Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

IGA [grocery] and just look at the things in the store, just to see all these things and to know we could take this can and this bag and buy these things.”

Once he had decided to defect, Gouzenko, a small man whom one of his neighbors thought “a very quiet and well-behaved gentleman,” began surreptitiously tagging cables in his cipher files that revealed the activities of GRU espionage agents in Canada, including physicist Alan Nunn May, Member of Parliament Fred Rose, National Research Council scientists Durn-ford Smith, Edward Wilfred Mazerall and Israel Halperin and a dozen others. Gouzenko had tagged an accumulation of some 109 documents by the time it appeared that he was about to be transferred back to Moscow, including the cables that reported Nunn May's transfer of samples of U235 and U233 to Gouzenko's superiors. The young cipher clerk returned to the embassy after an evening out with the boys on the warm Wednesday night of September 5, gained access on a pretext, stuffed his loose shirt full of the cables he had tagged and nervously walked out the front door.

Gouzenko was naive enough to imagine that the Soviet Union's recent allies were eager to know of its espionage activities against them and would welcome him with open arms. From the Soviet Embassy he took a streetcar downtown to the Ottawa Journal, intending to see the editor. When a woman on the elevator recognized him — she asked him if there was news breaking at the embassy — he panicked, rode the elevator back to the ground floor and bolted. Eventually he caught a streetcar home. His wife, who had agreed to defect with him, calmed him down and advised him to try again. Time was of the essence. “You still have several hours before the Embassy learns what has happened,” she told him.

Back to the Ottawa Journal offices Gouzenko went, his shirt still stuffed with the incriminating cables. The City Room was crowded. An office boy told Gouzenko that the editor was gone for the night and led him to an older man wearing a green eyeshade. Gouzenko walked up to the man — the night city editor, Chester Frowde — and signaled that he wanted to speak to him in private. Frowde led Gouzenko, “short, with a tubby build, and… white as a sheet,” into the newspaper morgue, where Gouzenko's first words were, “It's war. It's war. It's Russia.” But he chose not to tell Frowde his story. “He just stood there apparently paralysed with fright,” Frowde recalled. Gouzenko, for his part, “could see from the man's expression that he thought I was crazy.” Frowde walked him to the elevator. Gouzenko claims Frowde brushed him off. Frowde says Gouzenko refused even to give his name.

Where next? Gouzenko asked himself out in the street. The Justice Building, he decided, to see the Minister of Justice. A young Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer guarding the door told him to come back in the morning and turned him away. Frightened, he went home. His wife tucked the documents into her purse and hid it under her pillow and then the two of them lay awake the rest of the night worrying.

In the morning, Gouzenko took his visibly pregnant wife and his young son with him back to the Justice Building. The receptionist sent the Gouzenkos to see a clerk, to whom Igor explained that he could only speak to the Minister of Justice himself. The clerk called ahead and then led the little family to the Parliament Building, where Gouzenko explained his mission to another clerk. The second clerk sent the message along. The Gouzenkos waited for two hours. “They were all panicking,” Svetlana Gouzenko concludes. “They were all just in a panic. Didn't know what to do.” Finally the Minister of Justice sent out word that they should go back to the Soviet Embassy and return the documents. The Gouzenkos assumed that Soviet agents within the government must have made so stupid and deadly a decision. In fact, it came directly from the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King, who seems to have been terrified that he might stir up trouble with the Soviet Union.

Svetlana proposed they try the Ottawa Journal once more. This time a reporter at least interviewed them, a woman named Elizabeth Fraser. “[Gouzenko] was utterly agitated,” Fraser recalled, “almost incoherent. He blurted out on our first encounter: ‘It's dess [death] if you can't help us’ and then proceeded to try to convince me that his situation was indeed as dangerous as he felt it to be. He said he had evidence with him of terrible Soviet spying activities against the western countries and that he wanted to save Canada from their perfidy, all of which, given the political climate of the time, sounded to me utterly fantastic.” Fraser went to a senior editor for advice. “I am terribly sorry,” Gouzenko reports she told him when she came back. “Your story just doesn't seem to register here. Nobody wants to say anything but nice things about Stalin these days.” Svetlana asked Fraser what they should do. Fraser suggested they talk to the Crown Attorney about filing for naturalization. “That should prevent the Reds from taking you back,” she theorized.

