Chapter 6
ANTI-COMMUNIST AGENDAS

I had no intention to skip. Whatever the consequences, I meant to go through with it, having enough faith that the good people of Canada will in the days to come get a much better insight into the politics behind the spy trials.

Fred Rose, letter to Canadian justice minister Louis St. Laurent, July 1946

At 11 p.m. on March 14, 1946, just hours after Fred Rose appeared in the Canadian Parliament for the first session of the new year, the RCMP arrived at his Beechwood Avenue apartment in Ottawa. Rose was on the telephone with a correspondent from the Toronto Daily Star who had called to ask him about rumors that he was about to be arrested: “Well, I haven't been,” said Rose. “Here I am.” Then he interrupted himself: “Oh, oh. Two men have just come in.” “Police?” asked the reporter. “Of course.” According to Rose's wife, Fanny, who had arrived earlier that day from Montreal to watch the Parliament's opening session, there was “never so much as a knock. . . . They just came in and took Fred away.”¹

The Star reporter hurried over to the Rose apartment to talk to Fanny. After dabbing her red eyes and accepting a cigarette, she told the reporter, “He was an ideal father to our daughter Laura, who is nine and a half. She was so excited about my trip here to Parliament. She kept asking me what I was going to wear . . . and now look what has happened.” There was a bottle of wine sitting on the table; the Roses had been about to open it in celebration of Fanny's visit. “He is a very good man, Fred is,” she continued. “I have been married to him for 18 years and I know.”²

At 4 a.m. the next morning, thirty-eight-year-old Rose was arraigned by a magistrate in a Montreal court and bail was set at ten thousand dollars. The prosecutor claimed that a car bearing a Michigan license plate was parked outside Rose's apartment at the time of the arrest and suggested that a plan was afoot to whisk him across the border. According to the Star, “Rose, short and dapper in gray suit and gabardine coat, appeared calm, but not unconscious of the excitement which seemed to pervade the small, crowded courtroom. He looked straight ahead as photographers’ flash-bulbs popped on every side, but as the flashes continued from unexpected corners, he broke into an embarrassed laugh and shrugged appealingly to the photographers.”³

Mackenzie King was relieved when he heard about Rose. He and his advisers had been concerned that Rose would not leave the parliamentary grounds, where, as an mp, he was immune from arrest. Rose (code-named “Debouz” by the GRU) had not been detained in mid-February along with the other spy suspects; if the RCMP, and the King government, were seen to be detaining a member of Parliament without a formal charge in an effort to coerce him into confessing, it would have caused a public uproar. In fact just a couple of weeks earlier, both Norman Robertson and commission counsel Williams had expressed the view to the RCMP's Charles Rivett-Carnac that it would be better if Rose were to disappear altogether. As Williams said, “It would relieve a very embarrassing situation.” Rivett-Carnac and his colleagues had been strongly disapproving. Given that Rose was one of the chief instigators of the spying, they felt he should be made to account for his crime.⁴

The RCMP got its way. Without a confession, the initial evidence against Rose from Gouzenko was weak, but once the other GRU recruits incriminated him there seemed to be ample evidence to justify an arrest. The arrest was carefully planned to coincide with the tabling in Parliament of the Royal Commission's second interim report on the espionage case. Raymond Boyer had given testimony before the commission that deeply implicated Rose in the GRU spying effort, although the report itself did not mention Rose by name.

This latest drama in the Canadian spy case aroused tremendous reaction south of the border. The Canadian Embassy in Washington reported that in the United States the “press from every region front-paged the arrest of Fred Rose and charges against the four scientists.” The Rose case was an all-time first in the West. Never before had a publicly elected official been charged with spying for the Soviets. And the fact that the official in question was a prominent leader of the Canadian Communist Party made the case even more significant; it confirmed the direct connection between indigenous communist parties and the Soviet intelligence services. As for the four scientists added by the Royal Commission to its public list of spy suspects, although the interim report mentioned only that they had passed military information to the Soviets, the impression conveyed in the American press was that the atomic secret was out.⁵

The American press was quick to draw inferences from the unfolding spy case. The New York Journal-American, under a caption “How Many of These Are in the U.S.?” printed a large picture of Fred Rose accompanied by the statement in the interim report that some suspects “holding strategic positions” admitted that “they had a loyalty which took priority over the loyalty owed by them to their own country.” According to a message to Ottawa from the Canadian Embassy in Washington, the statement about loyalty “was seized upon” by members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) and the Military Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate “to reinforce their demands for a thorough housecleaning of the State Department.”⁶

Even before these alarming new developments, the spy scare in the United States – which had begun with the announcement of the Canadian case in mid-February 1946 – had been growing in intensity, giving impetus to a wave of anti-communist measures. HUAC began investigating possible leaks of information at the U.S. military's atomic research complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the U.S. Army ordered that all officers with “subversive” views be moved out of positions of trust. Most significant of all, especially for the future of East-West relations, the movement for civilian control of the bomb and for international cooperation in atomic research suffered a new and devastating setback. Until early 1946, the so-called McMahon Bill, which placed atomic energy under the control of a civilian Atomic Energy Commission, had enjoyed strong public support and stood a good chance of being passed by the U.S. Senate. Once news of the Canadian espionage case came out, support for the bill plummeted. In March, General Leslie Groves testified before the Senate Committee on Atomic Energy, and “used the spy scandal to cast doubt upon the wisdom of giving sole control over atomic energy to civilians.” The committee voted six to one in favor of an amendment giving the military jurisdiction over almost all phases of atomic energy research.⁷ The newly formed Federation of Atomic Scientists, which had lobbied strongly for the McMahon Bill, voiced strenuous opposition to the amendment, but to no avail. In the words of one historian, “Despite the scientists’ insistence that there were no real atomic secrets to be lost, the news from Canada revived barely submerged beliefs that espionage posed the most serious threat to the U.S. atomic monopoly.”⁸

That several of those named by Gouzenko, including Boyer and Nunn May, were prominent scholars who had been active in the left-wing Canadian Association of Scientific Workers (which also advocated international control of the bomb) made a deep impression in official Washington. Henceforth their colleagues in the United States would no longer be trusted. Scientists who advocated an internationalist approach were automatically considered secret friends of the Soviets.⁹

In Canada, the Royal Commission's claim that some of the spy suspects had admitted allegiance to the Soviet Union gave the concern about internal subversion a new urgency. Canadian-based New York Times reporter P.J. Philip reported that the “alien loyalty” issue had “profoundly moved this country, in which national consciousness and loyalty are relatively new developments.” It was only recently, Philip pointed out, that a single Canadian patriotism had emerged from conflicting allegiances. “Now suddenly and alarmingly there has developed evidence of a loyalty to a political doctrine and foreign national system that has nothing in common with Canadian liberty.”¹⁰

