Chapter 4
RED STORM CLOUDS

We are now up against an ideological conflict without parallel since Elizabethan times. The communists today are the papists of the last half of the seventeenth-century.

Escott Reid, Canadian diplomat

The Gouzenkos celebrated their first Christmas in Canada at Camp X in the company of Mountie George Mackay and his wife. Mackay recalled that “we had a turkey and did the whole thing up in a traditional Canadian Christmas. Presents were bought by the police and we had a Christmas tree with lights. Behind it all was to assimilate them into the Canadian way of life.” Anna, always resourceful, made the decorations for the tree out of papier-mâché.¹ It cannot have been much of a celebration for any of them, despite the fact that it was also Anna's twenty-second birthday. The Mackays were eager to get away to spend New Year's with family and friends. And Anna and Igor were probably trying hard not to wonder about their families, or about their own uncertain fate.

Anna was also tied up with her new baby daughter. According to Mackay, “when the second baby came, she almost cut herself off from the whole works. She devoted her entire time to the little girl. . . . He [Andrei] didn't come in for the same attention. She would spend hours with the little girl upstairs in her room. So it became an impossible thing to do anything with her in teaching her [English]. She wasn't interested.”² Igor was still being questioned occasionally, but the RCMP had obtained about as much as they could get from him, and he had a lot of time on his hands. One can only imagine what it must have been like for them, cooped up with a restless toddler and an infant in a small house in the middle of a cold and snowy nowhere, terrified that the Soviets would find them. Anna still barely spoke a word of English, and they were totally dependent on the RCMP for all their needs. The authorities in Ottawa had been told that Gouzenko's mental state was still fragile. A report on the legal aspects of the case, written in early December, observed, “There is always the question of what Corby might do and the possibility that, if this matter dragged on indefinitely, he would commit suicide or suffer a mental breakdown.”³

Gouzenko repeatedly expressed concern about what the Canadians would do with his GRU colleagues. Would they try to recruit some of them and persuade them to defect, or would they simply expel them as spies? As it turned out, the GRU ordered most of its officers in Ottawa, including Nikolai Zabotin, back home in December. Colonel and Mrs. Zabotin had departed on the S.S. Alexander Suvarov bound for Murmansk, a dismal frigid city in the far north of Russia. It was a nonstop trip; there would be no opportunity for those aboard to change their minds about returning to their home country. The Zabotins’ fellow passengers included the Soviet vice-consul in New York and the GRU chief rezident in the United States, Pavel Mikhailov, who had been recalled because Gouzenko's evidence compromised him.⁴ Mikhailov, code-named “Molière,” had been in the United States since 1941, actively engaged both in his diplomatic role and in coordinating the Soviet espionage effort in North America. He had maintained close contact with the Ottawa-based GRU staff, furnishing them with a radio transmitter to communicate with New York and arranging their occasional visits to the United States. The Gouzenko defection was a huge blow for Mikhailov, just as it was for NKVD rezident Pavlov, who remained in Ottawa, awaiting a decision from Moscow about his fate. Soviet intelligence officers and their agents in North America were all lying low.⁵

However much damage Gouzenko had caused the Soviets, he was not in the danger that he and the RCMP assumed he was, at least not immediately. According to the memoirs of former GRU officer Col. Mil'shtein, GRU headquarters in Moscow had a special, top secret section called Isk (meaning, “reprisal”), which carried out punishments, presumably murder, of so-called traitors. But any such acts required the permission of Stalin. After being informed of Gouzenko's defection, Stalin had requested a detailed report and a plan for responding. He then forbade the GRU to kill him. “The war has ended successfully,” Stalin is reported as saying. “Everyone is admiring the Soviet Union. What would they say about us if we did that? It is necessary to investigate everything and to designate a special authoritative commission, which Malenkov [the deputy prime minister] should chair.”⁶

Georgii Malenkov's commission, which included NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria, GRU chief Fedor Kuznetsov, and several others, began meeting almost daily, from noon until late in the evening, in Beria's headquarters at Lubianka prison in Moscow. For the Soviets, the Gouzenko defection was a crisis that called into question the quality of their intelligence services, and heads were going to roll. Although Malenkov was the nominal head of the commission, Beria, who had several NKVD cronies on the committee, ran the show. Mil'shtein himself was called in for questioning repeatedly and grilled – without being permitted to take a seat – about his 1944 trip to North America and his suspicions of Gouzenko. In the end, Mil'shtein escaped punishment, presumably because he was on record as having warned his superiors about the young cipher clerk.⁷

As for Zabotin, he was rumored in the West to have either received a death sentence or committed suicide. In fact, his life was spared, but only barely. He was sent to a labor camp in Siberia, along with his wife and much-adored son, who had been attending the Soviet Embassy school in Washington, D.C., and was about to enrol in Zabotin's prestigious alma mater, the Frunze Military Academy. The Zabotins were not released until after Stalin died in 1953. Not surprisingly, Zabotin and his wife, who had a stormy marriage from early on, divorced. Zabotin got remarried to a simple country girl and left Moscow for the provinces. But he died just a few years later, his health ruined by his years in Stalin's brutal Gulag.⁸

As a decorated war hero with a promising career ahead of him, Zabotin paid a heavy price for his failure to suspect that Gouzenko was planning to defect and for the lax security that prevailed under his leadership of the GRU residency in Ottawa. But his subordinates in Ottawa were not punished, and continued with successful careers in military intelligence. Indeed, Col. Motinov, who carried the uranium to Moscow, was awarded the plum position of military attaché and chief of the GRU residency in Washington, D.C. Either the Americans did not realize that he had been part of the Ottawa spy ring, or they turned a blind eye.⁹

