by Amy Knight
RCMP officer John Leopold came out regularly to interrogate the defector. Born in Bohemia to Jewish parents, Leopold had emigrated to Canada in 1913 and joined the RCMP five years later, at age twenty-eight. Only five feet four inches tall, Leopold was below the required height to be a Mountie. Being Jewish would also have been a drawback for entering the predominately Anglo-Canadian RCMP, but he seems to have passed himself off as a Christian, and his knowledge of several languages was a much-needed asset. He spent the next decade as a secret RCMP agent, posing as a house painter and working his way up the hierarchy of the radical Canadian labor movement.22
Leopold earned a name for himself as a single-minded anticommunist and was a star witness in a trial of members of the Canadian Communist Party in 1931. But he also had a history of personal problems. During the thirties he was almost booted out of the RCMP for alcoholism and insubordination. After the Soviet Union joined the Allies in the Second World War, Leopold was criticized for his obsession with fighting communism. His RCMP job, one Canadian civil servant complained in a 1942 memorandum to the prime minister, seemed “to depend on continuing to uncover Bolshevik plots.” But the Gouzenko case would mute Leopold's critics and further his career. In October 1945, he was appointed chief of the RCMP's Special Section (intelligence branch), and other promotions followed.23
Ironically, given his intense anti-communism, Leopold's relations with Gouzenko were difficult. Part of the problem was the language barrier. According to one Mountie guarding the family, “Gouzenko's English wasn't too good and Leopold's Russian wasn't very good, so they had a time getting things straight.” In the end, the RCMP called in a Russian-speaker, a former RCMP secret agent named Mervyn Black, to act as interpreter. Leopold continued to question Gouzenko with Black's assistance, but there was tension. Gouzenko's daughter would later claim that her father was threatened repeatedly with being handed over to the Soviets, apparently because Leopold did not find him sufficiently cooperative. This both terrified Gouzenko and antagonized him, and he soon made up his mind that Leopold was a Russian agent. On one occasion Gouzenko even refused to ride in the same car with him. “Don't ever have that man around me again,” Gouzenko reportedly told another Mountie.24 It may seem that Gouzenko was paranoid, but he knew from his experience in the GRU that the Soviets had double agents in Western governments. And, of course, Leopold was not exactly a typical Mountie.
At the beginning of October, the Gouzenkos were moved to a larger, heated three-bedroom cottage on Otter Lake, near Smiths Falls, Ontario. This was slightly more comfortable but with the baby coming it would not do for the long term. So after a couple of weeks they were transferred yet again, to a farmhouse located not far from Toronto in a place called Camp X. Situated on the shores of Lake Ontario, Camp X, or Special Training School 103, had been established by William Stephenson in 1941 for the purpose of training Americans (mainly from the Office of Strategic Services – oss – or the FBI), Canadians, and personnel from the British Security Coordination in the art of sabotage and counterintelligence. Those trained at the camp entered the so-called Special Operations Executive (soe) for dangerous missions behind enemy lines. The camp had been closed the year before but was still surrounded by wire fences and thus was ideal from the point of view of security.25
Anna Gouzenko, finally able to take a proper bath, looked on their new living quarters favorably, at least compared to what they were used to in Russia. According to one of the Mounties who lived there with them (and slept with a gun under his pillow), “It was a typical old farmhouse . . . not very comfortable. Not very imposing. She [Anna] was pleased as punch with it because she thought it was real nice. It wasn't. It was very awful. She was thinking in terms of one room and three people in a room. Here she had three bedrooms upstairs.”26 Anna, by this time seven months pregnant, was in “nesting” mode, content to keep busy knitting babies’ clothes, sewing on a machine provided by the RCMP, and looking after the rambunctious two-year-old Andrei.
