A SOVIET SAGA
Igor Gouzenko pulled back the curtain on Russian espionage in Canada in 1945. The defector exposed Soviet agents throughout Ottawa and, in later years, would talk to media from under a hood, writes Blair Crawford in today’s Great Canadian Story.
Defector Igor Gouzenko hid in a neighbour’s apartment on Somerset Street in Ottawa while Soviet agents ransacked his own, looking for documents on a spy network that he had secretly removed from the Soviet Embassy. The Gouzenko affair changed the way Canadians saw the chilling relations between East and West after the Second World War. This is one of 15 Canadian stories we are presenting as The Citizen marks Canada’s sesquicentennial. Sept. 5, 1945, was hot and muggy in Ottawa. The Second World War had ended just three days before with the surrender of Japan and it was less than a month since the Americans had ushered in the nuclear age by dropping their Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King spent that Wednesday putting the final touches on the throne speech, to be delivered the next day in Parliament — one that praised the sacrifice of Canada and its wartime allies and called for “a new order founded on world security and social justice.”
Also that evening, a 26-year-old cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko set out from his Somerset Street West apartment for the 45-minute walk to the Soviet Embassy in Sandy Hill. He was sweating when he rounded the corner to the compound on Charlotte Street.
“But I knew the perspiration trickling inside my shirt was caused by more than the weather,” Gouzenko wrote in his memoir, This Was My Choice. “Tonight was to be the turning point of my life, and the lives of my family, from Soviet slavery to democratic freedom.”
It would be a turning point in Canadian history, too. A few minutes later, Gouzenko left the embassy with 109 carefully chosen documents tucked in his waist band. They revealed the details of a secret Soviet espionage ring designed to infiltrate Canadian society.
It would be a stretch to say Igor Gouzenko “started” the Cold War, but his defection and revelations would change the way Canadians viewed themselves and the world in a new and chilling confrontation between East and West.
“He forced people’s eyes open. He forced them to confront reality,” says Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa’s Centre for International Policy Studies and one of Canada’s leading experts on spies and spying.
“He really set in motion the foundations for the Canadian security state.”
Born in Rogachev, USSR, in 1919, Gouzenko arrived with his wife, Svetlana, in Ottawa in 1943 to take a junior position at the embassy handling secret coded messages. He was outfitted in an “atrocious” suit and schooled on how to blend in to Canadian society (“Always wear a hat in the streets”; “keep your wives under reasonable control”; “never permit yourself to be more drunk than your guest or your host”).
But the Gouzenkos grew disenchanted with the Soviet system.
“The Soviet colony in Ottawa, ostensibly an isolated paradise in the jungle of democracy and a shining example of efficiency for the capitalistic nation to emulate, soon palled on me,” Gouzenko wrote in his memoir. “Even as I breathed the clean, free Canadian air through the steel bars of my cipher room window, there would come from behind and around me the ugly sounds of bickering, arising from rotten little intrigues and episodes that dug into the thin morality crust of the hypocritical USSR Embassy.”
In 1945, after learning he was to be transferred back to the USSR, and with the encouragement of Svetlana, Gouzenko decided to defect.
On that muggy September evening, with his documents hidden under his clothing and fearful the Soviet secret police were on his trail, Gouzenko faced a new problem: Who to give the documents to? Canada was so naive about espionage, there was no obvious place for him to go. First he tried the RCMP, but the officer on duty refused to believe his story. He then went to the Ottawa Journal and again was told the paper wasn’t interested.
The Gouzenkos spent the next night hiding in their neighbour’s apartment across the hall. Igor called the Ottawa police for protection and two constables, Thomas Walsh and Jock McCulloch, stood guard across the street in Dundonald Park, watching for the neighbour’s bathroom light to go off — Gouzenko’s prearranged signal that the Soviets had arrived.
When the signal came, Walsh and McCulloch entered the building and found four Soviet officials had broken into and were searching Gouzenko’s apartment. The officers ordered the men to leave, but could do little else because of the Soviets’ diplomatic immunity.
The next day, Gouzenko delivered his documents to the minister of justice. The revelations hit the government like a bombshell, but were kept in absolute secrecy.
“It was a small government, everyone knew each other. No one could imagine that people would betray Canadian secrets to a foreign power,” Wark said.
It would be five months before the RCMP swooped down on the spies Gouzenko had fingered. Eventually, 12 people were charged, including members of the military, a scientist in the National Research Council, even a member of Parliament, Fred Rose, the only elected communist in the House of Commons.
Once over his shock, Mackenzie King realized he could use the Gouzenko affair as a bargaining chip to assert Canada’s role in the postwar world. The Soviets were interested in Canada, he reasoned, so the British and Americans should be, too.
“(King) decided he was going to use the Gouzenko affair to create strong bonds between Canada and its close wartime intelligence allies,” Wark said. “There was no guarantee that things that developed during the Second World War — Canada’s close ties to the United States and Britain in particular, intelligence sharing … was going to continue in peacetime.
“In a way, the Gouzenko affair was one of the ways in which Canada solidified its partnership in what would come to be called the Five Eyes.”
The government’s harsh response to Gouzenko’s espionage allegations, and the heavy-handed tactics of the royal commission that subsequently looked into the spy affair in Canada — Wark likened it to a “star chamber” — did not sit well with civil libertarians. They watched with concern as the state trampled individual rights, justifying it because of fears of communism and Soviet peril.
“It was a bad start to finding the balance between security and rights,” Wark said.
“But the good news is two things came out of the overly harsh methods used in the Gouzenko affair. The process of detentions, absence of counsel, of secreting people away, was the reason for the founding of the Canadian civil liberties movement. It’s where it got its start. It spawned a countermeasure that has proven very important to the protection of rights and liberties in society.”
Gouzenko and his family were given a new identity for their protection and lived quietly in Port Credit outside Toronto. Gouzenko wrote two books about his experience and made occasional TV appearances, always dramatically in a hood that hid his face. He died of a heart attack in 1982. Svetlana died in 2001.
In the age of WikiLeaks, Gouzenko’s paltry 109 documents seem oldfashioned. He didn’t have access to a miniature camera like a gadgetequipped spy would have used, so he had no choice but to stuff the original documents down his pants.
“There’s a reason to be kind of nostalgic for those days,” Wark said. “Igor Gouzenko very carefully selected material he thought he needed to have to warn the West and secure his own passage to the West and his safety.”