In keeping with Stalin's diplomatic ploy of not ordering Gouzenko's murder (he could be whimsically merciful at times), the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa issued a statement about Gouzenko, in April 1946, that avoided calling him a traitor. He had stolen money from the embassy, they claimed, and was “indictable for the committed crime in case of his return to the USSR [italics added].” But the Soviets had a long-standing policy of murdering defectors as a way of deterring others, and they would not let Gouzenko off the hook permanently. After Stalin died, the Soviet Supreme Court sentenced him, in absentia, to “the highest form of punishment,” namely death.¹⁰

Meanwhile, the NKVD had visited its wrath upon the families of both Gouzenko and his wife. Gouzenko's mother died under interrogation at the NKVD's Lubianka prison. He always assumed that his sister Irina, who had been working as an architectural designer the last time he saw her, also perished as a result of his defection. But Gouzenko's criminal file, dating from sometime after 1956, listed his sister as married and living at that time in the district of Cheliabinsk. Curiously, although Gouzenko thought his brother Vsevolod had died during the Second World War, the file also notes that he was living in the same town as Irina. As for Anna's family, her mother, father, and sister Alia were imprisoned for five years, while Alia's daughter Tatiana was sent to an orphanage.¹¹

Gouzenko recalled that one of his RCMP interrogators said he thought him “extraordinarily callous” when he knew his family would suffer dreadful consequences. In his 1948 book, Gouzenko rationalized his defection thus: “My decision was a harsh one but, believe me, it was the only way to break the vicious ‘hostage circle’ used by the Soviet to hold and muzzle those persons sent to foreign embassies. . . . Somebody had to break that circle, and I made the sacrifice in the hope that if I got away with it, others may be prompted to take the gamble, for the ultimate good of a new Russia. There is still another factor to be considered. Mother was getting old and in Russia today, people aren't permitted to grow very old.”¹²

Did Gouzenko really believe there were many others who would be similarly willing to sacrifice the lives of their parents (no matter how old) and siblings in that way? Enough to help create a “new Russia”? He told his interrogators on more than one occasion that he hoped some of his colleagues in Ottawa, Zabotin in particular, would follow his lead and defect. Zabotin, who had both his wife and son with him in North America, knew he faced serious punishment on his return. The three of them could have defected during the three months following Gouzenko's disappearance. But to destroy the lives of family back home was for Zabotin or any of the other GRU staff probably inconceivable. Things would change after Stalin died, and defections would increase as the draconian measures against family members gradually ended. But in 1945 the situation was very different: to defect meant death or severe reprisals for family remaining in Russia. It is no small wonder that Gouzenko was so agitated during these early months after he sought asylum. He had not only fear to contend with, but also guilt.

While the Soviets were doing what they could to limit the damage of Gouzenko's defection, the British and the Americans were voicing concern about what was happening, or not happening, in Canada. As long as King was firm in his decision not to permit arrests in Canada without simultaneous American arrests, little could be done to force the issue, short of, as the British pointed out, a leak to the press. King was biding his time waiting for the Americans, but after a month, the FBI had come up with nothing against the suspects in the Bentley case. As time wore on, the likelihood of obtaining hard evidence against those actually involved in spying would become even smaller. Hoover clearly realized this and was frustrated that the Canadians were taking no further action against their spies in anticipation of FBI arrests. In early December 1945, he scribbled at the bottom of an internal FBI memorandum on the Gouzenko case (the contents of which are blacked out in the declassified copies): “They [the Canadians] should ‘expect’ no startling developments from here. It is their own decision & responsibility.” Two days later, at the bottom of another message about Gouzenko, Hoover observed, “Same spineless policy as pursued here.”¹³

During the month of January 1946, the Gouzenko case fell off King's radar screen. He did not mention it once in his January 1946 daily diary entries, although he met with Malcolm MacDonald on more than one occasion. King was preoccupied with domestic politics, as well as by the visit to Ottawa in mid-January of General Dwight Eisenhower and his wife. And his subordinates, including Justice Minister St. Laurent, Norman Robertson, Hume Wrong, and Lester Pearson, spent much of January in Moscow for discussions about the creation of a un Atomic Energy Commission.

It was a visit to Ottawa on February 1 by another prominent American, President Truman's personal adviser Admiral William Leahy, that forced King to return to the vexed Gouzenko problem. Leahy, a career navy officer in his seventies who had been Roosevelt's White House chief of staff, had apparently come with the specific purpose of finding out Canadian plans for the case. But King did not have the matter on his agenda for conversation. According to King's diary, he and Leahy discussed several other issues before they “talked a little of the Corby case. He [Leahy] felt that we ought to go on with our enquiry if it involved our own civil servants.” If Leahy's purpose was to persuade King to take action on the Gouzenko case, he made a crucial error. According to King, Leahy “agreed that it might have far-reaching repercussions. . . . He also felt that another world war would be between Russia and other parts, particularly the U.S. and the U.K., but that Canada would in all probability be the battlefield.”¹⁴

Leahy's observation doubtless put the fear of God into King, who might have delayed acting on the Gouzenko case even further had it not been for the revelations of American journalist Drew Pearson.

