by Amy Knight
There was, of course, at least one Soviet agent in British intelligence at this time, Kim Philby. Could this have been the individual Gouzenko was referring to? Probably not. Philby worked for the NKVD, not for the GRU, where Gouzenko was employed. It would be highly unusual for an NKVD message to be channeled to the GRU, even during wartime when the two agencies were often gathering the same types of information. Also, Gouzenko said that the agent in question was of Russian descent or background, which did not describe Philby.5 Nonetheless, although Philby knew that Gouzenko worked for the GRU, it did not stop him from worrying that Gouzenko was referring to him. Indeed, he was so agitated by Gouzenko's defection that his NKVD handler, as we have seen, had to “calm him down.”6
In speaking to Senator Jenner's subcommittee in January 1954, Gouzenko broached the subject of the British spy again. (The two-word name of the agency to which Gouzenko said Elli belonged is unfortunately blacked out in the released testimony.) Gouzenko explained, “I thought it would be of interest to the American authorities because I understand that sometimes they do their work in cooperation with the British authorities.”
Jay Sourwine, the subcommittee's counsel, was snappily dismissive:
Q: Was he in connection with the United States? Was he in a place to dispose of United States secrets? What is the United States connection with him?
A: Like I said in my previous statements, I thought in dealing with your particular case you would be in a better position to evaluate the importance or non-importance of that matter because you knew better than I if there is any connection whatever.
Q: Can you identify this agent?
A: It was by cover name, and anyway I gave all this information to the Royal Commission and I believe it was probably passed over to the FBI.
Q: Have you any reason to believe the Royal Commission has not made that available to the United States?
A: No, I have not. On the contrary, I think it is in the files of the FBI.
Q: What is the purpose in telling us, then?7
This was a rather curious reaction. Sourwine could not have been ignorant of the fact that two important British spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had fled to Moscow in 1951, and Philby, who was close to both of them, was under a cloud of suspicion. By 1954 it was well known in the U.S. government that all three had been in a position to compromise American secrets. Burgess had been employed at the Foreign Office and served as first secretary to the embassy in Washington, D.C., before he defected. Maclean had been a diplomat in Washington (with access to information that even Congress did not know) from 1944 to 1948. Before leaving Washington he had been head of the American Department of the Foreign Office. And Philby had been Britain's intelligence liaison officer in Washington from 1949 to 1951. Given the close alliance between the governments of Britain and the United States and the cooperative arrangements between their security services, a Soviet spy in Britain was of potentially enormous importance for the Americans.
This of course must have been Gouzenko's reasoning when he mentioned Elli to the subcommittee. He did not realize that SISS was not involved in the realities of counterespionage; its overriding domestic political agenda focused entirely on finding communists in the United States and exposing potential ones. Even the FBI, which was responsible for counterespionage and had received Gouzenko's information about Elli several years before, had not given it much attention. This, the FBI seems to have reasoned, was Britain's problem.
