by Amy Knight
Gouzenko was exaggerating. Had he been better informed, he would have understood that the Soviets had given their space program top priority and that their scientists in this area had made tremendous technological advances. Yes, the Soviets were spying, and they were after the secrets of America's military technology, but they had also poured tremendous resources into Sputnik. The Americans had simply fallen slightly behind in the race to launch a satellite.
A sympathetic Canadian journalist once observed of Gouzenko, “History in a way stopped with his defection. All the input was there. What carried him the rest of his life was the knowledge of the Soviet system and the KGB, which never changes and can't change.”42 Unfortunately, this was not the case. Gouzenko's knowledge of the Soviet system was limited to his brief years in the GRU, and things did change, especially after Stalin died. Gouzenko, with only Anna to bounce his ideas off of, was a world away from what was happening in Moscow. Posing as a Czech, he did not even associate with Russian émigrés.
Blinded by Gouzenko's shortcomings, the Mounties, who had direct contact with the defector, failed to appreciate the almost impossible situation he was in. They were disgusted at what they saw as his sense of privilege. When he had trouble sticking to the couple of manual jobs they arranged for him, they put it down to laziness. They did not realize, or care, that these jobs were demeaning for Gouzenko, who understandably wanted more than anything to be of value in the struggle against communism.
Frustrated that his talents were being wasted, Gouzenko took on the battle against communism and the KGB single-handedly. The more he was ignored by the Canadian government, the more he was demeaned in the press, the greater was his need to open the eyes of the West to the evils of the Soviet Union. Convinced that the RCMP and the Canadian government were infiltrated by Soviet spies, Gouzenko felt that his own credibility depended on exposing them.
He was especially suspicious of the Liberals, who regained power in 1963 after a Conservative interval of six years. In 1968, he went so far as to distribute a pamphlet entitled “Trudeau, A Potential Canadian Castro” at the Liberal leadership convention in Ottawa. The pamphlet, which bore his signature, charged that both Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau were communists. Trudeau, he suggested, who was about to succeed Pearson as Liberal leader, might even be a spy. Gouzenko based his claims about Trudeau in part on Elizabeth Bentley's leaked 1951 testimony to SISS. But he got things mixed up. She had mentioned meeting in Washington with a wealthy young man from Montreal, who brought her tidbits of news from Lester Pearson, but she was referring to Hazen Sise, not Trudeau.43
Gouzenko's pamphleteering caught the attention of the Toronto Daily Star. The paper published an editorial, entitled “Hate Flows in Canada Too,” in which it castigated Gouzenko for circulating inflammatory literature: “The poison flows from anti-Communist zealots who are attempting by innuendo and half truth to link Mr. Trudeau with a Communist conspiracy.” Noting that Bentley's SISS testimony was unsupported, the editorial ridiculed Gouzenko's suggestion that “Communist sympathizer” Pearson was passing information to “Communist agent” Trudeau. Literature of the sort Gouzenko was circulating should be “stamped or exposed as vicious,” the Star concluded.44
Not surprisingly, Gouzenko lashed out against his nemesis the Star yet again, accusing the paper of libel. This time no one settled; after a few years of haggling among the lawyers the case went to court. The author of the editorial, Val Sears, had been looking forward to the jury trial and his own opportunity, in his testimony as a defendant, to speak out against so-called hate literature. He was in for a rude shock. Instead of being asked to defend his editorial, he was questioned about Elizabeth Bentley. “The initial approach by Gouzenko's lawyer was devastating to me,” he recalled, “because he said I had alleged in the editorial that Elizabeth Bentley's testimony was a lie and would I tell the courts what part of Elizabeth Bentley's testimony was a lie and what was the truth. I was stumped. I grew up with the idea that Elizabeth Bentley, viewed from a liberal perspective, was an inappropriate witness. But to go back to the late 40s and single out what parts of her testimony were accurate and what were not, I said I couldn't possibly do that.”45