Desperately they trudged once again to the Justice Building. “The day was getting hot,” says Gouzenko. “… Anna was obviously growing weary.” They were told the applications clerk had gone to lunch. They went to lunch themselves and then took their son home and left him in the care of a neighbor. “Back we went to the Crown Attorney's office.” Only after they had wasted more time filling out naturalization papers did they learn that the process would take months.

So it went for the rest of the day. A woman in the Crown Attorney's office, Fernande Coulson, tried to help them, even to the extent of calling a reporter she knew and having Gouzenko translate extracts from the documents that referred to the atomic bomb. The reporter demurred. “It's too big for us to handle,” he told the Gouzenkos. “… It's a matter for the police or the government.” But neither the police nor the government expressed interest in the first important atomic espionage breakthrough since the beginning of Anglo-American atomic-bomb development. By the end of the day, Fernande Coulson had managed to convince an RCMP inspector to see the Gouzenkos — the next morning. Exhausted, knowing that by now Igor must have been missed at the embassy, the Gouzenkos went home. Coulson watched them out the window as they stumbled down the street and boarded a streetcar. “I said to myself: ‘That man may not be alive tomorrow.’”

Gouzenko sent his wife and child to the next building to hide while he reconnoitered his apartment. There were two men sitting on a bench in the park across the street, watching his windows. He thought they were probably NKVD and he took his wife and son around the back way. No sooner were they settled when someone began pounding on the door of the apartment and calling Gouzenko's name. Gouzenko recognized the man's voice — it was Zabotin's chauffeur. The Gouzenkos froze. Eventually the chauffeur went away. The men in the park were still watching. Gouzenko remembered that his neighbor next along the rear balcony, Harold Main, was a corporal in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He found the Mains on their balcony escaping the heat and asked if they would take care of his son if something happened to him. When the good sergeant learned what was wrong — Gouzenko told him the NKVD was making an attempt on their lives — he offered to take in Svetlana and the boy and summon the police. “He was a military man,” Svetlana Gouzenko comments, “and to tell him that one man can kill another was not new to him.” Fetched by Harold Main, the constables promised to keep the building under surveillance. In the meantime, Mrs. Main having objected to sheltering the Gouzenkos, another neighbor across the hall took them in.

At about ten o'clock that night, an NKVD officer and three embassy men — “three or four of them with a Russian-movie sleaze look to them,” remembers a neighbor who saw them out his window — pounded on Gouzenko's apartment door and then shouldered it open. After the Soviet raiding party had started searching the apartment, the constables stepped in with their guns drawn and demanded to know what was going on. The NKVD officer, invoking diplomatic immunity and insisting that the apartment was Soviet property, ordered the constables to leave the apartment. Instead they called in an inspector and the Soviets slunk away. The next morning the Mounties took the Gouzenkos into protective custody and questioned Gouzenko for five hours. The men watching from the park turned out to have been Mounties. “You weren't quite as neglected as you thought,” one of them told the Soviet cipher clerk.

Gouzenko had heard another, later knock on his apartment door the previous night but had not revealed himself hiding in his neighbor's apartment across the hall. The later visitor was Sir William Stephenson, the director of British intelligence in the Western Hemisphere whose code name was Intrepid, who wanted to hear Gouzenko's story. Luckily for Gouzenko, Stephenson happened to be visiting Ottawa from his offices in New York. He had urged Mackenzie King's deputy Norman Robertson to take Gouzenko when King had decided to send the Soviet defector back to the Soviet Embassy with his documents. After visiting Gouzenko's building, Stephenson had gone to Robertson's home in the middle of the night and had convinced him to place the Gouzenkos in protective custody.

The Canadian government spirited the Gouzenkos away to a safehouse and began Igor Gouzenko's lengthy debriefing. “It was much worse than what we would have believed,” King confided to his diary. Gouzenko's documents disclosed “an espionage system on a large scale.” Robertson told King “he felt that what we had discovered might affect the… Council of Foreign Ministers [then meeting in London]; that if publicity were given to this it might necessarily lead to a break in diplomatic relations between Canada and Russia and… in regard to other