Her husband, not surprisingly, remained highly apprehensive. RCMP officer George Mackay, who was Gouzenko's personal guard at Camp X, noted that the defector was “thoroughly frightened as to what his fate might be. . . . He wanted somebody with him all the time.”27 But he felt comfortable enough to begin painting landscapes, including one of the beach on Lake Ontario. (Presumably, his artist's supplies were courtesy of the RCMP.) The man in charge at Camp X, RCMP inspector George McClellan, reported back to Rivett-Carnac on October 8, “Black and I had a long talk with Corby today, and I think for the first time he is relaxing. He was very nervous, but on looking over the situation he feels he is safe.”28
Corby was Gouzenko's code name, given to him by Canadian authorities to ensure his security and to keep his defection a secret. The idea for the name came from Norman Robertson, who, so the story goes, had been putting all the documents related to the Gouzenko case in an empty box that bore the name of Corby Distillers on the outside. (Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Henry Corby, the company was, and still is, well known to Canadians who consume spirits.)
Robertson was working closely with the RCMP's Charles Rivett- Carnac on the Corby case. Rivett-Carnac fit the RCMP mould far better than did John Leopold. He was educated in England and had spent several years in India – where his father, an English baronet, had served as a high-ranking police official – before immigrating to Canada and joining the RCMP, in 1920, at age twenty-one. He would eventually rise to become RCMP commissioner.
Long aware that the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa had been trying to recruit agents for espionage, Rivett-Carnac was not completely surprised by Gouzenko's revelations.29 But this was the first time the RCMP had anything like concrete evidence of Soviet spying. As Rivett-Carnac put it, “So far it had not been possible to gain any positive proof of Russian activities which could be publicly laid on the table, for quite apart from the fact that the war had immersed us in an all-out effort in other directions, the Communist undercover network was of so secret a nature that there was not enough evidence to point this out definitely. If Gouzenko had anything in his possession of value it might close the gap!”30
For all his enthusiasm, Rivett-Carnac was out of his depth. Neither he nor anyone else in the RCMP, including Leopold, had experience with defectors. In the words of one observer, the Mounties “didn't know what the hell to do.” Another source confirmed that “this was too big for the Canadians to handle on their own. The RCMP was simply too ill-equipped to deal with a major espionage case alone.”31 So they needed help from the Americans and the British, who were more than willing to become involved.
The FBI in Washington heard about Gouzenko on September 8, when their representative in Ottawa, Glen Bethel (stationed there as part of a secret exchange arrangement with the RCMP) telephoned headquarters to say, “a matter had come up in connection with Communist cases which appeared to be of vital importance.” There was to be a conference in Ottawa on the matter on September 10, Bethel said, and he wanted someone from the bureau with a background in communism to attend. The FBI sent Lish Whitson, its top communist expert, “a quiet, studious researcher” who was deeply involved in the FBI's ongoing investigation of atomic espionage and the Comintern, the international organization uniting communist groups. As soon as Whitson arrived in Ottawa he called Hoover's deputy, Mickey Ladd, to say excitedly that they had “hit the jackpot.” They had quite a few documents and were “turning up material there all the time.”32 Hoover was delighted. On September 13, he wrote a letter to RCMP commissioner Stuart Wood, thanking him for drawing the Gouzenko case to his attention: “The details of the organized effort and the viciousness of its implications clearly demonstrate the necessity for the emphasis which has been placed by both our organizations on investigations of this type. Please accept my assurances of complete cooperation in this matter.” Somewhat later, in November 1945, the FBI sent an agent from its Buffalo, New York, office, as an additional liaison officer on the case in Ottawa.33
&nb
sp; MI6's Peter Dwyer, who may have arrived in Ottawa as early as September 6, was joined by John-Paul Evans, a colleague from the British Security Coordination in New York. Described by an FBI acquaintance as “a clever, witty and charming Briton,” Dwyer was ideally suited for the job of coordinating allied efforts in the Gouzenko case. As William Stephenson's second-in-command at the bsc during the war, Dwyer had been a frequent guest of the RCMP in Ottawa and so was on familiar ground. Moreover, as Kim Philby observed in My Silent War, Dwyer “had a great deal more to him than just wit. During the war, he had succeeded in the prickly task of establishing close personal relations with many leading figures in the FBI.” According to a former boss, Dwyer's abundant charm did not prevent him from being “tough in a quiet way.”34 Dwyer and Evans began working at RCMP headquarters, sending daily reports to the British Security Coordination in New York, where – due to concerns about the security of communications from Ottawa – Sir William Stephenson had set up a special encoding system. The messages were then forwarded to MI6 in London, where Philby was the first to read them. Not surprisingly, MI5 officials were not keen about this arrangement, because they could not be sure that they saw everything received by MI6. But Malcolm MacDonald and William Stephenson insisted that it was necessary for security reasons.