On February 3, 1946, Pearson stunned his nationwide radio audience by announcing that a Soviet spy had surrendered himself to the Canadian government and confessed to a “gigantic Russian espionage network inside the United States and Canada.” According to Pearson, “this Russian told Canadian authorities about a series of agents planted inside the American and Canadian governments who were working with the Soviets.” Pearson seemed unaware that the defection had occurred more than five months earlier, but he did tell his audience that Prime Minister Mackenzie King had made a special trip to Washington to inform President Truman of the details.¹⁵

King had no choice but to take action. On February 5, he reluctantly told his cabinet about the Gouzenko case and appointed a special commission, led by Supreme Court judges Robert Taschereau and R.L. Kellock, to investigate Gouzenko's accusations. Arrests, he told the cabinet, would follow shortly.¹⁶ King suspected the leak to Pearson was “inspired” by the Americans. “I may be wrong,” he wrote in his diary, “but I have a feeling there is a desire at [sic] Washington that this information should get out; that Canada should start the enquiry and that we should have the responsibility for beginning it and that the way should be paved for it being continued in the U.S. This may be all wrong, but I have that intuition very strongly. It is the way in which a certain kind of politics is played by a certain type of men.”¹⁷

Admiral Leahy may not have been far from King's mind when he wrote this entry. As a military man with strongly anti-Soviet views, Leahy, after witnessing King's reluctance to move ahead on the Gouzenko case, had good reason to leak information about the defection.¹⁸ Both he and Truman were unhappy with Secretary of State James Byrnes, who they thought was too conciliatory with the Soviets, and they felt the State Department was lagging on the Gouzenko issue. Truman himself had changed his attitude toward the Russians over the past months, as it became obvious that the Soviets were untrustworthy and unwilling to go along with any American proposals. In a January 6, 1946, message to Byrnes, Truman had made his views clear: “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making . . . I am tired of babying the Russians.”¹⁹ But it is unlikely that Truman would have authorized a leak of top secret information to a journalist, and doubtful that Leahy would have done this on his own. Moreover, Pearson's subsequent articles on the Canadian case would cast the White House in a bad light.

Hoover is the more likely suspect. The FBI and Hoover himself, a seasoned behind-the-scenes operator with a constant eye on the press, had a long history of cultivating journalists. Hoover corresponded frequently with Drew Pearson during the war years, mainly about persons in the United States who were sympathetic to the Nazis and about whom Pearson would inform Hoover directly. And in the post-war period, the FBI would make a habit of leaking information about communists to trusted journalists, including Pearson.²⁰

Another clue to Hoover's involvement was in a top secret telegram apparently from either Dwyer or William Stephenson, to MI6 on January 10, 1946. It included the following: “From information received from one of our representatives it appears to me that Drew Pearson is aware to some degree of both Corby and Speed [Bentley] cases. . . . Our representative was naturally unable and did not attempt to draw Pearson out on subject but is of opinion that information may have been obtained confidentially from Hoover himself in some general terms in hope of enlisting Pearson's support for dominant position both at home and abroad under present American Intelligence reshuffle.”²¹

According to an internal FBI memorandum, Hoover spoke with Drew Pearson by telephone on the morning of February 3, the day of Pearson's evening broadcast. Later that morning, Pearson called FBI public relations chief Lou Nichols, who noted in a memorandum that Pearson “appeared to have complete knowledge of the case.”²²

As one of Hoover's deputies, Robert Lamphere, recalled, the FBI had been frustrated with the way its spy cases were going: “We were near and yet so far. Igor Gouzenko and Bentley had shown that Russians were operating all around us, but we were unable to counter their efforts.”²³ Bentley's testimony had to be kept secret, so that she could be a witness before subsequent grand juries. But a public announcement of Gouzenko's revelations was just what Hoover and the FBI needed to create a climate in which to launch their spy hunt more aggressively. The Canadian intelligence attaché in Washington came to the same conclusion. After hearing from a journalist at Time magazine that Drew Pearson's source of information was almost certainly J. Edgar Hoover, his assessment in a message to Norman Robertson was that “Hoover wanted to force the issue.”²⁴

The pro-communist press, not surprisingly, also took the view that Hoover was behind the leak. A piece appearing some months later in the communist magazine New Masses claimed that one of Drew Pearson's employees had gone around Washington explaining why his boss broke the story: “It was like this, the Pearson scribe explained to many of his news sources in labor and progressive circles: J. Edgar Hoover asked Drew to use the story, and how could he turn him down? After all, the business works both ways.” This piece aroused such intense concern at the U.S. Embassy in London that an official there fired off a letter to Roger Hollis (with a copy to Philby) instructing him “to immediately call the . . . article to the attention of MI-5 and MI-6, at which time it should be unequivocally pointed out to these agencies that the above allegations are, of course, absolutely false and completely without any foundation.”²⁵ The tone of the letter suggested that the Americans were protesting too much.

For the next several days, there was remarkably little public reaction to the broadcast in either the United States or Canada. It was as if North America, still recovering from the trauma of war and struggling to come to terms with the atom bomb, was not ready for news of another crisis.

But this was the quiet before the storm. In his next weekly broadcast, on February 10, Pearson again brought up the Canadian espionage case. Sensational public trials of Canadian government officials for spying would soon take place, he predicted. This prompted a decisive reaction from Ottawa. According to a message from Peter Dwyer to MI6 on February 13, “Royal Commissioners suddenly decided today to prevent any further damage by leaks from Drew Pearson by taking action before his next Sunday broadcast.”²⁶ Two days later, during raids carried out in the early morning of February 15, 1946, the RCMP detained eleven individuals. That afternoon, Mackenzie King made his first public statement on the Gouzenko affair. Information had reached the Canadian government, he announced, that disclosures of secret information to a foreign country had occurred (he did not name the country in question) and that several persons had been detained. The next day, the RCMP detained two more suspects.