The judge suggested a recess to allow Sears time to consider his answer. Stunned, Sears went over to the hotel bar next door and had three Bloody Marys. He could not imagine how he was going to answer, until he remembered an old tactic from university days: stall your opponent by asking him to define his terms. “Bolstered by these Bloody Marys,” Sears recalled, “I returned to the stand, and the lawyer said, ‘I’ll repeat the question about the lies of Elizabeth Bentley.’ And I said, ‘I’ll have to tell you first off that I didn't say lies. I said half truths. Would you define what you mean by half truths? Because I have my own version of what a half truth is and I would be prepared to define that.’ And I babbled on like this. And to my utter surprise and delight the lawyer said, ‘Oh, never mind. I’m not going to pursue this line of questioning.’ I stepped off the stand sweating profusely.”46
Sears had hit upon an important point: in her numerous testimonies, Bentley invariably spoke in half truths. With her memories blurred by martinis and stimulated by what she read in the press, consistency was not one of her strong points, and by the time her allegations were repeated and passed on, the truth – if there ever was one – became even more mangled. In his response to Gouzenko's lawyer, Sears had demonstrated the Kafkaesque absurdity of having a court case center around Elizabeth Bentley's allegations. The jury found in favor of the defendant.
Gouzenko's last legal action, initiated in the spring of 1982, was once more against the Toronto Star. It related to an article entitled, ironically, “Libel: The Dark Cloud.”47 In discussing the growing trend of libel suits, the author, Daniel Stoffman, used Gouzenko as one example, citing his cases against John Sawatsky and June Callwood and noting generally that some individuals used libel suits as “a chance to cash in.” This naturally infuriated Gouzenko, who went straight to his lawyer. His case was weak and it is unlikely he would have won, but as it was he died two months later.
Stoffman criticized Gouzenko for trying to prevent people from writing about him unfavorably by intimidating them with the possibility of legal action.48 And he was of course right. Gouzenko had a vision of how he wanted to appear to others, and he did not want anyone to challenge that vision. (Yet he squandered the opportunity to tell the story himself. In 1974, he signed a contract with McGraw-Hill to publish his autobiography. Two years later, after collecting fifteen thousand dollars in advances, he had not produced a word.) The irony of Gouzenko's attempts to muzzle the press was that his tactics were similar to those used by the authorities in his former country, the Soviet Union. He claimed he was attracted to Canada because of its freedom and democracy, yet he attacked those same principles. As one Canadian writer observed, “In Russia they change history by destroying the evidence of what happened. I guess he didn't realize this. Allegedly he was attacking that vicious system which nurtured him and here he was playing the same role of book burner and record destroyer and perverter of the facts.”49
But one acquaintance of Gouzenko had a less harsh and probably more fair explanation for Gouzenko's litigiousness: “He gave a great deal of thought to these cases. He had been left in a situation where he couldn't live in the open. It's like some great athlete who's living in the past and is obsessed by days gone by. To some extent, here's a man who had this incredible public exposure at one time and was a cause célèbre . . . he may have even put too much emphasis and importance on his own life, as we all do, but he had more reason than most of us. So I think you have a man who was obsessed with his place in history and how to protect it and enhance it, or at least establish the truth from his point of view.”50
Gouzenko had a heart attack in June 1982 while he was sitting at the dining-room table pretending to conduct a symphony that was playing on the radio. He died instantly. The funeral was a quiet affair, attended only by the i
mmediate family and a couple of acquaintances who knew his real identity. The minister who conducted the funeral referred to him as Mr. George Brown, a pseudonym he often used when he met people for the first time. It was as if Gouzenko, the famous defector, had never existed.51
Gouzenko's preoccupation with his place in history stemmed from the fateful decision he made in 1945 to escape from his native Russia and put his and Anna's lives in the hands of a Western democracy. Given the sacrifices they had made, it was crucial for him to affirm that his defection had a significant impact. As we know, Gouzenko's inspiration in making his fateful decision was Viktor Kravchenko.52 Kravchenko, in his own words, chose “a precarious freedom against a comfortable enslavement,” knowing of the possible “frightening consequences” of what he did.53 Indeed, his decision to defect resulted in tragedy for those he left behind. Kravchenko's first wife, whom he had divorced before he left the Soviet Union, was shot. His son from that marriage, Valenin, was sent to a Soviet labor camp because he refused to denounce his father.
