Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko

Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko[i] is often cited as the person who ignited the Cold War. American historian Amy Knight wrote, “Although tensions between the Soviet Union and the West had been simmering for some months, it was the Canadian spy case that brought them out into the open, confirming once and for all that the Soviets were enemies rather than friends.”[ii] Russian intelligence historian Igor Anatolyevich Damaskin noted,

I have studied all accessible materials regarding all traitors, turncoats, and defectors, and I must say that, in my opinion, not one of them caused greater damage to our homeland than Gouzenko. It is not the operational damage—the compromising of a series of agents; other defectors gave away no small number. No. It is more that he himself was the detonator of the gigantic explosion of the “cold war,” which ended with our defeat and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and possibly continues even today, while Russia still exists.[iii]

Gouzenko’s sudden defection in September 1945—only a month after Japan's surrender in World War II—and the information he brought with him about Soviet intelligence activities during the war, did indeed introduce an element of doubt into the Grand Alliance between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain. The significance of his revelations, especially involving espionage directed at the atomic bomb, of which the United States had demonstrated the fearsome power just a month earlier, gave doubters about the future of the Soviet-Western alliance strong grounds for skepticism. Although it took over a year for the alliance to completely dissolve, Gouzenko's revelations played a major role in its eventual collapse.

However, Gouzenko’s revelations were clearly not the only factor involving Soviet intelligence that led to the deterioration in Western-Soviet relations. Other illuminators of Soviet intelligence activities like non-intelligence officer witnesses Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, and eventually the Venona program further fueled that doubt. Konstantin Volkov, who initially contacted the British Consulate in Istanbul on 24 August and walked into the consulate again one day before Gouzenko’s defection, could have been the “detonator” by identifying Soviet spies who had been operating inside the British government for a decade, but Soviet counterintelligence stopped him before he could ignite the explosives.

Alternatively, the label "detonator" could be applied to Drew Pearson, a Washington journalist who on 3 February 1946 broke the story that Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King had advised U.S. President Harry Truman about a Soviet spy ring operating in Canada. Some have surmised J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, who was reportedly frustrated that the Canadian government had not made any arrests as a result of Gouzenko’s revelations, leaked the information to Pearson to speed the process.[iv] Pearson's reporting, which included a large portion of hyperbole and fiction, triggered an immediate Canadian and British reaction and forced Gouzenko’s defection into the light before the Allies had decided to make it public.[v] The next day, Mackenzie King authorized the initiation of the Kellock-Taschereau Commission,[vi] a royal commission launched to investigate the “Gouzenko Affair.” The royal commission published its findings in June 1946, and the resulting 700-page book was a must read for all intelligence and counterintelligence officers in the year that followed.

But although any of these—Gouzenko, Volkov, Pearson, or Hoover—might have been the detonator, it was the Soviet Union that had set the explosives years before Gouzenko’s defection through its aggressive intelligence operations against its World War II allies. In reality, Gouzenko’s revelations simply uncovered activities that the Soviet Union had conducting since 1942 when the Soviet Union opened a legation in Canada. Soviet espionage in the Canadian military, atomic research establishment, and even within Parliament could justifiably be considered the beginning of the Cold War.

Much has been written by and about Gouzenko, and most of this literature focuses either on Gouzenko’s life and the dramatic events surrounding his defection, or on the Canadian, British, and U.S. investigations and political fallout that followed it. Gouzenko’s revelations prompted investigations in all three countries, some of which were controversial and drew negative reactions from the political left. Other revelations were partial and vague and resulted in mole hunts in the United States and Great Britain that lasted for years. However, the least ambiguous information that he provided was not about whether Alger Hiss was a spy or the identity of the source called “Elli,” but about GRU collection priorities during and immediately after World War II. The documents he brought with him, supplemented by what he carried in his memory, gave a clear picture of the types of agents the GRU was seeking to recruit and the information the GRU wanted to obtain from them. While some sources were not as productive as the GRU would have liked, others provided large volumes of information that the GRU could not have obtained openly.

It is from that perspective that this article will view Gouzenko’s revelations, with the objective of answering the question: what insights did Gouzenko’s revelations give about GRU priorities—and thence Soviet priorities—at the end of World War II? Assuming that the Soviet Union applied its intelligence collection resources to answer its most pressing national security questions, Gouzenko’s insights into GRU collection priorities could be extrapolated to derive the Soviet national security priorities overall. This paper will draw from Gouzenko’s materials the priorities that they represent.

Gouzenko's Life

Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko was born in January 1919 in the town of Rogachеvo, north of Moscow. The town was home to upper middle class merchants before the Bolshevik revolution, and they suffered much during the dekulakization period of the late 1920s-early 1930s. It eventually became a Soviet government center, and even today has streets with names like Sovetskaya, Kolkhoznaya, and Krasnogvardeyskaya.

Gouzenko’s father died fighting as a Red Army soldier during the Civil War, and Igor’s mother sent him to live with her mother for several years of his childhood. He reunited with his mother and siblings when she took a job as a teacher in a kolkhoz, but they were forced to leave when she fell afoul of the kolkhoz chairman for complaining about the miserable living conditions of the people in the village. They moved to Moscow where Igor lived until he began his Red Army career.

Gouzenko joined the Young Pioneers as a child and the Komsomol as a teenager. His book The Iron Curtain begins with an episode at a Komsomol meeting during his teenage years when a friend’s father was declared an “enemy of the people” for allegedly trying to establish a Trotskyist-Bukharinist bloc in the factory where he worked. Gouzenko’s friend was consequently expelled from the Komsomol, shunned by all of her schoolmates, and later sent to the north. He recalled that moment and his reaction to it, “That miserable memory, more perhaps than any other, influenced me on the afternoon of September 5, 1945, at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, when I made my big decision.”[vii]

He was accepted to study at an art studio in Moscow in 1937 and paid tuition by teaching literacy to illiterate adults. He became acquainted then with NKVD source networks inside the factory where he taught the workers. His knowledge of NKVD operations was mostly from the outside, and his negative perception of state security operations was typical of other GRU officers. He describes how, when factory workers identified secret collaborators in their midst, often because the secret collaborator had more food than other workers, they shunned them and refused to speak to them.[viii]

After studying in an art studio, he applied for acceptance in the Moscow Architectural Institute. While studying for the entrance exam, he met Svetlana Borisovna Guseva who was also studying for the exam. Gouzenko refers to her in his book by the name Anna. According to her obituary, Svetlana was born in December 1923 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.[ix] Тhe “KGB Wanted List,” however, shows her as being born in 1919 in Minsk, Belarus.[x] The fact that Svetlana and Igor were both studying for a college entrance exam at the same time seems to add support to the possibility that they were close to the same age rather than four years apart, suggesting that the birth year that the KGB listed for her may have been closer to the truth. Igor and Svetlana were married in November 1942, when she was either 19 or 23.

Soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Gouzenko was called into Soviet Army and assigned to the Kuybishev Military Engineering Academy, a prestigious institution, to study to become a GRU cipher clerk.[xi] During his training he began to get a glimpse of Soviet intelligence operations as he encrypted and decrypted operational messages from around the world. He also learned the importance of practicing strict security, along with the consequences of an inadvertent security violation. He cited an incident when a fellow cipher clerk mistakenly mishandled an encoded message, leaving it where a janitor could find it. Gouzenko later wrote that the message contained instructions from Moscow to the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Mikhailovich Mayskiy.[xii] The janitor turned it in, and the cipher clerk was arrested and executed.[xiii] Gouzenko faced a similar circumstance three years later when he was in Ottawa.

In May 1942, Gouzenko deployed to the front for several months, where he witnessed the severe measures being taken to deter retreat and prevent cowardice. He recalled an order from Stalin that held personnel responsible for their own equipment, stating, “it is better to die defending the guns that to surrender them and live.[xiv] He also recounted the treatment of Soviet soldiers returning to Moscow from the front, which prompted by a “drive against hooliganism” directed at “troublesome veterans.” “Overnight the praise for ‘our heroes’ shifted to brisk discussions of the big job lying ahead and how it was every soldier’s duty to make himself useful in peacetime, too.”[xv]

Gouzenko returned from deployment himself and began working at GRU headquarters deciphering operational messages. He stated that because he had some acquaintance with the German language, much of his work was with messages involving operations in Germany and Switzerland. He worked with messages from partisans operating behind the lines in Germany-held territory, in particular noting anti-German sabotage operations.[xvi] He also reported the recruitment of German and Italian POWs who were sent back to infiltrate German-held territory.

Gouzenko also cited reports from officers at the Russian mission in China. He had seen messages that indicated bad relations between the Soviet official representatives and the local Chinese government, discord and competition amongst the Soviet staff at the embassy, and overall unpleasant living conditions.[xvii] Nevertheless, he was happy when he received indications that his first overseas assignment might be China. He was excited about living abroad, and Svetlana shared his excitement in general, although she was less enthusiastic about China specifically. Gouzenko began studying about China. However, he soon learned that rather than going to China, his assignment would be to Canada.[xviii]

When he received his assignment to Canada, the assignment officer provided background about Soviet interests there. The officer indicated that the Soviet Union planned to infiltrate workers loyal to the Soviet Union into labor unions, who would agitate from within and eventually take leading labor positions, providing a platform for Soviet influence.[xix] Gouzenko’s revelations after his defection did not provide additional insight into this supposed Soviet plan; however, it is similar to reports from other Razvedupr defectors, such as Samuel Ginzberg (Krivitsky) and Aleksandr Graff (Barmine), who both reported Soviet efforts to infiltrate labor movements to establish Soviet influence in Britain and the United States.

In June 1943, Gouzenko arrived in Ottawa traveling with the new GRU rezident, Colonel Nikolay Ivanovich Zabotin. Svetlana arrived several months later. Gouzenko’s first impressions of Canada highlighted the contrast between life in Canada and the environment in which he had grown up; “I wonder where the workers live?”, he recalled his colleague asking as they saw the cleanliness and orderliness of Edmonton, Alberta.[xx] During the first year of Gouzenko’s stay in Canada he got used to living in a culture where the people “all seem so pro-Soviet” and “don’t seem to be the least bit scared of secret agents.”[xxi]

In May-June 1944, GRU Colonel Mikhail Abramovich Milshteyn traveled to the Soviet embassy in Ottawa to conduct an inspection. A note in Sam Carr’s file indicates that Carr met Milshteyn in June, when Milshteyn asked about the availability of people to assist with producing passports for GRU use.[xxii]

Milshteyn, who retired over twenty years later as a lieutenant general, wrote about his inspection visit in his 1995 memoirs, claiming to have observed several security anomalies related to Gouzenko. First, Gouzenko and his wife lived in a flat outside the embassy—cipher clerks were usually not afforded that level of freedom because of the highly sensitive communications to which they had access. Milshteyn wrote that Zabotin had allowed Gouzenko to live outside the embassy because Zabotin’s wife could not tolerate the sound of a child crying. Second, Gouzenko had access to the personal safe of the deputy GRU rezident Petr Semenovich Motinov, contrary to security rules. This consequently gave Gouzenko access to the biographies of all of the agents that Motinov was developing, some of which he subsequent brought with him when he defected. Finally, Milshteyn claimed to have discerned from Gouzenko’s voice that something was not right; he later wrote, “some unexplainable but troubling hunch bothered me during the whole conversation. I sensed some insincerity in him the whole time. His inner voice suggested that something was amiss…I came to the conclusion then, in June 1944, that he was preparing to escape. Preparing, but not yet finally decided.” Milshteyn informed the chief of personnel at GRU headquarters about his hunch, but he felt his report was ignored.[xxiii] The accuracy of Milshteyn’s self-congratulatory reminiscences about a premonition over fifty years earlier cannot be confirmed. However, separate reports indicate that code clerks were placed under firmer control after Gouzenko’s defection.[xxiv]

In September 1944, Gouzenko received reassignment notice to return to Moscow. It is unclear whether this was a direct result of Milshteyn’s report, but Gouzenko was able to convince Zabotin to allow him to remain in Canada because the rezidentura was undermanned and because Gouzenko’s English skills were better than other officers, making him valuable in his position.[xxv] But by that time, Gouzenko claimed he was already having doubts about his future in the Soviet Union and had begun making plans to remain in Canada. When the recall notice arrived, he was initially afraid that someone in the embassy had submitted a denunciation against him. In what sounds like Milshteyn’s later memory, Gouzenko wrote, “When I had first heard about Moscow ordering my return, I wondered if one of the Soviet secret police, or NKVD, agents in Canada had been reading my mind.”[xxvi] He and Anna discussed the recall notice and agreed that they would not return to the Soviet Union. However, Gouzenko received a reprieve this time, which he took as evidence that he was still a trusted GRU officer.

