Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

24. The Golden Age Exposed: Igor Gouzenko

181 The Golden Age Exposed Igor Gouzenko We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises made at Yalta. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 1945. Quoted by Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt Roosevelt’s prescient comment, uttered only weeks before his death in April 1945, proved to be an understatement when the first revelations of Soviet espionage against the West surfaced. A month after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, Igor Gouzenko, a GRU code clerk at the USSR Embassy in Ottawa, dropped his own bombshell. On September 5, 1945, he walked out of the embassy for the last time and requested asylum from the Canadian government. In return he offered information of stunning proportions on Soviet espionage in Canada and other Western countries.1 For intelligence professionals, defectors are manna from heaven. Intelligence officers spend long hours spotting and cultivating potential targets in hopes of persuading them to become spies, but a defector appears unannounced with a trove of secrets, talks willingly, and, to some degree, is easily controllable because he or she wants a new life from and is dependent on his or her hosts. 24 182 The Golden Age of Soviet Espionage—the 1930s and 1940s Gouzenko would be the first of many Soviet defectors who would later abandon the USSR during the Cold War. After a year on his first assignment in a relatively plush foreign capital, Gouzenko was shocked when his boss advised him that Moscow was recalling him home. Soviets abroad still harbored vivid memories about the fates of their colleagues who had been recalled to Moscow during the Stalinist purges. Gouzenko resided in an apartment outside the Soviet compound, a practice frowned on for code clerks, who would be under less scrutiny by the NKGB and thus were more vulnerable to capitalist temptations. A suspicious senior GRU officer on an inspection tour in Ottawa learned about Gouzenko’s living arrangements and had him ordered home for a review of the situation. Gouzenko was enjoying life in Ottawa with his wife and son and had another child on the way. Faced with an uncertain future back home, Gouzenko jumped ship.2 The gift of a defector can also be a Trojan horse, a stratagem by the opposition to feed false information or smoke out identities and the modus operandi of the enemy’s intelligence service. Aside from initial skepticism about Gouzenko, the Canadians were reluctant to disrupt relations with their wartime ally over the tall stories of a disgruntled code clerk eager to settle in the West. Gouzenko knew that his story alone would be insufficient to win Canadian sympathy, so he squirreled away more than one hundred documents detailing espionage activities and passed them to the Canadians. Despite Gouzenko’s documentary proof, Canadian prime minister William Mackenzie King was still afraid to offend Stalin by harboring a treasonous Russian. But the scope of Soviet espionage in the documents was too overwhelming to ignore, so Gouzenko was granted asylum. The shock waves of Gouzenko’s evidence of Soviet espionage reverberated beyond CanadatotheUnitedStates,GreatBritain,andAustralia.AlthoughGouzenko had worked for the GRU, his knowledge of Soviet espionage also extended to the NKGB. In Canada alone, the information he supplied resulted in the prosecution of twenty-one of its citizens for espionage. Gouzenko’s information would also have a profound impact on the United States. Other Soviets had defected before Gouzenko, but their allegations were undocumented and were dismissed during the wartime alliance with the USSR. Gouzenko, however, had backed his claims with irrefutable documentary proof and provided details of specific operations with signifi- 183 The Golden Age Exposed • Igor Gouzenko cant national defense implications. Among his revelations, he revealed that Alan Nunn May, a British scientist in Montreal, was a Soviet spy who had joined the Communist Party while studying at Cambridge. Nunn May had been involved in atomic bomb research, and the Americans crossed their fingers in hopes that he was an isolated case of Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project. Unfortunately, a year later the decrypted Venona message with the names of Manhattan Project scientists in Los Alamos would dash those hopes. Gouzenko also told the Canadians of a Soviet agent who was an “assistant to the assistant secretary of state under Stettinius.” When the FBI later debriefed him, Gouzenko described the spy as “an assistant to Stettinius.”3 This difference was crucial because...