The detentions created a sensation. Almost immediately, the press reported that the unnamed country was the Soviet Union and that the spying involved atomic secrets. The story made the front pages in the West for the next several weeks, with wild speculation about the defector, the spies, and the extent of the espionage. The already fragile post-war peace had now been destroyed by a new threat: the Allies’ erstwhile friend had been stealing their atom-bomb secrets. Both the White House and the State Department insisted that the Canadian case had nothing to do with Americans in the U.S. government, but it was inevitable that the trail would lead the press in that direction.

And it was inevitable that Drew Pearson, the recipient of inside information on the case, would be among the first to make the connection between espionage in Canada and in the United States. The day after the arrests, Pearson, in his nationally syndicated newspaper column, claimed that “the Russian agent taken by the Canadians has given the names and locations of about 1,700 other Soviet agents operating not only in Canada, but also in the United States. He has put the finger on certain officials inside both the American and Canadian governments,” and “photostats showing payments made to United States and Canadian officials have even come to light.” Most significant of all, Pearson made a point of noting that the White House and the State Department (considered widely to be bastions of liberal sentiment) had opposed going after these spies in America, but that the Justice Department (that is, the FBI) was “anxious to arrest and prosecute.”²⁷

Pearson's story must have pleased Hoover and his colleagues. Of course, the number of Soviet agents cited by Pearson was outlandish, and of course Gouzenko had not produced photostats showing Soviet payments to U.S. officials. But such exaggerations didn't hurt. Far from it. The suggestion that the Truman administration was preventing the FBI from fighting espionage effectively gave Hoover a clear advantage in the court of public opinion. He at last had the momentum he needed to pursue his anti-communist agenda more rigorously, an agenda that included forcing both Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss out of the U.S. administration.

Significantly, the day after Drew Pearson initially broke the story, Hoover had sent a letter (dated three days earlier) to the White House warning President Truman against confirming Harry White's nomination as a member of the governing board of the International Monetary Fund (imf) and reiterating Bentley's claims about him.²⁸ As part of the argument against White, Hoover cited a source “high placed in the Canadian government” who pointed out the danger of appointing someone like White, whose loyalty could not be assured. Moreover, Hoover claimed, his Canadian source expressed fear that “facts might come to light in the future throwing some sinister accusations at White and thereby jeopardize the successful operation of these important international financial institutions.”

Contrary to what has long been assumed, Igor Gouzenko, in the words of one scholar, “did not possess a shred of evidence, documentary or otherwise, that implicated Harry Dexter White in the Soviet conspiracy.”²⁹ Indeed, Gouzenko never mentioned White in his initial debriefings and would later, under intense grilling by American interrogators, persistently deny that he had any information on him. Hoover of course knew this, so he did not specifically mention Gouzenko as a source. But by citing a high-level Canadian official as saying that sinister accusations about White might be made in the future, he seemed to imply that evidence against White would emerge in the Canadian case. In fact the unnamed source from Canada was not a Canadian. As a top secret file from the Canadian archives reveals, the warning about White came from MI6's Peter Dwyer, who had been based in Washington to liaise with the FBI before being seconded to Ottawa to work on the Gouzenko case.

On January 28, 1946, Dwyer sent the following telegram to his office in Washington with the request that it be shown personally to Lish Whitson of the FBI (who had been in Ottawa for the Gouzenko case earlier):

For your most private information only we have learned from an informed diplomatic source something which would seem of grave concern. . . . [T]he two British and two Canadian delegates [to the imf] will nominate and support White. . . . With this backing we gather that White's nomination to this important post would be a more or less forgone conclusion. . . . If we allow Canadian and British delegates to carry out their present plan, we allow them to place a Soviet agent in a position of utmost importance in international relations. On the other hand we should not wish to warn our delegates without your complete agreement. . . . We would appreciate your earliest advice in this as our delegates arrive on Friday.³⁰

This telegram makes clear that not only was Hoover misleading about the source of his information against White (it was not a Canadian official), he also misrepresented what this source said. Dwyer's message was simple: he had heard that the British and Canadian delegates would support White's nomination and he wondered if these delegates should be told the information (gleaned from Bentley and transmitted in secret FBI reports which Dwyer would have seen) that White was a Soviet agent. Dwyer did not say anything about “sinister accusations” against White coming to light in the future.

In 1953, when the whole matter of Hoover's warnings to Truman about White became public, Canadian officials would confront Dwyer (who by this time had left MI6 and joined the Canadian government) with the telegram he had sent to the FBI seven years earlier. Dwyer claimed that William Stephenson inspired it, which would not be surprising given that Stephenson was a quintessential behind-the-scenes operator. But Dwyer himself had intimate ties with the FBI. According to Robert Lamphere, Dwyer had such a close relation with Assistant Director Mickey Ladd that “Ladd gave Peter Dwyer permission to drop in at the various offices of the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division and to talk freely with supervisors such as me. No other intelligence man, even from a U.S. agency, could do so; Dwyer's privilege was unique.”³¹ Lamphere goes on to say that he personally did not trust Dwyer, who was always engaging in “horse trading” with the FBI – giving out insignificant information while touting it as highly important in order to get a lot in return. Was Dwyer's letter to the FBI about White as straightforward as it seemed, or was it part of this “horse trading” game?