In mid-1945, Gouzenko made a mistake that was to be the catalyst that convinced him to finally defect. Similar to the security incident that he described in Moscow, he mistakenly left drafts of two classified dispatches lying outside the safe when he went home one evening, and a charwoman found the papers and turned them over to embassy security. Gouzenko was called in the next day to account for the mistake, and he pleaded with the security officer not to report it to Moscow. The security officer said he would do his best, but in June a notification arrived at the embassy recalling Gouzenko and his family to Moscow, spurring him to step up plans to remain in Canada.[xxvii] He claimed that during the three weeks after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, he began to make notes of the agent networks and marking pages of reports that he could take with him to prove his bona fides to Canadian authorities.[xxviii]

The story of his two days of wandering around Ottawa looking for someone to take him seriously has entered into spy legend. What he did not realize was that the Canadian government was aware of his offer to defect and was working out how it could be done securely and with the least disruption in Canadian-Soviet relations. When the Canadian government finally took him in on 7 September 1945, RCMP investigators extensively interrogated him throughout September and October, which, in conjunction with the documents he brought with him, yielded a wealth of material about GRU activities conducted during and immediately preceding Gouzenko’s 1943 arrival in Canada.

The papers that Gouzenko brought out with him included dossiers of GRU agents run by the Ottawa rezidentura; an itemized list of 109 cables sent by the diplomatic pouch from Ottawa to Moscow in 1944; copies of over 30 telegrams between the rezident in Ottawa and GRU headquarters in Moscow; and miscellaneous papers including draft telegrams to Moscow detailing clandestine operations.[xxix] The papers described agents with access to classified information in the National Research Council, the Department of External Affairs, Department of Munitions and Supply, the Office of the UK High Commissioner, and the three military services.

From Gouzenko’s first debriefings, the MI5 described him as an “extremely well-placed source whose present delicate situation allows him little opportunity for unreliability, backed by documentation which is undoubtedly authentic.”[xxx] SIS, describing Gouzenko’s interrogation, indicated “nothing emerged that cast doubt upon the accuracy of his story.”[xxxi]

He described the organization of the GRU and gave biographical details of his colleagues in the military attaché office in Ottawa. But of greatest significance were his reports of specific Soviet intelligence tasking provided to the GRU rezidentura in Ottawa. The material he brought included cables that had arrived at and been sent by the rezidentura after the close of World War II, and they indicated the attitude that the Soviet Union was taking toward the Western powers in the first weeks after the war.

Military forces information. Moscow tasked the Ottawa rezidentura to identify potential sources in the military-related government departments to take advantage of their accesses.[xxxii] The rezidentura began running sources with military access early in its existence in Canada in 1942, focusing on sources like Sam Carr, Eric Adams, and J. Scott Benning. Adams was employed at the Wartime Requirements Board and Benning was employed at the Crown company Allied War Supplies Corporation. Both provided information about military supplies and industries.[xxxiii]

As the war drew to a close, the GRU stepped up its search for sources with access to military information. In June 1945, Moscow instructed the rezidentura to task Carr to develop agents in all three branches of the Canadian military and in the General Staff. Moscow urged, “at the present time these fields are very interesting to us and we would like you to expend your maximum efforts in that direction.” The tasking to develop contacts in the Canadian General Staff was reiterated on 10 August 1945.[xxxiv] On 14 August 1945, Moscow tasked the rezidentura to determine Lieutenant David Shugar’s possibilities as an agent in the Navy Department, indicating, “We are interested in persons from those departmental services.”[xxxv]

The GRU encouraged agents employed in government service to retain their employment and their valuable accesses even as wartime departments shrank after the war. In August 1945, Moscow urged the Ottawa rezidentura to task Harold Gerson, for example, to remain at his government job in the Department of Munitions and Supply, despite Gerson’s warning that the department was downsizing and laying off employees. He countered with a proposal that the GRU pay $7,000 to help him start a geological engineering consulting firm, knowing that his government employment would soon end. Gouzenko defected before an answer to Gerson’s proposal arrived from Moscow.[xxxvi]

Some of the GRU’s collection signaled Soviet interest in performing what would later be labeled “intelligence preparation of the battlefield” (IPB). According to a U.S. Army field manual, “IPB is a systematic, continuous process of analyzing the threat and environment in a specific geographic area. It is designed to support staff estimates and military decision making.”[xxxvii] GRU collection in part was targeted at information that would characterize the Canadian, British, and U.S. military forces, which the Soviet Union already viewed as a threat in the weeks immediately after the close of World War II.

During debriefings, Gouzenko claimed that the Soviet Union was preparing for World War III, and the Embassy staff sensed that World War III was already on the horizon.[xxxviii] He later quoted the NKVD rezident in Otttawa as telling the embassy staff, “Remember that here in Canada you are surrounded by enemies.”[xxxix] He also quoted the GRU rezident as saying, “They [the Canadians] don’t seem to get it into their heads that today we are friends but tomorrow we might be enemies.”[xl] Gouzenko stressed that collection requirements for information about the atomic bomb, troop movements, costal maps, tank production, etc., were related to preparation for a future war. At the same time, he claimed, Soviet wartime production was not being converted to peacetime requirements, but continued in full war production.[xli]

GRU collection requirements included requests for information about Allied troop movements and locations. On 11 August 1945, two days after Soviet troops rolled into Manchuria and one day after the Japanese government informed the Allies that it would accept the surrender terms articulated in the Potsdam Declaration, the GRU sent a telegram instructing the Ottawa rezidentura to collect information about U.S. troop units in Europe and transfers of units to the Pacific Theater. The requirement tasked the collection of the locations, strengths, and future plans of specific U.S. divisions and corps. It also requested information about the establishment of a U.S. Army headquarters in Germany, its location, and the identity of its new commanding officer. The GRU headquarters telegram began with the caveat, “It is very important that we receive this information.”[xlii]

