The Gouzenko Affair was the name given to events in Canada surrounding the defection of Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk stationed at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, from the Soviet Union in 1945 and his allegations regarding the existence of a Soviet spy ring of Canadian communists. Gouzenko's defection and revelations are considered by historians to have marked the beginning of the Cold War in Canada, as well as potentially setting the stage for the "Red Scare" of the 1950s.
The Kellock–Taschereau Commission was a royal commission that began in February 1946 with the mandate to investigate the veracity of Gouzenko's information. The Commission, appointed on February 5, 1946, by Governor General the Earl of Athlone, on the advice of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, was headed by two judges of the Supreme Court of Canada: Robert Taschereau and Roy Kellock. The investigations led to the arrest of 21 people, along with 11 convictions. Among them was the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP) member of Parliament for Cartier, Fred Rose. Other notable people among those accused of passing over secrets were Canadian Army Captain Gordon Lunan, and Sam Carr, a senior organizer of the LPP.
Filling 6,000 pages, Gouzenko's testimony was not made public until 1981.
Background Prior to the Second World War, the Soviet Union had no diplomatic representation in Canada. However, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the two countries suddenly found themselves allies fighting a common enemy. Stories of the Soviets' struggle against Nazi Germany elicited sympathy for the Soviet cause. Organizations began sending aid to the Soviet Union and a number of Soviet-Canadian friendship societies were formed throughout the country, pushing for greater Canadian-Soviet co-operation. In 1943, the Canadian-Soviet Friendship League held its inaugural rally at Maple Leaf Gardens with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as its chair.
Public disdain for communism was also tempered by the events of the war. The early years of the war had seen extensive surveillance and arrests of trade unionists and suspected communists. However, as the war progressed, many left-wing groups, who had become disillusioned with the Soviet Union following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, took a renewed interest in communism. The Communist Party of Canada (CPC), which had been banned in 1940 under the Defence of Canada Regulations of the War Measures Act, found itself newly legitimized and formed the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP), which would go on to receive more than 100,000 votes in the 1945 federal election.
In February 1942, Canada and the Soviet Union reached an agreement to establish diplomatic relations. Later that year, the Soviet Union established a legation in Ottawa headed by ambassador Fedor Gusev. However, this relationship was based on the need for expediency, not trust, and the Canadian government remained immensely distrustful of the Soviet Union, regardless of public support for the Soviet war effort. The Allies had technically agreed to a free exchange of information on the development of new weapons but, in practice, this agreement was not followed. In particular, the Soviet Union had been left out of the Manhattan Project.
Espionage As the Eastern Front turned in the Soviet Union's favour, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, became convinced that the Western powers would soon return to their pre-war hostility toward the Soviet Union. He was determined to take advantage of their preoccupation with the war and infiltrate what he considered to be his future adversaries.
Canada was a prime target for foreign espionage, as the country possessed an abundance of information that would have been valuable to the Soviet Union. Canadian diplomats had close ties with officials in the United States and the United Kingdom. The Canadian Armed Forces had access to American and British weapon systems. Scientists at Canada's National Research Council (NRC) were closely involved with British and American scientists in the development of radar technology, code-breaking, and the explosive RDX. Most notably, the NRC was engaged in atomic fission research at its Montreal Laboratory.
Canada also lacked effective security measures and, unlike the United States or the United Kingdom, it did not have the resources to mount effective counterintelligence operations. By the later years of the war, RCMP resources were spread thin guarding military installations and it was unable to provide effective screening for new hires within the rapidly expanding public service. Furthermore, NRC scientists tended to see security measures as arbitrary and often ignored them entirely.
One of the first Soviets to arrive at the Embassy in Ottawa was Major Vsevolod Sokolov, an agent of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), the Soviet Union's foreign military intelligence agency. He set up a GRU spy ring, expanding upon the existing infrastructure of the CPC. Fred Rose, a union organizer and frequently jailed communist activist who would go on to become a member of Parliament under the LLP banner, reportedly approached Sokolov sometime in 1942 and expressed interest in working for the GRU. Together, Rose and Sam Carr, a national organizer for the CPC, actively helped the Soviets whenever possible and served as go-betweens for recruits, as Sokolov was leery of contacting agents directly. Both men were actively involved in Marxist study groups in Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa and, as such, had a broad array of connections with civil servants, academics, and scientists with sympathies to the Soviet Union. In August 1943, when Rose was elected to Parliament, Pavel Mikhailov, a GRU rezident based in New York who oversaw GRU activities in North America, wrote in a message to GRU headquarters in Moscow, "Fred, our man in LESOVIA [code name for Canada], has been elected to the LESOVIAN parliament."
