Chapter 10
TRAITORS AND SPIES
Defect, v.: To desert a cause, country, etc., esp. in order to adopt another
Traitor, n.: A person who betrays his country by violating his allegiance
Spy, n.: A person employed by a government to obtain secret information on intelligence about another country
Random House Dictionary of the English Language
Igor Gouzenko did not like being called a defector. It implied that he was a traitor. Instead, he insisted, he should be called an “escaper.” As he saw it, someone who had run away from the Soviets was not a traitor or a defector because the Soviet Union was an evil state. A traitor was someone who betrayed trust or violated an allegiance. How could one be accused of betraying a country where there was no freedom and whose government did nothing but lie to its citizens and make their lives miserable? He had a point. Who would consider the generals who plotted to kill Hitler in 1943 traitors to their country? Without such people, how would democracies ever defeat tyrannies?
Following this logic, when Newsweek magazine published an article in February 1964 that referred to him as a defector, Gouzenko went straight to a lawyer. As a journalist who was acquainted with Gouzenko remarked, he felt that defector “was not a nice word. . . . Mr. Gouzenko felt that from our side – our side being Canada, the Allies, the United States – we should not be looking at him as a bad man, as a traitor, which the Russians might want to look at him as, but in effect as a hero.” Gouzenko also objected to Newsweek's suggestion that defectors were psychologically troubled. He refused to settle when the magazine offered him one thousand dollars in damages and ended up getting nothing.1
Gouzenko was even more outraged when he was referred to as a spy. In March 1966, he appeared on a nationwide Canadian television show, This Hour Has Seven Days, with his trademark pillowcase over his head. The topic was Soviet spying techniques, an issue on which Gouzenko was a professed expert. He was anxious and defensive from the moment he appeared, objecting when he saw someone taking still photographs of him. Then, one of the hosts, Laurier LaPierre, asked in the course of the discussion, “Is that part of your experience as a spy?” Gouzenko bristled: “Don't use such horrible words. Don't forget, I exposed Soviet spy ring. Don't call me that.”2 After the taping of the program, Gouzenko threatened to sue the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for libel. It was a good thing for him that he did not. As the person at the Soviet Embassy responsible for encoding GRU messages sent to Moscow, he had been a key participant in Soviet espionage operations. In other words, he had been a spy.
Gouzenko's lawsuit against Newsweek was one of a string of libel cases that he initiated over the years. Because of Canada's stringent libel laws, which favored the plaintiff, he was often successful. In Canada, it was, and still is, possible to be sued for writing anything that damages a person's reputation. It is not necessary for the plaintiff to demonstrate malicious intent, and the onus is on the defendant to prove that what he or she wrote is true.3 Shortly after Gouzenko sued Newsweek, his lawyer filed a suit against Maclean's magazine for an article in which Gouzenko was discussed. Gouzenko was particularly offended by a passage that suggested he was no longer in danger of retaliation from the Soviets and was using the threat as a way of getting the Mounties to do household chores for him: “The Mounties soon noticed (or thought they did) that Gouzenko's fears for his own safety became particularly acute when it was time to put on the storm windows or the roof needed mending.” After a lengthy and costly legal battle, Maclean's paid Gouzenko seventy-five hundred dollars in damages.4
Gouzenko also initiated litigation against several authors, including Frank Rasky, who wrote a 1958 book called Gay Canadian Rogues. The book (published before “gay” meant homosexual) contained eleven “true crime” stories. One featured the cipher clerk Gouzenko, who was depicted as a hero. Gouzenko nonetheless took offense at the lighthearted references to him and the implication that he was a rogue. He managed not only to get fifteen thousand dollars from the publishers, but also to have the book withdrawn from stores.5
Another successful libel suit was against David Martin, who wrote Wilderness of Mirrors, a book about the CIA and defectors, which appeared in 1980. Martin's skepticism toward defectors in general and Gouzenko in particular offended Gouzenko. Martin, echoing the Newsweek article, suggested that defectors tended to have psychological troubles and, using Gouzenko as an example, drinking problems. Martin also questioned Gouzenko's motives for defecting. As a result, Harper & Row, Martin's publishers, had to buy space in the Globe and Mail to apologize “for one short passage which Mr. Gouzenko has found objectionable.” Gouzenko received ten thousand dollars in damages.6
Gouzenko later sued well-known author and journalist June Callwood over a book called Portrait of Canada, a social history, which contained only a couple of paragraphs about him. He didn't like it that Callwood referred to his behavior when he was seeking asylum as erratic and unstable. Callwood's publishers were forced to withhold the paperback edition of her book. Fortunately for Callwood, Gouzenko died before the case went to court. A dead person cannot be libeled, so the case was dropped.7
Journalist John Sawatsky was another target, for a book about the RCMP called Men in the Shadows, published in 1980 by Doubleday. The book, which included a chapter on the Gouzenko case, was selling well until Gouzenko registered his legal complaint: Sawatsky had defamed him. The planned paperback edition of Sawatsky's book was immediately canceled and Sawatsky, a freelancer, had to spend all his time on his defense. “Win or lose,” Sawatsky said at the time, “any thought of having any semblance of economic viability to maintain myself as an author is out the window.”8
