Gouzenko Affair (1945): The Defection That Exposed Soviet Spies

The Gouzenko affair began on the evening of 5 September 1945, when Igor Gouzenko, a young cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, walked out with more than 100 secret documents and asked Canada for protection. His papers revealed a Soviet espionage network inside the Canadian government and the Allied atomic research programme, and their publication in 1946 is often described as one of the opening events of the Cold War.

The affair came only days after Japan’s formal surrender, when the Soviet Union was still officially an ally. It forced Western governments to confront the scale of Soviet intelligence work against them.

Background

Gouzenko, born in 1919, was a lieutenant in Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. He arrived in Ottawa in 1943 to work as a cipher clerk for the military attaché, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, who ran an intelligence network from the embassy. Gouzenko lived with his wife, Svetlana, and their young son in an apartment on Somerset Street.

In 1945 he learned he was to be recalled to Moscow. Having grown attached to life in Canada, and fearing what might await him at home, he decided to defect and to take evidence with him to make sure he would be believed.

The defection

On 5 September Gouzenko left the embassy with documents hidden in his clothes. He went first to the Ottawa Journal newspaper and then to the Department of Justice, but no one took him seriously. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, when told, was reluctant to act, worried about the effect on relations with the Soviet Union.

The next evening, men from the embassy broke into the Gouzenkos’ apartment while the family sheltered with a neighbour across the hall. Ottawa city police were called, and on 7 September the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took the family into protective custody. Gouzenko was then questioned in secret by Canadian and British intelligence officers.

The spy ring revealed

The documents showed that Zabotin’s network had sources in several government departments, the National Research Council and the wartime atomic project. Among those named or identified were Fred Rose, a Labour-Progressive member of Parliament and the only communist in the House of Commons, and Sam Carr, a party organiser. The most serious case concerned Alan Nunn May, a British physicist working at the Montreal Laboratory, part of the Allied effort linked to the Manhattan Project. He had given Soviet agents information and small samples of uranium.

Gouzenko also told his interrogators that Soviet military intelligence had a source codenamed “Elli” in British intelligence. The identity of Elli has never been settled; suggestions have ranged from the later MI5 chief Roger Hollis, whom an official inquiry cleared, to the wartime intelligence officer Leo Long. In the United States, the defection of the courier Elizabeth Bentley in November 1945 soon added further evidence of Soviet networks.

For several months the governments of Canada, Britain and the United States kept the matter secret while they investigated. The story leaked in early February 1946, and on 5 February the Canadian government set up a royal commission under Supreme Court justices Robert Taschereau and Roy Kellock.

Arrests and trials

In mid-February 1946 the RCMP detained a group of suspects under wartime emergency powers. They were held incommunicado and questioned without lawyers, which drew criticism from civil liberties advocates. The commission’s report, published in June 1946, named those it believed had passed information.

A number of those named were then prosecuted, but convictions were obtained in only around half of the cases (accounts of the exact figures differ). Fred Rose received a six-year sentence and lost his seat. In Britain, Nunn May was arrested in March 1946 and in May was sentenced to ten years in prison; he served about six. Others were acquitted, which showed that the evidence against some suspects was weak.

Later life of Gouzenko

Gouzenko and his family lived the rest of their lives in Canada under assumed names and police protection. He wrote a memoir, This Was My Choice (1948), and a novel, The Fall of a Titan (1954), which won a Governor General’s Award. When he appeared on television he wore a hood to hide his face. He died near Toronto in 1982. A commemorative plaque now stands in Dundonald Park, opposite his former apartment.

Timeline

• 1943: Gouzenko arrives in Ottawa as a cipher clerk for the Soviet military attaché.
• 1945, 5 September: Gouzenko leaves the Soviet embassy with secret documents.
• 1945, 6–7 September: Embassy staff break into his apartment; the RCMP takes the family into protection.
• 1946, 5 February: Canada establishes the Kellock–Taschereau Royal Commission.
• 1946, mid-February: Suspects are detained in Ottawa and Montreal.
• 1946, March: Alan Nunn May is arrested in Britain.
• 1946, June: The royal commission publishes its report.
• 1982: Gouzenko dies in Ontario.

Why it matters

The Gouzenko affair was the first major public proof that the Soviet Union had spied on its wartime allies, including their atomic research. It shaped Western security policy and fed the climate of suspicion that later produced investigations into the Cambridge Five and the American Second Red Scare.