Twenty years after his defection, in 1964, Kravchenko took his own life.54 His two decades of “precarious freedom” had come at a great cost.
Things had turned out much better for Gouzenko. He had Anna by his side throughout, and together they showed a remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in forging new lives in Canada. Their daughter Evelyn says that “even to the day they died, not once did they regret their choice.”55 But there must have been times when her parents wondered what would have happened had they chosen differently and returned, as ordered by the GRU, to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1945. Gouzenko had been convinced he was in some sort of trouble with his bosses in Moscow. Indeed, though Gouzenko did not know it, Colonel Mil'shtein had given him a negative report when he returned from his trip to North America.
But if Gouzenko had been in serious trouble, the GRU would not have granted Zabotin's request to let him stay another year. Even with a black mark on his record, Gouzenko might not have fared too badly back in Moscow. Yes, the atmosphere was tense, fueled by the rivalry between the GRU and the NKVD, and by political intrigues in Stalin's Kremlin. But the purges of the late thirties and the war had depleted the ranks of the intelligence services. The GRU could ill afford to dispose of an intelligent and well-trained cipher clerk for some small malfeasance. Domestic life for the Gouzenkos back in Russia would have meant a crowded communal apartment (unless Anna's father had some pull with the housing bureaucrats) with just the bare necessities to survive on. They could not have supported more than two children. Nonetheless, if Gouzenko had worked hard and avoided trouble, there would have been more postings abroad and promotions. In the end, as the Soviet Union recovered from the devastation of the war, Igor and Anna might have lived reasonably comfortably – and, above all, they would not have sacrificed their family members to the grim retribution of Stalin's system.
But Gouzenko always said his choice was about more than physical comfort, or even freedom. He had hoped his defection, in exposing the evil intentions of the Soviet Union, would heighten the West's vigilance against spies and strengthen its resolve to stand up to the Soviet Union militarily. He had also imagined he would serve as an example for others to defect, thereby destabilizing Stalin's espionage apparatus and weakening the Soviet state. His case, and the ensuing spy scare in the West, most certainly provided the impetus for the United States, Canada, and Great Britain to strengthen their counterintelligence operations and heighten their vigilance. It also helped create the atmosphere that led to the U.S. military buildup and its determination to maintain nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.
It would, however, take almost fifty years from the time Gouzenko defected for the Soviet Union to collapse. And, contrary to what Gouzenko had envisaged, it was not a weakened security and intelligence service that caused the demise of the Soviet Union. Rather, it was a corrupt and inefficient communist bureaucracy that ignored the country's problems until it was too late. Indeed, although there were continued defections throughout the years of the Cold War from both the GRU and the NKVD's successor organizations, these agencies became steadily stronger and more effective.56
Gouzenko's defection, we know, created a crisis at NKVD and GRU headquarters in Moscow.57 The first reaction of the intelligence chiefs was to “cut and run.” Spies were called back home and spying operations curtailed dramatically. Then, in 1947, came a complete reorganization of the intelligence services. At the instigation of Foreign Minister Molotov, the GRU was merged with what had earlier been the Foreign Intelligence Service of the NKVD into a single organization, called the Committee of Information (KI), under Molotov's chairmanship. The new arrangement worked out badly. According to Vitalii Pavlov, who was directly affected, “The amalgamation of the different services – political and military intelligence – turned out to be an impractical venture. The sharp differences in the style of work of the two different units soon led to ineffective intelligence operations. . . . During the time that the ki existed the level of precision in solving the problems of foreign intelligence declined.”58
The experiment was short-lived. In 1948 military intelligence returned to the GRU, and by late 1951 the security services had reclaimed their foreign intelligence functions. Once Stalin and Beria were gone, the way was paved in 1954 for the new political leadership, led by Nikita Khrushchev, to introduce significant changes in the intelligence and security services and expand their operations. Khrushchev and his successors realized that their ambitious goals of extending Soviet power internationally and achieving military parity with the United States could not be accomplished without extensive foreign-intelligence operations. Beginning with Khrushchev, Soviet leaders pursued a policy of not only building up the strength of the services domestically and internationally, but also relying on them as a base of political support.