In fact, as the spy case demonstrated, most Canadians did not have a single, undivided allegiance to their country. Canada had not gained independence from Britain until 1867, almost one hundred years after the U.S., and it was still a member of the Commonwealth. The Anglo-Canadians, who predominated in the government, were often far-removed in cultural, economic, and political terms from the mainly Catholic French Canadians of Quebec. Indeed, French Canadians had their own sense of national identity, and many wanted Quebec to have more autonomy. (Significantly, the French-language media paid scant attention to the espionage affair. In one of the rare articles on the subject, a Catholic newspaper drew the conclusion that, since the spies were mainly English-speaking Canadians, it showed that the French were morally superior.)¹¹ As for the Canadian West, its sense of Canadian patriotism was so weak that successive prime ministers up to the time of Mackenzie King had worried that the region might try to secede and join the United States.

Canada was a huge, sparsely populated, polyglot country composed of different ethnic groups, many of them comprising recent immigrants without strong feelings of patriotism. In Montreal, where several of the spy suspects lived, linguistic, ethnic, and religious divisions were deeply aggravated by rising labor discontent and the growth of urban slums. Widespread anti-Semitism, in a city with a large population of Jews from Eastern Europe, added an additional dimension to the prevailing social disharmony, drawing members of the Jewish intellectual, cultural, and scientific elite, and also working-class Jews, toward radical leftist politics.

Fred Rose, a working-class Jew, was a direct product of this environment of political pluralism and ethnic ferment. Born Fred Rosenberg in Lublin, Poland, Rose had immigrated to Montreal with his Jewish parents in 1920, at age thirteen. He trained as an electrician, but soon was spending most of his time promoting international communism. After joining the Soviet-sponsored Young Communist League in 1925, Rose became an agitator and propagandist for the party. A 1928 RCMP dossier on twenty-one-year-old Rose (still known then as Rosenberg), described him as five feet four inches tall, with brown hair and dark blue eyes, “very talkative and inclined to speak quickly.” According to the dossier, his ability as an agitator was impressive: “Is a good speaker and commands the interest of his audiences. Also [a] good organizer. Has his whole heart in communism.”¹²

In 1930, Rose was selected as a representative of the ycl of Canada for training in Moscow, where he spent six months. (He told Canadian authorities he was headed for Germany, along with two other Canadian students. But on the ship bound for Europe, one of them blurted out their secret plan to travel to the Soviet Union and the news got back to the RCMP.)¹³ The Soviets were skilled both at training and indoctrinating young foreign recruits, and at shielding them from the grim realities of Stalinist life. Rose doubtless saw little of the long bread lines, and never heard about the millions of peasants who were dying as a result of Moscow's efforts to force them into collective farms. His Soviet trainers would have filled his head with lofty notions about the ultimate goals of communism and convinced him of the evils of the capitalist system, which he was to convey to the proletariat back in Canada.

After Rose's return to Montreal in late 1930, he became a paid party functionary and threw himself into his mission of spreading the communist word. It did not take long before he was arrested on charges of sedition (specifically, he was accused of trying to incite a crowd to revolt against the government) and sentenced to a year in prison. The ordeal did nothing to dampen Rose's commitment to the communist cause, despite the fact that he had a wife and small daughter to take care of. Upon his release in 1932, he resumed his public speaking and wrote and distributed pamphlets glorifying the Soviet Union and castigating the “imperialist” powers of the United States and Britain, along with their “junior partner,” Canada. Rose went into hiding when the Canadian Communist Party was outlawed in June 1940 and an order was issued for his arrest. He reemerged in 1942 and that year reportedly approached Zabotin's predecessor in Ottawa, Major Sokolov, with a request to work for the GRU. Sokolov then contacted the GRU rezident in New York, Pavel Mikhailov, who oversaw GRU operations in North America. Mikhailov was able to provide Rose's bona fides, and Rose was put in charge of the GRU's Montreal group, which included Raymond Boyer and Harold Gerson. The next year, in August 1943, Rose ran for election to the Canadian Parliament and won. To Mikhailov, this was important news, and immediately he sent a telegram to the director of the GRU in Moscow: “Fred, our man in LESOVIA [code name for Canada], has been elected to the lesovian parliament.”¹⁴

As a recruiter for the Soviets, Rose was one of the GRU's most important Canadian agents. But he was playing a dangerous game. What made him embark on the life of a spy when he was having such success as a leader of the Canadian Communist Party? That Rose was duped by the Soviets into thinking their country was a glorious utopia may not seem surprising if considered in light of his experience in Canada as a working-class Jew from Eastern Europe. But his decision to spy for the GRU is more difficult to fathom. Rose's participation in the GRU's espionage effort was to prove catastrophic for the Canadian Communist Party. When it became known that he and party organizer Sam Carr – two of the party's leaders – had been directly involved in spying, support for the party, not surprisingly, plummeted, and its political agenda was completely discredited. As one historian put it, “With their slavish loyalty to Moscow the Communists not only shot themselves in the foot as a party; they also harmed the entire Canadian Left, non-Communist as well as Communist.”¹⁵

In fact, three years before Rose's arrest for spying for the GRU, Mikhailov sent a word of warning to Moscow that he wanted passed on to the GRU in Ottawa: they should be “increasing caution to the maximum” with regard to Rose. Mikhailov clearly saw the dangers of having a high-profile communist and a politician like Rose participate in the Soviets’ espionage operations. If Rose were to be exposed, it would damage not only the Communist Party, but also the GRU, including Mikhailov, who had helped his colleagues in Canada to organize their network.

Rose's espionage was not detected by the RCMP until Gouzenko came along. RCMP officers had been conducting surveillance on Rose for years before his arrest, but their focus was on his domestic political radicalism and his efforts to stir up discontent among urban working classes. The fact that Rose was meeting with officials from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa on a regular basis from 1942 onward apparently either went unnoticed or gave little cause for concern at RCMP headquarters. After all, the Soviets were allies and Canada was preoccupied with the Nazi threat.

