When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.
Whittaker Chambers, Witness
In 1972, when former MI5 and MI6 chief Sir Dick White was asked why the British services were still investigating old spy cases, he had the following reply: “One day it will be necessary to have a balance sheet on this subject. It ought not to take precedence over contemporary inquiries, yet we must know how at a particular moment in our history we were messed about and bewildered by all this.”1 White of course was referring to the fact that Philby and his friends had managed to deceive MI5 and MI6 for so many years before they were exposed. Like many of his colleagues, White had been charmed by Philby's wit and congeniality and never questioned his loyalty. Even Sir Roger Hollis, who developed an antagonism toward Philby, did not have the slightest suspicion that he was working for the Soviets. Hollis, who had little appetite for defectors, ignored Gouzenko's warning about a spy in British intelligence. Although “Elli” was probably not Philby, it should have alerted Hollis and his colleagues to the fact that there might be a mole in their midst.
The complacency of MI5 and MI6 can be attributed in large part to the fact that their services were dominated by an upper-class old-boy network that had a strong sense of cohesion and loyalty. As one British writer observed about MI6, “From ‘C’ the Chief, downwards, the Secret Intelligence Service acted on the cardinal principle that gentlemen were preferable to players in the underground world of espionage, because gentlemen could be trusted. This mystique of class superiority came as naturally to its members as breathing; that it might be a false mystique which had dangerously outlived its validity simply did not occur to anyone.”2
But the FBI, a much more democratic organization than its British equivalent in terms of class origins, missed the boat as well. The FBI cooperated amicably with Philby from 1949 to 1951, when he was MI6 liaison in Washington, even sharing with him the Venona secrets. In My Silent War, Philby later scoffed at the FBI chief: “Hoover did not catch Maclean or Burgess; he did not catch Fuchs, and he would not have caught the rest if the British had not caught Fuchs and worked brilliantly on his tangled emotions . . . he did not even catch me. If ever there was a bubble reputation, it is Hoover's.”3 Philby of course ignores the fact that it was the FBI that tipped the British off about both Maclean and Fuchs, much to the embarrassment of MI5 and MI6. But it is true that Philby was operating, and meeting with his Soviet control in Washington, right under the noses of FBI agents.
A question that is just as important as why spies were overlooked is why so many innocent people were accused of spying: There are several answers, all having to do with the atmosphere of fear created by the espionage scare Igor Gouzenko's defection unleashed and the manipulation of that fear by those with a political agenda. As the Gouzenko affair demonstrates, the standards of proof required to label people as spies (as opposed to convicting them) was appallingly low. Hearsay evidence was widely accepted as fact. Gouzenko's rendition of what he heard from another code clerk back when he was in Moscow, for example, was taken as significant proof of Alger Hiss's guilt by the FBI and members of the U.S. Congress. And Elizabeth Bentley's allegations, even though she had never met Hiss and got his first name wrong, were enough for the FBI to obtain permission to conduct secret surveillance of him. In Canada, as the Royal Commission conducted its inquiry, much of the evidence, despite the documents from Gouzenko, was also hearsay, too flimsy to hold up in a court, but impressive enough to attach the label of spy to individuals who were completely innocent.
The principle of guilt by association became an accepted practice in building a case against people whose names came up as a result of the Gouzenko affair, in both Canada and the United States. (In fact, in Canada this principle had already been enshrined in the 1939 Official Secrets Act.) Friendships and acquaintanceships with left-wing intellectuals or, worse, communists were immediate grounds for suspicion, as were affiliations with groups and organizations that were considered ideologically dangerous, such as the Institute for Pacific Relations. Even having one's name listed in the address book of another suspected spy was tantamount to being guilty.