In fairness to Gouzenko, impartial observers would likely conclude that what Sawatsky wrote about him was defamatory. He portrayed Gouzenko as a cold-blooded opportunist who sought celebrity status by exploiting people. And he included quotes like this one from a disgruntled Mountie: “‘Gouzenko was not a true lover of liberty. He was a thoroughly ignorant Russian peasant who had no connection with the Russian Intelligence Service except as a cipher clerk. I have known him for some time and feel he is an unsavory character.’” Gouzenko had a good case, and if he had not died before it went to trial, he probably would have won.9
Sawatsky meanwhile, as part of his defense, set about interviewing everyone he could find who knew Gouzenko. As he delved deeper into the Gouzenko story, he began to realize that what the public knew about Gouzenko was more legend than fact. Sawatsky also came to understand that he had misjudged Gouzenko, that he had not sued for the money or publicity but because he wanted to maintain his standing in history. He wanted people to think of him as a hero. What emerged from Sawatsky's interviews with close to 150 people, published as an oral history, was that Gouzenko could not easily be summed up. He was a complex man, a blend of admirable qualities and deep faults, a person who was revered and scorned. He was both a victim of his fate and an engineer of his own demise. There were no easy answers to unravel the mystery of who he was.10
After Gouzenko's 1954 testimony before senators Jenner and McCarran, and his subsequent television interview with American journalist Drew Pearson, he had said virtually all he could say about Soviet espionage in the West. But Gouzenko managed to remain in the limelight: he became a best-selling author. Gouzenko's success as a novelist came as a surprise to everyone. His 1948 autobiography, a workman-like, uninspiring, and largely ghostwritten account of his life before his defection, had not sold well, although it ended up being profitable because it was made into a movie. Initially, Gouzenko had trouble finding an American publisher for his lengthy novel, The Fall of a Titan, which was translated from Russian by Mervyn Black. But after revisions and cuts, the manuscript was accepted by W.W. Norton and published in the spring of 1954. The book was a huge success and was translated into more than forty languages. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for months. The Toronto Daily Star called The Fall of a Titan a “panoramic novel . . . Tolstoyan in its sweep,” and it received the Governor General's Award in Canada for the best novel of 1954. 11
The story centers around the figure of Mikhail Gorin, a famous Soviet writer who bears close resemblance to the real-life Maksim Gorky. Stalin and his men decide that Gorin has become a threat, and they engage the NKVD, though a professor at the University of Rostov, to bring about his downfall. Gouzenko's three-hundred-thousand- word epic, rich with engaging characters, plots, and counterplots, was a remarkable achievement. As Granville Hicks observed in the New York Times, the author was exceptionally skillful at handling a complicated narrative: “Involved as the story is, the reader never loses its thread, but goes on, always more and more absorbed, to the explosive climax.”12
One might ask how a young man in his early thirties, with no experience at writing and little formal education in the arts, could have produced such a remarkable work. Some people even suggested that Gouzenko did not write the book himself. But according to the recollections of Gouzenko's American editor, George Brockway, this was clearly not the case. When Brockway met with Gouzenko to go over the final manuscript, Anna, “an extraordinarily pretty young woman,” came along. She, it turns out, had been working alongside her husband, helping to transcribe the drafts. According to Brockway, Anna brought several suitcases that contained the manuscript in all its stages, “from germinal idea and several false starts, through several longhand drafts in Russian and two drafts of the English translation by Mervyn Black, to the final revised, corrected and re-corrected translation. It made a lot of manuscript – probably two million words from first to last – and the sheer physical labor of putting them down on paper is staggering. Mrs. Gouzenko remarked that she often had difficulty in getting to take time out to mow the lawn.”13
In The Fall of a Titan, Gouzenko managed to portray for a Western audience the essence of the corrupt and immoral Soviet society in a literary form that was not only readable, but gripping. As Granville Hicks observed, “It is Mr. Gouzenko's ability to create this atmosphere – the anguish of the masses, the ruthlessness of the privileged few, the universal terror – that gives his book its overwhelming plausibility.”14 Where did this striking talent come from? In a subsequent article for the Times, Gouzenko explained that his creativity and his love of literature came from his grandmother, even though she could not read or write. As a young boy he listened to the poetry she composed aloud, and to the Russian folktales she narrated for him, “putting her whole soul into them.” Gouzenko became an avid reader and devoured the Russian classics. “The public library became my favorite resort,” he recalled. “I used to run there with palpitating heart and came away loaded with books.” He learned to write by following the examples of his favorite authors, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov.15
Gouzenko's description of Soviet life under Stalin during the purges was so realistic that it almost seemed autobiographical. Yet he had been only in his teens at the time the story took place. His memory of this period and his ability to recreate it for the reader was nothing short of astonishing. As Brockway expressed it, “The most startling thing about [Gouzenko] is his youth. I was prepared with the knowledge that he was born in 1919, but still I was startled . . . his novel, all the action of which takes place in 1937 or earlier, has such exceptional ‘presence’ that one feels the author must have been a participant in the scene he describes, and so one expects him to be fifteen or twenty years older than he is.”16 In sum, The Fall of a Titan was the work of a young genius, a writer with great promise.
