Igor Gouzenko
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Gouzenko wearing his white hood for anonymity |
Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko (
January 13,
1919,
Rogachev,
Soviet Union –
June 25,
1982,
Mississauga,
Canada) was a
cipher clerk for the
Soviet Embassy to Canada in
Ottawa,
Ontario. He
defected on
September 5,
1945 with 109 documents on Soviet
espionage activities in the West.
Gouzenko's defection exposed
Joseph Stalin's efforts to steal
nuclear secrets and the then unknown technique of planting
sleeper agents. With
World War II over, the spy scandal helped change perceptions of the Soviet Union from an ally to an enemy and thus contributed to the onset of the
Cold War.
Gouzenko was born in the
Soviet Union. At the start of the World War II he joined the military where he trained as a cipher clerk. In
1943 he came to Ottawa where for two years he coded and deciphed incoming and outgoing messages for the
GRU. His position as cipher clerk gave him access to Soviet espionage activities in the West.
In
1945, hearing that he and his family were to be sent home to the Soviet Union and dissatisfied with the quality of life and the politics of his homeland, he decided to defect. Gouzenko walked out of the Embassy door carrying with him a briefcase with Soviet code books and decyphering materials. He went to the
RCMP but his story was not believed. He then went to the
Ottawa Journal newspaper, but the paper's night editor wasn't interested, and suggested he go to the justice ministry, where nobody was on duty. Terrified that the Soviets had discovered his duplicity, he went back to his apartment and hid his family in the apartment across the hall for the night. Gouzenko, hidden by a neighbor, watched through the keyhole as a group of Soviet agents broke into his apartment and began searching through his belongings and only left when confronted by Ottawa police.
The next day Gouzenko was able to find contacts in the RCMP who could understand his evidence, which led to the arrest in Canada of a total of 39 suspects of which 18 were eventually convicted including
Fred Rose, the only
Communist Member of Parliament in the
Canadian House of Commons and
Sam Carr, the Communist Party's national organizer. A
Royal Commission of Inquiry, headed by Justice
Robert Taschereau and Justice
Roy Kellock was conducted into the Gouzenko Affair and his evidence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada. Even more importantly it alerted other countries around the world, such as the
United States and the
United Kingdom, that Soviet agents had almost certainly infiltrated their nations as well. Gouzenko's evidence led to the exposure and arrest of several spies outside of Canada including
Alan Nunn May and
Klaus Fuchs and contributed to the exposure of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
When Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, it is alleged that the Canadian
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King initially wanted nothing to do with him. Even with Gouzenko in hiding and under secret services' protection, King repeatedly pushed for a diplomatic solution to avoid upsetting the Soviet Union, then a wartime ally and ostensible friend. They reveal that King, then 70 and weary from six years of war leadership, was aghast when
Norman Robertson, his undersecretary for external affairs, and his assistant,
Hume Wrong, informed him on the morning of
September 6,
1945 that a "terrible thing" had happened. Gouzenko and his wife Anna, they told him, had appeared at the office of justice minister Louis St. Laurent with documents unmasking Soviet perfidy on Canadian soil. "It was like a bomb on top of everything else", King wrote.
Robertson told him Gouzenko was threatening suicide and suggested to offer him protection. But King was hesitant. He was adamant that his government not get involved, even if the man was apprehended by Soviet authorities or committed suicide. Fortunately for Gouzenko, Robertson ignored the prime minister's wishes and authorized the secret services to grant the family asylum, justifying his decision by saying their lives were in danger.
Gouzenko and his family were given another identity by the Canadian government out of fear of Soviet reprisals. Little is known about his life afterwards, but it is understood that he settled down to a middle class existence somewhere in Canada. Gouzenko managed to keep in the public eye, however, writing two books,
This Was My Choice a non-fiction account of his defection, and a novel
The Fall of a Titan which won a
Governor General's Award in
1954. Gouzenko also appeared occasionally on television, always with a white cloth draped over his head.
Gouzenko did die of a heart attack in
1982 and his grave was not initially marked. His wife Svetlana, who died in September 2001, was buried next to him and it was only in 2002 that the family did put up a headstone.
*
Canada in the Cold War*
CBC Digital Archives: The Gouzenko Affair*
CSIS site - Igor Gouzenko
