Chapter 1
THE DEFECTION

If Gouzenko hadn't fallen into the Western intelligence services’ lap, they would have had to invent somebody like him.

Ian Adams, Canadian journalist

There was nothing ordinary about Igor Gouzenko. But then spies – especially those who decide to defect – are by definition a unique species. Exceptionally ambitious and highly intelligent, Gouzenko had never been destined for the life of an average Soviet citizen in the grim and stifling Stalin era. Born in 1919 in the village of Rogachev, not far from Moscow, he never knew his father, who disappeared during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. His mother was a schoolteacher, with a higher degree in mathematics, and she struggled to raise her three children on her own. At one point, she had to send Igor, the youngest, to his grandmother to live because she could not make ends meet. Eventually, however, Igor's mother got a job in Moscow, where Igor was able to join the family.¹

Because of his strong academic record, Igor was accepted to study at the prestigious Moscow Architectural Institute. There he met Svetlana Gouseva, called Anna by Igor, an honor student and a beautiful brunette. At five feet seven inches, Anna was one inch taller than the sturdily built Igor, and four years younger. She had also lived a more privileged life than he had. Her father was a noted engineer, who participated in building the Moscow subway, and his family lived well, albeit by Soviet standards. Anna and Igor, who was brown-haired, with an oval face and deep-set, penetrating eyes, were attracted to each other instantly. After a quick courtship, they were married, and by all accounts they remained a passionately devoted couple throughout their eventful, often stormy, forty-year union. Both were strong-willed, intense and purposeful, and both were artistically talented. Their daughter Evelyn remarked years later, “My earliest recollections of my parents were at the easel.” In addition to painting, Igor would also produce an award-winning novel.²

The war put an end to Gouzenko's studies, but he was lucky enough not to be sent to the front. Instead, the NKVD, the Soviets’ secret police agency, singled him out – after a careful screening to ensure his political reliability – from among a group of Young Communist League members for a special assignment. Following courses at the Military Engineering Academy in Moscow and rigorous examinations in mathematics and sciences, Gouzenko was sent to the Higher Intelligence School of the Red Army, where he began training as a cipher clerk with Soviet military intelligence, known as the GRU. Because cipher clerks were the linchpin of the Soviet espionage effort, the year-long course was exacting, but Gouzenko passed with flying colors.³

In June 1943, Gouzenko arrived in Ottawa on his first (and, as it would turn out, his last) mission abroad, accompanied by his new boss, Col. Nikolai Zabotin, and Zabotin's assistant, Major Alexander Romanov. Anna, who was pregnant, would follow in a few months. Ottawa at that time was bustling. Formerly a rough-and-tumble lumber town on the majestic and sprawling Ottawa River, a major route for lumber and fur traders, Ottawa had in 1857 been designated Canada's capital. It retained its unsophisticated frontier character well into the next century, but with the advent of the Second World War, Ottawa, while still a “small town” compared to other world capitals, came into its own. The rapidly expanding civil service brought so many new inhabitants to the city that temporary buildings were erected along its perimeters. At lunchtime, the cafeteria of the elegant and grand Château Laurier Hotel, which stood on the Rideau Canal next to the imposing Houses of Parliament, was filled with government officials, diplomats, politicians, and journalists trading wartime news. In the evening, remnants of the same crowd, those not attending a gathering at one of the embassies, filled the bar.

From the moment they arrived, Gouzenko and his fellow GRU officers, who stayed at the Château Laurier while awaiting permanent living quarters, were in the thick of Ottawa life, a life infinitely more attractive and comfortable than the drab and difficult one they had left behind in Stalin's Russia.

Col. Zabotin was officially the new Soviet military attaché to Canada, but unbeknownst to his Canadian hosts, he was also the rezident, code-named “Grant,” in charge of GRU operations in Canada. With the intense fight against the Nazis turning in their favor, the Soviets had begun in earnest to launch an atomic-bomb project, and they wanted to speed up their progress by taking advantage of Western research. Canada, which had invited the Soviet Union to establish a legation in Ottawa in 1942 (it was elevated to an embassy in 1944), was assisting the United States and Britain in work on the atomic bomb. So the newly arrived GRU officers were instructed to recruit Canadians who could provide information about this research, as well as about other military-related issues. Their reports, and the responses from Moscow, were sent back and forth by telegraphed messages, which Gouzenko was responsible for ciphering and deciphering.⁴

Zabotin's group was not the first to carry out espionage for the GRU in Canada. In 1942, as part of a Canadian Mutual Aid program, Major Vsevolod Sokolov had arrived as the official Soviet inspector of Canadian war production plants that were supplying weapons to the Soviets. In a classic example of biting the hand that feeds you, Sokolov set up an Ottawa-based GRU spy ring using Canadian Communist Party officials Fred Rose and Sam Carr, who participated in the day-to-day running of the network. (Both Rose and Carr would eventually be arrested because of Gouzenko.) And for more than two decades before that, Canada had been used as an entrée for Soviet spies heading for the United States. According to one Soviet intelligence report, “A false Canadian identity document and passport enabled spies to cross from Canada to the United States without much difficulty and to remain indefinitely in the United States without molestation. . . . Canadian passports were also used by Soviet spies in Europe during the 1930s.” Officials from the Canadian Communist Party participated actively in this process, providing assistance to the Russians whenever required and also working with their comrades in the American Communist Party.⁵

As accredited diplomats from an Allied power, Zabotin and his staff, which was soon augmented with additional GRU officers, found a welcoming environment in Ottawa and indeed wherever they went in Canada. Canadians felt a special affinity for their Russian neighbors. Both countries had vast and undeveloped territories, including an Arctic North. They had in common the long, frigid winters of their lands. And of course there was Russia's heroic role at the Eastern Front. As one source described it, “Wartime differences were allowed because there was a common enemy. Even the left-wing theatre was acceptable enough for the New Theatre Group to go to Ottawa to do We Beg to Differ for the troops. Eaton's, the largest department store in Montreal and owned by a long-established English-Canadian dynasty, flew the hammer and sickle. Stalin was on the cover of Time. Across Canada, Soviet-Canadian friendship societies were formed, as were many organizations sending aid to the ussr. . . . The National Film Board of Canada made a pro-Russian film called Our Northern Neighbour.”⁶

Colonel Zabotin was highly popular with Canadians, particularly with ladies. There were rumors he had seduced one or two married women in the Ottawa diplomatic set.⁷ And no wonder. The son of a Tsarist military officer and a graduate of the prestigious Frunze Military Academy, thirty-four-year-old Zabotin was a decorated veteran of the ferocious 1942 Battle of Stalingrad, the first major victory for the Soviets against the Germans. Over six feet tall, he was strikingly handsome, with a broad smile and thick, prematurely gray hair. And he had a magnetic personality. As Gouzenko described Zabotin, “He must have been well educated because the polish of his Russian speech was a treat to hear. His bright, gay conversation sparkled with references to his place in the Ural Mountains, to his dogs and horses. We assumed that he belonged to a privileged family, a fact borne out by his sudden shifting of the conversation whenever we tried to learn more about his family.” Zabotin, Gouzenko added, was an obvious choice for the job of GRU rezident: “Zabotin looked every inch a soldier, and Red Army soldiers were then at the peak of their popularity with the democratic world.”⁸