Shortly after the book appeared, Tania Long of the New York Times interviewed Gouzenko. Long was struck by “his intensity, and the restless energy which impels him to keep moving, even if only within the confines of a living room. . . . His face, his hands, his body are constantly in motion. . . . The question arises – how can a man of this type devote himself so painstakingly for four years to a book like ‘The Fall of a Titan’? . . . Obviously beneath all this restlessness and nervous energy there is a drive as steady and unwavering as the powerful motors of a six-engine bomber.”17
When Long asked him about his future plans, Gouzenko said that he wanted, above all, to be a good writer: “My immediate ambition you might say is to write my next book in half the time I took on my first. I think I have learned a lot, and what is most important is that I now have confidence in myself. Can you imagine how it was for four years, writing away day after day, with the feeling that maybe I was completely wrong and no one to encourage me?” Perhaps Gouzenko's self doubts during these four years were not just about his ability to write a great novel. He seems also to have been questioning his decision to abandon his homeland. That he was struggling with this issue is clear from the topic of his next book. Gouzenko told Long it would be about the impact of the West on a Soviet man who left his country, “his struggle with his conscience as he begins to break away from his beliefs, and the terrible choice he is faced with in the end – to flee to freedom and thus cause the death of a close relative held as a hostage in Russia or forever to submit to a regime he has learned to detest.”18
Gouzenko and his wife had made exactly that terrible choice, and it was a decision they had to live with for the rest of their lives. It cannot have been easy. Anna recalled later that, when her husband first broached the idea of defecting, she asked him, “What would happen to all our relatives?” Gouzenko, who feared he was already in trouble with Soviet authorities, replied, “Have you got a guarantee that when we come back we will see our relatives? We could be sent right away to Siberia and . . . our relatives will [be] sent on the other side of Siberia and we would never meet.” Anna attempted to convince herself that her family had escaped punishment because, as she said, her father was a valuable scientist, and he met Igor only twice: “His guilt is nil and his association with Igor is very short. He didn't marry me off, I did it all myself. So to Igor my father is . . . no relation.”19 But at some point she learned that the Soviet government thought otherwise.
Despite this cloud over their lives, Gouzenko was full of optimism about his writing career when Long interviewed him. He had already completed the first chapter of his new book, he told her, and perhaps he might get to the point where he could write one book each year. But his plans never came to fruition. He worked on Ocean of Time for over twenty years, producing enough pages, as Anna said, to fill three books. He would often get up to write in the middle of the night. Igor developed diabetes, started to go blind in the 1960s, and eventually he lost his sight completely. He then wrote on a braille typewriter or dictated the novel to Anna. Anna became increasingly frustrated. They were desperate for the money from his book. The manuscript was far too long and needed to be cut. Yet her husband just kept writing and writing. He never managed to finish.20
Anna put much store in Igor's next book. After all, reviewers of The Fall of a Titan had compared its author with Tolstoy. He was certainly similar to Tolstoy in temperament. Like Tolstoy, he had a tremendous ego, was driven by a sense of mission, and tormented by the need to find meaning in his life. Both were obsessed with an idea – Tolstoy with Christianity, and Gouzenko with the struggle against communism. Both gambled with their money and both, by all accounts, were difficult to live with. Their wives were long-suffering.
Although Igor adored Anna and she worshipped him, Anna's life with her husband – as attested to by her lengthy interview with John Sawatsky in 1984 – was a struggle. Gouzenko, who was at home most of the time, was volatile and authoritarian. He had frequent outbursts of violence, which began shortly after his defection. Sometimes he would lose his temper over something small and strike Anna. At least twice, Anna went to the RCMP with bruises on her body. She allowed that he did this a lot: “When he would get mad, he would slap me real well.” But he would always feel guilty and apologize, and she would always forgive him. The only time Anna considered divorce was when her husband had a fling with a young office worker, but she apparently put a stop to it.21
In addition to acting as her husband's secretary, copyist, and chauffeur, Anna gave birth to eight children, made all their clothes, ran the household (or tried to), and engaged in several entrepreneurial ventures, none of which, including the purchase of the farm and some butcher shops, proved profitable. Life in the Gouzenko home was chaotic. According to a former Mountie, at mealtime “everybody helped themselves. . . . If they opened a can of stuff they didn't like they would just leave it there. So you would see on the table several opened cans sitting around. There seemed to be no regular mealtime. There was an awful lot of waste. A great deal of stuff must have been thrown out that way. She did try. She did try. It got out of control as far as she was concerned.”22 Anna simply had too much going on in her life to maintain order in the household, let alone cut the grass, which was always too long. Overextended as she was, there was the occasional mishap. One occurred when Anna was out doing errands one day: “She had a pack of her kids in the car and left them in there while she went shopping. The kids released the brake and the car went rolling down the hill and banged into a couple of cars and finally came to a stop. Fortunately nobody was hurt.”23
Money problems got worse and worse. The Gouzenkos continued their pattern of falling into debt and borrowing. In 1959, Igor and Anna went to see the Canadian editor of The Fall of a Titan. They were so broke, they said, that they could not even buy groceries. She gave them forty dollars, without asking what had happened to the approximately fifty thousand dollars he had received in royalties. (Much to his disappointment, his novel was not made into a movie.) The fifty thousand dollars had disappeared within just a few years. The Gouzenkos’ car was repossessed on numerous occasions. They went into arrears on their mortgage and came close to losing their house. Not long after their twins were born, in 1961, they had no money for heating-oil or food. They had to go out borrowing again.24
Around this time the Gouzenkos got some help with their finances. A wealthy Toronto attorney named B.B. Osler offered to consolidate Gouzenko's debts, which amounted to over $150,000, and raised money to pay some of them off, particularly the smaller loans to people who badly needed repayment. The other creditors agreed to an indefinite postponement. Osler thought Gouzenko had done a service to Canada and deserved to be compensated, but after working (pro bono) with Gouzenko on his finances for a year and a half, he ended up being disgusted with the defector and refused to see him any more. He reached the conclusion that Gouzenko was an opportunist and a cheat. What really bothered Osler was how disingenuous Gouzenko was when he borrowed money: “He got a lot of his money . . . on the undertaking that within 30 days he would have money from our government to compensate him for what he'd done for the country . . . and because they felt he'd been useful to the country they'd advance, some of them, all they had to him. And he took it and he had no intention of paying it back.”25
In 1962, the Canadian government awarded the Gouzenkos a pension of five hundred dollars a month, but this was not enough for the family to live on, even with the small annuity they had been receiving since 1947. A year or two later, a desperate Anna went to the House of Commons in tears and asked to see former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, back in Opposition after his Conservative Party had lost the elections of 1963. They were starving on the pension, she told him, and they had to have more. Her husband was not able to provide for them and she was worried about the children. The Liberal government, she said, was not responsive to the problem.26 It is not clear whether Diefenbaker helped the Gouzenkos or not. But sometime in the late 1960s Gouzenko started receiving annual increases in his pension, and the Canadian government hired an accountant to help straighten the family's finances out yet again. Gouzenko had said they were around $20,000 in debt, but it turned out to be close to $140,000. The government had to initiate the same process of negotiating with the creditors that B.B. Osler had gone through.27
Had Gouzenko invested wisely, or simply saved some of the money he had received, he would not have been in these dire straits. As more than one observer has pointed out, however, this was probably too much to expect of someone with no experience in a capitalist system. He had grown up in a society where there was little concept of earning a wage or being rewarded for hard work. The vast proletariat in the Soviet Union was essentially slave labor in the service of Stalin's all-powerful, greedy bureaucracy. Entrepreneurship did not exist. To improve one's lot economically one had to learn the way of bribes, payoffs, and cheating, some of which Gouzenko had witnessed at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa.
