the birthday celebrations of Politburo members, milk production awards to kolkhozes, and, during the war, the valiant struggle against the Nazis. Imagine what Zabotin and his colleagues, having been raised in this environment, must have thought when they arrived in Canada and were allowed to tour military plants and talk with government employees about the war effort. To them, a glance at an open-source Canadian publication on the latest developments in arms-munitions research was the equivalent of being privy to one of the Kremlin's greatest secrets.

  Soviet intelligence officers sent a great volume of material to Russia from the West. Their list of recruits, or potential recruits, was long enough to keep several officers at NKVD and GRU headquarters busy assigning, and reassigning, code names. But the content and value of the information is another question entirely. As British Cold War scholar Sheila Kerr reminds us, despite all new evidence, including the Venona decryptions, historians today do not have a clear picture of the significance of what the Soviets received from their spies. Referring specifically to Donald Maclean, Kerr observes that we know his potential for espionage, “but only Soviet sources can reveal the intelligence requirements Maclean was ordered to fulfill and exactly what intelligence he passed to his NKVD controller.”14

  The British, to their credit, did not indulge in inquisitions in the manner of the Canadians and Americans, and they avoided trampling on civil liberties in the wake of the spy scare. Although MI5 and MI6 went through terrible agonies about spies in their midst, in gentlemanly fashion they kept their investigations quiet, at least until journalist Chapman Pincher wrested the story from them and former MI6 officer Peter Wright wrote his exposé. But the British were not above reacting harshly to national security threats, as we know from the way they responded to the crisis in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. As for Canada, despite the lessons learned from the shameful disregard of civil liberties in the Gouzenko spy case, history briefly repeated itself in October 1970. In fear of terrorism by what turned out to be a small group of Quebec separatists, Trudeau's Liberal government declared a state of emergency and reinstated the draconian War Measures Act.

  Today, in Canada, the United States, and Britain, there are again concerns about violations of civil liberties in the name of national security. It might be argued that analogies to the McCarthy era are inappropriate, because terrorism today is a much greater threat than that faced by the West during the Soviet espionage scare. But at the time, with visions of the atomic bomb exploding over Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh in people's minds, the thought that the Soviet Union could have this weapon at its disposal because of atomic espionage was no less frightening than the specter of terrorism is today. And once the fear took over, it was not difficult to convince people that the threat to national security justified infringements of individual rights and the rolling back of democratic principles of justice.

  Although it was not Gouzenko's fault, his name became linked with the excesses of the spy scare in Canada and, indirectly, with the McCarthy era in the United States. This association explains why the Canadian government remained ambivalent about Gouzenko's place in Canadian history until the spring of 2004, when it GRUdgingly allowed a plaque to be erected in Ottawa honoring his memory. That it was more than twenty years after Gouzenko's death suggests there was strong resistance to the idea of giving him back the hero status he first achieved in defecting. However grateful people were to Gouzenko for opening up their eyes to the dangers of Soviet espionage, many could not forget the price that was paid for that knowledge.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Hoover to Connelly, September 12, 1945, Harry S. Truman Library, President's Secretary's Files (Subject File), “FBI-Atomic Bomb,” box 167.

  2. Hoover to Lyon, September 18, 1945, U.S. National Archives [hereafter nara], RG 59, 861.20242/9-1845. Hoover also sent another letter to the White House on that day, most of which is blacked out, but it probably contained the same information.

  3. Hoover to Lyon, September 24, 1945, Central Intelligence Agency, Igor Gouzenko File.

  4. The literature on the Alger Hiss case is vast. The best-known account is that of Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Random House, 1978). Revised edition, 1997. The office of Special Political Affairs was created at the State Department specifically for dealing with United Nations issues. After Hiss became the director of spa in March 1945, he reported directly to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius.

  5. Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935–90 (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 34.

  6. For a thorough study of Krivitsky's life as a defector, see Gary Kern, A Death in Washington: Walter C. Krivitsky and the Stalin Terror (New York: Enigma Books, 2003). Kern leaves open the question as to whether Krivitsky killed himself or was murdered.

  7. Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 96.

  8. FBI Gouzenko file, 100-342972-37.

  9. The two British services were formed in the early twentieth century out of sections five and six of British Military Intelligence (hence the mi designations). Their functions were not entirely separate, which caused some friction. MI5 was in charge of security and counterintelligence at home, but it also had similar responsibilities for British territory abroad. And MI6, while primarily concerned with intelligence gathering abroad, had its own counterintelligence department, section 5.

  10. Bower, The Perfect English Spy, p. 66.

  11. David Stafford, Camp X (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1986), p. 259.

  12. As quoted in Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 781.

  13. James Littleton, Target Nation: Canada and the Western Intelligence Network (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1982), p. 16; Bower, The Perfect English Spy, p. 78. Roger Hollis of MI5 counted at least eight “crypto communists” among Labour mps.

  14. Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 1096.

  15. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 45.

  16. Fuchs had been recruited by the GRU in 1941 in London. By 1944, he was handed over from the GRU to the NKVD. See the Russian website www.agentura.ru/dosie/gru/imperia/atomspy, “atomnyi shpionazh,” pp. 6-9. Also see David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), chapter four.