With the help of Dwyer's letter, it soon became “common knowledge” in Washington circles that Gouzenko had implicated White, a rumor that Hoover did not attempt to quell. In a memorandum to his subordinates, written in February 1946, Hoover observed, “I told the Attorney General that I saw Drew Pearson the other day and he mentioned that he understood White was mixed up in the Canadian case. I told Pearson that I could make no comment.”³²

For all Hoover's efforts, Truman was not impressed, and the appointment of White to the imf went through as planned. Truman's decision not to prevent White's appointment would become the source of a bitter public controversy between him and Hoover in 1953, a controversy in which the Gouzenko case was again dragged up. Although Truman would later be widely criticized for his decision, at the time it was by no means unreasonable. In the report on White sent to Truman along with Hoover's letter on February 4, the FBI admitted that “it should be realized that to prove these charges at this time when they relate to activities occurring in 1942 and 1943 is practically impossible.” The report was based solely on what Bentley had said about White. Not only were the charges over three years old, Bentley had stated all along that she had never even met him.

Mackenzie King's diary offers another example of how accusations against alleged spies were distorted and recycled. On February 5, right after Drew Pearson's exposé of the Canadian spy case, King wrote in his diary that he had had a “very confidential” talk with Norman Robertson about espionage: “He [Robertson] tells me that suspicions are directed right up to the top of the [U.S.] treasury, naming the person; also that it is directed against another person who was very close to Stettinius at San Francisco and who took a prominent part in matters there. . . . The lady Corby concerned had for two years been employed as liaison between the Soviet headquarters in New York and officials in different government departments, from whom she was securing documents.” [italics added]

King quite obviously was receiving an update from Robertson on the allegations of Elizabeth Bentley, referred to by the Canadians as Lady Corby, which were reproduced in reports from the FBI. Robertson was not talking about anything Gouzenko, who by this time had finished his debriefing, had come up with. But this entry was changed in the published version of the diary.³³ It reads, “The lady Corby [named] had for two years . . .” This gives the impression that King is referring to some woman Gouzenko named or identified as a spy and that Robertson was relating new information from Gouzenko. Not having consulted the original diary, numerous historians have added King's comments to their list of evidence against both White and Hiss.³⁴

The accusations of spying against White and other Americans were at this point still a secret. The center of public attention was Canada, where an unprecedented drama was taking place, a drama in which the prime minister was playing a leading role. King was surprised when, upon waking up on the morning of February 15, he heard about the detentions. He had been told that they would take place early that morning, but had forgotten. Although he was relieved to learn that the police had been deterred from rounding the suspects up at 3 a.m. and had waited until the more civilized hour of 7 a.m., he was concerned about criticisms of his government for using “star chamber” methods in handling the case and about being “held up [in] the world as the very opposite of a democrat.”³⁵

King had planned to give a public statement after the detentions, but he decided that the Russians should hear it privately first, even though the statement made no specific reference to the Soviet Union. So that afternoon King and Robertson met with the Soviet chargé d’affaires, Nikolai Belokhvostikov, and Vitalii Pavlov, who in addition to being the secret NKVD rezident was also second secretary at the Soviet Embassy. King read them the statement, pointing out that the unnamed foreign mission referred to was theirs. He also informed them of an unpleasant incident in Toronto. The new Soviet military attaché in Ottawa, Grigorii Popov, had recently been arrested for drunkenness. Then King launched into a self-effacing apology: “The young men were about to rise when I stopped them for a moment to say how sorry Robertson and I were that it was necessary to speak of these matters at all; that we were all close friends, and that nothing should destroy that relationship.” Although Belokhvostikov “had his happy smile” when he shook hands, Pavlov, not surprisingly, was “quite indifferent.” He doubtless knew what was coming; the Soviets would not take the public announcement of the espionage case lightly.³⁶

King saw himself and his country at the center of an earthshaking crisis. The day after the roundup of spy suspects he wrote in his diary, “I have been somehow singled out as an instrument of the part of unseen forces to bring about the exposure that has now taken place. There has never been anything in the world's history more complete than what we will reveal of the Russian method to control the continent. . . . As Prime Minister I have had to take the responsibility. The world now knows that I went to see the President and that I also went to see [British Foreign Minister] Bevin.” And the next diary entry, on February 17, included this observation: “It can be honestly [said] that few more courageous acts have ever been performed by leaders of the government than my own in the Russian intrigue against the Christian world and the manner in which I have fearlessly taken up and have begun to expose the whole of it.”

King apparently forgot that he had pushed all along for a quiet diplomatic solution to the Gouzenko affair instead of exposing the case publicly, and also that just two days before he had apologized to a key figure in the “Russian intrigue,” Mr. Pavlov. Why did King refer to the intrigue as being against the “Christian world”? As a subsequent diary entry makes clear, King, like Elizabeth Bentley, associated spying with Jews. Wondering to himself why American officials, Byrnes in particular, denied that the Gouzenko case had any connection to their country, King observed, “I am coming to feel that the democratic party [in the United States] have allowed themselves to be too greatly controlled by the Jews and Jewish influence and that Russia has sympathizers in high and influential places . . . I must say that the evidence is strong, not against all Jews, which is quite wrong, as one cannot indict a race any more than one can a nation, but that in a large percentage of the race there are tendencies and trends which are dangerous indeed.”³⁷

King was stung by the harsh response of his erstwhile friends the Soviets. Thanks to Kim Philby, the Soviets had an advance copy of King's first official statement on the case, along with reports on how the allies planned to respond publicly to the Soviets. So their counterattack, which focused on King, was well prepared. On February 20, Moscow Radio acknowledged, much to the surprise of many in the West, that the Soviets had indeed been spying, but said the information they received was of little value. The Soviet military attaché to Ottawa “received from acquaintances among Canadian citizens certain information of a secret character which, however, did not present a special interest to Soviet authorities. These matters had already been published.” Technical expertise had reached such a high level in the Soviet Union, the radio broadcast went on to say, and so much information had already appeared in scientific journals, that “it would be ridiculous to assert that the communication of such insignificant secret data could create any danger whatsoever for the security of Canada.” In other words, Canada was making a mountain out of a molehill. The Soviets also said that the Canadian government's position was “not compatible with friendly relations between the two countries” and implied that King was acting as a lackey for the British.³⁸