Soviet diplomats in Ottawa, including those secretly working for the GRU, earned high marks for their hospitality, and their receptions were always well attended. According to one Canadian, the Soviets were “the toast of the town. They were sought after for their boisterous energy, their entertaining stories, their generosity with unrationed liquor, their mammoth parties.”⁹ The hospitality was reciprocated. Zabotin and his crew even received a rare invitation to an exclusive Canadian lodge owned by a wealthy Ottawa manufacturer for duck hunting.¹⁰

Zabotin operated differently from his predecessors in Ottawa. They had cautiously refrained from contacting agents directly, using men like Rose and Carr as go-betweens. Under the more daring Zabotin, GRU officers often contacted recruits or potential recruits themselves. With the atmosphere toward the Russians so cordial, the GRU apparently thought the risks involved had diminished.¹¹ Within a short time the GRU had managed to establish itself within Ottawa's government and diplomatic circles and to enlist a small group of civil servants and scientists to pass it information.

What drew the recruits into the GRU's net? Most of them were well-educated young intellectuals who had been attracted to communism in the late 1930s with the rise of the popular front. They had participated in societies like the Spanish Relief Committee, the League Against Fascism, and the Civil Liberties Union. The spread of fascism abroad and the desire for social change at home drew these people from a philosophy of liberalism toward communism. Most attended Marxist study groups organized by the Canadian Communist Party, where they were spotted by the Soviets as likely candidates for their growing network of agents. In the words of Gordon Lunan, a captain in the Canadian Armed Forces, who would spend five years in prison for acting as a middleman for Zabotin's team, “I admired the Soviet Union for what I believed then to be its enlightened world view. I wished it well, but like most of my comrades, I suspect, I would not have wanted to live there or to make Canada over in its likeness. RCMP claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the real glue that bound me to my comrades and them to me was the shared desire for a more humane society, a fairer distribution of wealth.”¹² The feeling of wartime comradeship with the Russians seems to have justified, for some of these communist sympathizers, actual collaboration with them. As one source put it, “In the context of World War II, it was possible for well-meaning, politically naive citizens to pass information to the Soviet Union, Canada's ally in the battle against the Nazis, without considering themselves traitors.”¹³

In addition to the GRU, the Soviets had a second espionage ring, run by the Ottawa NKVD rezident, Vitalii Pavlov. Born and raised in Siberia, where his father was an accountant and his mother a village teacher, Pavlov studied automobile mechanics at a technical institute before being singled out to join the NKVD. The Stalinist purges that began in 1936 had decimated the ranks of the secret police, and Pavlov was part of a cohort brought in to fill the vacuum. In 1938, after graduating from the NKVD Higher School in Moscow, where he gained fluency in English, Pavlov joined the Foreign Department of the NKVD and spent a short time in the United States before the war broke out. Accompanied by his wife, Klavdia, and young son, he arrived in Ottawa in 1942 as the Soviet consul when the Soviet legation was established. Like Zabotin, Pavlov was exceptionally good-looking, with typically Russian high cheekbones, a thick head of curly hair, and slightly slanted large eyes. This was his first official posting abroad, and Pavlov was young, in his late twenties, and inexperienced. But he was determined to succeed at his job.¹⁴

Judging from Pavlov's memoirs, the new consul's responsibilities as a diplomat, especially before Georgii Zarubin arrived as Soviet ambassador to Ottawa in 1944, prevented him from devoting as much time as he needed to his espionage operations for the NKVD. He was charting new territory, and the GRU already had a more established and extensive network. Also, the NKVD's responsibilities included security at the embassy, so Pavlov had to keep a close watch on what his colleagues were up to, a difficult task in Ottawa's open society. Pavlov was nonetheless able to cultivate wide connections in Canada's political and diplomatic circles, where Russian hospitality was so greatly appreciated. Few suspected that the young consul was from the NKVD – and after a few drinks, Pavlov's interlocutors often said things worth passing on to Moscow headquarters.¹⁵

But it was not as if the Canadian security services had their eyes closed. Or as if they and their allies in the British and American intelligence communities were uninterested in knowing what the Soviets were up to. Gouzenko had been warned in Moscow that as a cipher clerk he would be prey for Western counterespionage agencies. He was always to be on his guard against foreigners who might try to recruit him. He also had to carefully observe the rigorous and cumbersome embassy security regulations, lest he come under criticism from Pavlov or Zabotin.¹⁶

According to Gouzenko, Pavlov had his hands full at the Soviet Embassy, which, under the impact of the oppressive Stalinist bureaucracy, was seething with intrigue, backstabbing, and petty corruption. Morale was bad and there was constant bickering. With alcohol flowing freely, drinking episodes occasionally got out of hand; fights over women resulted in broken dishes, and hangovers lasted well into the afternoon. Ottawa landlords started complaining that their Russian tenants were keeping their apartments in deplorably filthy conditions; they were allowing their residences to deteriorate into pigsties. Pavlov, the minder of all these ill-behaved Russians, reported back to Moscow that when inspecting one of his compatriots’ apartments, the “stench and dirt made my hair stand on end.”¹⁷

Despite all the unpleasantness at the embassy, Gouzenko was blissfully happy with Anna, who had arrived in October 1943 and given birth to their first child, a son named Andrei, a few months later. The Gouzenkos were struck by how pleasant life was in Canada compared to the dreary existence back home. Canada was not a shining example of economic prosperity, but it was far better off than the Gouzenkos’ own country, which was staggering under the devastation wrought by its struggles against Germany. As Gouzenko observed, “The unbelievable supplies of food, the restaurants, the movies, the wide open stores, the absolute freedom of the people, combined to create the impression of a dream from which I must surely awaken.”¹⁸

Winters in Ottawa were even colder than those in Moscow, but the sun shone a lot, the snow was uniquely clean and white, and there were never the interminable queues for groceries. Anna and Igor bought their first dining set, on time, and settled into a pleasant existence. The couple was, in Gouzenko's words, “supremely content” in their home, a small and rather drab apartment at 511 Somerset Street. Gouzenko later said, “I heard Zabotin remark more than once that living abroad spoiled some Russians. It had certainly spoiled Anna and me. In Ottawa we had a comfortable apartment of our own. In Moscow a place that size would have been shared by four or five families.”¹⁹ Gouzenko also found Canadians easygoing and approachable. Amazingly, he recalled some years after his defection that “he even enjoyed talking to the police because they were friendly and warm.”²⁰

Then, “like a bolt from the blue,” came terrible news. In September 1944, Gouzenko was called into Zabotin's office. Sitting at his desk and staring numbly at a letter that had just arrived from Moscow, Zabotin informed Gouzenko, “For reasons unstated, the immediate recall of you and your family has been ordered by the Director.”²¹ Gouzenko was paralyzed with fear. It had been only fourteen months since he had first arrived, for a tour of duty that was to last three years. Why was his stay being cut short? He must be in some sort of trouble, and under Stalin's repressive regime, trouble meant a labor camp or, even worse, a firing squad.

