UPROOTED BY SUSPICION
The Gouzenko Affair launched the Cold War, and branded Montreal’s David Shugar a spy
Dr. David Shugar was a brilliant physicist with many prospects until police stormed into his Montreal home and accused him of spying for the Soviets. It was the start of the Cold War, and Canada was far from immune to anti-communist hysteria. Shugar was cleared, but the stigma cost him his job and chased him from the country. Marian Scott tells his story in Saturday Extra
Early on Feb. 15, 1946, David Shugar was awakened by a pounding on the door. A posse of burly RCMP officers, reeking of liquor, unceremoniously bundled him into the back of a car and whisked him to a secret detention centre in Ottawa, where he would be interrogated for four weeks on suspicion of spying for the Soviet Union.
Just hours earlier, life seemed to be brimming with promise for the brilliant, 30-year-old physicist from Montreal, who had recently started a job as a research scientist for the federal Department of Health and Welfare in Ottawa.
An officer in the Royal Canadian Navy during the war, Shugar had been happily married for two years to the love of his life, Grace.
But suddenly, he found himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare that would cost him his job, his reputation and his country.
Unbeknownst to Shugar, the defection of a Russian cipher clerk five months earlier was about to change his life forever — along with the course of world history.
On Sept. 5, 1945, Igor Gouzenko fled from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa and demanded asylum. To buy his freedom, he had smuggled out hundreds of documents revealing that the Soviets were operating a spy network right under the noses of the Canadian government.
The Gouzenko Affair helped launch the Cold War, turning public opinion against the Soviet Union, a wartime ally, and hardening the United States’ resolve to maintain its monopoly on the atom bomb, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
For David Shugar, life would never be the same.
“It was a nightmare for me, a nightmare,” said Shugar, who will turn 100 on Sept. 10, in an interview by Skype from Warsaw, Poland, where he has lived for 63 years.
It was the first time the retired professor of biophysics has spoken to the media about the ordeal that began nearly 70 years ago.
“Bitterness” is the word that best describes his feelings about the events that led to a lifetime of exile from Canada, he said.
Under the War Measures Act — which was still in force even though the war had ended on Sept. 2, 1945 — suspects were held incommunicado and called to testify before a Royal Commission headed by two Supreme Court Justices, where usual legal protections, like the right to be represented by counsel, were not observed.
“I was picked up, taken to jail, and submitted to interrogation without any counsel and interrogated by two members of the Supreme Court who treated me as if they had no doubt about what I was guilty of, and kept threatening me all the time,” he recounted.
Despite being acquitted of passing secrets to the Soviets in two separate trials, Shugar was fired from his government job and unable to find another.
STIGMA AND EXILE
Even though Shugar was cleared in court, the Royal Commission’s report — widely reported in newspapers, magazines and books — described him as a communist spy, noted Reg Whitaker, an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Victoria and author of Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 19451957 (University of Toronto Press, 1996).
“He and others like him who had been detained ... had been identified in an official government document, the report of the Royal Commission, as traitors to their country and agents of Soviet espionage,” Whitaker said.
“Even if you were exonerated in the courts, that still hung around your neck. And a lot of these people had great difficulty in getting work for the government again because they were now deemed security risks, so their careers in the public sector were finished.”
Shugar’s case is a reminder that the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts actually began in Canada, Whitaker said.
“Canadians got very self-righteous a little later when they saw the United States in the McCarthy era in the early ’50s, with Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),” he said.
Anti-communist hysteria targeted tens of thousands of Americans, including physicist Albert Einstein, filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, folksinger Pete Seeger, detective story-writer Dashiell Hammett and the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer.
“Canadians smugly said, ‘Look at those Americans going off the rails again.’
“But in a way, what happened in 1945 was something the Americans couldn’t even have done. But it was done here,” he said.
The War Measures Act gave the Canadian government unlimited powers to arrest, detain and deport citizens.
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King used the act to sign two secret orders in council awarding the RCMP sweeping authority to detain and interrogate suspects and setting up the Royal Commission to investigate Gouzenko’s allegations.
In 1948, with all doors closed to him in Canada, Shugar moved to Paris, where he was awarded a research fellowship at the Pasteur Institute. But two years later, he was expelled by the French government, under American pressure, for his alleged communist activities in Canada. In Brussels, he had a similar experience.
So in 1952, Shugar accepted an invitation from physicist Leopold Infeld, an associate of Albert Einstein who had also left Canada after being smeared as a suspected communist, to accept an academic post in Warsaw, Poland.
“I would have preferred remaining in Canada. I am still Canadian and not a Polish citizen,” he said.
Nonetheless, Shugar, who still carries on scientific research, can look back on a distinguished academic career that includes organizing the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Department of Biophysics in the University of Warsaw’s faculty of physics. A member of the Royal Society of Canada, he has conducted groundbreaking cancer research, organized conferences and symposiums and authored hundreds of scholarly articles.
His wife of 72 years, Grace, who died in 2013, also learned Polish and became an eminent professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Warsaw.
The couple contemplated a return to Canada in the mid-1960s, but the tragic death from cancer of their teenage daughter, Barbara, induced them to stay in Poland, where she is buried.
As his 100th birthday approaches, Shugar said what he would like from the Canadian government is “an apology for all I went through. I was acquitted twice in a court of law.”
His family members in Canada, with support from Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, are asking the federal government to apologize for his treatment in the 1940s. His niece Harriet Shugar of Dorval has launched a petition and Facebook page calling on Ottawa to express regret for the persecution of Shugar.