The Soviets did not let up on King. Pravda accused him of starting an anti-Soviet campaign to distract attention from British Foreign Minister Bevin's failure to undermine the Soviets in the United Nations. In late February, the Soviet magazine the New Times printed a scathing article that accused King of sympathizing with fascism. After King visited Hitler in 1937, the article said, the Canadian prime minister “advertised him [Hitler] as a ‘simple peasant who does not desire anything outside of Germany,’ an estimate which does not in the least honor the farsightedness of its author.”³⁹

Had the Soviets known what King was saying about Jews in his diary, they could have made his views on Hitler look considerably worse. As it was, the maligned prime minister noted despondently in his diary, “The dispatches from Russia make clear that my name is now an anathema throughout the whole Russian empire.”⁴⁰

King's reputation was also in danger at home, as he predicted it would be, now that his government was sanctioning the abuse of civil rights. Both the RCMP and the new Royal Commission went to extremes in interrogating the thirteen detainees, two of whom, Emma Woikin and Kathleen Willsher, were women. In fact, the entire process by which the spy suspects were detained, questioned, and later tried in court amounted to an egregious and, for Canada, unprecedented violation of civil liberties.

The suspects were held incommunicado at the Rockcliffe Barracks, an RCMP training establishment on the outskirts of Ottawa. Their accommodation was grim – spartan rooms with narrow, thin-mattressed beds. The windows were nailed shut. They were detained, without access to counsel, under a special Order-in-Council, P.C. 6444, which had been secretly passed in October 1945, when the RCMP was contemplating arrests in the case if the British arrested Alan Nunn May. The order was issued under the War Measures Act, which conferred emergency powers of arrest and detention upon the prime minister and the minister of justice. At the end of 1945, with the war over, the government had relinquished its emergency powers and the War Measures Act was no longer in force. However, when Justice Minister St. Laurent was asked at the time in Parliament if there were any orders outstanding under the act, St. Laurent said no. Later he claimed he forgot about P.C. 6444. ⁴¹

The detention of suspects by the RCMP under Order-in-Council P.C. 6444, while not technically illegal, was not in the spirit of the law. Although the order itself had never been formally revoked, it was issued “pursuant to the powers conferred by the War Measures Act,” which had expired. Furthermore, P.C. 6444 authorized only preventative detention, justified by the threat that the subject would communicate secret information to a foreign power if he or she was not detained. As the Royal Commission's report subsequently acknowledged, “the exercise of authority conferred by this Order will be seen to be purely preventative in its nature and not punitive with respect to past conduct. It is not concerned with and leaves untouched the question of accountability for such conduct under the general law.”⁴²

Soviet espionage activities in Canada had all but ceased since Gouzenko's defection. The suspects who had actually been spying had long since ended contacts with the GRU, and they posed no threat to Canada's security. This was evident to the RCMP, who had been following them for months. They were simply going about their daily lives, unaware of the turmoil in the upper reaches of allied intelligence and governments. Without doubt, the detentions under P.C. 6444 were not preventative; they were carried out as the first stage of a criminal process.⁴³

The detentions fueled a sense of danger and urgency among the Canadian public. A telegram from Ottawa to MI6 noted that “owing to lack of further official information, [the] Canadian press throughout [the] country is speculating wildly with every kind of sensationalism. Stress is continually laid on atomic aspect.”⁴⁴ The spies were so dangerous, Canada's Globe and Mail reported on February 19, that “the police feared either an escape attempt on the part of suspects held in the espionage inquiry here or an organized attempt to deliver them from the well-patrolled barracks at Rockcliffe.” The barracks were “bathed in the glare of search-lights.” Security had been tightened, and the men on duty were issued live ammunition. For tranquil Ottawa, it amounted to a state of siege; the extraordinary guard detail was “not matched at any project involving top security during the war.” Inside the barracks, the dazed detainees were held under constant guard, lest they attempt escape or suicide.

Instructions for the guards, who had to take an oath of secrecy, were extensive:

The security of the persons detained is of the utmost importance and constant supervision by day and night is to be given to each and every one of them; particular care to be given to attempts to escape or possible suicide. There must be no conversation between the guards and the prisoners. The persons detained are not allowed to communicate with anyone outside. Should they write a letter this will be handed to the N.C.O. in charge. . . . The guards on duty on the grounds will be on the lookout for any possible signaling from the barracks’ windows or from neighboring houses or parked cars or any other place. . . . Detained persons must under no circumstances be allowed to speak with one another. As far as possible they should be prevented from seeing one another. Individual guards will keep a minute diary of their watch. . . . These reports are of the utmost importance and it will be necessary for the guards to keep their eyes and ears highly attuned and observe everything that goes on.⁴⁵

RCMP criminal investigators Harvison and Anthony, who had by now spent close to three months gathering evidence in the case, handled the interrogations. Harvison, described by one of the accused spies as “a tall, thin, almost cadaverous man with a long bony face,” whose “eyebrows and unshaven tufts on his cheekbones gave him somewhat the appearance of a raccoon,” rose to the occasion.⁴⁶ He was tough and ruthless in the face of what he saw unambiguously as communist enemies. Having chased after Fred Rose for years, Harvison was anxious to finally lay hold of some of Rose's agents. (Rose himself was not apprehended at this time, presumably because he was a member of Parliament and the RCMP wanted first to gather evidence against him from his recruits. And Sam Carr, the other Communist Party official who had been running agents, had fled the country.)