For at least the first year after he defected, Gouzenko did not even handle money. All of his needs and those of his family were taken care of (albeit modestly) by the RCMP. Suddenly, with his 1947 article in Cosmopolitan, his first book, and the movie deal, Gouzenko struck it rich. The RCMP withdrew quickly, leaving him to his own devices, with the exception of the live-in guard. Gouzenko's instant fame brought him a sense of entitlement. He wanted to experience the good life and started taking people out to fancy Toronto restaurants, where he would often order the most expensive dish on the menu. According to Gouzenko's former trust officer at his bank, “If he took you out to lunch he made sure that you were well looked after. You didn't eat in greasy spoons. . . . He was very generous. Too generous. You've got to remember that somebody who is brought up in that particular culture who came to this culture – you're going from scrub boards to washing machines and I think he wanted to enjoy the best.”28 Anna, who some have said was the smarter of the two, or at least the more sensible, might have stepped in (as she did later in their marriage) and tried to prevent Igor from throwing away money and making careless investments, but she was burdened with small children and perhaps cowed by her husband's domineering ways.
Gouzenko took considerable interest in his children and was very proud of them. They were a close and devoted family. But the financial concerns, lawsuits, and feuds with the RCMP distracted both him and Anna. And then, of course, there was the strain of his false identity. The children were not told until each reached the age of sixteen that Krysac was not their real name and that their parents came from Russia, not Czechoslovakia. Evelyn Wilson recalled that she once became suspicious when she saw a man on television with a hood over his head and heard him talking. He sounded exactly like her father. She was nonetheless shocked when she learned the truth at sixteen: “When you are always cheering for the Czech hockey team over the Russian one and then you find out you are a Russian, you feel bad.”29
Indeed, Evelyn was not only stunned, she was angry, as were her siblings when they learned the truth about their parents. “We rebelled,” recalled Evelyn, “that's what happened. My poor parents, on top of all the troubles they had, there were these unruly teenagers, who in their state of mind wanted to distance themselves from this, so we took on some of the popular criticisms of our father.” Evelyn recalls that she was particularly humiliated by the pillowcase her father wore when he appeared on television (her mother's idea). People said he looked like a member of the Ku Klux Klan. “For a long time,” Evelyn says, “all I felt was embarrassment.”30
One of Gouzenko's lawyers observed that “considering the circumstances of their upbringing, they were remarkably well-adjusted and personable young adults, which must be regarded as an enduring tribute to the character and example set by their parents.”31 But as their parents became obsessed with lawsuits and efforts to expose the sinister influence of the KGB, the job of raising eight children suffered. Evelyn, who was frequently saddled with taking care of her younger siblings in her parents’ absence, escaped. She got married, and had her first child at the age of seventeen. Evelyn eventually returned to the fold and embraced her parents as heroes, as did her sisters. But there was ambivalence among the four sons. The sons were conspicuously absent at a ceremony held in September 2002 to honor their parents, and at two subsequent public ceremonies, where plaques dedicated to Gouzenko were unveiled. Evidently, they chose to preserve their identity as Krysacs rather than acknowledge that they were the sons of the famous defector Gouzenko.32
Throughout his years in Canada, Gouzenko was obsessed with the idea that the KGB (as the Soviet secret police were called after 1954) wanted to kill him. When he was to meet someone, he never made an appointment beforehand. KGB assassins might be waiting for him. If he and Anna were driving someone to a Toronto restaurant, Anna would take a roundabout way to get there. Before long, Gouzenko decided that the RCMP, because it had been infiltrated by the KGB, was in on a plot against him. According to a journalist friend, “He was convinced his house was bugged by the Mounties. He said he in turn had put in a secret taping system that was voice-activated apparently. I have no idea where the tape was kept. I never pursued that with him because he was so paranoid that would have made him nervous. He said he taped his own house so that if anything should happen to him he or his family would have a record.33
On his way to Montebello to meet senators Jenner and McCarran in early 1954, Gouzenko became fixated with the idea that the RCMP was going to use the occasion to get rid of him. He thought they were planning to stage a car accident. When the Mounties circled around the town to make sure their two-car caravan was not being followed and suggested that Gouzenko ride separately from his lawyer, he became suspicious and upset.34 A journalist who knew Gouzenko once observed, “I would assume, since I've known an awful lot of psychiatrists, they could spend 10 minutes with him and decide he was a paranoid personality. He did strike me that way . . . I had a feeling he was crazy but had good reasons for being that way.”35
After several years of guarding Gouzenko from supposed Soviet assassins, the RCMP began to question whether their protection was really necessary. The simple fact that he had blown his cover on numerous occasions with no repercussions, and that journalists never seemed to have trouble finding him, made it doubtful that he was in danger of being murdered by the KGB. Frustrated by Gouzenko's carelessness and fed up with his demands, the RCMP gave up guarding him by the early 1960s.