Tasking also extended to the Canadian military. Moscow tasked the rezidentura to collect information about the size and organization a post-war Canadian Army. Ottawa was to collect information about the Canadian Army divisions returning from overseas, along with the names and numbers of divisions that were being divided or reorganized.[xliii] Nikolay Zheveinov or Zheivinov, who was operating in Ottawa under Tass correspondent cover, also provided information on air and naval matters.[xliv]

Moscow’s tasking also included information about the weapons and equipment that the Canadian, British, and U.S. militaries would be ordering and maintaining for the future. The rezidentura was to collect information from Department of Munitions and Supply about guns, shells, small arms, optical and radio equipment, automobiles and tanks, chemical warfare equipment, and the details of plants producing them. In August 1945, Harold Gerson provided a copy of a letter from the Deputy Minister of Munitions and Supplies dating from sometime before May 1945 that listed the manufacturing facilities assigned to produce various types of military hardware.[xlv] The rezidentura also received information about electronic shells used by American Navy and the explosives used in depth bombs and double charge shells for cannon. Alan Nunn May also passed his Soviet contact information about an electronic device the U.S. Navy was using against Japanese suicide aircraft.[xlvi]

Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) Squadron Leader Matt Nightingale reportedly provided a set of navigational maps for the Canadian coast.[xlvii] Rogov initially met Nightingale in late 1944 and learned that he was being demobilized from the RCAF and going to work as a communications engineer at Bell Telephone of Canada. The rezidentura reported Nightingale’s accesses to Moscow, viewing him as a potential source of intelligence on airfields on both coasts of Canada. Rogov broached several topics of interest to the Soviet Union with Nightingale, including information about telephone intercept devices, communications between airports, the network and locations of airfields and RCAF maps, and the Gander Project, which involved communications systems on the east coast of Canada.[xlviii]

Gouzenko reported that the GRU even considered targeting the son of Canadian General Andrew George Latta McNaughton. The rezidentura reported receiving interesting information from him, although there was no indication that he provided anything sensitive or that he wittingly cooperated with Soviet intelligence.[xlix]

Military research and development information. In addition to tactically significant information, the GRU also targeted military technologies under development that could translate into future weapons threats. Moscow tasked the GRU rezidentura in Ottawa to collect a range of military-related scientific research, particularly emphasizing radar and electronics research and research into explosives, and many of the people that the rezidentura targeted for recruitment had access to military research.

The GRU was very interested in recruiting sources with access to the National Research Council (NRC). The GRU tasked these agents to provide information about the organization and personnel of the NRC in general, as well as specifics about military-related research being conducted there. The rezidentura received the tasking to “give more details of organization of research council. Manipulate so as to get their leaders and find out what they do.”[l] Although the GRU did not receive all of the information it tasked agents to obtain, it was constantly seeking new sources of information to replace less productive ones.

David Gordon Lunan, a lieutenant in the Canadian Army working on the editorial staff of the military magazine Canadian Affairs, became a GRU agent handler in spring 1945. In March, Lunan was put in charge of a team of subagents tasked with obtaining information about the NRC and its activities. The team was made up of Ned Mazerall, an NRC electrical engineer; Durnford Smith, also an NRC engineer; and Israel Halperin, a mathematician engaged in military research.

Electronic research was particularly emphasized in the GRU taskings to its NRC agents, which received assignments to provide NRC information about the development of radar, photographs, technical data, and periodic reports characterizing radar research. Of interest also was information about American aircraft navigational radar.[li] Mazerall was tasked with providing models of developed radios, photographs, technical data, and the purposes for radio equipment. He was to write reports every three months about radio equipment under development at the NRC Radio Department, which was involved in radar research at the time.[lii]

Smith worked in the microwave section of the NRC. He was recruited in about March 1945 and tasked with writing about the work of his section. He reported in April that he was working on a battleship radar device for use in the Pacific Theater. Lunan reported, “This is an extremely sensitive detecting device, which has been successfully tried out on the East Coast. Present work is the designing and construction of a pilot model. Badeau [Durnford Smith] has been largely responsible for this.”[liii] This may have been similar to the device that the U.S. Navy was using against Japanese suicide aircraft, about which Nunn May reported at about the same time as Smith.[liv]

The NRC library contained classified books on topics such as radar, antennas, microwave components, electromagnetic propagation, and other electronic research topics. Smith had access to the library, and made large amounts of data available to the GRU for photographing. The GRU tasked Smith through Lunan several times to bring out specific books, referring to them by their catalogue numbers.[lv] Smith provided about 700 pages, including secret and top secret material, about magnetic and radio locators for field artillery on 25 August 1945.[lvi] That same day the rezidentura renewed a task to provide information about new radio tubes and equipment, to obtain information about “electron shells,” and to provide technical manuals.[lvii]

The GRU had received information from another unidentified source about the development by the RCAF and the NRC of a photoflash bomb, which produced 750 million candle power for area illumination to assist with aerial photography. The GRU tasked Smith in July 1945 to collect information about the work of the NRC’s Photographic Research Committee, including details of the new photoflash bomb, as well as the types of aerial photographic equipment and lenses used by the RAF and RCAF, and research into radio-locators used by anti-aircraft artillery. Smith was specifically tasked to provide information on overhead aerial photography, color aerial photography, and infrared photography through clouds. On 18 August, Smith met with his GRU handler and reported that he had just returned from the United States and could give an account of his trip.[lviii]

Canadian Navy Lieutenant David Shugar worked for the Canadian Navy in the Directorate of Electrical Supply engaged in research on submarine detection. The rezidentura was eager to obtain Shugar’s information and provided him a list of items to obtain. The list particularly focused on sonar research being done in the United States and Great Britain, specifically tasking Shugar to obtain technical details of hydrophonic stations and shipboard sonar capabilities, ASDIC sonar systems, and radio direction finding systems. Shugar responded that he could access the desired information, either directly through his work or through his access to Navy Headquarters.[lix]

An unidentified source codenamed “Green,” who is listed in the rezidentura’s document register, also provided information about military production. “Green” worked at the Montreal Locomotive Works as an assistant to the superintendent of the section on contracts. The plant’s manufacturing line was transitioned to producing tanks during the war, and items 105-107 and 214 in the register list documents provided by Green, including blue prints from the Department of Munitions and Supply provided in November 1944 and undated notes on a tank factory.[lx]

Explosives Research

Several GRU sources were tapped for information about research into various types of explosives, including manufacturing processes, formulas, samples, and methods employed by the Canadians and British for production of explosives and chemical materials and details of the explosives and propellants research facilities.