Gouzenko knew how the Soviet secret police had dealt with intelligence officers in the past. In 1939, newly appointed NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria recalled scores of Soviet operatives from abroad and had them imprisoned or executed as part of a vendetta against his predecessor, the notorious instigator of the purges, Nikolai Yezhov. The war years had brought a respite, but the same vindictive and ruthless men were running the security and intelligence services, and the same rules applied: mistakes, if discovered, were unforgivable.²²

Gouzenko's colleague Alexander Romanov had been sent ignominiously back to Moscow from Ottawa a few weeks earlier, because of episodes of drunken and disorderly conduct, including inappropriate advances to the wife of a general in the Canadian Army. But something much more innocent than that, such as an indiscreet remark in front of an informer, might also get a GRU officer blacklisted and sent back to headquarters.²³ Pavlov or one of his assistants seemed always to be within earshot. And Gouzenko knew he had made some mistakes. He had arrived late to work, and been reprimanded, on several occasions. He had once left scraps of secret documents on the floor in his cipher room, where they were discovered by a cleaning lady and turned over to one of the embassy officials.²⁴ Also, of course, he should not have been talking to Ottawa policemen.

Unknown to Gouzenko, however, he had not fallen into disfavor with the NKVD, but with a Moscow-based GRU colonel named Mikhail Mil'shtein (alias “Milsky”), who had made an inspection tour of GRU “residencies” in North America in the summer of 1944. Mil'shtein, who published his memoirs shortly before his death in 1993, recalled that Zabotin spoke highly of Gouzenko and asked Mil'shtein to meet with the cipher clerk, even though Mil'shtein was not supposed to interview members of the technical staff, who had no diplomatic status. Mil'shtein claimed he was suspicious of Gouzenko from the start, especially when he found out that Gouzenko had unauthorized access to a safe in one of the cipher rooms. He was also taken aback by a request from Gouzenko to participate in operational work, as an intelligence agent – a request that Mil'shtein turned down.²⁵

The final straw for Mil'shtein was when he found out that Gouzenko and his family were on their own at 511 Somerset Street, although the embassy rules dictated that they reside in buildings where other staff were living, so they could keep an eye on one another. When Mil'shtein brought this violation to Zabotin's attention and suggested that the Gouzenkos move into his building, Zabotin did nothing about it. It seems that Mrs. Zabotin did not want to be disturbed by the Gouzenkos’ baby and thus persuaded her husband to keep the family away. (For their part, this suited the Gouzenkos well, because, according to Igor, the Zabotins quarreled frequently and loudly late into the night.) Upon his return to Moscow at the end of July 1944, Mil'shtein had reported his concerns about Gouzenko. Although they were not entirely convinced that Mil'shtein's suspicions warranted any action, GRU leaders decided nonetheless to order the young cipher clerk back home. They did not want to take chances with an employee who had access to all their secret communications.²⁶

Luckily for Gouzenko, the generous-spirited Zabotin liked him and, uncharacteristic as this may seem for a Soviet intelligence officer, was willing to go to bat for him. (Zabotin had also lobbied hard for the disgraced Romanov, a fellow veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad, but to no avail.) So, in a move that would have disastrous consequences for his own future, Zabotin persuaded Moscow headquarters to postpone the departure on the grounds that Gouzenko's cipher skills were indispensable to the GRU's work (which they probably were).²⁷ Gouzenko was relieved when he heard the news, but he knew that this was only a reprieve. That night, sometime in September 1944, he broached the idea of defecting with Anna, whose advice he always respected. She concurred with the plan. Gouzenko wrote later, “I felt a great load lifted from me. The die had finally been cast. And, best of all, Anna agreed on the course. There was no use pointing out the dangers – she knew them full well. There was no necessity of stressing absolute secrecy. She knew certain death lay ahead if the least hint of my intended desertion got about.”²⁸ Dramatic as these words may sound, they were true. Gouzenko had embarked on a plan of action that was fraught with peril. Not only for him, Anna, and their little boy, but also for their families in Russia, who stood to suffer the unfettered wrath of the Stalinist system of justice.

It is not clear exactly what Gouzenko's plans were as the next year went by. He heard in the spring of 1945 that his replacement would be arriving in Ottawa within a few months, but he took no action for some months after that. He apparently used the time to learn more about the various agents his embassy colleagues had recruited, and to gather evidence that would arouse the interest of the Canadian counterintelligence services. He had heard about Viktor Kravchenko's defection to the United States a year earlier and was inspired by his example. But Gouzenko did not intend to defect empty-handed, as Kravchenko reportedly had. He wanted to have something tangible to offer his potential hosts, something that would give credence to what he planned to tell them about Soviet espionage. The Cold War was still a long way off, and the Canadian government would be reluctant to offend Moscow by protecting a Soviet citizen who had committed treason. He had to produce something impressive if he was going to be received with open arms in Canada.

The problem for Gouzenko was that the GRU recruits in Canada had not managed to steal any earth-shaking secrets, especially regarding atomic research, which was the Kremlin's top priority. Contrary to what the Soviets apparently assumed, Canada's participation in the American atomic-bomb project was limited. Although Canada was an important supplier of uranium to the Americans, Canadian scientists, and all but a few British ones, were excluded from the highly secret research conducted as part of the Manhattan Project. Canadian work on an experimental heavy-water reactor in Montreal, which would be used for a full-scale reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, after the war, was peripheral to the atomic research being carried out in the United States.²⁹ In comparison with Klaus Fuchs, who was passing valuable information about the American bomb project to the Soviets, the Canadian recruits had much less to offer.

Also, as Gouzenko's memoirs reveal, the GRU station in Ottawa during the 1943–45 period was not exactly a model of efficiency-driven productivity. GRU employees wanted to make the most of their stay in the West and enjoy the “good life” while they could. But at the same time they were anxious to please their bosses back home.