But Gouzenko continued to insist he was a marked man. As one observer remarked, “Without this sense that there was some kind of physical danger attached to his existence a lot of the glamour surrounding him would have disappeared and he would have become like other defectors who, whether in art or science, were not as well known as Gouzenko and would live out fairly unremarkable lives.”36 Sometimes he even hinted to members of the media that an assassination attempt had been made against him. When asked for specifics, however, he would demur, claiming that what he had referred to was “character assassination.” Gouzenko at some point convinced himself that before the Soviets killed him they would try to destroy his credibility. How would the KGB go about doing this? By using certain elements of the Canadian media that were controlled by communists. He once told an interviewer that one of the editors of the Toronto Daily Star, which Gouzenko sued more than once, was pro- Russian and followed the communist line. The same was true, in Gouzenko's view, of certain broadcasters at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Protecting his reputation, then, was not only a personal matter, it was a fight against communists and the KGB.37
Gouzenko also developed the theory that the Canadian government had covered up many of the facts about his case, pointing out that the GRU documents he had produced were still not publicly available. He claimed that the documents contained the names of individuals receiving government protection. In a cbc television interview in the spring of 1981, Gouzenko stated flatly that the persons named were in high positions and that it would be embarrassing for the government to reveal them. Gouzenko added, “I have a feeling that if, say, I die, they would be published, you know, and the reason [is] it would be easy to clean them, to white wash and to purge them and nobody would be able to say they were [not] the same as before or the same number of them and so on. While I’m alive, I can say . . . ‘just a moment, where is that document which I brought with me?’ or ‘just a moment, that document didn't read the way it used to be.’”38
Ironically, just a few months later, in October of 1981, the Canadian government declassified the testimony taken by the Royal Commission on Espionage (more than six thousand pages). Copies of the documents Gouzenko brought out, and also a substantial portion of the vast number of exhibits that were part of its inquiry, were declassified three years later. Although the RCMP and Canadian government files on the case remained closed, it could not be said that the commission had covered up evidence about spies that had cropped up in the course of its investigation. It is true that many names appeared in Israel Halperin's infectious address book, which the RCMP confiscated after his arrest and which to this day is still classified as secret. But these individuals, many of whom were not Canadians, were beyond the commission's purview. Besides, the RCMP had dutifully sent a copy of the address book to both the FBI and MI5.
Gouzenko's allegation that the Canadian government was shielding people who had been involved in spying was not true. Of all people, he should have known better. With his razor-sharp mind and his near-photographic memory, he knew by heart the details of all the documents he took from the Soviet Embassy and all that he said to his interrogators. Yes, several of those whose names had come up were suspected of involvement with the Russians and were never prosecuted. This had nothing to do with a cover-up. The evidence in those instances turned out to be too flimsy for Canadian authorities to even consider taking legal action.
Gouzenko's growing paranoia was partly the Canadian government's fault. Despite their initial efforts to cast him as a hero, Canadian authorities, particularly the RCMP, had never trusted his motives. (Indeed, the RCMP made this clear in giving Gouzenko his unflattering surname.) And they did not know what to do with him once the spy trials had ended. Instead of hiring him as a consultant to analyze unfolding events in the Soviet Union, or to develop a program of asylum for other defectors, they put Gouzenko out to pasture. He was not even thirty years old. As one of Gouzenko's many lawyers recalled, “Here is a superbly intelligent human being who really understands the Russian system, their mentality, their training, their approach. Why they wouldn't have made more use of him I’ll never know. This really bothered him. I think he kind of hoped to be treated as an expert or a consultant. He felt they didn't get 10 per cent of what they could have out of him. . . . He might not have always had the answer but it would have been a very interesting sounding board because he was a very, very bright man.”39
But the Canadian government, the RCMP in particular, had its reasons not to continue to seek Gouzenko's advice. Because Gouzenko had come to the West at a young age and been out of touch with the Soviet Union ever since, it was thought he had little to offer. Also, while it is true that in the United States defectors from the Soviet Union were eventually used as contract advisers to the CIA, and some were considered quite valuable, when Gouzenko was offered asylum the Cold War was just beginning, and there were no policies or programs for dealing with defectors.40
Furthermore, Gouzenko, like many defectors, was convinced the Soviets had managed to put their spies everywhere, which prompted him to make questionable claims. Just after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, in October 1957, throwing Americans into a panic, he wrote a letter to U.S. president Eisenhower, reproduced in part in the New York Times. It read as follows: “The fact that the United States, with its advanced scientific and material resources, was not able to launch the first earth satellite should be the subject of serious thought and investigation. In my opinion, it indicates the work of well-organized spy rings in the United States missile production system. These rings on the one hand are pumping out of the United States valuable scientific and other information and on the other hand are sabotaging and delaying the United States missile effort under all kinds of seemingly logical excuses.”41
Gouzenko was exaggerating. Had he been better informed, he would have understood that the Soviets had given their space program top priority and that their scientists in this area had made tremendous technological advances. Yes, the Soviets were spying, and they were after the secrets of America's military technology, but they had also poured tremendous resources into Sputnik. The Americans had simply fallen slightly behind in the race to launch a satellite.