By 1982, the year Gouzenko died, the prestige and might of the KGB had risen to the point that one of its own, Iurii Andropov, became the Soviet leader. Andropov, since 1967, had been chief of the KGB, which incorporated both foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence. He was not a reformer in the Western sense of the word. As ambassador to Hungary, he had in 1956 presided over the Soviet invasion of that country. And in 1968, he urged the Politburo to move Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. But he was sophisticated enough to understand that organizations must change with the times, and he managed to create a cadre of foreign-intelligence officers that in terms of training and professionalism was second to none. The high salaries, military ranks, and access to foreign currency offered by the KGB, as well as the opportunity to live abroad, attracted the best and the brightest from within the Soviet Union. The new breed of intelligence officer was well educated and fluent in several languages, with a broad knowledge of other cultures and a great deal of self-confidence.
The same was true of the GRU, Gouzenko's former agency, which expanded its operations abroad considerably in the late 1970s and 1980s, taking advantage of a more relaxed Western attitude toward Russians in the period of détente. The typical GRU officer at this time (and their numbers were constantly expanding) had all the scientific expertise and training necessary to supply the Soviet military with the vital intelligence. According to one source, the GRU was, “because of its overall scientific orientation, its bolder operational style, its increased collection opportunities that reflect a wider variety of technology-related cover positions overseas, and its clearer understanding of collection objectives,” even more successful than the KGB.59 This was a far cry from the days of Zabotin and his colleagues, who lacked the expertise to discern what was scientifically important and the incentive to devote themselves to their jobs.
The response of the allies to Gouzenko's revelations about Soviet espionage, particularly in the United States, where a new Central Intelligence Agency was established in 1947, gave additional incentive to the intelligence agencies in Moscow. (If we are to believe Pavlov, the creation of the ki in that year was a r
eaction to the establishment of the CIA.) A new kind of war had begun with the West, a war in which the soldiers were spies, and the Kremlin was determined to win. The stakes were high, because the Soviets also wanted to surpass the Americans in the arms race, and in order to do so they needed all the information they could get on Western military technology. It is no small wonder that, by the end of the 1980s, both the KGB and the GRU, with the aid of their colleagues in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, had developed into vast intelligence empires that played key roles in determining and implementing Soviet foreign policy.
What contributed to the Soviets’ success in the intelligence wars of the 1970s and 1980s was the skill they acquired in recruiting and handling Western agents. Ideology could no longer be used to convert Westerners into spies, as it had been in the days of Philby and his Cambridge colleagues. Communism had lost its appeal, even among members of the Soviet elite, who used it mainly as window dressing for a regime that was based on coercion rather than consensus. But, as Gouzenko pointed out in his 1954 interview with SISS, money always held an allure. Three of the most important American spies – John Walker, who started spying for the KGB in 1967; Robert Hanssen, who offered his services to the GRU in 1979; and Aldrich Ames, recruited by the KGB in 1985 – all betrayed their country for money. All were eventually caught and prosecuted, but not without having inflicted significant damage on American national security. Walker, for example provided the KGB with U.S. cryptographic secrets that enabled them to decipher coded military messages for almost twenty years. Ames and Hanssen passed on information that resulted in the deaths of several Western agents in Russia.