How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies

331 Pages·2006·1.92 MB·English

by  Amy Knight

HOW THE COLD WAR BEGAN
ALSO BY AMY KNIGHT
The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union (1988)
Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (1993)
Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors (1996)
Who Killed Kirov?: The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery (1999)
HOW
THE COLD WAR
BEGAN
THE IGOR GOUZENKO AFFAIR AND
THE HUNT FOR SOVIET SPIES
With an Author's Note for U.S. Readers
AMY KNIGHT
CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
HOW THE COLDWAR BEGAN
The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies
Carroll & Graf Publishers
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
245 West 17th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10011
Copyright © 2005 by Amy Knight
Published by arrangement with McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto, Ontario,
Canada First Carroll & Graf edition 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part
without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may
quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or
electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from
the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN-10: 0-78671-816-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-78671-816-0
eBook ISBN: 9780786733088
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
To Molly Knight Raskin
CHRONOLOGY OF MAIN EVENTS IN
THE GOUZENKO AFFAIR
June 1943 Igor Gouzenko arrives in Ottawa with GRU team.
October
Anna Gouzenko joins her husband.
1943
September Gouzenko hears he is being called back to Moscow. His boss
1944 Zabotin manages a post-ponement.
August 6,
United States detonates atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
1945
September 5, Gouzenko leaves the Soviet Embassy for the last time, with the
1945 intention of defecting.
September 6, Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King learns of
1945 the defection.
September 7,
Gouzenko arrives at RCMP headquarters for debriefing.
1945
September Mackenzie King travels to Washington to meet President Harry
29, 1945 Truman.
November 8, Elizabeth Bentley signs her first statement, revealing an espionage
1945 network in Washington and New York.
February 3,
Drew Pearson breaks the Canadian spy story.
1946
February 13, Royal Commission on Espionage begins taking testimony from
1946 Gouzenko.
February 15, Canadian spy suspects arrested and interrogation by the RCMP
1946 begins.
March 2,
The first of the spy suspects is formally charged.
1946
March
First Interim Report of Royal Commission appears.
4,1946
March Alan Nnnn May arrested in London; Winston Churchill gives his
5,1946 "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri.
June 1946 Fred Rose trial and conviction.
Final Report of Royal Commission on Espionage appears; last of
July 1946
Soviet diplomats suspected of spying leave Canada.
July 1946
Soviet diplomats suspected of spying leave Canada.
March 1946-
Trials of Canadian spy suspects.
1947
January
U.S. Federal Grand Jury hears testimony from Bentley and
1947-July
Whittaker Chambers.
1948
August 1948 Harry Dexter White testifies before HUAC; dies.
November Chambers produces documents to back up his charges against
1948 Hiss.
December
Alger Hiss indicted for perjury before a Grand Jury
1948
January 1949FBI arrests Sam Carr.
Senator Pat McCarran's Subcommittee on Immigration interviews
May 1949
Gouzenko in Ottawa.
May-July
First Hiss perjury trial, ending in a hung jury.
1949
Hiss found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison; Klaus
January 1950
Fuchs confesses to espionage.
September
FBI requests report on Herbert Norman from RCMP.
1950
May 1951 Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess defect to Soviet Union.
Herbert Norman mentioned in Senate Internal Security
August 1951
Subcommittee (SISS) hearings.
March 1953 Stalin dies.
January 1954SISS takes testimony from Gouzenko in Ottawa.
March 1957 Norman's name again brought up at SISS hearings.
April 4, 1957Norman commits suicide.
January 1963Kim Philby defects to Moscow.
June 1982 Gouzenko dies.
NOTE: I have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration from the
Russian Cyrillic. Exceptions are well-known names, such as Gouzenko, which
appear in the more familiar Anglicized forms.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
When I first started my research on the Gouzenko affair, I did not expect that
it would involve rethinking the sensational Alger Hiss case, which
polarized American public opinion during the McCarthy era and aroused heated
debate among historians in the United States in the past five decades. Ever since
new documentation emerged in the 1990s, said to prove conclusively that Hiss
was a spy, many historians have considered the Hiss case closed.
But a close scrutiny of this new evidence—prompted by my suspicion that
the FBI distorted statements made by Gouzenko to help make their case against
Hiss—led me to join the small minority of Cold War scholars who remained
unconvinced that Hiss was a Soviet agent. The first supposedly definitive proof
against Hiss was the now famous March 30, 1945 telegram from the Soviet
intelligence chief in Washington, Anatolii Gorsky, to Moscow headquarters.
Gorsky's message, deciphered by the U.S. National Security Agency (as part of a
secret program called Venona) and made public in 1995, contained references to
a spy codenamed “Ales,” who was said to be Alger Hiss. As I explain in this
book, there were actually far too many uncertainties of meaning in that
fragmented message to come to any conclusions about the identity of Ales.
Since my book was published in Canada last year, the NSA has released the
original Russian version of the decryption. Far from resolving the ambiguities,
as many had hoped, the original makes it even more doubtful that “Ales” was
Alger Hiss. To mention one example: the Russian text makes it clear that the
group of spies run by Ales consisted of his family members. They had for many
years provided such valuable military secrets to the Soviets that they were
awarded decorations. It is highly improbable that Hiss's family could have had
any military information worth sharing with the Soviets. Hiss's wife, Priscilla,
was a stay-at-home mother, and his brother Donald a lawyer for the State
Department.
The other much-cited evidence against Hiss appeared in a book called The
Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein (currently the archivist of the United States)
and Alexander Vassiliev (a former KGB officer), published in 1999 and based
on documents that Vassiliev consulted in the KGB archives. The fact that several
of the messages from Soviet intelligence operatives reproduced in The Haunted
Wood contained references to Alger Hiss led readers to the conclusion that he