Harvison later claimed that he and Anthony carefully explained to the suspects the reasons for their detentions and the authority under which they had been detained. Also, that they told the detainees “it was their right, if they so wished, to refuse to answer questions or provide information.”⁴⁷ The prisoners’ accounts were much different. Gordon Lunan, who had been detained at Montreal's Dorval Airport on his return from a tour of duty in England, recalled Harvison telling him on their first encounter, “Well, we've tangled with you reds before and you scream your heads off but there is no way you're going to wiggle out of this one. You know why you're here. Are you ready to tell us what you know?” (Harvison later fell back on anti-Semitism, apparently unaware that Lunan's wife was Jewish. “Are you going to stand by,” he asked Lunan, “and let people with names like Rosenberg, Kogan, Mazerall, Rabinovitch, and Halperin sell Canada down the river?”) When Lunan told Harvison he wanted to see his lawyer, Harvison simply told him he had no rights and was obliged to answer all questions.⁴⁸

Lunan, it will be recalled, had for a few months in 1945 acted as a go-between for GRU colonel Rogov and three of the other accused: Edward Mazerall, Durnford Smith, and Israel Halperin. Because Gouzenko had considerable paper evidence linking Lunan to Soviet espionage, Lunan was considered a key figure in the case. Lunan would say later that he was not an enthusiastic (or effective) participant in this spying venture, which is probably true. He had emigrated from Scotland to Montreal in 1938, when he was in his early twenties, and became active in political movements, such as the leftist Quebec Committee for Allied Victory, before joining the communist Labour Progressive Party. The party then was legal, and Fred Rose, the LPP member of Parliament, was popular and influential. Lunan remembered it as “a period of innocent euphoria during which iron curtains or cold wars would have been laughed off as the ravings of the hard-core right.” In 1945, after Lunan moved to Ottawa to edit a publication for servicemen called Canadian Affairs, Fred Rose invited himself to Lunan's home for dinner one night and asked if he would like to help out the Russians. It had seemed natural to say yes. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to Rogov by Rose's mistress, Freda Linton, who by the time of the commission hearings had left the country and was living in Washington, D.C., under the watchful eye of the FBI (which had not considered the evidence against her sufficient to justify extradition to Canada).⁴⁹

Lunan had been hoping to get to know the Russians and tell them all about Canadian politics. He was not prepared for the abrupt and secretive manner of Colonel Rogov, who sped around with Lunan in a chauffeur-driven car before giving him his instructions in a white envelope and dumping him out in the street. Rogov was no charmer like Zabotin or Pavlov. He was “shabbily and rather oddly dressed,” thought Lunan, “he certainly did not look like a military man. His un-Canadian pants, wide enough and long enough to hide his shoes, made me think of a New Yorker report that you could easily pick out the Russian secret servicemen in a crowd because they wore their fedoras undented.” Lunan was especially taken aback when Rogov (who called himself Jan) offered him money, which he refused. Lunan would later claim, “Fred Rose screwed me in the whole thing.” He would have backed out of it, he said, except that it would have meant that he had broken a commitment to the party.⁵⁰

According to Harvison, Lunan readily confessed: “The ‘martyr’ welcomed the opportunity to give a statement and filled a notebook with details of his work for the Soviets.”⁵¹ In fact, Lunan at first denied any involvement in spying. Then Harvison confronted him with documents that seemed to incriminate him and told him that others had implicated him (indeed, Mazerall had). According to a report from Ottawa to MI6, “Unfortunately for him [Lunan] he colours easily under shock. He did so when his cover name was quoted to him and when shown Photostat of his first instruction from Grant [Zabotin].”⁵² After a few days Lunan broke down.

On February 20, another message arrived at MI6 from Ottawa: “After long and delicate interrogation, during which was told of overwhelming evidence against him, LUNAN was finally brought to point where he stated he might be prepared to assist Canadian government and that he could be of great help. He has gone far enough to make retraction difficult and with luck he will make statement tomorrow.” Lunan wrote his confession in the notebook he had been given. By this time he was terrified that, because he was a serviceman, he might even be shot. He felt he had no choice but to confess, and name his sources, if he wanted to see his wife and a lawyer. The next day Ottawa reported success: “LUNAN has confessed completely . . . and has implicated fully SMITH, MAZERALL and HALPERIN.”⁵³

The Royal Commission was supposed to inquire into the extent and nature of the espionage and then hand over a report to the government, which would decide whether to prosecute specific individuals. In other words, the commission was to be a fact-finding body, not a court of law or a punitive agency. Yet it was the commission's lawyers who had written to the Minister of Justice on February 14 requesting that the minister activate the orders for detention and interrogation of the suspects.

