and political impotence.’ It has been suggested that Roosevelt agreed to Stalin’s plans in return for the Soviet leader’s support for the establishment of the United Nations. (It’s worth noting that the NKVD had the US delegation’s property bugged, and that the Soviets regarded another of Roosevelt’s advisers, Harry Hopkins, almost as one of their own — Hopkins wasn’t a Communist by conviction, but he accepted that the Soviets would inevitably be the dominant power in Europe after the end of the war, and advised the president accordingly.)
When the leaders met at Yalta in 1945, following the successful invasion on D-Day, the war was all but over. Russian and Allied troops were virtually in Berlin, and great swathes of Eastern Europe were now to all intents and purposes governed by Moscow. As one of Roosevelt’s advisers Bernard Baruch pointed out, it would be futile ‘to demand of Russia what she thinks she needs and most of which she now possesses’. Poland would be under Soviet rule, although Stalin promised there would be elections. Germany would be divided into four zones, with Berlin itself divided, an island within the Soviet zone.
Charles Bohlen felt that Stalin was hoodwinking the president. ‘What [Roosevelt] did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions,’ he wrote. ‘The existence of a gap between the Soviet Union and the United States, a gap that could not be bridged, was never fully perceived by Franklin Roosevelt.’ Roosevelt himself said, ‘I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.’
But Stalin had no intention of following through on his promises. Roosevelt told Congress that he hoped the Yalta agreement would ‘spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed’. It was a naive view, at best. Stalin refused to allow Western observers in for the elections, and Roosevelt realized, less than three weeks before his death, that: ‘We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.’
On 12 April 1945, Roosevelt died of a cerebral haemorrhage. His successor, Harry S. Truman, was a great deal blunter than Roosevelt had ever been: when the Soviet Foreign Minister complained that he had never been addressed in such a way, after a dressing-down by the president, Truman replied, ‘Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.’ It was Truman who sat down with Churchill — and then new British Prime Minister Clement Atlee, whose Labour Party took power in the post-war election that occurred mid-conference — and Stalin at Potsdam, a suburb in the south-west of Berlin, and discovered that most of the important decisions had already been taken and Stalin had no intention of accepting any decisions that didn’t directly benefit the Soviet Union’s plans. Truman’s priority, initially, was the still-continuing war in the Far East, and gaining Soviet support for that. In the end, though, the use of the atom bomb, first at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, prompted the Japanese surrender — and Truman could focus on the Soviet duplicity that he saw. Duplicity that would be revealed in detail when a cypher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected to the West that September.
Just as the record executive who turned down the Beatles has gone down in history as missing one of the great opportunities of the twentieth century, in espionage terms so did the night editor at the
Igor Gouzenko had decided to defect from his post at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. Although he was officially employed as a cypher clerk, he was in fact a lieutenant in Soviet Army intelligence, the GRU, and became determined to claim asylum when he learned that he and his family were due to return to the Soviet Union. He was well aware that anyone who served overseas was regarded with suspicion by the Soviet secret police, and he knew that life in Canada, even with the inevitable austerity post-war, would be better than in his homeland. In order to ensure that the Canadians would allow him to stay, rather than simply returning him to the embassy, he appropriated a packet containing more than a hundred decrypted messages that provided details of recent Soviet espionage against both Canada and the US.
Gouzenko tried to interest both the
The papers that Gouzenko brought with him were dynamite. Although they referred to agents by code- names, there was enough in plain language to reveal a string of Soviet informants in all manner of places. ‘The amazing thing,’ Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary after he had been briefed on the information Gouzenko provided, ‘is how many contacts have been successfully made with people in key positions in government and industrial circles.’
In their official history, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) credits Gouzenko’s revelations with:
… usher[ing] in the modern era of Canadian security intelligence. Previously, the ‘communist menace’ had been viewed by authorities in terms of its threat to the labour movement. Gouzenko’s information showed that the Soviets of the day were interested in more than cultivating disaffected workers: they were intent on acquiring military, scientific, and technological information by whatever means available to them. Such knowledge had become the key to advancement, and the Soviets intended to progress.
The information he provided led to a sweeping investigation and arrests under the Canadian War Measures Act. Eleven of the twenty-one Canadians arrested were convicted, including member of parliament Fred Rose, the only Communist ever elected to the Canadian governing body.
The British and Americans, understandably, wanted to know more about Gouzenko’s revelations, particularly since it was ‘supported by convincing documentary [evidence of] political and scientific espionage’, according to the official report. MI5 agent Roger Hollis was sent to assist with debriefing, and passed information back to London — although since one of the contacts there was Soviet agent Kim Philby, Moscow Centre was kept up to speed on the revelations, and able to attempt to minimise the damage.
There was little they could do, though. Gouzenko’s material revealed one of the key Soviet agents involved with Moscow Centre’s attempts to obtain information about the American atomic program — something that the Soviets had been interested in for some considerable period.
The Gouzenko papers specifically identified the scientist Alan Nunn May as one of the agents in place within the Manhattan Project, the code-name for the development of the atomic bomb. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain since the thirties, Nunn May had offered information to the Soviets about the possibility of a ‘dirty’ nuclear bomb in 1941. When he was sent to Canada in January 1943 to work on the Manhattan Project, he became part of the GRU network run out of the Ottawa embassy by Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, and passed both information and samples of Uranium-235 to the Soviets, apparently in exchange for two bottles of whiskey and $700, which Nunn May said he burned. When he returned to Britain he was eventually arrested by MI5, and confessed. He would later be sentenced to ten years in prison, despite his barrister’s argument that at the time he passed the materials, the Soviets were British allies. The Soviets’ other key mole within the Manhattan Project would remain safe for a while longer.
While the RCMP and MI5 were probing Gouzenko’s secrets, the FBI were dealing with revelations of their own when one of the longest-standing Soviet agents on American soil came in of her own free will and began blowing open various Soviet intelligence operations.
Elizabeth Bentley, later known as the Red Spy Queen, had joined the CPUSA in 1935, and when she got a job working for the Italian Library of Information — a propaganda bureau for the fascist Italian regime — based in New York City three years later, she offered her services as a spy. NKVD agent Jacob Golos became her controller, although Bentley maintained that she was unaware that she was in the employ of Moscow Centre for at least two years. In 1940, when Golos was forced to register under the Foreign Aliens Registration Act, Bentley became the intermediary with his rings of agents, and took charge of Golos’ cover operation, the United States Service and Shipping Corporation. During the war, she ran the Silvermaster group, a network based around Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an economist with the War Production Board, which passed information on German military strength and American munitions production, as well as other useful material, back to Moscow.
When Golos died of a heart attack in 1943, Bentley, code-named