Intelligence output was often exaggerated as a result and low-grade information was presented as being much more significant than it actually was. According to Gouzenko, “Everybody on the Military Attaché staff began to find reasons for remaining after hours so that their check-out signature would appear frequently in the ‘overtime’ section of the time journal which was always mailed to Moscow. This developed into something of a competition typical of most Soviet institutions. We faked our work to see who could stay longest.” Even Zabotin, constantly prodded by his bosses to produce information, was “eager as a schoolboy to be praised for good work.”³⁰

But Zabotin was distracted by other matters. According to a subsequent British MI6 report, Zabotin began an affair in early 1944 with a Russian émigré, Nina Farmer, who was separated from her American husband and living in Montreal. The “buoyant and attractive” Mrs. Farmer first glimpsed Colonel Zabotin sitting in full uniform with other Soviet officers at a gala performance of the symphony in Montreal. After seeing Zabotin again, this time at a ballet, in early January 1944, she returned with him and his retinue of officers to the lavish Prince of Wales Suite at Montreal's Ritz Hotel, where the group was staying while in town. They danced and feasted until 4 a.m., whereupon Zabotin accompanied Mrs. Farmer to her apartment. According to the report, based on a long interview with Mrs. Farmer in 1946, several months after the spy scandal broke,

A month later, at the hour of midnight, Mrs. FARMER was rung up by Colonel ZABOTIN apparently in a mood of gay irresponsibility – he was at that time paying a visit of inspection to the ORVIDA war plant and was in good spirits as he had roistered with some Russian engineers whom he had found on the spot. After that, the ice was thoroughly broken and Colonel ZABOTIN would quite often ring her when visiting war plants in the vicinity. He also got in touch with her in Montreal whenever he passed through, and used to take her out, dine and dance with her, and entertain her.³¹

The MI6 report, commissioned when Nina Farmer gained employment in Berlin after the war at the Allied Control Commission for Germany, noted that other witnesses confirmed that Mrs. Farmer was probably Zabotin's mistress. But the report went on to point out that Farmer had no idea her lover was engaged in espionage. The only hint he gave her was when he asked, in a moment of frivolity, what she thought of the name “Grant,” his code name for communications with Moscow. Of course, Nina Farmer had no idea what Zabotin was talking about.³²

Why should Zabotin's infidelity be particularly noteworthy? For someone in his position, his behavior was highly reckless. Not only was his wife just two hours away in Ottawa, Zabotin was cavorting in Montreal with Mrs. Farmer with little attempt at secrecy, even from his colleagues at the embassy, several of whom Mrs. Farmer met. As a Russian who had fled her homeland, she would have been considered an enemy to the Soviets. If the NKVD had learned of Zabotin's liaison (not to mention the money he squandered on her entertainment), he would have been sent back to the Soviet Union on the next boat.

With the distractions of an extramarital affair, and continuous discord at the embassy between the GRU and the NKVD, it is no wonder that the reports Zabotin sent through Gouzenko to Moscow were not all that revelatory. Zabotin and his colleagues provided a lot of information, but judging from the documents Gouzenko brought out, much of it was already published, or too general to be considered valuable. As military attaché in a country that was a war ally, Zabotin was entitled to a certain amount of information pro forma from the Canadian government. Shortly before he had arrived in 1943, the Canadian Department of National Defence had set up an organization to liaise with foreign military attachés and supply them with technical information that they might request. Through this arrangement, Zabotin had visited several Canadian military training centers, installations, and munitions plants, and received publications on military weapons. He regularly informed Moscow of what he and his subordinates had learned. But this information came from Zabotin in his role as military attaché. He was also required to send Moscow secret military intelligence obtained in his capacity as GRU rezident.

Although the most urgent interest of the GRU was Western atomic research, as late as the summer of 1945 its Ottawa branch was still producing only rudimentary information on the subject. Thus, for example, one of Zabotin's assistants, Major Vasilii Rogov, drafted a telegram for Moscow based on supposedly secret information from Raymond Boyer, a prominent young professor of chemistry at McGill University: “As a result of experiments carried out with uranium, it has been found that uranium may be used for filling bombs, which is already in fact being done. The Americans have undertaken wide research work, having invested $660 million in this business.”³³ And in March 1945, Gordon Lunan, recently recruited by Fred Rose, passed on information he had obtained from an electrical engineer, Durnford Smith (code-named “Badeau”): “Badeau informs me that most secret work at present is on nuclear physics (bombardment of radio-active substances to produce energy). This is more hush-hush than radar. . . . In general, he claims to know of no new developments in radar, except in minor improvements in its application.”³⁴

Neither of these reports would have impressed the GRU leadership in Moscow, let alone Soviet scientists. (In fact the report citing Raymond Boyer stated wrongly that a new Canadian plant to produce uranium was under construction at Grand Mère, Quebec, when the plant was actually at Chalk River.) The Soviets had long been aware that the Americans were working on an atomic bomb, and, thanks to Klaus Fuchs, their scientists knew all about the fissionable material – uranium-235 or plutonium – used in making the bomb.

Another of Lunan's “informers” was Israel Halperin, a young professor of mathematics on leave from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, in order to serve in the Canadian Artillery. The GRU in Ottawa wanted Halperin, whose assigned code name was “Bacon,” to give them information about explosives plants and “if possible to pass on the [formulas] of explosives and its samples.”³⁵ They also sought to get uranium samples from him. But after several meetings with Halperin, all Lunan was able to produce was a report on the organization and capacity of Canadian explosives plants, which contained nothing that was not a matter of public record.

Halperin, who according to Lunan “made no secret of his liberal views,” was happy to help out the Russians by providing open-source information. But when pressed to go further, and when it became clear the Soviets were interested in atomic secrets, Halperin backed off. Thus, Lunan reported to his GRU controller, “It has become very difficult to work with him, especially after my request for Ur-235 (Uran 235). He said that as far as he knows, it is absolutely impossible to get it . . . Bacon explained to me the theory of nuclear energy which is probably known to you. He refuses to put down in writing anything and does not want to give a photograph or information on himself. I think that at present he has a fuller understanding of the essence of my requests and he has a particular dislike for them. . . . He says that he does not know anything about matters that are not already known to you.”³⁶ By early July 1945, Lunan was forced to explain to his controllers that “this fellow is a mathematician, and not a chemist or physicist, which may account for his remoteness from the details of explosive research.”³⁷

The third individual assigned to Lunan was Edward Mazerall (alias “Bagley”), an engineer at the Canadian National Research Council. By all accounts, Mazerall was also a very reluctant player in the espionage game. It took weeks for Lunan to arrange a meeting with him and he continually begged off the tasks the GRU had set for him. “He lives in the country,” Lunan reported, “and his wife is antagonistic to his political participation.” Eventually, at the end of July 1945, Mazerall produced two rather innocuous Canadian research reports on air navigation, one of which was a research proposal and the other something that was to be presented at a forthcoming conference on civil aviation, which the Soviets would be attending.³⁸

At this point, Lunan, whose wife was expecting a baby, decided to cease his work for the Soviets: “My judgment eventually led me to abdicate my role as intermediary. Rogov [Lunan's GRU controller] was not interested in my assessment of Canadian or international affairs and I was not qualified to appraise information of a scientific nature, or to discuss or evaluate any reciprocal information coming from Rogov. Nor, for that matter, was I prepared to pressure or influence the others to do anything against their own judgment.”³⁹

As far as can be gleaned from the documents Gouzenko brought out, Durnford Smith was the most “productive” of Lunan's sources. But his information was so technical that the GRU decided to have Rogov deal with him directly. For the brief period of July and August 1945, Smith, an employee of the Canadian National Research Council, passed on a considerable amount of material on radar systems, radio tubes, and microwaves, the bulk of which was in secret scientific journals for the year 1945. But this was far from the secrets of American atomic research that the GRU was so anxious to obtain.