Speaking to the Jenner subcommittee, Gouzenko claimed he had written three pages about Elli sometime earlier, but he did not say for whom. Although the cover name was a female one, Gouzenko said, it might have been a man. He went on, “There was identification, a further clue . . . this particular one [referring to Elli] . . . had a Russian background. This may mean that he was on a commission in Moscow previously or maybe it could be that some of his relations had a Russian background, or maybe he was engaged previously on Russian questions. But from the telegram it was clear, and I also described in the detail the circumstances under which this telegram came to my attention.”8
It was not until 1963, the year Kim Philby defected to Moscow, that the issue of Elli and a possible British mole aroused the interest of the British security and intelligence services. Philby, who had retired from MI6 soon after Burgess and Maclean disappeared and was working in Beirut, had long been assumed to have been a spy, but no one could prove it. His defection was prompted by an interview with an MI6 officer who accused him of spying. The fact that Philby's first comment when he saw the officer at his door was “I rather thought it would be you” led members of MI5 and MI6 to assume he had been warned about the visit ahead of time and that the warning must have come from yet another spy in one of their agencies. As a result, a joint MI5–MI6 committee called Fluency was formed in 1964 to investigate penetrations of British intelligence. It was chaired by Peter Wright, who later would describe the mole hunt in Spycatcher.9
The Fluency Committee soon turned to Gouzenko's allegations about Elli. But by this time the story had inexplicably changed. Instead of Elli being a spy in British intelligence, MI6, Wright saw information suggesting Gouzenko said that Elli was a spy in “five of mi,” which he later changed to MI5. Wright contacted the RCMP to request an interview with Gouzenko, but was told that this was not a good idea. The RCMP claimed that Gouzenko was an alcoholic (which was not true) and was always after money (which was). An interview, the RCMP said, would make these problems worse and inevitably be leaked to the press by Gouzenko.10
Wright says he then asked the RCMP for notes of its debriefing of Gouzenko, only to be told they had been destroyed.11 But the notes, quoted above, were in the records of the RCMP. Was the RCMP being deliberately uncooperative, or did Wright not press very hard? If Wright had seen the notes of Gouzenko's RCMP debriefing he would have known that Gouzenko made no mention of MI5 to the RCMP. Moreover, Gouzenko's statements confirmed that Elli was from MI6 because Elli was privy to information about a British secret agent in Moscow. MI5, a counterintelligence agency, did not recruit agents in the Soviet Union, as MI6 was designated to do.
It also appears that the Fluency Committee did not consult the bsc report of September 1945, which quotes Gouzenko as referring to an agent in British Intelligence. Perhaps they did but were still in doubt about which agency Gouzenko was referring to. The committee decided to interview Peter Dwyer, who, it will be recalled, was one of the authors of the bsc report and had been sending messages to MI6 headquarters from Ottawa after the defection outlining Gouzenko's information. Dwyer had returned to Washington as MI6 liaison there, but in late 1949 relinquished his post (to none other than Philby) and moved to Ottawa to work on security matters for the Canadian government. At some point during the Fluency investigation, Maurice Oldfield, Philby's replacement in MI6, appeared on Dwyer's doorstep in Ottawa with the rest of the “mole-hunters” and interviewed Dwyer for two days. The interviews, which left Dwyer “exhausted and irritated with security intelligence and its bottomless well of suspicion,” apparently yielded no firm answers to the question of who Elli was.12
With Wright insisting that Elli was from MI5, the suspicions in Britain fell on Roger Hollis, director of MI5 since 1956. Hollis's accusers apparently did not know that Gouzenko had described Elli initially as being of Russian descent or having some connection with Russia, which would have ruled out not only Hollis but also most others in MI5. By the time he retired in 1965, Hollis had faced several GRUeling interrogations, none of which exonerated him. Even Hollis's former colleague, Sir Dick White, who became head of MI6 when Hollis succeeded him at MI5, considered it entirely possible that Hollis was Elli. When he paid a visit to J. Edgar Hoover in 1966, White felt compelled to tell the FBI chief that “various allegations have been made against Roger Hollis and an investigation is under way.”13
The FBI's Robert Lamphere wrote in his memoirs that he also thought Hollis was a spy and assumed that Hollis had tipped the Soviets off about the A