The FBI had also failed to notice Rose, although he maintained close contact with Soviet agents in America, including Mikhailov, and, according to Elizabeth Bentley, made several visits to New York. In March 1946, when the news of the Canadian spy case was dominating the press, Bentley's memory was triggered and she elaborated further about Rose to the FBI: “She distinctly recalls rose had seven or eight names of Canadian governmental employees for whom he desired [Jacob] golos to arrange contacts, presumably in Canada. It was learned [that] Informant [Bentley] saw this list of names, but recalled none of them except that the name of eric adams, also a subject in the current Canadian case, may have been included.”¹⁶

According to Bentley, Rose had spent ten days in New York, much of the time in private conversations with Golos, who reimbursed Rose for his expenses with money from the Russians. His wife accompanied Rose, but his girlfriend – a young Jewish woman with horn-rimmed glasses who spoke with a Canadian accent – was there at the same time. She wore a Canadian Army uniform. Thinking that this might be Freda Linton, Rose's mistress and courier, the FBI showed Bentley a photograph of Linton, but Bentley could not identify her as being the person she had met. She went on to tell the FBI that in the early part of 1944, “several young Canadians of both sexes in uniform contacted her in New York and simply mentioned [that] fred rose had suggested that they look her up.”¹⁷

Although the FBI had been playing down the relationship between the Gouzenko and Bentley cases, Hoover's deputy, Mickey Ladd, thought Bentley's new testimony suggested strong connections. In a long memorandum to Hoover giving the details of Bentley's testimony, Ladd concluded:

The above-noted contacts between Fred Rose, Jacob Golos and the informant Gregory [Bentley] are believed of considerable significance in view of the light they throw on the apparent organizational connections between the subjects of the Silvermaster case [which arose out of Bentley's accusations against American government officials connected with Nathan Silvermaster] and the subjects of the Guzenko [sic] case. . . . This information, of course, raises the definite possibility that at least at one time there was such a direct organizational connection between Fred Rose and Jacob Golos, between the Soviet espionage parallels involved in the Corby case in Canada and the Soviet espionage parallels involved in the Silvermaster case in the United States.¹⁸

There was another espionage thread leading from Canada to the United States. A Soviet GRU agent named Arthur Adams who had been operating in New York since 1938 had previously lived in Toronto and had obtained a false Canadian passport there through Sam Carr's network. In contrast to the Rose case, the FBI had known about Adams for some time, and he had been under constant surveillance since he was observed in 1944 obtaining material from a physicist at a Chicago research laboratory. It is difficult to say how much information on atomic matters Adams passed on to the GRU before he fled the United States in early 1946. (He died in Moscow in 1970 and was buried with honors in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.) Adams met with at least one or two scientists who were connected with the Manhattan Project, and a Russian source claims that he gave materials on atomic research (along with a sample of pure uranium) to the GRU. According to this source, in early 1944 Adams described in detail to the GRU the destructive powers of the atomic bomb, explaining that it was intended for Japan, but “there is no guarantee that our allies would not try to pressure us, once they have such a weapon at their disposal.”¹⁹

The FBI was eager to arrest Adams, but they lacked evidence. For FBI officer Robert Lamphere this was frustrating: “Our agents followed Adams around the clock. . . . The man knew he was being tailed, and wasn't going to renew his contacts. Wasn't that a waste of manpower?”²⁰ The FBI was also reportedly told by the State Department to hold off on arresting Adams because they did not want to damage relations with the Soviets, so J. Edgar Hoover again resorted to his tactic of using the media to pressure the Truman administration. In early December 1945, the New York Journal American published a sensational story, out of the blue, about a Russian atom spy called “Alfred Adamson” who had entered the U.S. from Canada in 1938. He was “a small, gnome-like man. . . . He has a furtive walk, a pair of deep-set piercing eyes and a nervous habit of always looking over his shoulder.” The story, while not entirely accurate, correctly related the basic facts of Adams's efforts to get atomic secrets: “A year ago Adamson is known to have passed information and what is believed to be atomic bomb plans to a member of the Russian Consulate here. The Soviet official, whose name is known to this newspaper, left for Moscow two weeks after his contact with Adamson. His plane flew direct to the Kremlin. The diplomatic pouch he carried, under international law, was immune from search or seizure.”²¹

Noting that the spy “has had access to some of the most carefully- watched secrets in American military history,” the Journal blamed the State Department for the fact that he was still at large: “The arrest of Adamson cannot be made without the sanction of the State Department, which must rule on the seizure of agents working for a foreign power. Proof of the activities of this Kremlin vassal was given to the State Department two years ago, and since that time the FBI has been in constant communication with officials of the State Department regarding his operations. Yet Adamson and his confederates are still not under arrest.” As observed in a message to MI6, the piece was inspired by the FBI: “This story comes . . . most opportunely when [the] FBI are preparing Speed [Bentley] case for consideration of State.”²²

Hoover and the FBI were well aware of the power of the press. So too were the RCMP and the Canadian government. They had high stakes in Fred Rose's pre-trial hearing, held in Montreal on March 22. It was the first public hearing in the Gouzenko case, and they pulled out all the stops. A message from Ottawa to MI6 noted, “You may possibly be surprised at the amount of material which will be used, but the reason for this is that the Montreal Courts are unpredictable and Crown [the prosecution] is anxious to ensure that the strongest possible case is made against rose immediately while the going is good.”²³

The heavily guarded star witness was Igor Gouzenko, making his first public appearance immaculately dressed in a single-breasted light gray suit. Gouzenko had been alarmed at the possibility of appearing in public, and the RCMP had requested that the court hear his testimony in camera, but to no avail. The prosecution wanted to take full advantage of Gouzenko's debut as a witness.²⁴ To protect his secret identity, photographers were barred from the courtroom and sketches were not permitted, but a reporter from the Montreal Star provided this description:

Against a background of six alert Mounties in a crowded and dramatically hushed courtroom today, Igor Gouzenko . . . told his story of espionage in Canada. . . . Fair skinned, with dark brown hair, and intelligent but slightly stolid features, he obviously had had a recent haircut. . . . His hair was parted to the side and his hands, with fists half clenched, rested on the top of the witness box.²⁵

According to a reporter for Time magazine, “The first impression I had of him when he came into the witness stand was his size.