The final commission report, issued in the summer of 1946, stated that the commission had no jurisdiction over the interrogation carried out by the RCMP. The report also stated that “the transcription of whatever interrogation took place . . . was not made available to us, nor was it referred to by Counsel, except that in a very few instances in connection with certain points which arose, the witness was referred to statements made by the witness during interrogation.”⁵⁴

What this meant was that, if suspects denied their guilt before the Royal Commission, they would be reminded of statements they had made to the RCMP, statements supplied in many cases after weeks spent in solitary confinement, with little sleep and no access to lawyers who could advise them on their rights. Thus they frequently broke down and confessed. Confessions, not the prevention of further acts of espionage, were the purpose of the detainment. As one cabinet minister put it, “If we had let them see a lawyer, he would have told them not to talk.”⁵⁵

If this strategy worked well with Lunan, it worked even better with twenty-five-year-old Emma Woikin. The young woman was hauled out of bed by the RCMP on the morning of February 15. Code-named “Nora” by the GRU, she was by all accounts a pitiful spy. Sobbing her way through Harvison's interrogations, she confessed to everything she was accused of and never even mentioned a lawyer. A former cipher clerk at the Canadian Department of External Affairs, Woikin had come to Ottawa from Saskatchewan two years earlier, after the suicide of her husband and the subsequent death of her baby. Her parents were Russian Doukhobors, and she herself spoke Russian. Alone in the “big city” of Ottawa, anxious to find friends, and still emotionally overwrought over her personal tragedies, she had gravitated to the Federation of Russian Canadians, where Soviet Embassy employees maintained an active presence. According to an official at the Department of External Affairs who rented a room to Woikin, she was “a highly emotional, maladjusted and unstable person, with a naïve and child-like sense of values and in need of a simple, direct object of admiration and devotion.”⁵⁶

Woikin found that object of admiration when she became acquainted with Major Vsevolod Sokolov from the Soviet Embassy, whose charms won her over. Sokolov, described as “an attractive man with an intelligent face, an easy manner, and a look of coiled energy that suggested sexuality,” invited Woikin to his house, where he lived with his wife, Lida. With the sanction of Zabotin, they met frequently. Sokolov gave the young woman expensive perfume and made her feel important. He also told her about how wonderful life was in the Soviet Union, where poverty, he said, did not exist. Before long Sokolov asked Woikin if she would like to help the Russians, which she enthusiastically agreed to do. She was enamored with everything Russian (including Major Sokolov) and happy to help.⁵⁷

Woikin memorized the contents of telegrams she was instructed to decipher at External Affairs and then made written summaries. Lida Sokolov, who began meeting Woikin for coffee, passed these on to her husband. On one occasion, however, the arrangements were more elaborate. Woikin was instructed to go to a washroom next to a suite of dentists’ offices. She taped her documents to the underside of a porcelain toilet-tank cover, where they were later retrieved by an embassy chauffeur.⁵⁸ Canadian authorities refused, on grounds of national security, to release the contents of four of these “top-secret reports” (in Woikin's handwriting), which Gouzenko had stolen from the Soviet Embassy. When Woikin's summaries were finally declassified almost forty years later, it emerged that none of the information she transmitted to the Sokolovs could have been of any value to the Soviets. Based on communications between Canada's Department of External Affairs and the British Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in London, the four reports summarized brief discussions of political conditions in Austria and Eastern Europe (which could have been read in any newspaper) and a discussion on Spain between the Soviet ambassador to Britain and the British foreign minister. This was hardly the stuff of serious espionage. But the information was secret, and Woikin therefore had violated the law in revealing it to her Russian friends.⁵⁹

Lida Sokolov told Woikin in mid-September 1945 that they could not meet anymore because there was “some trouble.” A week or so later Woikin was transferred from the cipher division. Nonetheless, when the RCMP rousted her out of bed on the morning of February 15, it came as a complete shock. Just three days after Woikin's arrest, the RCMP was able to report that she had confessed and dictated a statement. She even admitted to having accepted a present of fifty dollars from Lida Sokolov. The RCMP, in a secret telegram sent to MI6, clearly understood that Woikin was more a victim than a spy: “This is a pathetic case. Canadian of Russian parentage, she lived in considerable poverty. Her newborn child apparently died of lack of medical care and her husband committed suicide. In resultant nervous condition she was therefore fair game to diplomatic representatives of Soviet Union – particularly after she had found employment in cipher room of External Affairs. Conscious of her origins and vaguely believing she might assist political system, under which she was led to believe poverty did not exist, she agreed to work for them.”⁶⁰ This understanding of Woikin's extenuating circumstances did not prevent the RCMP from giving her a good working-over at the Rockcliffe Barracks. Like Lunan, she was led to believe she might be executed for her crimes.

Woikin was doomed from the start. She was still without legal counsel when she appeared on February 22 before the Royal Commission, which wrung further details out of her with little difficulty. By the time she was brought before the magistrate on March 2 to be formally charged with violating the Official Secrets Act, Woikin's mental state was precarious: “She wore no hat and her hair looked as if it had not been combed for days . . . she was ‘in shock.’ The first charge against her was read. In a flat, unnatural monotone, Mrs. Woikin said ‘I did it.’ The magistrate interrupted to ask her if she wished to be represented by counsel. She merely shook her head and repeated over and over, ‘I did it.’ . . . The clerk asked her to plead guilty or not guilty. She replied: ‘I did it.’ The magistrate tried to explain that she would have to offer a plea one way or another. She kept on repeating the same three words. Finally he was able to get through to her, and she said, in a voice that [could] scarcely be heard: ‘I did it. I’m guilty.’”⁶¹

Woikin's family in Saskatchewan scraped together money for the fifteen-hundred-dollar bail and hired her a lawyer for her trial. But given her confessions to the RCMP and the Royal Commission, there was little the lawyer could do, except to elicit some sympathy for her from the judge and to emphasize that the secrets she had betrayed were very minor. Woikin, the first of the spy suspects to be tried, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison.⁶² Given she had feared she would be executed, she may have considered her punishment mild. And she may well have deserved it. Nonetheless, it was a sad day for the Canadian system of justice.