On Sept. 5, 1945, a 26-year-old cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko walked out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa carrying documents that proved the Soviet Union had been running spy rings inside the country of its wartime ally, an act that helped touch off the Cold War and that nobody in Ottawa wanted to take seriously for two full days.
Gouzenko had arrived in the capital in 1943, posted to the cipher section of what was then the Soviet legation. According to Parks Canada, which documents the affair through its Louis S. St. Laurent National Historic Site, it was in that cipher room that he discovered the existence of espionage networks in Canada run by Col. Nikolai Zabotin, the Soviet military attache at the embassy. Robert Bothwell, writing in The Canadian Encyclopedia, notes that Gouzenko decided to defect after learning in 1945 that he and his family were to be sent home to the Soviet Union.
What followed was less a spy thriller than a bureaucratic farce. Parks Canada’s account says Gouzenko left the embassy on Sept. 5 with documents drafted mostly in Russian and walked into the offices of the Ottawa Journal, where he told his story. The paper decided the scoop was both dangerous and beyond the scope of a local daily, and suggested he try the Department of Justice the next morning.
He did. On Sept. 6, Gouzenko and his family attempted to see the justice minister, Louis St. Laurent, who would become prime minister three years later. St. Laurent’s staff had briefed him, but Parks Canada records that the minister preferred to verify the allegations before meeting the defector, reasoning that relations with the U.S.S.R. were good and that acting rashly could damage the friendship between the two countries.
The delay nearly cost Gouzenko everything. Soviet officials attempted to seize him, and only after that failed attempt did the Canadian government move. Bothwell writes that it was on Sept. 7, following the abortive recapture, that Gouzenko and his family were finally given protective custody. The affair then stayed secret for months while the government quietly assembled its case.
The reckoning came the following winter. Parks Canada says 13 suspects were arrested on Feb. 15, 1946, with the War Measures Act used as the legal justification, followed by a further 26 arrests on March 14. Sources differ on the initial figure: The Canadian Encyclopedia states that Mackenzie King’s government authorized the arrest of 12 suspects. Among those eventually caught up in the case was Fred Rose, the Montreal member of Parliament, whom Parks Canada lists under his birth name, Rosenberg.
The detainees were brought before what became known as the Kellock-Taschereau Royal Commission, named for the two Supreme Court of Canada judges who led it. Library and Archives Canada’s account of the affair notes the commission was handed a wide mandate and extraordinary legal powers, a point that has kept the Gouzenko case in Canadian civil liberties arguments ever since. In July 1946, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the commissioners confirmed that a spy ring had been operating in Canada, aimed among other things at the secrets of the atomic bomb. Conviction rates were mixed. Parks Canada records that seven of the 13 initial suspects were convicted, while of the 26 arrested in March, 11 were convicted, 10 acquitted and five released without indictment.
Gouzenko himself was given a new identity and lived the rest of his life under police protection. He wrote a memoir, This Was My Choice, in 1948, and a novel, The Fall of a Titan, which won a Governor General’s Award in 1954. When he surfaced for the occasional television interview, he wore a hood or a mask, an image that became his public trademark. He died near Toronto in June 1982, of what appeared to be natural causes, with the circumstances kept largely secret.
Eighty-one years on, the walk he took on Sept. 5, 1945 is still cited by historians as one of the moments the wartime alliance ended and the Cold War began, and it began in an Ottawa newsroom that turned him away.