He seemed to me a very short person. . . . The other thing I noticed about him was his cocky manner. . . . He threw his shoulders back and barked out his answers. He also managed to convey a slight contempt for everybody who was quizzing him.”²⁶

Gouzenko's testimony, in which he named Fred Rose and Sam Carr as recruiters for the GRU, and also discussed the other accused spies, held the courtroom spellbound. The prosecutor, anxious to establish Gouzenko's credibility as a witness, had prepared himself well and asked Gouzenko all the right questions. (He had obviously studied Gouzenko's secret testimony before the Royal Commission, which the counsel for the defense was not able to see.) When asked why he decided to seek asylum in Canada, Gouzenko failed to mention that he had been called back early to Russia because he was in trouble and instead gave his well-rehearsed speech about his love for Canadian democracy. He made his decision, he said, because he wanted to let the Canadian people know the Russians were spying on them in preparation for a future war. According to the Montreal Gazette, “Gouzenko spoke for a solid twenty-five minutes detailing the differences between Canadian democracy and Soviet life. No orator, he spoke slowly, picking his phrases . . . the crowd hung on every word. Counsel did not interrupt him, and they were dramatic minutes to everyone in this room.”²⁷

Rose's attorney, J.L. Cohen, did not cross-examine Gouzenko. Cohen, described by one observer as “a chubby man who smoked cigars and wore his hat square on the top of his head,” was a brilliant and flamboyant Toronto lawyer who was known for his sympathy toward underdogs.²⁸ This was the first time he had seen Gouzenko, and he was unfamiliar with much of the evidence the prosecution produced at the hearing, so he had presumably decided to postpone his cross-examination until Rose's trial. But in his closing remarks, Cohen voiced skepticism about Gouzenko's motives for wanting to stay in Canada: “A telegram comes . . . asking Colonel Zabotin to send him back to Moscow. Gouzenko would not like this, and I don't blame [him]. Here he is living in Ottawa, and living well, certainly very well as compared with the way of life in Russia and in Moscow in 1944. . . . His overwhelming admiration of our way of life and his abhorrence for the way of life he was brought up in came to the front at the time he was to be replaced . . .”²⁹

Cohen also observed that, according to documents, Zabotin did not bother to notify Moscow of Rose's reelection to the Canadian Parliament in June 1945 until fully a month after the election: “I would hate to believe that if Debouz [Rose] was so important to the schemes of Soviet Russia, they would not have known prior to the 12th of July that their recruiting agent in Canada was re-elected.”³⁰ Cohen, of course, was unfamiliar with the ways of the GRU's residency in Ottawa, where Zabotin and his staff were not always on the ball.

Carefully rehearsed as Gouzenko was, he and his handlers made blunders. Gouzenko named five detainees who had not yet completed testimony before the Royal Commission and who had not been formerly charged, possibly prejudicing their right to a fair hearing. And he mentioned two other individuals as being agents, when in fact they were not. A telegram to MI6 noted, “this could therefore throw doubt on [the] reliability of [the] rest of Corby's evidence in the hands of [a] good defence lawyer.” The Canadian Department of External Affairs, anxious to avoid a deep rift in relations with the Soviet Union, was also unhappy about Gouzenko's hyperbolic prediction that the Soviets were preparing for a third world war.³¹ But as one Canadian writer pointed out, part of his job in testifying for the prosecution was to establish a climate of fear: “When you look at the trial transcripts you get an idea of the role of Gouzenko. . . . ‘third world war was going to be staged by the Russians against the west.’ . . . ‘secret cells impregnated by communist agents’ – in other words, terrifying rhetoric. And he would always give the whole set-up at the Soviet Embassy with all these scary-sounding foreign names and code names. That was the ritual at both these trials [of Rose and Boyer].”³²

When asked by the prosecutor about the identities of those mentioned by code name in GRU documents, Gouzenko also named Arthur Steinberg, “a person in the United States,” and discussed the telegram that supposedly incriminated him, which was presented in evidence at the hearing. And he mentioned Ignacy Witczak, who had entered the United States from Canada using a false Canadian passport, but by this time had fled abroad. The FBI had Steinberg under intensive surveillance, keeping his case under wraps while they gathered evidence. And the Witczak case was an embarrassment that the bureau did not want publicized. As a message to MI6 observed, “Mention of Arthur STEINBERG and WITCZAK without prior warning to FBI or USA government would again seem most injudicious.”³³ Gouzenko's testimony prompted a hasty memorandum to Hoover from his deputy Mickey Ladd: “Gouzenko named by name and cover name practically all of the Soviet agents who have figured in the above case . . . also several of the figures involved in the United States, including Ignacy Witczak and Arthur Gerald Steinberg, both of whom, as you will of course recall, have been the subjects of extensive Bureau investigations.” Ladd went on to note hopefully that, although the Canadian press had mentioned Steinberg, thus far the American press had not, although there were several U.S. correspondents covering the trial in Montreal.³⁴

In fact, Gouzenko's reference to Steinberg was reported in several American newspapers, which raised speculation in the United States as to why he had not been arrested.³⁵ The problem, as usual for the FBI, was that they had no evidence against Dr. Steinberg. A garbled telegram from Zabotin to his bosses mentioning Steinberg as a possible recruit and Gouzenko's hearsay statements that he remembered other telegrams about him would never hold up in court. Hoover was well aware of this, and thus would have much preferred that the Canadians had kept both Steinberg and Witczak out of the picture.

Gouzenko was a tireless and effective witness in the Rose hearing, but in the view of one observer the prosecutors let him go too far in their zeal to nail Rose: “The Crown Counsel in Montreal allowed Corby to go much further than was intended or expected. . . . [The] general opinion at the moment seems to be that [the] desirability of establishing [a] strong case against rose in Quebec Courts would not justify irrelevant lengths to which Counsel has gone.”³⁶

It was probably not necessary for the prosecution to bring up the names of Steinberg and Witczak in order to strengthen the case against Rose. But the RCMP, which was guiding the prosecution, may have had other motives for doing so, since they and the Canadian government would have preferred not to go it alone in publicly prosecuting spies. While the British had finally taken the requisite legal action against Alan Nunn May, the Americans were still doing and saying nothing in public. U.S. secretary of state James Byrnes had denied there were any spies in the United States who were connected to the Canadian case, and the FBI, when repeatedly asked by the press about the implications for the United States, had “no comment.” It is probably no accident that on March 28 the FBI learned from a member of the American press that, according to a high RCMP official, “the case in Canada is amateurish compared to what exists in the United States and he cannot understand why we do not crack down.” Hoover was “very much disturbed.”³⁷

Had the Canadians understood the complex role that the FBI played in the American political system, and the tensions among the FBI, the White House, the State Department, and Congress, they might not have expected so much. Hoover's cryptic messages to RCMP commissioner Wood in the autumn of 1945, explaining that his agency faced legal constraints the Canadians did not, apparently failed to make clear to the Canadians that the FBI could not, for a very long time, proceed with arrests. On the other hand, Hoover never told the Canadians the truth – that they would have to go it alone. Instead, he had pushed them into it.