The sources especially focused on the development of the explosive RDX, for which a new method of production was developed in Canada during World War II. Raymond Boyer, a professor at McGill University, gave a classified report on a new process for manufacturing the explosive RDX, described as “a process different from that previously employed anywhere else.”[lxi] In 1943 and 1944, he had provided new Canadian methods of making RDX, proportions, ingredients, and uses. He also gave general information about an RDX pilot-plant near Grand Mere, Quebec.[lxii] Separately, Sam Carr also asked Dr. David Shugar about RDX.[lxiii]

One of Lunan’s agents, Israel Halperin, a professor of mathematics who was commissioned as a Canadian Army officer attached to the Directorate of Artillery involved in making field improvements in ordnance, had access to a wide range of ordnance information and research into high explosives. The GRU tasked him with reporting on research done at the Valcartier explosives and propellants research facility, including formulas for explosive compounds. He served as the liaison officer from the Directorate of Artillery and the Canadian Army Research Division, Explosives (CARDE), and he provided information to Lunan in April on CARDE, which he had been responsible for organizing.[lxiv]

Harold Gerson was recruited in September 1942. He worked for the Crown company Allied War Supplied, Ltd., from 1941 to 1944, when he took a job at the Department of Munitions and Supply. In November 1945 he moved to another Crown company, War Assets Corporation, but retained some duties in the Department of Munitions and Supply. Gerson specialized in the production of chemicals and explosives, and the data that the GRU tasked him with reporting was related to production of artillery and cannon shells.

In August 1944, soon after he started working for the Department of Munitions and Supply, Gerson provided the GRU with a package of material containing monthly reports on research into technological questions related to the production of war materials. Moscow referenced that package in August 1945, and further instructed the rezidentura to obtain:

1. The method and the technological processes of the production of munitions and explosives.
2. The composition and process of plastic explosives and the production of TNB and NS, their purpose of use, their method of use and their particular properties.
3. The application of picrite and nitroguanidine.
4. The technique of producing detonator capsules of and igniting capsules.[lxv]

At the about same time, Ottawa reported documents provided by Gerson regarding the numbers of cannon shells being produced in the UK, citing 14 August British General Staff urgent call for more shells.[lxvi] On 14 August 1945, Moscow requested information about methods and processes for producing explosives including plastic explosives, nitrate, and nitroguanidine, and to collect technical data on production of detonator capsules and igniting capsules.[lxvii] On 28 August 1945, the rezidentura reported to Moscow information from Gerson about Torpex, a high explosive used in depth charges.[lxviii]

Atomic information. Soviet interest in atomic information became the most prominent item in the public’s perception of the Gouzenko materials. Gouzenko claimed that atomic energy had been high on the Soviets’ priorities for several years before his defection. He said in a press article, “the word ‘uranium’ was listed among the more frequently used phrases in the secret cipher code book of the Director of Military Intelligence in Moscow when I began to work in the communications section there in 1942.”[lxix] On 22 August 1945, Moscow tasked Zabotin to collect all possible information, including technological processes, drawings, and calculations, related the atomic bomb. Information on the atomic bomb was designated as “Task Number 1” and the instructions mandated Zabotin to obtain information by the end of 1945.[lxx]

Operations to collect the atomic materials had been underway in Canada since earlier 1945, including the details about the Chalk River uranium processing plant. GRU agent handler David Gordon Lunan reported to Rogov in March 1945:

“Badeau [Durnford Smith] informs me that most secret work at present is on nuclear physics (bombardment of radioactive substances to produce energy). This is more hush-hush than radar and is being carried on at the University of Montreal and at McMaster University at Hamilton. Badeau thinks that government purchasing of a radium producing plant is connected with this research.[lxxi]

Lunan also asked Halperin for information about the Chalk River project and uranium 235. Halperin reacted with surprise to this request and claimed no knowledge of those topics.[lxxii] The request appears to have frightened Halperin, because Lunan complained “It has become impossible to work with him [Halperin] since my request for Ur 235.”[lxxiii]

Greater success toward achieving “Task Number 1” came when Ottawa rezidentura officer Pavel Nikitovich Angelov contacted Alan Nunn May, a British atomic scientist who had access to the information that Moscow was seeking, in early 1945 to renew a clandestine relationship that Nunn May had had with the Soviets since at least 1942. Nunn May had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1930s and was a student at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, at the same time as Donald McLean. He claimed to have first come into contact with Soviet intelligence through communist circles in 1942 after being asked to analyze a U.S. report that the Nazis were planning to create radioactive “dirty bombs.”[lxxiv] He arrived in Canada in 1943 as part of a British scientific group to assist with the Atomic Energy Project. Before he left for Canada, the GRU gave him a pass phrase to for recontact.[lxxv]

The GRU restarted the relationship with Nunn May in the spring of 1945, and soon the Ottawa rezidentura reported that Nunn May had provided a complete survey of atomic energy and the uranium research structure in Canada and United States. Gouzenko later described Nunn May’s information: “The message described the whole set-up of the American atomic bomb project—naming Major General Leslie R. Groves as its director and Oppenheimer as ‘the brains,’ listing the other scientists engaged in the work and locating the plants and experimental stations at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Chicago University, Chicago, Illinois; and Hanford, Washington.”[lxxvi] In July 1945, Moscow ordered the Ottawa rezidentura to get additional detailed information on the progress of work on uranium from Nunn May before his departure for the UK in September.[lxxvii] On 9 August 1945, the rezidentura reported Nunn May’s information, indicting that atomic experiments had been conducted in New Mexico and that the bomb dropped on Japan was made of Uranium 235, which was produced through magnetic separation.[lxxviii]

Nunn May also handed over 162 micrograms of uranium 233 in July. The rezidentura wanted to transfer the material to Moscow quickly, so it sent it with then-Lieutenant Colonel Petr Semenovich Motinov, who was scheduled to transfer back to Moscow. Motinov sailed by ship to Vladivostok and took an airplane flight from there to Moscow, all while carrying the ampule in his belt. He later described the scene when he arrived in Moscow: “The Director himself met me at the airport. I took the precious ampule out of my belt with great care and handed it to the Director. He immediately walked over to a black car that was standing nearby and handed the ampule into the car.” Motinov asked who was in the car, and the Director told him it was Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beriya. Motorin was later promoted to general, although his naïve handling of the radioactive material left him with health problems that required blood transfusions several times per year for the rest of his life. [lxxix]

