The Cold War and the Curate's Egg

Abstract

Let me tell you a story, begins the fairy tale. It is early September 1945, a hot Ottawa day, the start of a steamy late summer weekend. At the Soviet embassy, at the top of Charlotte Street, a bulky, sweating figure emerges, like many others from Ottawa's office buildings, and heads for home. Igor Gouzenko is a cypher clerk at the embassy; his duties, among other things, involve encoding espionage reports from Soviet agents in Canada.The year was a busy one in Gouzenko's business. The war ended, in stages: indeed the last stage, the war against Japan, had just been completed with the surrender of the Japanese empire after an American atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It was a subject about which Moscow had some curiosity, and, since Canada was involved, in a minor way, in the development of the American secret weapon, fragmentary reports on atomic research featured in the traffic back to Russia, along with information on the movements of allied armies in Europe, descriptions of Canadian military research projects, and other moderately interesting data.All routine stuff, except for the fact that Gouzenko the cypher clerk had stuffed the lot into his briefcase. For Gouzenko had been recalled to Moscow with his family, and he did not want to go. Instead he hoped that by handing over the Soviet espionage files he would be able to interest the Canadian government and secure asylum for himself and his family in Canada.The sequel is well known. The bewildered Gouzenko, used to a government in which the secret police never slept and knew no rest breaks, found that the Canadian government was taking a collective siesta in the first weekend of peace since 1939. Successively the minister of justice, the police, and then finally the free press told Gouzenko that they did not want to hear from him, at least not until after the weekend. With the clock ticking, and detection certain, this might have been a death sentence. And indeed in his desperation Gouzenko threatened to commit suicide rather than go back to the embassy. Meanwhile, glancing out their apartment window, the Gouzenkos noticed that they were being watched.Fortunately for Gouzenko things were not quite what they seemed. The government, in its roundabout way, had taken note of the Russian's story. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was seized of the problem. The people watching the Gouzenko apartment were Canadian police agents. Yet, anxious to avoid an incident, and fearful of thrusting Canada forward into an international scandal, Mackenzie King had grasped the most hopeful element of this whole puzzling incident. It would be most convenient, the prime minister mused, if Gouzenko did indeed commit suicide. Then the police could seize his documents and scan them, all the while professing ignorance and innocence to the Soviet Union. All in all, the perfect solution -- the Canadian way, to adapt the title of a recent book.Finally, Gouzenko was rescued, with his family, and spilled the beans, such as they were, to Canadian intelligence, such as it was, and to the British and by extension to the Americans. Six months later the news broke, and, just as Mackenzie King anticipated, it was a major scandal and served as a milestone in the deterioration of relations between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies.Later historians, myself included, have appreciated both the dramatic qualities and the symbolic value of the Gouzenko affair. Its timing was almost perfect, both in the discovery and in the disclosure, its coincidences many and gratifying, its encapsulation of the nature of the Soviet government -- and incidentally some of the weaknesses of the Soviet system -- nearly flawless.Yet the standard accounts of the Gouzenko affair have another side. Dramatic and convenient as they have been, they also have a tendency to mislead even as they illuminate. One is almost tempted to say that the affair casts a false light over the development of Canadian policy in the early years of the cold war -- not because anything in the standard story is untrue, although details and interpretations may be disputed -- but because we have been concentrating on some of the wrong details and drawing some tangential conclusions. …