Proliferation

Abstract

At 8 p.m. on 5 September 1945 Igor Gouzenko, principal cipher clerk to Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, the military attaché at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected. Over the previous few weeks he had removed from the embassy a number of documents marked ‘Top secret. Burn after reading.’ In total there were more than a hundred carefully selected secret documents detailing a vast Soviet network operating in the United States and Canada, among them a member of the British high commissioner's staff, Kathleen Wilsher, codenamed ‘Ellie’. The British high commissioner, Malcolm MacDonald, was informed of the case and it was decided that Ellie should be placed under observation. MacDonald then agreed to serve on a small informal committee made up of Canadian intelligence officers, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, and the Canadian Permanent Secretary for External Affairs, Norman Robertson, to investigate the extent of Soviet espionage in Canada. MacDonald's membership of this committee was regarded as essential, since Mackenzie King ‘wished to share all the secrets with his colleagues in London’.