merican success in deciphering their coded messages (the Venona project): “To me, there now remains little doubt that it was Hollis who provided the earliest information to the KGB that the FBI was reading their 1944–45 cables. Philby probably added to that knowledge after his arrival in the United States, but the prime culprit in this affair was Hollis.” Significantly, Lamphere based his assumptions partly on what he thought Gouzenko had said, that “he told his interviewers that there was a top Russian spy inside MI-5.”14
Nonetheless, not everyone agreed with this view. The identity, or even existence, of Elli remained a subject of deep controversy in MI5. It hung over the service like a black cloud. Fluency ceased its work after Hollis retired, but in the autumn of 1972, right around the time that Hollis died, the Elli investigation was reopened. MI5 asked again to interview Gouzenko, and this time the RCMP not only acquiesced, it also provided MI5's interviewer, Patrick Stewart, with the notes of the initial debriefing of Gouzenko. Stewart, accompanied by several Mounties, met Gouzenko at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. He showed Gouzenko a copy of the bsc report and the notes from his interview with the RCMP shortly thereafter, both of which had Gouzenko saying Elli was working in British Intelligence, MI6, not counterintelligence, MI5. Gouzenko went into a fury and threw the papers across the room. He claimed that he had not said what was written in the bsc report, that someone had falsified his statements. As for the notes of the RCMP interview, which were in the handwriting of the translator, Mervyn Black, Gouzenko said they had been forged. He demanded, to no avail, that he be allowed to take the notes home so he could compare them with his copies of Black's handwriting.15
Why was Gouzenko so upset? He had been dismayed when the MI5 officer who had interviewed him in September 1945 did not seem interested in Elli. Gouzenko had planned to give him more details, but the man left after just a few minutes. For years afterward, Gouzenko wondered why no one had acted on his information and followed up on the Elli case. Apparently, he convinced himself that it was a cover-up and that Elli worked for MI5. Later, when he realized that the MI5 officer who had interviewed him in 1945 was Roger Hollis, and that Hollis was suspected of being a mole, Gouzenko became certain that Hollis had deliberately misrepresented his statements to hide the fact that he was Elli. But the records spoke for themselves. Unless Gouzenko had given the wrong information in his interviews after his defection, Hollis, as a member of MI5, could not have been Elli.16
Robert Lamphere may have been receptive to the theory that Hollis was Elli because MI5 had so many failures in its counterintelligence efforts against the Soviets. Not only did MI5 overlook Alan Nunn May until Gouzenko defected with proof that he was Soviet agent, the service, as noted earlier, also failed to investigate Klaus Fuchs, who had been working at a top secret nuclear facility in Britain since 1946. FBI officials first suspected Fuchs of espionage on behalf of the NKVD in 1949, when as part of the Venona project they deciphered a 1944 telegram to Moscow from the NKVD in New York. The telegram gave details about the Manhattan Project summarized in a top secret paper written by Fuchs for the Americans. Working with MI6 liaison Peter Dwyer, Lamphere soon concluded, after looking at the background of those who had access to the paper, that Fuchs had passed the information to the Soviets. The FBI reported the discovery to MI5, where it was received with great consternation. In late 1949, MI5's William Skardon, who had interviewed Alan Nunn May three years earlier, questioned Fuchs and got him to confess.
Fuchs was arrested on February 2, 1950, and charged with violating the Official Secrets Act.17
The FBI and MI5 had an additional shock when they learned of the defection of Maclean and Burgess in 1951, made worse because it was clear that Philby was probably a spy as well. It was bad enough to contemplate the secrets that had been compromised by Maclean and Burgess. The implications of Philby's treachery were even graver. Lamphere and his colleagues had shared highly sensitive information with him. Philby had even learned about the top secret Venona project, which was known to only a select group in the American intelligence community. The realization that such information, especially information concerning deciphered Soviet messages, had been passed on to the Soviets was devastating. In Lamphere's words, “I sat at my desk and tried to recollect precisely how much Philby had been told about the FBI's counterintelligence operations, and how much he might have deduced from conversations with Peter Dwyer. . . . What about the techniques we were perfecting, the direction and training of our agents, our relations with the British, the French and the Canadian intelligence services? Philby had been in a position to know so much!”18 Peter Dwyer must have been equally disturbed when he heard Philby was probably a spy. It meant the Soviets had had access to all the information in the secret messages about the Gouzenko case that he had sent in 1945 and 1946 to MI6 and MI5.