Of all the Canadian scientists the GRU had cultivated, Professor Boyer was the most valuable. Boyer, who came from a wealthy and prominent Montreal family, was a committed communist. He had in fact been recruited by Canadian Communist Party organizer Fred Rose well before Zabotin arrived in Ottawa, and throughout 1943 and 19⁴⁴ he passed on secret information about Canadian work on chemical explosives, in particular rdx. But he had nothing to offer on the atomic bomb.

The only GRU recruit in Canada in a position to provide information about atomic research was Alan Nunn May, a nuclear scientist from Britain who had been working at the National Research Council in Montreal since early 1943. Born in 1912 in Birmingham, England, May studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the mid-1930s, earning his doctorate in physics and going on to teach at King's College, London. Cambridge transformed May, as it did Kim Philby and others, into a radical. He joined the Communist Party and in 1935 even spent a few weeks in Leningrad with a group of Cambridge graduates.⁴⁰

May, who had joined Britain's atomic-bomb research team, the so-called Tube Alloys project, in 1942, had already begun passing information about his work on uranium to the GRU when he was still in Britain. But for some reason GRU headquarters did not tell Zabotin about May until early 1945, almost two years after May had arrived in Canada. According to Gouzenko, after Zabotin was told about May, he “remained in a vile mood for some time. He had been working hard to contact somebody immediately involved with the atomic project, yet Moscow had kept quiet about an agent of Dr. May's qualifications who had been practically under Zabotin's nose all the time.”⁴¹

In May 1945, Zabotin sent GRU Lt. Pavel Angelov to contact May in Montreal. Angelov went straight to the scientist's home, catching him by surprise. May was unreceptive. He told Angelov that he did not want to resume contact with the GRU because he feared he was under RCMP surveillance. Angelov persisted, arguing that May was obliged to follow orders from Moscow, and the latter reluctantly agreed to cooperate.⁴²

May eventually provided Zabotin's group with a report about atomic research, and, as the FBI pointed out in its initial message to the White House, he even produced a small quantity of radioactive uranium-233, which the Soviets eagerly sent off to Moscow with Zabotin's assistant, Lt.-Colonel Petr Motinov. Motinov, who, like Zabotin, had graduated from the Frunze Military Academy, was trusted with this highly sensitive – and physically harmful – job because he was an experienced GRU officer, having already served in China. As Motinov recalled much later, he was met at the airport by the GRU's chief director: “With great care I pulled the valuable ampoule out from under my waist-band and handed it to the director. He walked slowly to a black car, which stood on the tarmac and put the ampoule inside. I then asked the director ‘Who was in there?’ ‘That's Beria,’ whispered the director. Up to this day I still have from that uranium an agonizingly painful wound, and must get my blood changed several times a year.”⁴³

Zabotin's bosses were not satisfied, probably because most of the information from May had already been published. After receiving May's reports and the uranium sample, the GRU director in Moscow cabled Zabotin in late-August 1945: “Take measures to organize acquisition of documentary materials on the atomic bomb! The technical process, drawings, calculations.”44 By this time May was scheduled to go back to Britain, and there appeared to be no other recruits of his stature on the Canadian horizon. Zabotin and his colleagues had fallen far short of the goal assigned to them two years earlier, to produce new facts about the American bomb that would speed up the Soviet research effort.

Although Moscow was under no illusion it was getting valuable atomic secrets from Canada, the Soviets were nevertheless conducting espionage operations against an ally. Gouzenko planned to show Canadian authorities evidence of an active espionage network: the secret meetings that took place; the code names assigned to new or prospective recruits; the military information being passed to Moscow. Gouzenko was not entirely confident, however, that the materials he had would be enough to persuade the Canadians to grant him asylum. As Anna later recalled, he kept putting off his defection in the expectation that new materials would arrive from the Montreal group of GRU contacts, particularly documents on atomic research from Nunn May. Also, Gouzenko was hoping that something might happen to damage the image of the Soviet Union as an ally of Canada and cause friction between the governments of the two countries. He feared that otherwise Canadians might find it difficult to accept that the “heroic Soviets” were in fact enemies.⁴⁵ As it turns out, Gouzenko's concerns were justified. He would have a terrible time convincing the Canadian authorities to take him seriously.

Even today, with many archival materials on the Gouzenko affair now declassified, it is difficult to separate fact from legend in the dramatic story of Igor Gouzenko's flight from the Soviet Embassy in September 1945 and his two-day effort to gain asylum. Once Gouzenko was safely in the hands of the RCMP, he worked with them in preparing an account of those events that was not entirely truthful. It was carefully geared to present him in the best possible light and to avoid controversy when the defection was later made public. Gouzenko embellished the story further in a 1947 article for Cosmopolitan magazine, which served as the basis for an autobiography published in 1948. Although his (and the RCMP's) version of the defection became accepted as truth, it contains obvious inconsistencies, as does the official story of what occurred behind the scenes in the Canadian government. As with many important events in history, the real story of Gouzenko's defection became blurred by popular myth.

Gouzenko arrived at his sudden decision to leave the Soviet Embassy for good on the night of Wednesday, September 5, 1945, when he learned he was to hand over his job to a new cipher clerk, Lt. Kulakov, the next day. Gouzenko was not scheduled to leave for Moscow until October, but he would no longer have access to the cipher section's secret documents after the sixth. He claimed initially that he had been earmarking certain documents to take out with him, by folding over the upper right corners. (In later testimony, he talked about stashing papers in a wooden box in his office.) On the night of the fifth, he said, while his colleagues were at the movies, he stuffed the documents under his shirt and walked out of the Soviet Embassy.⁴⁶

His account is implausible for several reasons. Zabotin and Kulakov both had access to Gouzenko's office and files. Had they noticed the folds at the top of certain documents (or come across papers stashed in a box), Gouzenko's plan to defect would have been discovered. Gouzenko, who had already been reprimanded for a security violation, was too intelligent to behave so recklessly. In addition, September 5 was a hot and sultry night in Ottawa and Gouzenko had come to work in his shirtsleeves. In the Cosmopolitan article, Gouzenko stated that “There were almost a hundred documents, some of them small scraps of paper and others covering several large sheets of stationery. . . . The documents felt like they weighed a ton and I imagined that they were bulging out from under my shirt.”⁴⁷ So how did Gouzenko walk out of the embassy unnoticed?