Moscow ordered Ottawa to develop a contact plan for Nunn May once he returned to London.[lxxx] But Moscow also instructed Zabotin to identify through Nunn May other prospective agents that could provide atomic information in Canada. Nunn May proposed Philip Wallace, chairman of the Montreal branch of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers, and Zabotin sent Wallace’s biographic information to Moscow, although there is no indication that the rezidentura followed up on this information before Gouzenko’s defection.[lxxxi]

Ottawa also sent Moscow information about Norman Veall, a 25-year-old NRC employee who was in charge of developing experimental glass. He arrived in Canada from the UK carrying a letter of recommendation from a Communist Party member, which he did not destroy, posing a potential security risk. The Ottawa rezidentura asked Nunn May whether Veall could become a source of information about the atomic bomb. But Nunn May advised against it because he was a low-level employee and was careless with security. Ottawa recommended referring him to the NKVD station instead.[lxxxii]

Apparently not satisfied with the information Nunn May had provided, Moscow again ordered Ottawa on 22 August 1945 to obtain documentary materials on technological processes, drawings, calculations related to the atomic bomb.[lxxxiii] The previous week it had ordered Ottawa to provide a more detailed description of the exterior of a plant, possibly referring to a plant associated with the atomic program.[lxxxiv]

Political information. The GRU rezidentura in Ottawa ran several sources who reported primarily political information, delving into topics that would typically be handled by the Soviet civilian intelligence apparatus. These sources were particularly placed in ministries of foreign affairs in Canada, the United States, and Czechoslovakia, and inside the Canadian Parliament. Although little is known of the specific information these sources provided, their placement gave them access to information about planning for international negotiations as World War II ended as the international community created the United Nations. This showed a consistent Soviet priority for sources with access to ministries of foreign affairs, as reflected in other cases such as Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in the UK.

Of the greatest concern to the UK government was Kathleen Willsher, who worked as a clerical employee and later assistant registrar in the office of High Commission for United Kingdom in Ottawa, with access to classified British Foreign Office communications. She first met Fred Rose in 1935, at which time Rose asked her to supply her thoughts on policy issues to support the Communist Party. She did not recall much of what she provided at the time, but in general she described it as British policy on world events, including the Spanish Civil War and attitudes toward Germany and Italy. Her contact with Rose ended in 1939 when the war began.[lxxxv]

In 1942, GRU agent handler Eric Adams reestablished contact with Willsher and began again asking he for general information about British policy. She claimed to have believed that the information was intended to assist the Communist Party of Canada,[lxxxvi] but her Canadian communist handlers were providing the information to Soviet intelligence. The list of 109 rezidentura telegrams that Gouzenko provided contains three reports from Willsher from October, November, and December 1944.[lxxxvii]

Adams’s handling of Willsher was similar to Rose’s; he asked questions on behalf of the Party that she could answer through her access at the UK High Commission. Willsher stated during interrogation that Adams had asked for information that might help the Soviet Union convince the Allies to open a second front in Europe and about U.S.-UK relations.[lxxxviii] Willsher’s reports included a telegram dated 3 November 1944 from the Canadian Ambassador to Moscow, Dana Wilgress, describing financial credits for trade assurances between the USSR and Great Britain after the war.[lxxxix] Soviet taskings also extended to attempts to collect information about British intelligence activities; Adams, asked Willsher for any information she could provide about SIS activity at the High Commission; however; her access did not include SIS information.[xc]

Gouzenko provided a vague lead to a Soviet source inside British intelligence codenamed “Elli,” whose existence he learned about while he worked at GRU headquarters before leaving for Canada. Gouzenko had little identifying information about “Elli” except that he worked in “five of MI,” which could have either been MI5 or Section Five of MI6. The vagueness of the information led to various hypotheses about the identity of “Elli,” including MI5’s Roger Hollis and Kim Philby, who worked in Section Five of MI6. But, despite passionate arguments from Peter Wright, who directly confronted Hollis, the culprit was never identified.[xci]

Willsher’s interrogation by the Royal Commission included questions about why she provided information to Adams, and by extension the Party. The commissioner asked, “Do you mean, Miss Willsher, that by becoming a member of the Communist Party you are expected to do what you are asked to do regardless of any obligation you may have in any other direction; is that what you mean?” She answered, “That is the sort of thing, yes.”[xcii] This concept of loyalty to the Party over country became a uniting point around which anti-Communists rallied in the coming months as the Gouzenko affair was openly discussed.

Emma Woikin worked as a cipher clerk in the Canadian Department of External Affairs from February 1944 until her arrest in February 1946. Woikin became friends GRU with rezidentura officer Major Vsevolod Sergeyevich Sokolov and his wife, and Sokolov gave taskings to Woikin during her visits to the Sokolovs’ home or during outings with Mrs. Sokolova.[xciii] The rezidentura was initially wary of Woikin, fearing that her approach to the embassy might have been a provocation, but eventually the value of her material, some of which was provided directly to Stalin, convinced the GRU that she was genuine.[xciv] Woikin met Sokolov while Mikshteyn was visiting Ottawa in May-June 1944, and Sokolov, Zabotin, and Mishteyn discussed how to make use of her as an agent.[xcv] Beginning about October 1944, she provided unencrypted versions of diplomatic cables that had originated in the Dominion Office in London. She identified cables that she thought might be of interest to the Soviets, which included cables on Spain, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Central European states generally. According to Knight, the information she provided dealt with political conditions in Austria and Eastern Europe and a discussion about Spain between the Soviet Ambassador to Britain and the British Foreign Minister.[xcvi]

Gouzenko reported that Zabotin had an agent partially named Zasansky in the Czechoslovakian Mission in Ottawa in 1945. Gouzenko could provide little information about him, and as of late 1949 SIS had not learned anything new about him.[xcvii] But, given the emphasis that Woikin’s reporting placed on Central Europe, Zasansky’s reporting may have been along the same general line.