Raymond Boyer's testimony at the Rose pre-trial hearing added to the spy fever. His explanation that he had willingly handed over the secret of the RDX explosive to Rose because “he was anxious to do what he could to have the Soviet Union obtain the process officially from Canada” reinforced the image of Communist Party members as clandestine agents of Moscow in North America. This statement coincided with news from Seattle that a Soviet military officer, Lt. Redin, had been arrested on suspicions of spying. Although the FBI refused to comment on any connection that Redin might have with the Canadian case, Congressman John Wood, the chairman of huac, gave a different impression. His immediate reaction was that his committee should confer with the Canadians “on any ‘interlocking activities’ between reported attempts to obtain American bomb secrets and alleged Soviet espionage in Canada.” An article in the Christian Science Monitor cited the Redin arrest as “the first official acknowledgement here that a Moscow spy ring may have been operating in the United States as well as Canada.” The article went on to observe that “new concern has developed among congressmen and government officials over the security of American secrets. President Truman's assurance that the nation's security is airtight against foreign spies is being questioned.”³⁸

HUAC's decision to intervene in the Canadian case was unwelcome news for both the FBI and the State Department. On March 29, Ladd informed Hoover that their liaison with the RCMP, Glen Bethel, had called asking for instructions as to what to do if members of HUAC showed up in Ottawa. Hoover's response: “He must make no comment and of course should not accompany any representative of the Committee.”³⁹ The State Department concurred. American ambassador to Canada Ray Atherton told Bethel he had written to Washington strongly recommending that no one from HUAC be permitted to come to Canada to inquire into the Gouzenko case. Any such trip, Atherton said, “would be neither wise nor proper.”⁴⁰ HUAC continued to pursue the matter. In June 1946, Congressman Wood asked U.S. secretary of state Byrnes to send a letter to the Canadian government formally requesting an interview with Gouzenko. Apparently Byrnes did not cooperate, because HUAC was never invited to Ottawa.⁴¹

By March 1946, Hoover was reaping what he had sown. He had wanted the publicity from the Canadian spy case to raise the alarm about espionage in his country and strengthen public support for his anti-Communist agenda. But he did not like the press claiming there was a huge network of spies in the United States busily collecting atomic secrets under the nose of a helpless FBI. And he certainly did not need HUAC racing up to Canada to interfere in the Gouzenko case. Whatever connections the case had with the United States, Hoover did not want them addressed, at least for the moment.

On the evening of March 18, four days before the Rose hearing in Montreal, Mackenzie King had given his long-awaited explanation of the spy case to a hushed House of Commons, its galleries packed with onlookers. Far to the left of King sat Fred Rose, who had been released from custody on bail. He took his place quietly and listened without apparent emotion. King's complicated tale lasted for almost an hour and a half, but his audience hung on his every word. As the Winnipeg Tribune described it, “Calm in voice and gesture – he might have been talking academically about a change in the tariff – Mr. King last night told the most dramatic story ever unfolded in the House of Commons.”⁴²

In fact, King had found the speech, which he gave without notes, a terrible ordeal: “I was horrified to find that I was excessively tired. I could feel the whole weight of my body from my neck down and also the drawing of my throat from fatigue which made it very difficult for me to raise my voice and speak out clearly. . . . What distressed me even more in speaking was that I saw clearly my mind would get just a little clouded at times, from weariness. I was not quite sure I was using the right words and not feeling sure of the points which I wanted to develop.”⁴³

But King soldiered on, persuading the House of Commons that his government had made the right decisions in what he said was “the most serious situation that has arisen at any time in Canada.” The Canadian government had moved so cautiously, King explained, because it realized how far-reaching the repercussions might be. He gave a detailed description of Gouzenko's defection and the steps his government had taken in the following months, revealing that he had even considered visiting Stalin personally to get an explanation of the Soviet spying activities in Canada. King ended with a declaration of faith in the friendship between Russia and Canada. Stalin, he suggested, might not even have known about his country's espionage efforts in Canada: “What I know, or have learned of Mr. Stalin from those who have been closely associated with him in the war, causes me to believe that he would not countenance action of this kind on the part of officials of his country. I believe that when these facts are known to him and to others in positions of full responsibility, we shall find that a change will come that will make a vast difference indeed.”⁴⁴

King plainly still indulged in fantasies about Stalin. Had he any inkling of how the Soviet leader operated, he would have realized how unrealistic his image of him was. Stalin, to use a modern term, “micro-managed” everything, trusted no one, and allowed for little, if any, individual initiative in his huge government and party apparatus. Inherently suspicious of the security and intelligence services, he followed closely everything they did (with the help of legions of informers). Indeed, although many Soviet citizens wanted to believe that Stalin had not approved of the purges of 1936–38, when the NKVD murdered millions of innocent citizens, the NKVD had been following Stalin's direct orders. He even went over transcripts of the interrogations of some of his former party colleagues. Although Stalin distrusted his intelligence services and was often reluctant to believe their reports, he kept well abreast of their espionage operations abroad.

Mackenzie King, understandably, knew little of Kremlin politics, which were shrouded in mystery for the West. King's world was one of sensible, well-meaning politicians who felt a duty to work for the public good. Anxious to include Stalin in this vision, King talked himself into the possibilities of personal diplomacy. He believed that if he could only meet with Stalin, somehow he could make him see the light, and the Russians would again become friends with the West. The day after his speech, King noted in his diary that he asked the Czech ambassador to Canada, Frantisek Pavlasek, if he would please give Czech president Eduard Benesh a message for Stalin, “letting Stalin know the kind of man I am and what I stand for in my lifelong efforts to improve conditions of the masses and in the way of international friendship. Pavlasek said he would be delighted to do that and would send word this afternoon. I know Benes [sic] is a great friend of Stalin's and I know what Benes feels about myself. I had in mind that a meeting with Stalin is almost sure to come sooner or later. I had this in mind in what I said Monday night.”⁴⁵

Four days later, after Stalin had made a public statement in favor of world peace and the United Nations, King mused, “I am wondering very much if that utterance of his at this time is not the result of what I said in the House on Monday; with what I know of Stalin, I thought he was a man who would not countenance what had been done here. . . . Also I am wondering if Dr. Pavlasek did not cable Benes [sic] on Monday as he said he would, and Benes since cabled Stalin as to the type of man I am . . .”⁴⁶

King did not let matters rest there. He decided to send a personal message through Benesh to Soviet foreign minister Viachislav Molotov, known in Western diplomatic circles as “Mr. No,” because of his cold manner and his iron-fisted methods. The message, now in the Russian archives, read as follows:

The measures taken against spies in Canada were not and are not directed against the Soviet Union and Generalissimo Stalin, as the hostile press has asserted to the Soviet Union. It is necessary to have recourse to the internal considerations of the Canadian government to understand these measures. I would be very obligated to you if you would explain this affair to Generalissimo Stalin, as my friend, who from personal ties knows my character and can confirm that I am very interested in maintaining cordiality and friendship with the Soviet Union. I am also certain that the spying operations were conducted without the authority of Ambassador Zarubin, towards whom I have the greatest respect.⁴⁷

Stalin did not respond to King's gestures of friendship. Quite the opposite. Through diplomatic channels, the Soviets let the Canadians know how much the bad publicity displeased them. And while they had been willing to acknowledge that Zabotin and his GRU group had been gathering information illicitly, they were incensed that Gouzenko had referred to Pavlov and his subordinates as NKVD spies. A note of protest from the Soviets in Ottawa, released to the press on April 4, stated: “The Soviet Embassy deems it its duty to declare that the slanderous statements of the criminal [Gouzenko] as well as the reports in the Canadian newspapers based on these statements regarding the mentioned diplomatic members of the Soviet Embassy in Canada are completely fictitious and deserve no credit.” To reinforce its claim that Pavlov and his men were diplomats, not spies, the Soviet Embassy sent a brazen note to the Canadian Department of External Affairs in May 1946 notifying them that Pavlov had been promoted from second to first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa.⁴⁸

That Moscow voiced indignation over the claims about Pavlov, while at the same time acknowledged publicly that Zabotin and his GRU officers had been spying, might be explained by the simple fact that Gouzenko's documents had not implicated the NKVD. But there were other factors as well, in particular the rivalry between the two intelligence agencies. Although the GRU's job was to collect military intelligence, there was considerable overlap with the intelligence gathering of the NKVD, so the two services often competed for agents, information, and, of course, influence with the Kremlin. The Gouzenko defection was a black mark on the GRU, and the foreign-intelligence body of the NKVD (renamed the MGB in March 1946) was going to make sure it stayed there.

In early April 1946, a leading MGB official in Moscow sent out a lengthy message to residencies abroad, apparently in response to Gouzenko's references to its agents at the Rose hearing. It was a scathing indictment of the GRU residency in Ottawa.⁴⁹ First, the official noted, because the GRU's work in Ottawa was organized so that each operational employee had detailed knowledge of the operations of other staff members, “personal dossiers on the agent network became common knowledge.” Another problem was that the agent network made extensive use of members of the Communist Party in Canada, who were well known to the Canadian authorities (Fred Rose being a good example). And Gouzenko, thanks to a “decline in vigilance and a disregard for elementary principles of security,” had access to information on the NKVD and to “state secrets of the highest importance.”

The message failed to mention yet another black mark against the GRU, the arrest in Toronto of Zabotin's replacement, Grigorii Popov. In addition to his drunken and disorderly conduct, Popov was discovered to be carrying a concealed weapon. The documents the RCMP found on him convinced them that, like Zabotin, he was a GRU agent. Popov, presumably at Ottawa's request, was recalled to Moscow in March, leaving by ship from Philadelphia. When Popov was en route from Canada to the United States, Dwyer dispatched a top secret cable to London: “I drew FBI's attention to [the] fact that he is almost certainly being recalled in disgrace and they propose to attempt to approach him if occasion offers with view to persuading him to follow in corby's footsteps. I believe they may have some reasonable chance of success since his wife and child are traveling with him and he must be well aware of what awaits him if he returns.” As it turned out, the opportunity to speak alone to Popov did not present itself. Even if it had, Popov would probably have refused. The rest of his family, and that of his wife, were hostages in the Soviet Union.⁵⁰

As the MGB's message observed, Gouzenko's defection had “caused great damage to our country and has, in particular, very greatly complicated our work in the American countries.” But while the author of this message placed the blame for this catastrophe squarely on the GRU, he could not get around the fact that Pavlov and the NKVD shared responsibility for ensuring security at the embassy in Ottawa. In the final paragraph of his coded message he instructed the MGB residencies to heighten their vigilance drastically:

In the instructions which we are sending you by the next post, rules and regulations are given for ensuring security in the work and for fostering in our comrades the qualities of party vigilance and discipline. You are directed to observe these rules and regulations scrupulously, applying them everywhere in actual practice. Without waiting for the receipt of the instructions, ascertain how matters stand in your RESIDENCY. Take all necessary measures to improve the organization of all agent networks and operational work, paying special attention to tightening security. The work must be organized so that each member of the staff and agent can have no knowledge of our work beyond what directly relates to the task which he is carrying out.⁵¹

Gouzenko's defection was a wake-up call to both Soviet intelligence agencies. Their operations were foundering and serious changes were called for. But Beria himself would not preside over these changes. He relinquished his job as NKVD chief in early 1946 to take charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project. In August 1949, Beria would oversee the successful detonation of the first Soviet plutonium bomb. But by the time the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb in August 1953, Beria had been imprisoned by his rivals in the wake of the power struggle that ensued after Stalin's death in March of that year. He was executed in December 1953, on the orders of the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.⁵²

Although Mackenzie King was willing to give Stalin, and even the Soviet ambassador to Canada, the benefit of the doubt about their involvement in espionage, he was not so inclined when it came to the Canadian spy suspects. It never occurred to King, if we are to judge from his diary and his public statements, that any of those detained by the RCMP might have been innocent. (And he continued to focus on the Jewish angle, observing, inaccurately, in his diary that “It is a rather extraordinary thing that most of those caught in this present net are Jews, or have Jewish wives or [are] of Jewish descent.”) King was certainly concerned about the violations of civil liberties by Canadian authorities, but his concerns centered on the image of his Liberal government rather than on the individuals whose rights were being violated. As he lamented in his diary, “It will always be held against us and the Liberal party that we sanctioned anything that meant so much in the way of deprivation of liberty for a number of people. Moreover, as I saw at the start, it has raised an issue in the minds of people even more important than that of espionage and will probably result in several of the persons being freed altogether when they come before the court, or given trifling sentences.”⁵³

King wrote this on March 21, after a week in which he and his government had come under strong criticism in Parliament for their treatment of the spy suspects. The leader of the Opposition, John Bracken, compared the methods employed by the police to those of a totalitarian system. Another speaker said that the Canadian people would never live down the fact that the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens were abrogated in those “black days.” And a former Liberal cabinet minister named Chubby Power delivered a blistering attack on the government, ending with the following: “I cannot wish to turn back the pages of history seven hundred years and repeal the Magna Charta. I cannot by my silence appear to approve even tacitly what I believe to have been a great mistake on the part of the government. If this is to be the funeral of liberalism I do not desire to be even an honorary pall-bearer.”⁵⁴

Despite the criticism, the RCMP still held five people in custody at Rockcliffe Barracks: Eric Adams, Durnford Smith, Scott Benning, Fred Poland, and Israel Halperin. These were the suspects who had wisely refused to confess to the RCMP and would be the “least cooperative” with the Royal Commission. They were not released until March 29, whereupon they were immediately charged and arrested. The Royal Commission's third interim report was issued on the same day. Of the five, all would be acquitted at trial, except Durnford Smith, one of Lunan's recruits, who was sentenced to five years in prison.