Part of the Gouzenko legend is that he took 109 documents from the GRU. In fact that number refers to the sum of items on a mailing list Colonel Zabotin sent to Moscow in early 1945. Zabotin's list was one of the documents Gouzenko stole. The actual number of separate sheets of paper that ended up in the hands of the RCMP, including telegrams, letters, reports, dossiers on agents, and handwritten notes, was around 250, because, as Gouzenko said, some of the documents contained several pages.⁴⁸ It would have been physically impossible for Gouzenko to contain all these papers underneath his shirt. Gouzenko later admitted, under questioning by a lawyer, that he had been taking documents home with him for some weeks. This was confirmed by a former RCMP deputy commissioner who worked on the Gouzenko case: “He was preparing for this for a long time and bringing papers home. . . . As soon as he thought there was a chance of returning [to Russia] he probably started collecting material.”⁴⁹ Why did Gouzenko say otherwise? In order to be credible, he couldn't appear devious. That he had been stealing documents for some time conveyed an impression of calculation and dishonesty, so it had to be covered up.⁵⁰

When he finally left the Soviet Embassy on Charlotte Street for the last time, Gouzenko was nearly overcome with fear. One slight hitch, one unforeseen circumstance, and he would have been thrown into the clutches of the NKVD. This may explain why his behavior that night was not entirely rational. After he left the embassy, Gouzenko did not go to the RCMP with his documents. Instead he headed for the offices of a local paper, the Ottawa Journal, intending to spill out his story just as Viktor Kravchenko had done a year earlier at the New York Times. He lost his nerve, however, when he reached the top floor of the building, where the editor's office was located, and fled home to Somerset Street, shaken and sweating. Anna urged him to go back. His colleagues at the embassy would not realize the documents were missing until the next day, she reassured him. He still had time.

But when Gouzenko arrived at the offices of the Ottawa Journal at nine o’clock in the evening and started to explain himself in what was at best broken English, the response was not what he had imagined. The night editor on duty recalled that Gouzenko was unable to answer any of his questions, that he just stood there and repeated, “It's war. It's war. It's Russia.” As one eyewitness later remarked, “Nobody could figure out what the hell the guy wanted.”⁵¹ Finally the editor suggested to Gouzenko that he go to the RCMP offices, which were in the building of the ministry of justice, not far from the Journal. Gouzenko went to the Justice Building, but he did not try to contact the RCMP. Instead he asked the policeman on duty if he could see the minister of justice. He was told to come back the next morning.⁵² Gouzenko cannot have been thinking straight. He had been living in Ottawa for over two years; surely he must have known that government offices were closed in the evenings and that the justice minister was unlikely to be there.

Gouzenko returned home to a frantic Anna. Somehow they got through the night and the next morning the two of them, Anna heavily pregnant with their second child, trudged back to the Justice Building with little Andrei in tow. Gouzenko asked again to see Mr. Louis St. Laurent, the minister of justice, but after waiting two hours he was turned away. Another visit to the Ottawa Journal, where Gouzenko was understandably “utterly agitated and almost incoherent,” produced no better results. The editors decided that since the story was unsubstantiated and might cause a problem with Canada's ally the Soviet Union, they could not run it. They advised Gouzenko to go to the RCMP's Bureau of Naturalization, where Gouzenko asked for protection and was refused.

By this time Andrei was tired and hungry, so Igor and Anna deposited him at the home of an English neighbor, a Mrs. Bourke, who lived in a house nearby. The couple then took a streetcar to the offices of the Canadian Crown Attorney, where a secretary named Fernande Coulson was receptive to their plight. Interviewed some years later, Coulson recalled that she telephoned the RCMP and a Mountie came over to talk to Gouzenko but told him in the end there was nothing he could do. A desperate telephone call to John Leopold, assistant chief for intelligence at the RCMP, produced mixed results. According to Coulson, Leopold at first said “we can't touch him,” but he finally agreed to see Gouzenko the next morning.⁵³

Igor and Anna were beside themselves. Time had just about run out. Gouzenko's colleagues at the embassy would have noted his absence by now, and once documents were seen to be missing, their lives would be in danger. After they retrieved Andrei from their neighbor and were back in their own apartment, a driver from the Soviet Embassy arrived and began pounding at their door and shouting. Several minutes went by before he left. A terrified Gouzenko went out on his balcony and pleaded with his neighbor on the adjoining balcony, Harold Main, for help. Main decided he should contact the police and went off on his bicycle to the station. Meanwhile, another neighbor, Mrs. Frances Elliott, heard all the commotion and offered her apartment as a refuge for the pitiful family.⁵⁴

The city police were just as unhelpful as the RCMP. Main said later that the police “seemed to know about it. . . . The Ottawa police were working with the RCMP. I think they already made contact with the RCMP.”⁵⁵ They agreed to cruise by 511 Somerset, but said they could not do anything more because Gouzenko's apartment was Russian property.

It was not until a group from the Soviet Embassy, led by NKVD rezident Pavlov, broke into the Gouzenkos’ apartment around midnight and began ransacking it, apparently looking for the stolen documents, that the police intervened. It was like a game of cops and robbers, with the hapless Ottawa police confronting belligerent Russians desperate to find their missing cipher clerk and his documents. The Gouzenkos peered out at the scene through their neighbor's keyhole across the hall. Eventually the Russians gave in to the police and GRUdgingly departed. One policeman then remained at the Elliott apartment until the next morning, September 7, when Gouzenko was escorted to the RCMP. No one had much sleep at 511 Somerset Street that night.⁵⁶

The RCMP hesitated to give Gouzenko asylum in large part because Prime Minister King did not want Canada to become embroiled in an unpleasant diplomatic incident with the Soviets. King first learned about the defection on the morning of Thursday, September 6, while Gouzenko was waiting desperately for an audience with the Canadian justice minister, Mr. St. Laurent. The prime minister arrived at his office in Ottawa's Parliament Buildings shortly before the House of Commons was scheduled to convene its new session. Judging from what he wrote in his meticulously kept private diary, King was not in a good mood on this particular morning. Although he had been prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party on and off for almost twenty years, he was nervous about meeting the new members of Parliament, which had a considerably larger number from opposition parties than in previous sessions. And he was weary from the long, painstaking hours spent preparing the government's Speech from the Throne, to be delivered that day by Canada's governor general.