And finally, of course, adherence to the ideology of communism, or any expression of political beliefs that were close to that ideology, was the equivalent, in the eyes of the Royal Commissioners and men like Hoover, McCarthy, and McCarran, to espionage. It did not matter if the suspect had abandoned communism years before. The guilt could not be erased unless the individual came forward and renounced past beliefs, as Gouzenko, Bentley, and Chambers did. As Canadian scholar Reg Whitaker observed, to the anti-communist witch-hunters there was only one way to absolve oneself: “public renunciation of past sins and enlistment in the ranks of the inquisition, accompanied of course by the presentation of severed heads on a platter, or what is known in the trade as ‘the naming of names.’”4
In Canada, once the Royal Commission had finished its investigation and the spy trials began, the standards of proof were much higher. This is why the prosecution was able to convict fewer than half of the defendants. Nonetheless, the process of justice was marred, several of those convicted having sealed their fate because, without access to lawyers and under extreme duress in the RCMP barracks, they had confessed to passing information to the GRU. With the exception of Fred Rose and Sam Carr, the convicted Canadians never had the subversive intent of spies like Philby and his colleagues, who continued with their espionage well beyond World War II. The Russians were wartime allies of the West and the information they gave was intended to help them with the war effort. A broadcast journalist who interviewed several Canadians convicted of violating the Official Secrets Act makes this point well: “Almost all . . . who I met, and perhaps all of them, felt they had stumbled into something innocently and been hammered for it far more viciously than they could have ever imagined. It seemed to me that none of them ever expected that anything they were doing was going to lead them into any kind of trouble. And I got the impression [that] they wouldn't have done what they did had they thought there would be those kinds of consequences.”5
However deplorably the Canadian authorities behaved in their treatment of the spy suspects in the Gouzenko case, Canada did not experience the prolonged inquisitions that took place in the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s. With the exception of a very few, like Alger Hiss, Americans who were suspected of spying never got their day in court. They were tried by congressional investigators, harassed by the FBI, and slandered by the press on the basis of evidence that would never have stood up to established judicial standards.
The academic community in America contributed to this process. The renowned American sociologist Robert Bellah, who had been a member of the American Communist Party in the late 1940s, recently described the enormous pressure exerted upon him as a graduate student at Harvard to “cooperate” with HUAC and the FBI. Bellah, who had left the party in 1949, was warned by Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy in 1954 that he would lose his Ph.D. fellowship if he did not agree to an interview with the FBI. A week later, Bellah was picked up off the street by the FBI and pressured to “name names,” but he refused to do so. Bellah came close to having his dissertation funding cut off and had to refuse a faculty appointment at Harvard the next year because he would have to promise to answer questions posed by one of the committees in Washington. He later joined the Harvard faculty and taught there for many years, but he still has bitter memories about his experience as an ex-communist: “What all this amounts to is a record not of Harvard's being a bulwark against McCarthyism, but of abject cowardice. . . . What the committees and the FBI wanted was for people to name names, and Harvard willingly cooperated, using its power of appointment and renewal to pressure people to do so.”6
Bellah's experience at Harvard sheds light on why Herbert Norman's friend and mentor Shigeto Tsuru agreed to testify about Norman at a SISS hearing shortly before Norman's suicide in 1957. As a visiting professor at Harvard and a non-American, Tsuru was probably threatened by the Harvard administration with immediate dismissal if he refused to appear before SISS. In fact, Harvard must already have been cooperating with the FBI in 1942, shortly after Tsuru was forced to leave the university and return to Japan because of the war. How would FBI agents have learned about Tsuru's library, with its collection of Marxist literature, and then have been allowed to confiscate it, if they had not had help from someone at Harvard?
American academia's discreet collaboration with the witch-hunters helped to damage the careers of many scholars, including Arthur Steinberg, just as it contributed to the demise of Herbert Norman. Why did authorities at Harvard, and many other highly reputable American educational institutions, acquiesce to the McCarthyites? To a certain extent they were intimidated into doing so. But many must also have accepted the underlying premise of the Red Scare – that communism was a terrible threat to Western democracy. Indeed, the common liberal view in the United States was that, although anti-communism was being taken too far, the danger of communism required firm action and justified many of the measures taken that impinged on civil liberties.
Anti-communism had been firmly entrenched in the FBI and the RCMP before Gouzenko's defection. Communists were considered dangerous subversives because of their radical ideology and their association with trade unions, which were seen as a threat to government stability. But it was the Gouzenko affair that forged the connection in many minds between domestic communism and Soviet espionage, a connection that would later be affirmed by Bentley, Chambers, and the defection of three of the Cambridge spies.
The problem with anti-communism was that it failed to distinguish between adherence to, or sympathy with, communism as an ideology and the concrete act of betraying one's country by spying for Stalin's secret police. Many of those suspected of spying had, like Herbert Norman, discarded communism altogether once World War II began. And most of those who continued to call themselves Marxists or communists were unwilling to spy for the Soviets. It may be true that Cambridge University, where Philby and his fellow spies studied, was “a hotbed of communism” in the 1930s, and that Harvard and Princeton harbored a lot of Marxists as well. But the mistake the red hunters in the United States and Canada made was to assume that all those who in the 1930s embraced Marxism, or even joined the Communist Party, were enlisted by the Soviets to be spies. Yes, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Alan Nunn May, and others did end up working for the Soviets. But most did not.