Philby would also have been in a position to inform the Soviets that Fuchs was under suspicion, because he was in Washington in late 1949, at the very time Dwyer and Lamphere were closing in on Fuchs. But, as was the case earlier when he found out that Nunn May was about to be interrogated by British authorities, Philby apparently thought he would risk exposing himself if he passed on the information to Moscow. In fact, he even helped in the Fuchs investigation. According to a Russian biographer of Philby who interviewed him after he defected, “It is possible that Philby's arrival in Washington and his participation in the search for the leak of secret information from Los Alamos [the Manhattan Project] hastened the discovery of Klaus Fuchs. Kim did not clarify the situation during our conversations.”19
One additional piece of evidence the FBI had added to their case against Fuchs was the fact that his name appeared in Israel Halperin's address book. Although the information from Fuchs was going to the NKVD, not to the GRU, which was alleged to have recruited Halperin, the FBI still considered the address-book entry significant. On October 21, 1949, Hoover sent a letter to the Atomic Energy Commission, apprising the committee of his agency's findings on Fuchs. To reinforce the FBI's case, Hoover mentioned the entry in Halperin's address book and went on to observe, “With respect to Israel Halperin, documents abstracted from the Soviet Embassy at Ottawa, Canada, by Igor Gouzenko, Soviet Code Clerk who defected to the Canadian authorities on September 5, 1945, supported by the testimony of Gouzenko himself, established that Halperin was a member of the Soviet Military Intelligence espionage network operating in Canada during the period 1942–1943.” The charges against Halperin were dismissed, Hoover went on, because the prosecution did not have independent evidence, “a condition precedent to the admissibility of Soviet documents.”20
Hoover was distorting the facts. It was true that the prosecution required “independent evidence” beyond Gouzenko's documents and statements in order to prosecute the Canadian spy suspects. Such evidence consisted mainly of confessions of the suspects or statements implicating them by others, such as Lunan. In Halperin's case, the evidence showed that, while he flirted with communism and the idea of helping out the Soviets, he had refused to furnish written information or convey secrets to Gordon Lunan. Lunan's testimony had confirmed this. In short, not only was there no independent evidence of Halperin's guilt, the Gouzenko documents themselves did not incriminate him.
Despite the fact that Halperin had been cleared by the courts, the FBI considered his address book (which is still classified as secret) as a key piece of evidence against possible spies. It included the names of 163 individuals living in the United States, all of whom the FBI attempted to identify and investigate. Many of these individuals, such as John Blewett, Halperin's roommate at Princeton, were listed in the address book for obviously personal, not political reasons. But that did not deter the FBI. As one historian observed, “It is as if Halperin's address book was a carrier of a virus, infecting all who came in contact with it.”21
One of those who would be “infected” by the Halperin address book was Canadian diplomat E. Herbert Norman. Norman had known Halperin ever since they roomed across the hall from e
ach other as undergraduates at the University of Toronto in the early 1930s. Unfortunately for Norman, the Halperin connection was just one of several circumstances that would make him the object of allegations by spy-hunters in Washington. The allegations would turn out to be false, but they haunted him throughout his career and the damage they caused was very real. The Norman case would become a topic of intense controversy in Canada, arousing the passions of both sides in the debate over the West's response to Soviet espionage, just as the Hiss case polarized Americans for years. But Norman's story was more about the McCarthy era in the United States than it was about Canada, because the source of his torment was the FBI and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
Born in 1909 in Japan, where his parents were Canadian Methodist missionaries, Herbert Norman was strongly influenced by his religious upbringing and his family's belief in the importance of public service. Introspective and intellectually curious, Norman was an excellent student who had the makings of a scholar early on. His innate desire to learn was stimulated by his home environment, where he was surrounded by books, and also by numerous trips abroad. By the time he was a young teenager, Norman had visited several countries in Asia and the Middle East. He learned to speak Japanese, which was no small achievement for a young person raised in an English-speaking family.22
Norman left Japan in 1929 to study at the University of Toronto, where he completed his undergraduate degree four years later. In 1933, Norman went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, for two years of postgraduate studies in history. Like many bright young men of his generation, Norman was attracted to communism at Cambridge. It was a natural reaction to the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, especially for someone who was raised with a strong social conscience. Norman did more than just discuss Marxism as a philosophy in small study groups at Cambridge. He became, by his own acknowledgment, committed to the political ideology of communism, and, judging from a letter he wrote to his brother a few years later, may have actually joined the party in 1934. In Norman's case, however, the activities that party membership entailed amounted to little more than participation in a hunger march and attempts to recruit some Indian students to the party. By all accounts, Norman was on the periphery of the communist movement at Cambridge, not part of the inner group of communists that included Burgess, Maclean, and Philby.23