King was not keen to tackle his country's problems as a “middle-power” in the post-war world. Despite its small population (eleven and a half million, less than that of New York state), Canada had contributed in a major way to the war effort and sacrificed over forty-two thousand lives. At the war's end, it had one of the largest armies of United Nations countries. As one source observed, “Canada had fought abroad and produced at home as it had never fought and worked before – and her war record, at home and abroad, had gained her new stature in the world. Canada could no longer be classified simply as a promising young country; she had come of age.”⁵⁷

But since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month earlier, the world had become much more complex. How the new weapon would be controlled, and how it would affect the foreign policy of the Western allies, were questions that now dominated Canada's agenda, an agenda complicated by the constant challenge of asserting Canada's role in its alliance with the far more powerful United States and Britain. Because King had chosen to retain the portfolio of minister of external affairs along with that of prime minister, he was deeply involved in Canada's foreign policy and, at seventy years old, beginning to feel the strain. “I really need a complete rest and a change,” King had written in his diary two weeks earlier.⁵⁸

Unfortunately for the world-weary prime minister, he was about to be thrust into a political and diplomatic crisis that would test his mettle as never before. King found his close adviser Norman Robertson, undersecretary for external affairs, and Robertson's assistant, Hume Wrong, waiting for him in his office. Both men were looking grave. As King wrote in his diary that night, Robertson told him that a “terrible thing” had happened. “It was like a bomb on top of everything and one could not say how serious it might be or to what it might lead.”⁵⁹ Just a half an hour or so earlier, Robertson said, a man from the Soviet Embassy had appeared with his wife at the office of Minister of Justice St. Laurent. The man had said that he worked with ciphers and that he had in his possession a number of documents showing that the Soviets had spies in Canada and the U.S., and that “some of these men were around Stettinius [the U.S. Secretary of State] in the States, and that one was in our own Research laboratories here (assumedly seeking to get secret information with regard to the atomic bomb).” King observed further that “Robertson seemed to feel that the information might be so important both to the States . . . and to Britain that it would be in their interests to seize it no matter how it was obtained.”⁶⁰

Robertson said the defector was threatening suicide and suggested that the RCMP offer him protection. But King was hesitant: “I said to both Robertson and Wrong that I thought we should be extremely careful in becoming a party to any course of action which would link the govt. of Canada up with this matter in a manner which might cause Russia to feel that we had performed an unfriendly act. That to seek to gather information in any underhanded way would make clear that we did not trust the Embassy.” After a talk with St. Laurent, King was adamant that his government not get involved, even if the man was apprehended by Soviet authorities or committed suicide: “My own feeling is that the individual has incurred the displeasure of the Embassy and is really seeking to shield himself.”⁶¹

King would later be criticized for not immediately grasping the importance of what the defector had to offer and for his naïveté in trusting the Soviets. But his reaction was understandable. Apart from wishing to avoid a diplomatic debacle, King also questioned the motives of the potential defector. The man was quite possibly lying to save his own skin, or because he wanted to live in Canada and needed a means to gain asylum. Whatever the case, King was not about to allow a Soviet code clerk to disrupt the cordial diplomacy that had characterized Ottawa's relations with Moscow.

One question that arises from King's diary entry for September 6 is how Robertson was able to give King details about Gouzenko's allegations as early as that morning. At that point Gouzenko had supposedly only mumbled incoherently to the night editor at the Ottawa Journal, “it's war, it's war,” and spoken briefly to a secretary of St. Laurent, requesting a meeting with the minister. Had someone perhaps been in contact with Gouzenko before he actually defected and been apprised of what he had to say about espionage? A number of other strange circumstances suggest that there was more to the defection story than what was eventually presented to the public.

Though Prime Minister King did not know it, the RCMP had been monitoring the movements of Gouzenko closely since the night before, when he had gone to the Ottawa Journal in his unsuccessful attempt to tell the world his story. On September 6 – the day King first learned about the cipher clerk – the chief of the RCMP intelligence branch, Charles Rivett-Carnac, had a secret meeting with Norman Robertson. By that night, as King slept at his Ottawa residence, RCMP officers were stationed outside Gouzenko's apartment building and Robertson was conferring at his home with an “eminent officer of the British Secret Service.”⁶²

Who was this eminent British intelligence officer? The widely accepted theory, reinforced by what appears in the published (and edited) version of King's diary, is that it was British Security Coordination Chief William Stephenson, who had by some great coincidence (one historian calls it “miraculous”) made a rare visit from New York to Canada exactly at the time Gouzenko defected. Stephenson, according to this theory, was staying at Montebello, a luxurious rustic lodge about an hour's drive from Ottawa, just as the incident erupted. Once in Ottawa, he “argued strongly against King's view that Gouzenko should be ignored. The Russian, he said, would certainly have information valuable not merely to Canada but also to Britain, the United States, and other Allies. Furthermore, Gouzenko's life was almost certainly in danger. They should act, and do so immediately, by taking Gouzenko in.”⁶³ Stephenson's arguments were reportedly what persuaded Robertson not to follow King's decision and instead to allow the RCMP to intervene officially in the Gouzenko case.

But if we consult the unedited text of King's diary in the archives, it becomes clear that the above-mentioned intelligence officer could not have been Stephenson. On September 6, King wrote in his diary, “The head of the British Secret Service arrived at the Seigniory Club [Montebello] today. Robertson was going down to see him tonight. I told him he should stay and make this individual come to Ottawa to talk with him” [italics added]. On September 7, King noted that he had authorized Robertson to telephone Stephenson in New York. And on September 8, King records, “Robertson said that Stephenson and the FBI representatives would be here tonight.”

King's account in his diary was confirmed many years later by one of Robertson's deputies, who in an interview let it slip that in fact Stephenson was not in Ottawa when the defection occurred: “We wanted to get Stephenson [here] quickly and he was coming by commercial air. I was told to ask the Air Force to bring him up specially but it didn't work – because I couldn't tell them why. You had to pretend that anything you did was perfectly normal. Otherwise it suggested some kind of crisis, which is the last thing they [the government] wanted to do. So I remember talking to the Air Force and they weren't a bit convinced. But he [Stephenson] did turn up.”⁶⁴

Some sources have hypothesized that the British intelligence officer referred to by King was none other than MI6 director Sir Stewart Menzies, “C.”⁶⁵ But a more probable candidate is Peter Dwyer, the MI6 representative in Washington who had worked for William Stephenson during the war. Dwyer was, apart from Stephenson, the top British intelligence officer in North America, and he would play a leading role in the Gouzenko case. In a telegram to London on September 10, British High Commissioner to Canada Malcolm MacDonald referred to one of Stephenson's men “who has been here for the last three days and who knows all the facts.”⁶⁶ But why would Dwyer have suddenly showed up at Montebello on September 6? Was it just a coincidence that Gouzenko defected the night before?