  17. The newly released files on the Gouzenko case from the National Archives in Britain are filled with reports to and from Philby. See the National Archives [hereafter TNA], KV 2/1419-KV 2/1424.

  18. Soviet intelligence archives are not open to researchers, but many of their documents have been publish
ed in Russian, along with memoirs of former intelligence officers. Another important new source of materials on Gouzenko are the John Sawatsky Papers, recently donated to the University of Regina Library. The papers consist of interviews with people who knew Gouzenko personally. Although significant portions of these interviews were published as a book, John Sawatsky, Gouzenko: The Untold Story (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1984), the unpublished portions provide fascinating new details about Gouzenko's life.

  Chapter 1: THE DEFECTION

  1. See Gouzenko's autobiography, The Iron Curtain (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1948); and Igor Gouzenko, “I Was Inside Stalin's Spy Ring,” Cosmopolitan, February 1947.

  2. Gouzenko's daughter Evelyn Wilson spoke about her parents at a conference in Ottawa, April 14, 2004.

  3. Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, pp. 50-69. Also see Gouzenko's testimony at the preliminary hearing for Fred Rose, March 22, 1946, pp. 1-26 in the Library and Archives Canada [hereafter lac], MG 30, A 94, vol. 45, file 3155. The acronym GRU stands for Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie.

  4. “Atomnyi shpionazh”; Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, pp. 119-224; The Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and the Circumstances Surrounding the Communication, by Public Officials and Other Persons in Positions of Trust of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power, June 1946 [Hereafter RC Report] (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1946), pp. 11-18.

  5. “The Canadian Case in Retrospect,” MI5 report, TNA, KV 2/1424.

  6. Merrily Weisbord, The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials and the Cold War (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1994), p. 119.

  7. As told to this author by two former Canadian diplomats who were in Ottawa at the time.

  8. Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, p. 182.

  9. Weisbord, The Strangest Dream, p. 134.

  10. LAC, RG 33/62, volume 16, exhibits 576-578. The host of the Russians was Gerald Woods.

  11. See TNA, KV 2/1424, “The Canadian Case in Retrospect.”

  12. Gordon Lunan, The Making of a Spy: A Political Odyssey (Montreal: Robert Davies, 1995), pp. 95-96.

  13. Littleton, Target Nation, p. 20.

  14. See his memoirs: Vitalii Pavlov, Operatsiia “sneg,” Polveka vo vneshnei razvedke KGB (Moscow, 1996), pp. 44-55.

  15. Ibid., pp. 66-87.

  16. Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, p. 205.

  17. Ibid., p. 204.

  18. Ibid., p. 188.

  19. Ibid., p. 201; Gouzenko, “I Was Inside Stalin's Spy Ring,” p. 85.

  20. John Sawatsky Papers, University of Regina Archives, 84-38, box 1, file 8, interview with Bill McMurty, October 20, 1983.

  21. Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, p. 215.

  22. Ibid., pp. 203-219.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Transcript of Gouzenko's testimony before the Royal Commission, LAC, RG 33/62, vol. 1, book one, February 13-22, 1946, pp. 370-371; 393-394; Also see TNA, KV 2/1419, report on Corby and a bsc (British Security Coordination) Report, dated September 1945, where it is stated that “without question, he [Gouzenko] was afraid of being liquidated.” LAC, MG 26, J4, vol. 417.

  25. Mikhail Mil'shtein, “Pobeg Guzenko,” Sovershenno sekretno, no. 3, 1995, pp. 24-25.

  26. Ibid.

  27. In could be that Zabotin did not want either Romanov or Gouzenko going back early because they might “spill the beans” to headquarters about some of the things he did or said in unguarded moments.

  28. Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, pp. 218-219.

  29. See Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945–1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 43-46, for a discussion of Canadian and British participation in the Allied bomb project.

  30. Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, pp. 215; 222.

  31. TNA, KV 2/1423, report from Major G.H. Leggett, Intelligence Bureau, Advance H.Q., Control Commission for Germany, June 17, 1946.

  32. Ibid.

  33. RC Report, p. 384.

  34. Ibid., p. 135.

  35. Ibid., p. 124.

  36. Ibid., p. 145.

  37. Ibid., pp. 142-143.

  38. Ibid., pp. 135; 145-146.

  39. Lunan, The Making of a Spy, p. 148.

  40. Dmitrii Prokhorov, “Istoriia Allana Meia,” February 26, 2001, www.agentura.press/2001/mey.txt.

  41. Atomnyi shpionazh, p. 15; Gouzenko, The Iron Curtain, p. 237. Gouzenko says that May handed over reports on atomic research several months before Hiroshima, but the GRU does not appear to have passed on his reports until July 1945. See RC Report, pp. 452-458.