“His name and his reputation were ruined. He had to leave Canada as a result,” she said.
“He’s my hero. This man is such an inspiration to me in terms of moving forward and not letting things get you down.”
COMMUNISM AND ROMANCE
Born in 1915 in Józefów, Poland, Shugar was three when his family immigrated to Montreal at the end of the First World War.
The family lived on Duluth St. near St. Urbain St., in a flat where everyone congregated around the heat of the kitchen stove with its long stovepipe, recalled his brother, Hyman, 90.
His father was an Orthodox Jewish egg candler, who tested eggs for freshness. David helped by delivering eggs to customers on his bicycle.
The immigrant neighbourhood seethed with lively debates between communists, socialists and Zionists. As the federal riding of Cartier, it twice elected communist MP Fred Rose, under the Labour Progressive Party banner, in 1943 and 1945. (The Communist Party in Canada reorganized as the Labour Progressive Party in 1943.) One of Rose’s opponents was future New Democratic Party leader David Lewis, running for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).
In his 1955 novel Son of a Smaller Hero, Mordecai Richler captured the neighbourhood’s dynamic mix of radical politics and sleaze.
“Every night St. Lawrence Boulevard is lit up like a neon cake and used-up men stumble out of a hundred different flophouses to mix with rabbinical students and pimps and Trotskyites and poolroom sharks,” “You can take Rita the Polack up to the Liberty Rooms or you can listen to Panofsky speak on Tim Buck and The Worker.” In 1945, Igor Gouzenko, who worked as a cipher clerk for the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, revealed to the Canadian government that the Soviets were operating a spy network there. After his defection, he concealed his face whenever he appeared in public under his real name.
David came first in the province on his matriculation exams, according to the family, and attended McGill University on scholarships, earning his PhD at age 25.
“He was the best of all of us,” his brother Hyman said.
It was at McGill that he met Grace Wales, an education student from St-Andrew’s East (now St-André-d’Argenteuil) who was involved in the progressive Christian Student Movement. Grace consulted David about how to circulate a petition against Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis’s Padlock Law, which allowed police to padlock any building used to promote communism, said Grace’s nephew David Roback.
“She had this idea that she would
go around the countryside and get the Québécois to sign this petition about what a terrible law this was. Of course, it didn’t go very far. I think she said she got one signature and that was her mother,” he said.
“Clearly, there were some sparks there of a romantic nature. And that’s how they met. It’s how they got together romantically but also politically.”
Grace “was bright, she was beautiful, she was pleasant, she was smart,” said Ruth Feigelson, 93, a friend and former stalwart of communist circles who campaigned for Rose.
“Intermarriage was not a common event. David came from a very orthodox and religious family and, of course, Grace was not Jewish,” she said.
“There was a very great bond between them,” she added.
The massive unemployment, breadlines and hobo jungles of the Depression led many intellectuals to see communism as the answer, Feigelson said. “They were do-gooders. “They wanted to create a better society,” she said.
Grace, who shared an apartment with Feigelson in Toronto, where both worked in youth organizations, ran as a school trustee.
Shugar, who was fired and reinstated for organizing a union at the federal Crown corporation where he worked as a researcher after graduation, was on the executive of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers.
CHANGE OF MOMENTUM
When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, a host of friendship societies sprang up to support the valiant Russians, whose military and civilian death toll in the war
has been estimated at 25 million.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signalled a new dynamic in U.S.-Soviet relations. The initial goal of the Manhattan Project had been to develop the atom bomb before the Germans did so, but with the defeat of Hitler it took on a different significance. As research progressed, the Americans became increasingly reluctant to share nuclear secrets with their wartime allies, particularly the Soviets.
In Canada, where the British and Canadian atomic weapons program, known by the code name Tube Alloys, had moved to the Montreal Laboratory in 1942, efforts stalled because some of the scientific information American researchers were expected to supply under the 1943 Quebec Agreement on nuclear research was not forthcoming.
However, the same day Gouzenko defected, the ZEEP nuclear reactor in Chalk River, Ont., the world’s first outside the U.S., went critical.
When news of Gouzenko’s defection broke in February 1946, a debate over the control of nuclear weapons was in full swing.
Should the United States continue
to protect its nuclear monopoly or should there be international control of atomic energy? Should American atomic research be under military or civilian control?
Gouzenko’s allegations would have a profound impact on that debate.
Mackenzie King issued his first public statement on the espionage affair on Feb. 15, 1946, hours after the RCMP rounded up 13 suspects, including Shugar.
King was not eager to make the affair public but his hand was forced by American radio commentator Drew Pearson, who broke the story on his weekly broadcast Feb. 3. The source of the leak is unknown but it has been variously attributed to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover or U.S. General Leslie Groves, who was responsible for the Manhattan Project.
In February 1946, passage of a U.S. bill establishing civilian control of atomic research seemed assured, writes Gregg Herken in his book The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945-1950 (Princeton University Press, 1981).
But the eruption of the Gouzenko espionage scandal at that precise moment swung “both public and congressional opinion (to) now favouring military-style security and the close safeguarding of all information concerning the bomb.
“The result of the ‘atom spy’ scandal and its attendant hysteria by early summer of 1946 was passage of a bill on domestic control that not only guaranteed a strong military voice in the commission, but also severely restricted the extent of international cooperation possible through the exchange of information on atomic energy,” Herken writes.
I would have preferred remaining in Canada. I am still Canadian and not a Polish citizen. David Shugar, accused of being a Soviet spy 70 years ago There was a very great bond between them. They were do-gooders. They wanted to create a better society.