There are other puzzles about the defection story that remain unsolved. Whatever happened to the Gouzenkos’ English friend, Mrs. Bourke, who took care of Andrei and, according to Gouzenko, gave them tea when they went to retrieve him? Although the Royal Commission investigating the case later interviewed all of the other neighbors extensively, Mrs. Bourke was never heard from (or mentioned) after Gouzenko spoke about her in his initial statement to the RCMP.⁶⁷ And why did Mr. Edwin Elliott, whose wife, Frances, allowed the Gouzenkos to spend the night in her apartment hiding from the NKVD, write to Mackenzie King months later (after the case was made public) asking for money in exchange for silence about certain aspects of the Gouzenko case? Did Mrs. Elliott know something that she did not reveal in her testimony before the Royal Commission? As it turned out, the RCMP ordered all the neighbors to keep quiet about the Gouzenkos, even after the story became public.⁶⁸

It is also puzzling that as his first step in defecting, Gouzenko, who spoke only broken English and carried a bunch of documents in Russian (which no one at the Journal could read), approached a small city newspaper instead of going to the RCMP. He had, after all, placed himself and his family in a situation of real physical danger, which required police protection. Gouzenko later told the RCMP that he did not want to go directly to them, because he thought that someone there might be a Soviet agent: “I knew that the system of military intelligence [the GRU] had not its own agent on the staff of the R.C.M. Police in Ottawa, but I did not know whether or not the system of the NKVD had its own agent there. Therefor [sic] I considered that it was dangerous for the whole undertaking to turn to the R.C.M. Police at first as, under the worst circumstances, if there were a Soviet agent there and all this subject were turned over to him, he would be able to direct it into a channel favourable to the Soviet intelligence and to the benefit of the agent himself.”⁶⁹ What apparently did not occur to Gouzenko was that, even if the Ottawa Journal had publicized his story immediately, he would still have had to seek protection from the RCMP and hand over his documents.

Of course, Gouzenko was in a state of high anxiety, so he may not have thought things out clearly. Also, he was mindful of the story of Kravchenko. He was unaware, however, that Kravchenko had been talking to the FBI prior to his defection and, in exchange for providing information about Soviet espionage, had set forth a number of demands, including physical protection, a change of identity, and monetary support.⁷⁰ Apparently such a course of action did not occur to Gouzenko. Or did it? Is it possible, as some have suggested, that he had made contact with someone in the Canadian or British intelligence services before he defected but went to a newspaper in order to ensure that he would get asylum?

There is nothing to indicate such prior contact in the RCMP files that have been released, and two former RCMP officers have emphatically stated that Gouzenko was a complete unknown to their agency before September 5, 1945.⁷¹ As for prior communication with British intelligence, again, there is no indication in the MI5 files that have recently been declassified. Nonetheless, the possibility of such an encounter cannot be dismissed out of hand. The British were actively engaged in attempts to recruit Soviet spies, and they considered Canada legitimate territory for such attempts. It might be added that in a September 2001 interview in Moscow, NKVD rezident Vitalii Pavlov, although offering no evidence, said that Gouzenko had been induced to defect by a Western counterintelligence service.⁷²

If Gouzenko had had some contact with a member of the British intelligence services before September 5 and perhaps had already passed on some documents, this might explain why Norman Robertson knew details about Gouzenko's evidence as early as the morning of September 6. It might also explain how Anna Gouzenko, on the night of September 6, was able to fit all the GRU documents they had at their apartment into her purse before going across the hall to spend the night. Remember that in total, Gouzenko had stolen about 250 sheets of paper. One of the Ottawa policemen later recalled that Anna was carrying a “ladies’ handbag”: “She showed me her bag with everything they had taken from the Russians. . . . She held onto it all the time, Not him. Her.”⁷³ Because the RCMP hushed up the witnesses and kept all their testimony under wraps for years, we cannot be sure of what exactly Gouzenko said and what he did during this twenty-four-hour period. One thing can be said with certainty: Gouzenko's decision to defect on September 5, 1945, threw everyone, including the RCMP and British intelligence, into a tailspin.

When King awoke on the morning of Friday the seventh, he called Norman Robertson, who told him that “last night's events had not given him much rest.” By now Gouzenko was at RCMP headquarters making a statement. Robertson apparently justified his decision to let the RCMP intervene by the fact that the defector's life was in danger. He appears not to have told King that the RCMP had been well informed of the Russian's movements for almost two days and had already, on the previous afternoon, agreed to meet with him.

The situation became more complicated that evening, after King returned from a garden party at the British High Commission, Earnscliffe. (“It is always that way,” King lamented in his diary entry of September 7, “the moment I take an hour or two off for social events, most important events come up.”) Robertson told him he had received the particulars of what the defector said to the police and what his documents revealed. “They disclose an espionage system on a large scale,” wrote King in his diary. “He [Robertson] said that it went to lengths we could not have believed.” Robertson also said Gouzenko's information showed that the former American secretary of state Stettinius had been “surrounded by spies,” who had informed the Russian government of everything that was going on. There was currently a spy in the Canadian Department of External Affairs who had access to ciphers, and in a Canadian research laboratory where they were working on the atomic bomb. There was a British scientist in Montreal who was a Russian agent, and also a spy at the British High Commission in Ottawa who saw all the ingoing and outgoing telegrams.⁷⁴

Gouzenko's interview at RCMP headquarters that morning had been with Intelligence Chief Rivett-Carnac and his deputy John Leopold, who knew a little Russian. According to a top secret RCMP report, “Gouzenko was in a highly agitated and emotionally disturbed state. In fact, he appeared close to a nervous collapse. Because of this condition his speech was rather incoherent and his train of thought and expression were confused to the point of being extremely difficult to comprehend . . . these Headquarters were convinced from Gouzenko's actions and temporary mental instability that the weight of his precarious position would have driven him to the murder of his wife and final suicide.”⁷⁵ In subsequent testimony before the Canadian Royal Commission, another RCMP officer who was present during this first interview had a similar, although less dramatic, impression: “Due to Mr. Gouzenko's highly nervous condition it was difficult to gather a coherent story. It was therefore arranged that Mr. Gouzenko would be interviewed later in the afternoon by Inspector Leopold.”⁷⁶

After one more interview with Leopold the same day, Gouzenko and his family were whisked off to a secret hiding place near Ottawa. Amazingly, despite Gouzenko's confusion, and although many of Gouzenko's documents were in handwritten Russian (and thus difficult to decipher), the RCMP was convinced that Gouzenko's revelations were of such significance that they notified British and American intelligence officials immediately. And, only three days later, on the morning of September 10, the Canadian government felt sufficiently confident of the defector's information to issue a secret Order-in-Council authorizing the detention (if necessary) of British scientist Alan Nunn May under the provisions of the War Measures Act.⁷⁷ May, who was about to return to Britain, was identified in the documents only by his Russian code name, Alek.

The rapidity with which the RCMP acted might again suggest that someone from the intelligence services had seen Gouzenko or his documents before September 5. But it is equally possible that a cursory look at some roughly translated items from Gouzenko was enough to spur the RCMP into swift action. The defection of a cipher clerk from a foreign embassy was, after all, a momentous occurrence. Gouzenko's desperation, to the point of threatening suicide, made it likely that he was telling the truth about who he was and where his documents came from. With a scientist passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, a Soviet agent operating at the British High Commission, and spies surrounding the American secretary of state, the RCMP had to act quickly.