Although he worked for MI6, the small and dynamic Stephenson, whose “restless attitude toward his place in history” would make him a legend, was in fact a Canadian. A former amateur lightweight boxing champion, Stephenson had grown up near Winnipeg, Manitoba. He became a fighter pilot in World War i and then a highly successful entrepreneur and financial speculator. His extensive business interests and private intelligence contacts attracted the attention of Winston Churchill, who asked him to take charge of coordinating the exchange of intelligence between Britain and the United States during the Second World War. In 1941, the bsc was established for this purpose, with headquarters at 3603 Rockefeller Center. The bsc also was to operate covertly on behalf of the British government and to gain “assurance of American participation in secret activities throughout the world.” According to some sources, Churchill had such confidence in Stephenson that he authorized him to view the transcripts from Britain's top secret decoding of German Enigma ciphers at Bletchley Park and then to decide what information to pass to the Americans and Canadians.36 But given Stephenson's proclivity for self-promotion, this might have been only lore.
Neither J. Edgar Hoover nor MI6 chief Stewart Menzies trusted Stephenson. Hoover and Stephenson had a falling out back in 1942, when Hoover, resentful of Stephenson's prerogatives in wartime intelligence, participated in an effort to curtail the bsc's operations in the United States. In response, “Stephenson told Hoover exactly what he thought of him,” accusing him of intrigue and refusing to have any dealings with him. The situation later improved because of Hoover's efforts at reconciliation, but the two remained deeply suspicious of each other. As for Menzies, who gave Churchill daily briefings on the decrypts coming from Bletchley Park, he had reportedly opposed Stephenson's appointment as the representative of British intelligence in the Western hemisphere. Thus it is ironic that Stephenson was able to take charge of the communications network in the Gouzenko case.37
Interestingly, Stephenson seems to have decided to steer the FBI and MI6 away from matters concerning the Soviets’ cryptology. The British and Americans sent cryptology experts from their military security branches to Ottawa through Stephenson and independent of the regular intelligence services. Although the GRU would have immediately changed all its codes, Gouzenko at least was able to explain to his debriefers how the GRU's cipher system operated.38
For security reasons, and perhaps also because of Gouzenko's precarious mental state, the number of interviewers was kept to a minimum. Although the FBI's Lish Whitson interviewed Gouzenko (using Mervyn Black as the interpreter) shortly after the defection, neither Dwyer nor John-Paul Evans talked directly to him. Instead, they passed questions through John Leopold, who would provide written translations, presumably done by Black, of Gouzenko's responses.39 But one British representative did meet directly with Gouzenko – Roger Hollis, the MI5 officer responsible for monitoring communist subversion in the British dominion. As such, Hollis was MI5's point man for the Gouzenko case.