In the frenzy of the espionage scare, these considerations were discarded. Once a communist, always a Soviet spy. Indeed, the apparent reason why Hoover and McCarran had such disdain for Lester Pearson was that Pearson recognized the distinction between domestic communism and the ideology of the Soviet state, and between those who adhered to communism in the 1930s and those who acted as secret agents for the GRU and NKVD during and after the war. What Pearson and his colleagues tried to do in the Norman case was to look beyond his “youthful indiscretions” and consider Norman's career as a whole, his consistent record as a diplomat who discharged his duty to the interests of Canada and the West.
But this approach was far from the modus operandi of the McCarthyites in Washington. When SISS held its hearings in March 1957 in search of further evidence to label Norman a spy, its investigators paid no heed to the fact that he was at the time the Canadian ambassador to Egypt and that, as such, he had played a crucial role in resolving the Suez crisis. The automatic equation of communist leanings before the war years with active subversion of government policies during the war and after left no room for serious consideration of who the suspects were and what they had accomplished.
One of the most disturbing features of the Red Scare as it was played out after Gouzenko's defection was that separate pieces of inadequate evidence against those suspected of disloyalty were presented together in a composite picture that appeared more convincing. Unfortunately, historians of the Cold War over the past decade have adopted a similar practice in assessing spy cases. The Alger Hiss case is a good example.
A piece of evidence that is frequently cited by historians to show that Hiss was spying is a decrypted NKVD message from the Venona project, dated March 30, 1945.7 The message discussed an employee of the State Department with the code name “Ales” who had been working with the GRU since 1935 and was given an award for his services by the Soviets. FBI agent Robert Lamphere, who was enlisted to help on the Venona project in 1948, tentatively identified “Ales” as Alger Hiss in May 1950, just as Hiss's appeal of the perjury conviction was being heard. But the identification was never verified, and it is easy to see why. The Soviets chose code names for their agents in order to conceal their identities. It is unlikely that they would have assigned Hiss a code name that so closely resembled his real name. Also, there is much syntactical ambiguity in this message, largely because of missing words and word endings.
The FBI frequently made tentative identifications of cover names in Venona messages, often changing them later as new information came to light. Indeed, an FBI memorandum warns: “The fragmentary nature of the messages themselves, the assumptions made by the cryptographers in breaking the messages, and the questionable interpretations and translations involved, plus the extensive use of cover names for persons and places, make the problem of positive identification extremely difficult.”8
Venona was an invaluable tool in the effort to expose Soviet spies. Without Venona, neither Fuchs nor Maclean would have been uncovered, and the Americans and their allies would not have realized the extent of the Soviet espionage effort. Nonetheless, Venona must be treated with caution by historians. The decrypted messages that are available represent only a small portion of the NKVD and GRU traffic that passed back and forth between the United States and Moscow during the mid-1940s. Did that traffic include a message that might have exonerated Hiss? It is useful to recall the example of Arthur Steinberg, who, judging from a GRU message to Moscow produced by Gouzenko, appeared to have been a recruit for the GRU (he even had a code name). But as we have seen, another message from Gouzenko's documents, which apparently never left RCMP headquarters, showed that Steinberg was frightened by a Soviet attempt to recruit him and rejected the proposition outright.9
As we know, Gouzenko's stolen GRU documents were often difficult to interpret, especially since many were written in Russian. Although Gouzenko himself was able to provide most of the real names behind the code names, there were still a lot of ambiguities. In at least one case, the translator got the name wrong.10 These documents were not sufficient in themselves as evidence for a prosecution. Similarly, the Venona telegram about “Ales” would never have held up in court as evidence against Alger Hiss. Yet historians over the past decade have almost unanimously declared it to be the definitive proof that Hiss was engaged in espionage for the Russians.11
The example of Gouzenko also illustrates the confusion that can arise out of verbal allegations from defectors, particularly after they have been interviewed repeatedly. Gouzenko's descriptions of the State Department spy, reported initially in 1945 as an assistant to an Assistant Secretary of State, changed markedly by the time he testified before senators Jenner and McCarran in 1954. Gouzenko also changed his testimony about “Elli.” As one experienced RCMP counterintelligence officer observed, “Once you start interviewing and reinterviewing defectors their answers echo your questions. Passed from one person, or one agency to another, defectors glean information from their interrogators and start to incorporate it into their fund of knowledge.”12 This not only happened with Gouzenko, but also with Bentley and Chambers. Their stories changed after almost every interview they had with the FBI or with congressional committees. And yet the historical consensus today is that the thrust of their testimonies was reliable.