Smith, a thirty-four-year-old English Canadian from Montreal, had just submitted his Ph.D. thesis for a doctorate degree in physics at McGill University. As a result of the accusations against him, McGill authorities suspended him from the university, making his thesis ineligible for consideration. Six of the arrested spies were McGill graduates, and the university was getting unfavorable publicity. (In mid-March, a Quebec newspaper observed, “You send your boy to McGill a Canadian democrat and he graduates an international communist.”)⁵⁵ McGill's scientists had been active in the war research effort, particularly in the areas of chemical warfare and explosives, as well as in atomic science. In order to expand its postwar research program, the university needed more funding, and thus wanted to limit any damage to its reputation.

Smith, married and the father of two small children, had, as noted, refused to cooperate with the RCMP. According to a report sent to MI6 in February, “Durnford Smith flatly denies any knowledge of affair nor will he admit to recognizing Photostat of his own handwriting. He suggested it was probably a forgery. He is however in bad nervous state and his guard reports that he was physically sick after his first interview. He will probably confess later.” Two days later, the picture was less optimistic: “DURNFORD SMITH has again been exhaustively interrogated. He is acutely apprehensive but every approach produces only denial. In view [of the] evidence against him, it is most likely he will not be further interrogated as it will almost certainly prove profitless.”⁵⁶

Despite Smith's intransigence, his interrogator, Clifford Harvison, could not help but admire him. Harvison's son later recalled, “One thing my dad couldn't get over during the pre-trial detention was that there never was a night that Durnford Smith didn't sit down and write a delightful children's story for his kids. My dad said how a guy with what was on his mind could write really delightful material like that for his kids really got to him. And he said it told him something about the sort of man he was.”⁵⁷

Smith was a “difficult witness” when he appeared before the Royal Commission on March 19, demanding that he have a lawyer before testifying. The commissioners tried to insist that, since they were not a court but merely a body of inquiry, there was no need for the “witnesses” to have lawyers. By this time the remaining detainees knew that the others had been arrested following their appearances before the commission, and they realized that their testimony would be used to prosecute them. The following interchange took place between Smith and the commissioners:

Smith: I feel it is not fair to make me testify until I have seen Mr. Aylen [his lawyer].

Kellock: Mr. Smith, there is not any question of fairness involved. You are here as a witness . . .

Smith: But is it not true that all previous witnesses have been subsequently placed under accusation?

Taschereau: There is no accusation against you.

Smith: But all previous witnesses before the Commission, as far as I know, have been subsequently accused. I cannot rid myself of the feeling–

Taschereau: There is no witness that has been accused when he came here as a witness. When the investigation is finished and we have finished our work we will make a report to the government and the government will deal with you as they deem advisable, but for the moment you are just a witness for the purpose of this investigation . . .

Smith: I have the feeling I am not really a witness.

Taschereau: Oh yes, you are a witness.

Kellock: It does not matter what your feeling is . . . ⁵⁸

The commission finally relented, and Smith was able to have his lawyer with him. But the lawyer faced an uphill struggle. The commission had papers from Gouzenko to show that Smith, who at the time was working for the National Research Council on matters relating to radar, had had meetings with Gordon Lunan and GRU Colonel Rogov and that he handed over secret or confidential documents, including several from the Library of the National Research Council. Gouzenko also brought out some notes, on radar optics and on the staff of the National Research Council, which were in Smith's handwriting.⁵⁹ What clinched the case against Smith, however, was the testimony by Lunan to the RCMP and the Royal Commission that he had recruited Smith and that Smith had indeed given materials to the GRU. According to a message to MI6, “He [Lunan] confirms step by step events shown in Corby papers and his testimony makes findings against still recalcitrant Durnforth [sic] SMITH and HALPERIN [a] foregone conclusion.”⁶⁰

Lunan seems to have regretted his statements incriminating Smith, which were elicited at the Rockcliffe Barracks when he was under extreme duress and in fear of being executed for treason.

Indeed, according to one source, he was “sickened” to discover that he had implicated Smith, along with his other two recruits, Mazerall and Halperin. Lunan refused to testify at Smith's trial, but by then it was too late. The prosecution was able to use his earlier statements as evidence.⁶¹

As before, it was not clear whether the information Smith gave to the Soviets was particularly valuable, despite the fact that much of it was classified as secret. Apparently the GRU photographed it and sent it to Moscow, but this does not necessarily mean it was important. Zabotin and his colleagues were not scientists and would not have been able to evaluate the significance of what they got from Smith. And they seem to have been unclear about what Smith did, asking him at one point to supply them with uranium-235, when his research had nothing to do with uranium or the atomic bomb. But Smith did violate the Official Secrets Act, and for that he paid dearly, spending the next five years in prison. After serving his sentence, he eventually gained his doctorate and taught physics at the University of New Brunswick.

Israel Halperin, described in an MI6 telegram as “shaken but slippery,” also refused to talk, thus making it especially difficult for the RCMP and the Royal Commission because they had very little evidence against him. As noted earlier, Halperin had never provided documents to Gordon Lunan and was shocked when he was asked for a sample of uranium-235. (Again, the request was pointless, because Halperin was a professor of mathematics, not a physicist.) The documents from Gouzenko showed that, as was so often the case, the GRU had an extensive shopping list and had earmarked Halperin, whom they code-named “Bacon,” as one of the sources of information. But it is clear that there was a huge gap between what the GRU wanted and what it got.

From Halperin, they obtained nothing beyond verbal information about Canadian Army research on explosives, which Halperin furnished to Lunan in April 1945. Lunan wrote up the information in a one-and-a-half-page report.⁶² The Royal Commissioners observed “we have been told that this information conveyed to Lunan by Halperin was of a highly secret nature.” But Halperin did not consider it secret and even advised Lunan (who edited a magazine for the armed services) to go directly to his chief and ask for the information. Lunan, however, demurred: “I advised him that this was not wise as I do not wish to show any official interest in this field until and unless we decide to do an article on it. He claims there is no particular secrecy about the set-up, but I persuaded him to give me the whole report on the matter.”⁶³

Lunan continued to press Halperin for written information, but Halperin consistently refused. As Lunan reported to his GRU controllers: “It is impossible to get anything from him except . . . verbal descriptions, and I am not in a position to understand everything fully where it concerns technical details.” In his memoirs, Lunan was more explicit about where Halperin stood: “I soon came to realize that he was an unwitting victim who had no intention of becoming involved in what after all could be construed as technically illegal even if he was in general supportive of the Russians as allies and in favor of the sharing of scientific knowledge.”⁶⁴ In the end, Halperin begged off entirely.