A sympathetic Canadian journalist once observed of Gouzenko, “History in a way stopped with his defection. All the input was there. What carried him the rest of his life was the knowledge of the Soviet system and the KGB, which never changes and can't change.”42 Unfortunately, this was not the case. Gouzenko's knowledge of the Soviet system was limited to his brief years in the GRU, and things did change, especially after Stalin died. Gouzenko, with only Anna to bounce his ideas off of, was a world away from what was happening in Moscow. Posing as a Czech, he did not even associate with Russian émigrés.
Blinded by Gouzenko's shortcomings, the Mounties, who had direct contact with the defector, failed to appreciate the almost impossible situation he was in. They were disgusted at what they saw as his sense of privilege. When he had trouble sticking to the couple of manual jobs they arranged for him, they put it down to laziness. They did not realize, or care, that these jobs were demeaning for Gouzenko, who understandably wanted more than anything to be of value in the struggle against communism.
Frustrated that his talents were being wasted, Gouzenko took on the battle against communism and the KGB single-handedly. The more he was ignored by the Canadian government, the more he was demeaned in the press, the greater was his need to open the eyes of the West to the evils of the Soviet Union. Convinced that the RCMP and the Canadian government were infiltrated by Soviet spies, Gouzenko felt that his own credibility depended on exposing them.
He was especially suspicious of the Liberals, who regained power in 1963 after a Conservative interval of six years. In 1968, he went so far as to distribute a pamphlet entitled “Trudeau, A Potential Canadian Castro” at the Liberal leadership convention in Ottawa. The pamphlet, which bore his signature, charged that both Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau were communists. Trudeau, he suggested, who was about to succeed Pearson as Liberal leader, might even be a spy. Gouzenko based his claims about Trudeau in part on Elizabeth Bentley's leaked 1951 testimony to SISS. But he got things mixed up. She had mentioned meeting in Washington with a wealthy young man from Montreal, who brought her tidbits of news from Lester Pearson, but she was referring to Hazen Sise, not Trudeau.43
Gouzenko's pamphleteering caught the attention of the Toronto Daily Star. The paper published an editorial, entitled “Hate Flows in Canada Too,” in which it castigated Gouzenko for circulating inflammatory literature: “The poison flows from anti-Communist zealots who are attempting by innuendo and half truth to link Mr. Trudeau with a Communist conspiracy.” Noting that Bentley's SISS testimony was unsupported, the editorial ridiculed Gouzenko's suggestion that “Communist sympathizer” Pearson was passing information to “Communist agent” Trudeau. Literature of the sort Gouzenko was circulating should be “stamped or exposed as vicious,” the Star concluded.44
Not surprisingly, Gouzenko lashed out against his nemesis the Star yet again, accusing the paper of libel. This time no one settled; after a few years of haggling among the lawyers the case went to court. The author of the editorial, Val Sears, had been looking forward to the jury trial and his own opportunity, in his testimony as a defendant, to speak out against so-called hate literature. He was in for a rude shock. Instead of being asked to defend his editorial, he was questioned about Elizabeth Bentley. “The initial approach by Gouzenko's lawyer was devastating to me,” he recalled, “because he said I had alleged in the editorial that Elizabeth Bentley's testimony was a lie and would I tell the courts what part of Elizabeth Bentley's testimony was a lie and what was the truth. I was stumped. I grew up with the idea that Elizabeth Bentley, viewed from a liberal perspective, was an inappropriate witness. But to go back to the late 40s and single out what parts of her testimony were accurate and what were not, I said I couldn't possibly do that.”45
The judge suggested a recess to allow Sears time to consider his answer. Stunned, Sears went over to the hotel bar next door and had three Bloody Marys. He could not imagine how he was going to answer, until he remembered an old tactic from university days: stall your opponent by asking him to define his terms. “Bolstered by these Bloody Marys,” Sears recalled, “I returned to the stand, and the lawyer said, ‘I’ll repeat the question about the lies of Elizabeth Bentley.’ And I said, ‘I’ll have to tell you first off that I didn't say lies. I said half truths. Would you define what you mean by half truths? Because I have my own version of what a half truth is and I would be prepared to define that.’ And I babbled on like this. And to my utter surprise and delight the lawyer said, ‘Oh, never mind. I’m not going to pursue this line of questioning.’ I stepped off the stand sweating profusely.”46
Sears had hit upon an important point: in her numerous testimonies, Bentley invariably spoke in half truths. With her memories blurred by martinis and stimulated by what she read in the press, consistency was not one of her strong points, and by the time her allegations were repeated and passed on, the truth – if there ever was one – became even more mangled. In his response to Gouzenko's lawyer, Sears had demonstrated the Kafkaesque absurdity of having a court case center around Elizabeth Bentley's allegations. The jury found in favor of the defendant.
Gouzenko's last legal action, initiated in the spring of 1982, was once more against the Toronto Star. It related to an article entitled, ironically, “Libel: The Dark Cloud.”47 In discussing the growing trend of libel suits, the author, Daniel Stoffman, used Gouzenko as one example, citing his cases against John Sawatsky and June Callwood and noting generally that some individuals used libel suits as “a chance to cash in.” This naturally infuriated Gouzenko, who went straight to his lawyer. His case was weak and it is unlikely he would have won, but as it was he died two months later.