Another important lesson from the Gouzenko case is that when a name was mentioned in Soviet intelligence traffic it did not necessarily mean that the individual in question was a spy. Soviet intelligence officers passed on to Moscow names of persons they wanted to enlist, like Steinberg and Halperin, but were unsuccessful in doing so. It might be tempting to see a code name in a Soviet telegram and assume that person behind it was a full-fledged spy, but in many cases the “spy” was unsuspecting. Even in the case of Harry Dexter White, who is shown by Venona decryptions to have met with Soviet agents and passed information, there is no evidence that he was doing this with the intention of subverting American policies.13
GRU and NKVD officers also may have exaggerated the importance of what they received from their recruits. Indeed, it is difficult to know how useful the intelligence actually was to the Kremlin. The Soviet Union was a closed society, where all information, beyond what was disseminated in the official press, was secret. And what appeared in that press was a highly sanitized version of reality, excluding any news that reflected what was actually happening in the country. The public heard mainly about the birthday celebrations of Politburo members, milk production awards to kolkhozes, and, during the war, the valiant struggle against the Nazis. Imagine what Zabotin and his colleagues, having been raised in this environment, must have thought when they arrived in Canada and were allowed to tour military plants and talk with government employees about the war effort. To them, a glance at an open-source Canadian publication on the latest developments in arms-munitions research was the equivalent of being privy to one of the Kremlin's greatest secrets.
Soviet intelligence officers sent a great volume of material to Russia from the West. Their list of recruits, or potential recruits, was long enough to keep several officers at NKVD and GRU headquarters busy assigning, and reassigning, code names. But the content and value of the information is another question entirely. As British Cold War scholar Sheila Kerr reminds us, despite all new evidence, including the Venona decryptions, historians today do not have a clear picture of the significance of what the Soviets received from their spies. Referring specifically to Donald Maclean, Kerr observes that we know his potential for espionage, “but only Soviet sources can reveal the intelligence requirements Maclean was ordered to fulfill and exactly what intelligence he passed to his NKVD controller.”14
The British, to their credit, did not indulge in inquisitions in the manner of the Canadians and Americans, and they avoided trampling on civil liberties in the wake of the spy scare. Although MI5 and MI6 went through terrible agonies about spies in their midst, in gentlemanly fashion they kept their investigations quiet, at least until journalist Chapman Pincher wrested the story from them and former MI6 officer Peter Wright wrote his exposé. But the British were not above reacting harshly to national security threats, as we know from the way they responded to the crisis in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. As for Canada, despite the lessons learned from the shameful disregard of civil liberties in the Gouzenko spy case, history briefly repeated itself in October 1970. In fear of terrorism by what turned out to be a small group of Quebec separatists, Trudeau's Liberal government declared a state of emergency and reinstated the draconian War Measures Act.
Today, in Canada, the United States, and Britain, there are again concerns about violations of civil liberties in the name of national security. It might be argued that analogies to the McCarthy era are inappropriate, because terrorism today is a much greater threat than that faced by the West during the Soviet espionage scare. But at the time, with visions of the atomic bomb exploding over Hiroshima and Nagasaki still fresh in people's minds, the thought that the Soviet Union could have this weapon at its disposal because of atomic espionage was no less frightening than the specter of terrorism is today. And once the fear took over, it was not difficult to convince people that the threat to national security justified infringements of individual rights and the rolling back of democratic principles of justice.
Although it was not Gouzenko's fault, his name became linked with the excesses of the spy scare in Canada and, indirectly, with the McCarthy era in the United States. This association explains why the Canadian government remained ambivalent about Gouzenko's place in Canadian history until the spring of 2004, when it GRUdgingly allowed a plaque to be erected in Ottawa honoring his memory. That it was more than twenty years after Gouzenko's death suggests there was strong resistance to the idea of giving him back the hero status he first achieved in defecting. However grateful people were to Gouzenko for opening up their eyes to the dangers of Soviet espionage, many could not forget the price that was paid for that knowledge.