The United States was also a target for political collection. Gouzenko recounted information that he had learned from the officer who had arrived in June 1945 Ottawa to replace him, Lieutenant Kulakov. Kulakov told Gouzenko that an assistant to the U.S. Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, was an agent of the Soviet intelligence agent; however, Gouzenko could not give the individual’s name.[xcviii] The FBI suspected Alger Hiss, who had participated in the U.S. delegation at the February 1945 Yalta Conference, headed by Stettinius, and chaired the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco United Nations Conference in April to June 1945. The FBI never proved Hiss to be the agent that Gouzenko mentioned and no other candidate was ever conclusively implicated. Nevertheless, whoever it was, the GRU had a Soviet agent close to the U.S. Secretary of State, and thus knowledgeable of U.S. negotiating strategies for post-war diplomacy.

On 4 January 1954, Senators William E. Jenner and Pat McCarran of the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Committee of the Judiciary interviewed Gouzenko in Canada.[xcix] They requested the interview because the Royal Commission Report, which dealt with allegations of espionage inside Canada, did not mention an agent within the U.S. State Department.[c] They wanted to dig further into Gouzenko’s recollections to gather evidence to identify spies inside the United States. However, their interview turned up no new information.

Soviet intelligence interest in the San Francisco United Nations Conference was also manifested by Zheveinov’s travel to San Francisco. Zheveinov returned to Ottawa sometime before mid-August, when he reported on the conference as well as about the situation in Canada after the June 1945 federal elections and the resulting disposition of political forces in Canada. He also reported in June that South American communist parties were reawakening class warfare, based on a directive from Molotov himself.[ci] The rezidentura reported that Zheveinov was sick when he returned from San Francisco and that he received permission in August to travel to Moscow to complete his report writing there.[cii] Zheveinov left Ottawa not long after Gouzenko’s defection and members of the press gallery in Ottawa saw him off with him a farewell cocktail party, where Zheveinov “delivered a grandiloquent speech of friendship for Canada.”[ciii]

Gouzenko reported that the Soviet embassy viewed the San Francisco Conference as being of little significance except as a platform for Soviet propaganda to lull Western powers into a false view of Soviet intentions. He claimed that an occasion at the conference when the Ukrainian delegation voted against the USSR and exerted its autonomy was nothing more than a maneuver to show the West that Soviet republics were free to make their own choices. The event elicited a satirical report from Soviet Ambassador Georgiy Nikolayevich Zarubin.[civ]

The GRU’s most valuable source of political information was Fred Rose, a long-time Communist Party activist who was arrested for communist agitation in 1929 and again in September 1942. He had also worked for the OGPU in the 1920s and 1930s, although his 1929 arrest was not related to espionage. He served only a short time in jail after both arrests, and in 1942 he was released on the condition that he would not participate in any Communist Party activities.[cv] However, he contacted the GRU rezidentura in September 1942 and offered his assistance, and on instructions from New York-based Pavel Petrovich Melkishev (aka Pavel Petrovich Mikhailov), he became a hub of a GRU source network in Canada.

Rose was already serving as a GRU agent when he was elected to the Canadian Parliament in August 1943 and reelected in June 1945. Soon after the 1945 election, the rezidentura reported to Moscow Rose’s successful election, but also reported that the other two “корпоранты” (party collaborators), Tim Buck and Sam Carr, had lost their elections.[cvi] In addition to his source handling work, Rose provided information on parliamentary and political matters, including the details of a secret session of Parliament that occurred near the end of 1944.[cvii]

Gouzenko had direct access only to communications related to the GRU operations in Ottawa. However, in addition to this network, Gouzenko was peripherally aware of a Naval GRU intelligence rezidentura,[cviii] separate NKVD rezidenturas for political and commercial espionage, and another NKVD rezidentura for monitoring the Soviet colony. Gouzenko noted further a parallel network of agents that researched the backgrounds and potential agents and reported to Moscow for decisions about whether to proceed with recruitment or not.[cix] He also claimed, “the announcement of the dissolution of the Comintern was probably the greatest farce of the Communists in recent years.”[cx] Each of these had a separate code clerk, so Gouzenko’s first-hand knowledge related only to the network of GRU operations in Ottawa.

Targeting Japan

In August 1945, the Ottawa rezidentura received instructions from Moscow to expedite the process of receiving a passport through Carr.[cxi] Carr had been involved in obtaining a false passport for an individual using the name Ignacy Samuel Witczak since late 1944, but by August 1945, Moscow instructed that no more delays were possible. Carr facilitated the issuance of the false passport later in August. [cxii]

The Ottawa rezidentura probably knew little about Witczak besides his name and the information needed to obtain a false passport. The rezidentura almost assuredly was not aware of his targets.[cxiii] However, the passport lead was sufficient for the FBI to launch an investigation and locate Witczak, although delays in the decision to pursue arrests based on Gouzenko’s leads resulted in Witczak avoiding arrest and fleeing the United States.

Ignacy Samuel Witczak was the cover name for a GRU illegal who used a passport collected from a Canadian citizen who had served in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. The fake Witczak and his wife, whose cover name was Bunia Witczak, arrived in the United States in 1938 from Canada, and they are listed in the 1940 U.S. Census under their cover names.

In 1990, former GRU general Petr Ivanovich Ivashutin published an article in which he mentioned Litvin's code name, Mulat, for the first time publicly.[cxiv] In the early 1990s Litvin was interviewed about his career and he gave the background behind his selection as an illegal to travel to the United States. He stated that he was selected because of his experience in Far Eastern affairs—he had graduated from the Far Eastern Institute in Vladivostok.[cxv] His assignment was to recruit sources among people in southern California who had family or business ties to Japan, although as he later also targeted information about the U.S. military.

Litvin, known to his friends as Sam Witczak, enrolled as a student at the University of Southern California and received a bachelor’s degree in 1942 and a master’s degree in political science in 1943.[cxvi] He actively sought potential agents and successfully recruited some, whom the FBI interviewed but never prosecuted. One of Witczak’s potential agents, Dr. Arnold Krieger, testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities on 11 September 1951 that Witczak had attempted to recruit him to be a letter drop in China, Japan, or Latin America.[cxvii] Witczak also asked Krieger to supply information about his military training in the Army Air Corps during World War II. The FBI initiated surveillance of Witczak soon after Gouzenko’s defection, but he disappeared leaving his wife and two-year-old son in Los Angeles. The FBI spotted him in New York, and then Chicago in November 1945, but never arrested him. His family slipped onto the Soviet ship Sakhalin on 21 January 1946,[cxviii] and the FBI attempted without success to spot them when the Sakhalin pulled into a South American port.[cxix] Litvin died in Russia in 1993.