Stoffman criticized Gouzenko for trying to prevent people from writing about him unfavorably by intimidating them with the possibility of legal action.48 And he was of course right. Gouzenko had a vision of how he wanted to appear to others, and he did not want anyone to challenge that vision. (Yet he squandered the opportunity to tell the story himself. In 1974, he signed a contract with McGraw-Hill to publish his autobiography. Two years later, after collecting fifteen thousand dollars in advances, he had not produced a word.) The irony of Gouzenko's attempts to muzzle the press was that his tactics were similar to those used by the authorities in his former country, the Soviet Union. He claimed he was attracted to Canada because of its freedom and democracy, yet he attacked those same principles. As one Canadian writer observed, “In Russia they change history by destroying the evidence of what happened. I guess he didn't realize this. Allegedly he was attacking that vicious system which nurtured him and here he was playing the same role of book burner and record destroyer and perverter of the facts.”49
But one acquaintance of Gouzenko had a less harsh and probably more fair explanation for Gouzenko's litigiousness: “He gave a great deal of thought to these cases. He had been left in a situation where he couldn't live in the open. It's like some great athlete who's living in the past and is obsessed by days gone by. To some extent, here's a man who had this incredible public exposure at one time and was a cause célèbre . . . he may have even put too much emphasis and importance on his own life, as we all do, but he had more reason than most of us. So I think you have a man who was obsessed with his place in history and how to protect it and enhance it, or at least establish the truth from his point of view.”50
Gouzenko had a heart attack in June 1982 while he was sitting at the dining-room table pretending to conduct a symphony that was playing on the radio. He died instantly. The funeral was a quiet affair, attended only by the immediate family and a couple of acquaintances who knew his real identity. The minister who conducted the funeral referred to him as Mr. George Brown, a pseudonym he often used when he met people for the first time. It was as if Gouzenko, the famous defector, had never existed.51
Gouzenko's preoccupation with his place in history stemmed from the fateful decision he made in 1945 to escape from his native Russia and put his and Anna's lives in the hands of a Western democracy. Given the sacrifices they had made, it was crucial for him to affirm that his defection had a significant impact. As we know, Gouzenko's inspiration in making his fateful decision was Viktor Kravchenko.52 Kravchenko, in his own words, chose “a precarious freedom against a comfortable enslavement,” knowing of the possible “frightening consequences” of what he did.53 Indeed, his decision to defect resulted in tragedy for those he left behind. Kravchenko's first wife, whom he had divorced before he left the Soviet Union, was shot. His son from that marriage, Valenin, was sent to a Soviet labor camp because he refused to denounce his father.
Twenty years after his defection, in 1964, Kravchenko took his own life.54 His two decades of “precarious freedom” had come at a great cost.
Things had turned out much better for Gouzenko. He had Anna by his side throughout, and together they showed a remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in forging new lives in Canada. Their daughter Evelyn says that “even to the day they died, not once did they regret their choice.”55 But there must have been times when her parents wondered what would have happened had they chosen differently and returned, as ordered by the GRU, to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1945. Gouzenko had been convinced he was in some sort of trouble with his bosses in Moscow. Indeed, though Gouzenko did not know it, Colonel Mil'shtein had given him a negative report when he returned from his trip to North America.
But if Gouzenko had been in serious trouble, the GRU would not have granted Zabotin's request to let him stay another year. Even with a black mark on his record, Gouzenko might not have fared too badly back in Moscow. Yes, the atmosphere was tense, fueled by the rivalry between the GRU and the NKVD, and by political intrigues in Stalin's Kremlin. But the purges of the late thirties and the war had depleted the ranks of the intelligence services. The GRU could ill afford to dispose of an intelligent and well-trained cipher clerk for some small malfeasance. Domestic life for the Gouzenkos back in Russia would have meant a crowded communal apartment (unless Anna's father had some pull with the housing bureaucrats) with just the bare necessities to survive on. They could not have supported more than two children. Nonetheless, if Gouzenko had worked hard and avoided trouble, there would have been more postings abroad and promotions. In the end, as the Soviet Union recovered from the devastation of the war, Igor and Anna might have lived reasonably comfortably – and, above all, they would not have sacrificed their family members to the grim retribution of Stalin's system.
But Gouzenko always said his choice was about more than physical comfort, or even freedom. He had hoped his defection, in exposing the evil intentions of the Soviet Union, would heighten the West's vigilance against spies and strengthen its resolve to stand up to the Soviet Union militarily. He had also imagined he would serve as an example for others to defect, thereby destabilizing Stalin's espionage apparatus and weakening the Soviet state. His case, and the ensuing spy scare in the West, most certainly provided the impetus for the United States, Canada, and Great Britain to strengthen their counterintelligence operations and heighten their vigilance. It also helped create the atmosphere that led to the U.S. military buildup and its determination to maintain nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.
It would, however, take almost fifty years from the time Gouzenko defected for the Soviet Union to collapse. And, contrary to what Gouzenko had envisaged, it was not a weakened security and intelligence service that caused the demise of the Soviet Union. Rather, it was a corrupt and inefficient communist bureaucracy that ignored the country's problems until it was too late. Indeed, although there were continued defections throughout the years of the Cold War from both the GRU and the NKVD's successor organizations, these agencies became steadily stronger and more effective.56
Gouzenko's defection, we know, created a crisis at NKVD and GRU headquarters in Moscow.57 The first reaction of the intelligence chiefs was to “cut and run.” Spies were called back home and spying operations curtailed dramatically. Then, in 1947, came a complete reorganization of the intelligence services. At the instigation of Foreign Minister Molotov, the GRU was merged with what had earlier been the Foreign Intelligence Service of the NKVD into a single organization, called the Committee of Information (KI), under Molotov's chairmanship. The new arrangement worked out badly. According to Vitalii Pavlov, who was directly affected, “The amalgamation of the different services – political and military intelligence – turned out to be an impractical venture. The sharp differences in the style of work of the two different units soon led to ineffective intelligence operations. . . . During the time that the ki existed the level of precision in solving the problems of foreign intelligence declined.”58
The experiment was short-lived. In 1948 military intelligence returned to the GRU, and by late 1951 the security services had reclaimed their foreign intelligence functions. Once Stalin and Beria were gone, the way was paved in 1954 for the new political leadership, led by Nikita Khrushchev, to introduce significant changes in the intelligence and security services and expand their operations. Khrushchev and his successors realized that their ambitious goals of extending Soviet power internationally and achieving military parity with the United States could not be accomplished without extensive foreign-intelligence operations. Beginning with Khrushchev, Soviet leaders pursued a policy of not only building up the strength of the services domestically and internationally, but also relying on them as a base of political support.