The Royal Commission had ordered Halperin's arrest simply because his name appeared in the Russian documents. Lunan's subsequent admission that he had met with Halperin, though no proof that Halperin had violated the Official Secrets Act, was taken as additional evidence against him. Halperin had returned to teaching at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, when the RCMP arrested him at dawn on February 15, 1946. Married and the father of three small children, Halperin, whose parents were Russian Jews, had already achieved considerable prominence in the field of mathematics. Born in Montreal in 1911, he had received his doctorate in 1936 from Princeton, a renowned center for mathematics that attracted scholars from all over the world.

As Halperin later described his years at Princeton: “It seemed to me we were all monks in a monastery, all working with the purest motives to discover mathematics and to share it with others. . . . Those were the days when refugees were coming out of Europe, and those in mathematics seemed to head first for Princeton, because the Institute and the University's math department were both there. It was a tremendous concentration of talent. There was hardly a day that in the common room we wouldn't see a new face and ask who that was, and the answer would be some mathematician we'd heard of, who was a great researcher.”⁶⁵ In the course of a distinguished teaching career at Queen's and later the University of Toronto, Halperin would publish more than one hundred scientific papers.

Like Smith, Halperin insisted upon having a lawyer present when he was brought before the Royal Commission and refused to be sworn in. When told by the commissioners that they could force him to testify, he asked, “Does that include physical intimidation?” Halperin finally was allowed to have counsel, but he nonetheless refused to answer the commissioners’ questions, declaring after six days, “I will not open my mouth here again.” According to an MI6 report, he “attempted to leave [the] room and was restrained.”⁶⁶ The commissioners deemed him guilty, and he was charged in court with conspiracy to violate the Official Secrets Act.

Halperin's arrest shocked the scientific community in North America, which launched a campaign on his behalf. In Canada, theoretical physicist Leopold Infeld, a professor at the University of Toronto and a firm opponent of keeping atomic research secret, spearheaded the movement for the acquittal and release of Halperin, along with that of David Shugar. In the United States, a group of physicists from Princeton and mit, including Albert Einstein, addressed a petition to Prime Minister King asking for a fair trial for Halperin: “Professor Halperin is known to the undersigned, not only as a mathematician of high standing, but also as a man of the greatest integrity. We find it impossible to believe that he is guilty of any real breach of trust or honor.” The petition went on to say that, even if Halperin had given general information to a fellow army officer about a weapon already in wide battle use, it would be only a technical violation of security regulations: “Such ‘violations’ were common occurrences among civilian scientists and army officers alike, in the normal process of cutting red tape. If such formal matters are considered crimes then almost every Army officer or scientist engaged in war research is guilty of crime.”⁶⁷

Although Halperin was acquitted in March 1947, this was not enough to clear his name. Once he and the others had been deemed guilty by the commission, which published its final report in July 1946, they would always be under a shadow of suspicion. The commission eventually printed an addendum to the published copies of its final report, noting in June 1947 that nine of the people accused of passing secrets had been acquitted by the courts. But the commissioners left the impression that this was because the court was constrained by legal technicalities that excluded valid evidence against the suspects: “It should not be assumed that in any case the evidence before the Royal Commission and that adduced in the criminal proceedings were the same.”⁶⁸

The FBI apparently concurred. In March 1947, FBI agents interviewed Halperin's former roommate at Princeton, John Blewett, and his wife, Hilda, both American physicists who had been offered positions at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and were waiting for security clearances. John Blewett recalled that the FBI agents were “vividly” interested in Halperin: “The thing I remember most is they said, ‘What do you think of your friend Halperin now’ And I said, ‘I don't think he's guilty.’” The Blewetts’ clearance was held up for months.⁶⁹

Meanwhile, Halperin had had to fight for his job at Queen's University, where members of the board of trustees tried, unsuccessfully, to have him dismissed for “impropriety.” After this baptism of fire as one of the first victims of the Red Scare, Halperin not only went on to earn his reputation as one of Canada's most prominent mathematicians, he also became a tireless human rights advocate for scientists, and in 1999 received an award from the New York Academy of Sciences for his decades-long work to achieve freedom for repressed scientists around the world.⁷⁰

Lunan's refusal to testify at Halperin's trial was of course a great help to the defense because it obliged the prosecution to rely on the Royal Commission transcripts, where Halperin had refused to implicate himself. But the incriminating testimonies of others before the commission were used at their trials. The defense lawyers in several of the spy cases tried to have the Royal Commission transcripts disallowed as evidence in court, because the defendants had been without counsel and had not been warned about self-incrimination. In addition, as attorney Joseph Cohen pointed out, the commission had free use of RCMP interrogation transcripts and counseled repeatedly with the RCMP throughout the hearings. No cross-examinations were permitted. While all these factors caused outrage among civil liberties advocates, the courts allowed the transcripts to be used as evidence in all cases.

Why did the courts favor the prosecution on these issues? First, the motions were without precedent, having never before been confronted in a Canadian court, and the judges were reluctant to question the legality of actions of the federal government under the authority of an Order-in-Council. Second, the judges seemed to think that since the nation was in jeopardy and the security of Canada was at stake, the normal judicial process could be ignored. In the words of one scholar, “The judges who presided over the spy trials were unanimous in their belief that an emergency justified circumventing certain aspects of the legal process. While this was consistent with the court's practice during the war, it is significant that they chose to extend the same principle to a commission that had elicited confessions from suspects detained by the government in peacetime.”⁷¹

Thanks to the public debate over civil liberties that arose in Canada in response to the spy trials, the government was challenged in its claim that a threat to national security justified the abrogation of certain fundamental legal rights. And civil liberties advocates launched a broad movement for the creation of a Canadian Bill of Rights to avoid such violations in the future. Canada was forced to face, head-on, the crucial problem of balancing national security with individual rights. Nonetheless, as a result of the whole chain reaction Gouzenko's defection had unleashed, innocent lives had crumbled, brilliant careers were destroyed, and Canada had been thrown into a spy frenzy. While the excesses began with the RCMP roundup and Royal Commission hearings, they would soon take on a more sinister aspect as they spilled over to Canada's southern neighbor.