In June 1943, Colonel Nicholai Zabotin arrived as the military attaché to the Embassy. Officially, he was charged with facilitating the delivery of military technology to the Soviet Union. Covertly, however, he took charge of the GRU's intelligence operations in Canada. Code-named "Grant", he was tasked with gathering information about radar technology, explosives, and, in particular, the atomic bomb. He was also instructed to recruit Canadian researchers and civil servants who would provide information during and after the war.
Zabotin was considerably less cautious than Sokolov. He opted to have Embassy staff deal with agents directly rather than through intermediaries. He also struck up an affair with a Russian immigrant in Montreal named Nina Farmer. As an expatriate, she would have been considered a traitor and, had Soviet authorities discovered the affair, Zabotin most likely would have been recalled. Zabotin largely delegated management of the individual operatives to his subordinates: Lieutenant Colonel Petr Motinov, Major Vasili Rogov, and Sokolov.
The GRU was not the only Soviet intelligence agency operating in Ottawa. The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police and precursor to the KGB, also operated out of the Embassy, headed by Vitali Pavlov, who had arrived in Ottawa in 1942 when the legation was initially established. Additionally, Soviet naval intelligence may also have been operating out of the Embassy. However, the GRU and the NKVD did not share resources or intelligence and their relationship was highly dysfunctional. Infighting was frequent as the two agencies competed for informants. Staff would frequently undermine each other by reporting even minor infractions to Moscow. Responsibility for Embassy staff technically fell to Pavlov, although he and Zabotin rarely spoke to each other.
The Lunan cell Some of the Canadians recruited by the GRU were charged with managing the activities of other agents. One of these individuals was Gordon Lunan, an officer with the Wartime Information Board who served as an editor for Canadian Affairs, a military journal written for members of the armed forces serving overseas. Lunan was recruited by Rose in March 1945 and his career in journalism offered him cover for recruiting informants, some of whom were led to believe they were speaking to him in his capacity as editor of Canadian Affairs. Of Zabotin's subordinates, Rogov had the most demanding job, as he managed the Lunan cell.
Lunan (to whom the GRU had assigned the code name, "Back") was tasked with recruiting and managing two NRC engineers: Edward Mazerall (code-named "Bagley") and Durnford Smith (code-named "Badeau"), as well as Israel Halperin (code-named "Bacon"), a mathematics professor at Queen's University who had taken leave to serve in the Canadian Artillery during the war. Smith was the most productive of Lunan's sources and, from March to August 1945, he passed 17 reports on radar systems, totalling about 700 pages.
Mazerall was a far more reluctant accomplice. In late July 1945, Lunan approached Mazerall under the guise that the editor of an army newspaper was looking for information on developments in radar technology. Mazerall gave him two documents marked "confidential" – a research proposal and a paper on air navigation that was set to be presented at an upcoming symposium in London, which the Soviets would be attending.
Likewise, Halperin proved to be of limited use to the Soviets. Although he met with Lunan several times, he supplied him only with verbal information on the capacity of Canadian explosives plants, information that was already publicly available. Lunan continued to press Halperin for more information, but Halperin continually refused. Halperin eventually cut off contact with Lunan entirely.
Other notable agents Zabotin's most valuable agent was Alan Nunn May, a British nuclear physicist who worked at the Montreal Laboratory under the United Kingdom's Tube Alloys project. Nunn May had been passing on information regarding his work on uranium as early as 1942, when he still worked in the United Kingdom. However, the GRU did not inform Zabotin about Nunn May until May 1945, nearly two years after Nunn May arrived in Canada. Zabotin promptly dispatched Lieutenant Pavel Angelov to make contact. Nunn May was initially reluctant to provide the Soviets with further aid, as he feared he was under RCMP surveillance, but ultimately agreed to co-operate. He was tasked with obtaining secret information on nuclear technology from the Montreal and Chicago laboratories, which he visited several times in 1944 and 1945.
Nunn May was ultimately able to supply the Soviets with samples of uranium. Embassy staff, unfamiliar with the hazardous effects of radiation, stored it unconcernedly in an office safe for two weeks. Motinov then delivered the sample to Moscow, storing it under his waistband. The uranium sample reportedly left him with a painful wound and he required regular blood transfusions for the rest of his life.
Another notable agent was Raymond Boyer, an assistant professor of chemistry at McGill University who worked with the NRC and served as the secretary of the Canadian-American RDX Committee. Boyer was recruited by Rose in February 1943. The United States had vetoed an Allied initiative to share information on RDX with the Soviet Union; however, throughout 1943 and 1944, Boyer provided the Soviets with classified information on a number of chemical compounds, including RDX.
Other scientists with communist leanings that had piqued the attention of the GRU were David Shugar, a sonar specialist with the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), and Matt Nightingale, a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) engineer with knowledge of LORAN navigation systems. These men were considered valuable not only for the information they had access to in Canada, but also because they had access to secret research in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Igor Gouzenko