By 1982, the year Gouzenko died, the prestige and might of the KGB had risen to the point that one of its own, Iurii Andropov, became the Soviet leader. Andropov, since 1967, had been chief of the KGB, which incorporated both foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence. He was not a reformer in the Western sense of the word. As ambassador to Hungary, he had in 1956 presided over the Soviet invasion of that country. And in 1968, he urged the Politburo to move Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. But he was sophisticated enough to understand that organizations must change with the times, and he managed to create a cadre of foreign-intelligence officers that in terms of training and professionalism was second to none. The high salaries, military ranks, and access to foreign currency offered by the KGB, as well as the opportunity to live abroad, attracted the best and the brightest from within the Soviet Union. The new breed of intelligence officer was well educated and fluent in several languages, with a broad knowledge of other cultures and a great deal of self-confidence.
The same was true of the GRU, Gouzenko's former agency, which expanded its operations abroad considerably in the late 1970s and 1980s, taking advantage of a more relaxed Western attitude toward Russians in the period of détente. The typical GRU officer at this time (and their numbers were constantly expanding) had all the scientific expertise and training necessary to supply the Soviet military with the vital intelligence. According to one source, the GRU was, “because of its overall scientific orientation, its bolder operational style, its increased collection opportunities that reflect a wider variety of technology-related cover positions overseas, and its clearer understanding of collection objectives,” even more successful than the KGB.59 This was a far cry from the days of Zabotin and his colleagues, who lacked the expertise to discern what was scientifically important and the incentive to devote themselves to their jobs.
The response of the allies to Gouzenko's revelations about Soviet espionage, particularly in the United States, where a new Central Intelligence Agency was established in 1947, gave additional incentive to the intelligence agencies in Moscow. (If we are to believe Pavlov, the creation of the ki in that year was a reaction to the establishment of the CIA.) A new kind of war had begun with the West, a war in which the soldiers were spies, and the Kremlin was determined to win. The stakes were high, because the Soviets also wanted to surpass the Americans in the arms race, and in order to do so they needed all the information they could get on Western military technology. It is no small wonder that, by the end of the 1980s, both the KGB and the GRU, with the aid of their colleagues in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, had developed into vast intelligence empires that played key roles in determining and implementing Soviet foreign policy.
What contributed to the Soviets’ success in the intelligence wars of the 1970s and 1980s was the skill they acquired in recruiting and handling Western agents. Ideology could no longer be used to convert Westerners into spies, as it had been in the days of Philby and his Cambridge colleagues. Communism had lost its appeal, even among members of the Soviet elite, who used it mainly as window dressing for a regime that was based on coercion rather than consensus. But, as Gouzenko pointed out in his 1954 interview with SISS, money always held an allure. Three of the most important American spies – John Walker, who started spying for the KGB in 1967; Robert Hanssen, who offered his services to the GRU in 1979; and Aldrich Ames, recruited by the KGB in 1985 – all betrayed their country for money. All were eventually caught and prosecuted, but not without having inflicted significant damage on American national security. Walker, for example provided the KGB with U.S. cryptographic secrets that enabled them to decipher coded military messages for almost twenty years. Ames and Hanssen passed on information that resulted in the deaths of several Western agents in Russia.
For a while after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seemed that the Russian security and intelligence apparatus was doomed to extinction. The KGB was disbanded in disgrace, with its leaders implicated in the coup plot against Gorbachev. The KGB's empire in Eastern Europe was lost, along with its branches in the Soviet republics that were no longer part of the Soviet Union. There were cutbacks, dismissals, and defections from both the foreign and domestic sides of the security services. It did not take long, however, before the former KGB, reorganized under a new name, reestablished itself as a pillar of the Russian state. Russian president Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer, can take a great deal of the credit for the fact that the security services have gained such prominence in Russian political life. But the process began under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, who continued the Soviet habit of relying on the security services for his political support and designated Putin as his successor.
The history of both the KGB and the GRU is officially extolled in today's Russia. No one talks about the Gulag and the executions in Lubianka prison, but people are very vocal in expressing their pride in the achievements of Soviet intelligence during the Cold War. The surviving veterans of that war are revered. They live in the best apartments and enjoy generous pensions. Several, like Vitalii Pavlov, have written their memoirs, which sell well. Former spymasters like to get together to reminisce about old times and discuss past conquests. At one KGB reunion, President Putin showed up to join them.60 Some of the old guard still call themselves communists, but for most communism is a relic of the past. In fact, for many of these veterans of the Cold War, it was never anything more than a convenient myth, a propaganda tool used to attract potential agents for their espionage effort. One wonders what they thought of Fred Rose, Sam Carr, Raymond Boyer, Gordon Lunan, and the others they recruited as agents and who consequently were sent to prison, the ones who were true believers.