A tall, stooping man of forty, Hollis had been educated at Oxford, but failed to pass his final examinations. According to Sir Dick White, his boss at MI5, who had been a contemporary at Oxford, Hollis might have been a successful classical scholar, “but he chose instead an Oxford interlude of wine and roses.” White thought well of Hollis: “Roger was hard-working, calm and fair-minded. What I liked was his competence and his dry and witty manner.” But others recalled “his irksome nasal tone and his predilection for pinching women's bottoms, characteristics redeemed by his fund of ‘good, dirty jokes which he told well.’”40
Whereas the view toward communism within MI5 had been much more benign since Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Hollis himself, like Menzies at MI6, was never persuaded that Soviet subversion had ceased to be a dangerous threat. Although Churchill had directed the intelligence services to treat the Soviet Union as an ally and relax pressure on the communists, Hollis ignored the order. MI5 continued to conduct counterintelligence operations, albeit discreetly, against communists in Britain throughout the war.41
Unfortunately for Hollis, MI5 had overlooked Alan Nunn May, an outspoken communist when he was studying at Cambridge – reportedly even “protesting against Britain's ‘imperialist war’ with Germany.” Although May was privy to atomic secrets after he was recruited to the Tube Alloys project, MI5 had never conducted a security screening on him. His alleged espionage now created an embarrassment for the British government, which had been anxious to become more involved in the American atomic weapons project. On September 10, British High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald sent the following message to Sir Alexander Cadogan, British undersecretary for foreign affairs: “Robertson draws my attention to the fact that vetting of United Kingdom scientists sent to Canada on [atomic] project was responsibility of British Government and if these leakages on further investigation prove as serious as they appear at moment then H.M.G. [her Majesty's government] will be liable to criticism by United States Government.”42
Philby was partly responsible for the decision to send Hollis to Canada on September 16. He did not want to go himself, but it was not because of the Volkov affair. At that point, contrary to most accounts, Philby had not yet learned of Volkov's effort to defect in Istanbul, so he had no idea that he was in danger of being exposed. Philby wanted to avoid going to Canada because, as one source puts it, “this would remove him from the London center, from where every Western move in the [Gouzenko] crisis could be monitored by him and passed on to his Soviet contacts.”43
The RCMP was preparing to present Gouzenko to the world as a hero, but Hollis considered him differently. As a British historian explained, “Defectors, he reasoned, were deserters or, worse, traitors, distastefully different from captured Abwehr agents.” Hollis was not receptive to what Gouzenko had to say: “Instead of tickling Gouzenko's vanity and absorbing lessons about Soviet intelligence techniques, Hollis abruptly left the defector after just one hour and flew back across the Atlantic to chase Nunn May, now living in London.”44 Hollis returned to Canada for a second interview with Gouzenko, on November 21, 1945, and he considered Gouzenko important enough to raise the idea of taking him to London for debriefing. But Gouzenko later claimed that Hollis misrepresented what he said in the interviews and even went so far as to accuse Hollis of being a Soviet spy.45
Mackenzie King shared Hollis's reservations about Gouzenko's motives, but he nonetheless took the defector's revelations seriously and was shocked that the Soviets had been conducting espionage against his country. He confided to his diary on September 11, “This revelation gives one a new and more appalling outlook on the world than one has ever had before . . . I cannot believe that this information has
come to me as a matter of chance. I can only pray for God's guidance that I may be able to be an instrument in the control of powers beyond me to help save a desperate situation.”
King was extremely pious, but his spirituality was not confined to God. His main inspiration came from talking to his deceased mother through mediums. A lifelong bachelor, King preferred above all the solitude of his country residence, Kingsmere. His greatest pleasure was going for walks with his little Irish terrier, Pat, whom each evening he would kiss goodnight. A descendant of a Scotch-English family, King was not a man of great political vision or intellectual depth, despite his impressive academic credentials, which included post-graduate work at Harvard and the University of Chicago. Yet he had managed repeatedly to win the support of his Liberal Party and the Canadian electorate. One of King's biographers wondered, “Did he stay in office by Machiavellian cunning? Or was the man so ordinary that he was the average Canadian writ large – unconsciously embodying the aspirations of most of his countrymen? Or did he succeed by default, surviving only because his rivals were so tragically incompetent? There was no agreement, no consensus, because somehow this rather pudgy little man, best remembered for his indecision and procrastination or his uninspiring platitudes, could never be reconciled with the political leader who had a talent for winning elections.”46
Time magazine explained King's persistent success as a politician more precisely, if not condescendingly: Canada was “a country deeply endowed with moral sense. Its feelings about ‘decency’ stem from deep roots in both its Anglo-Saxon and French traditions.” As a result, Canadians, who valued respectability and could even be puritanical, appreciated a leader like King: “A steady, colorless man with too much honor and intellect to be a demagogue, too little fire to be an orator, too little hair and too few mannerisms to be spectacular, King fits his country's mood and pattern.”47