Operational Support

When Milshteyn was visiting Ottawa he encouraged the rezidentura to revive networks of specialists who had assisted the GRU to obtain false travel documents and passports in the past, but who had drifted out of use. He discussed this with Sam Carr.[cxx] The rezidentura also explored the possibility in April 1944 of using the Gerson’s wife’s relatives, some of which were doctors and other professionals living in Romania and Bukovina, for operational purposes. The idea originated with Gerson’s request to Rogov to send money to the relatives through Red Cross channels. The rezidentura recommended to Moscow to take advantage of the relatives’ presence and use them as mail drops for passing operational mail along with the Red Cross packages.[cxxi] No further information is available about the GRU’s reaction to the proposal, but Gouzenko’s compromise of Gerson likely prevented any follow up.

Investigation and Report

As noted above, Prime Minister Mackenzie King reluctantly authorized the Royal Commission to “investigate the facts relating to and the circumstances surrounding the communication, by public officials and other person in positions of trust of secret and confidential information to agents of a foreign power.” The final Royal Commission Report, published in June 1946, lays out the details of Soviet taskings and of the agents to which they were assigned. After having read excerpts from the Royal Commission’s first interim report on Soviet intelligence activities in Canada, published on 2 March, Mackenzie King told the Canadian Parliament on 18 March 1946, “I need scarcely say that these paragraphs describe as serious a situation as has existed in Canada at any time.“[cxxii]

Mackenzie King dismissed the idea of severing relations with the Soviet Union over the espionage activities revealed by Gouzenko.[cxxiii] He went on to say that he had considered taking the matter up directly with Stalin, stating,

“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 actions 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 a change will come that will make a vast difference indeed…. What has happened in this instance may have been the action of a few men which I am certain will not be condoned and would not be countenanced by the Russian people.”[cxxiv]

Mackenzie King’s statement was followed a statement by left-leaning MP Major James Coldwell, who, in an attempt to avoid “complicat[ing] a very difficult international situation” stated, “We are not trying a foreign power; we are charging our own nationals with an offense against their fellow citizens, which, if proven, no right-thinking person can possibly condone.”

This contradicts the language in the Royal Commission’s first interim report, which stated, “The evidence reveals that these operations were carried on by certain members of the staff of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa under direct instructions from Moscow.”[cxxv]

The GRU began in earnest to establish a network of agents in Canada in September-October 1942, when Sokolov, Zabotin’s predecessor as GRU rezident in Ottawa, recruited Carr, the Organizing Secretary of the Labour-Progressive Party (the organization founded on the basis of the Communist Party of Canada, which was banned in 1940). Carr became a talent scout for the GRU and handled prospective agents until they were of proven value and could be handed over to a case officer for handling.[cxxvi] The OGPU had originally recruited Rose in the 1920s. He was in contact with Jacob Golos and Gaik Badalovich Ovakimyan in New York and supported document forgery operations of Iosif Vulfovich Volodarskiy, who defected in 1938.[cxxvii] The NKVD handed Rose over to the GRU in 1942 when the GRU assigned Sokolov to Ottawa.[cxxviii]

In October 1946, the SIS compiled an assessment of the agent handling and recruiting methods used by the GRU rezidentura in Ottawa, based on the Royal Commission report. The assessment noted “the most startling aspect of the entire network was the uncanny success with which the Russians were able to find Canadians who were wiling to betray their country.” The agents that the GRU office recruited to collect information were chosen for their access to information, not solely because their influential positions. Thus, agents included low-level employees such as Emma Woikin and Kathleen Willsher. The GRU recruited primarily among Canadian communists who met secretly in “study groups,” and who had been psychologically developed for clandestine work through their underground membership in the party, while avoiding publicly visible communist activity. Gouzenko even reported that Moscow rejected a potential agent because he was a known, active communist, among other reasons.[cxxix] Nevertheless, the party provided both a motivated pool of sympathetic recruits and an organizational framework for communicating with them through Canadian communist leaders, Carr and Rose. The investigations that followed Gouzenko’s revelations found that agents were motivated almost exclusively by ideology and that money played little role in the GRU’s recruitment in Canada.[cxxx]

Post-Defection Life

Gouzenko’s first published account appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in four segments from February to May 1947, in which he described the harrowing events surrounding his defection and his reasons for breaking with the Soviet Union.[cxxxi] According to MI5 information, Gouzenko received $50,000 for his four articles in Cosmopolitan.[cxxxii] RCMP told the MI5 that Gouzenko was a free agent when he wrote his articles, and that the RCMP exercised no control over their content.[cxxxiii] These articles were the basis for a Hollywood movie titled The Iron Curtain, released in 1948, which portrayed Gouzenko as a brave Soviet officer who resisted internal embassy intrigue to reveal to the world the real dangers of the Soviet espionage. According to Variety magazine, the movie earned $2 million,[cxxxiv] although it is unclear how much of this Gouzenko received. Also in 1948, Gouzenko published a book version of his story on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: a U.S. version, titled The Iron Curtain,[cxxxv] which was released at the same time as the movie; and a Canadian and British version titled This Was My Choice.[cxxxvi]

However, despite these successes, Gouzenko struggled to provide a living for his ever-increasing family, and in 1954 he published a novel title The Fall of a Titan,[cxxxvii] a fictional account of Maksim Gorkiy, referring to him with the thinly veiled name Mikhail Gorin, and his fall from favor with the Soviet authorities. The book earned some money for Gouzenko and he hoped to repeat the success of The Iron Curtain by selling the rights for a movie. In 1961, Gouzenko wrote a letter to Richard Nixon asking for his support. Nixon wrote back praising the book as a “superb novel” that, if turned into a movie, “could strike some mighty blows in the cause of freedom.”[cxxxviii] However, no movie ever emerged, and Gouzenko was left with little income.

He lived with his family in Canada the rest of his life and died in June 1982. Svetlana lived sixteen years after Igor’s death and died in September 2001. Their gravestone in Mississauga, Ontario, reads, “We chose freedom for mankind.”