  42. Prokhorov, “Istoriia.”

  43. As quoted inwww.agentura.ru/dosie/gru/imperia/atomspy.

  44. RC Report, p. 452.

  45. Sawatsky Papers, 85-26, box 1, Interview with Mrs. Gouzenko, March 17, 1984.

  46. RC Report, p. 641; LAC, RG 33/32, Gouzenko testimony, pp. 120-121; February 13, p. 77, pp. 118.

  47. Gouzenko, “I Was Inside Stalin's Spy Ring,” p. 164.

  48. The documents from Gouzenko were copied as exhibits for the Royal Commission on Espionage that investigated the Gouzenko case in 1946. For a list of the documents, see LAC, RG 33/62 Microfilm T- 1368. Copies of the exhibits themselves are scattered throughout the Royal Commission records, but can be located in the index to the massive Royal Commission files.

  49. LAC, MG 30 (Cohen Papers), series A94, vol. 45, file 3156; Author's interview with William Kelly, Ottawa, November 16, 2001.

  50. The fact that Gouzenko had been recalled because he was in trouble was also covered up. In a signed statement to the RCMP, which was later published, Gouzenko said that he defected because he was attracted by Canada's democratic system of government and disgusted by the “double-faced politics of the Soviet government.” RC Report, pp. 637-648. The statement was signed on October 10, 1945.

  51. Sawatsky Papers, 84-38, box 2, Interview with Ken Parks, December 27, 1983.

  52. Sawatsky, Gouzenko, pp. 21-25; Gouzenko statement of October 10, 1945, “account of steps taken on Sept. 5th, 6th, and 7th.” CSIS files and microfilm C274152, LAC.

  53. Sawatsky, Gouzenko, pp. 26-40; Gouzenko statement.

  54. LAC, MG 26, J4, vol. 390, file 32; Testimony by Gouzenko and his neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Main and Mrs. Frances Elliott, before the Royal Commission on Espionage, LAC, RG 33/62, vol. 1, book 1, February 13-22, 1946, pp. 379-446.

  55. Sawatsky Papers, 84-38, box 1, file 8, interview with Harold Main, March 8, 1984.

  56. Sawatsky, Gouzenko, pp. 44-47.

  57. “Preventative Medicine,” Time magazine, January 7, 1946.

  58. LAC, William MacKenzie King Diary [hereafter WMK Diary], Aug. 25, 1945.

  59. WMK Diary, Sept. 6, 1945.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Ibid.

  62. See the memoirs of the British High Commissioner to Canada: Malcolm MacDonald, People & Places: Random Reminiscences of the Rt. Hon. Malcolm MacDonald (London: Collins, 1969), p. 188. Also see the memoirs of RCMP intelligence branch chief (and later commissioner) Charles Rivett-Carnac, Pursuit in the Wilderness (Boston: Little Brown, 1965), pp. 306-307; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), pp. 229-232; and Stafford, Camp X, p. 258-259. The story that Stephenson was the mysterious intelligence officer in Ottawa that night is also repeated in William Stevenson, Intrepid's Last Case (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 51-55.

  63. Stafford, Camp X, p. 258. Hyde, The Quiet Canadian, pp. 229-232. According to Hyde, Stephenson “seldom left his New York headquarters, except to fly to Washington . . . or to cross the Atlantic to report progress to the prime minister and the various departments represented by the B.S.C.” (p. 4)

  64. Sawatsky Papers, 84-38, box 2, interview with George Glazebrook, February 29, 1984.

  65. See John Bryden, Best-Kept Secret: Canadian Secret Intelligence in the Second World War (Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1993), pp. 267-275 and Mark
Kristmanson, Plateaus of Freedom: Nationality, Culture, and State Security in Canada, 1940–1960 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 143-173 for the speculation on Menzies.

  66. TNA, KV 2/1425, telegram for Sir Alexander Cadogan from Malcolm MacDonald, dated September 10, 1945.

  67. For Gouzenko's statement mentioning Mrs. Bourke, see LAC MG26, J4, vol. 390, file 32.

  68. On the Elliotts, see Kristmanson, Plateaus of Freedom, pp. 168-170 and an interview with their former son-in-law: Sawatsky papers, 84-38, box 2, interview with M.J. Sumpton, undated. Sumpton said that his father-in- law, Mr. Elliott, was particularly angry that all the neighbors had to be quiet for the rest of their lives, when Gouzenko was allowed to write a book and magazine articles telling his version of events.

  69. LAC, MG 26, J4, vol. 390, file 32. On this version, the person editing the statement earmarked this portion to be omitted.

  70. See Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp. 50-53. In fact, the FBI seems to have backed out of this arrangement and left Kravchenko on his own after a series of interviews with him.

  71. Interviews with William Kelly, Ottawa, November 16, 2001, and Dan Mulvenna (by telephone to Leesburg, Virginia), February 4, 2005. Neither Kelly, who was eventually to become deputy commissioner of the RCMP, nor Mulvenna worked on the Gouzenko case until after the defection, however.

  72. Transcript of interview with Lt-Gen. Vitalii Pavlov, conducted in Moscow on September 29, 2001, by Svetlana Chervonnaya and passed on to this author. Also see Pavlov, Operatsiia “sneg,” p. 75. Pavlov wrote: “I do not believe the widely spread myth that Gouzenko made the decision to defect independently.”

  73. Sawatsky Papers, 84-38, box 1, file 7, interview with John McCulloch, October 5, 1983.