The First War of Physics (56 page)

He returned later that evening, but the night editor found him shaking, white as a sheet and incoherent. ‘It’s war. It’s war. It’s Russia’, he mumbled in poor English. Nobody at the
Ottawa Journal
could figure out what Gouzenko wanted. The night editor recommended that he go to the RCMP, at the Ministry of Justice a short walk away. Gouzenko could no longer think straight. He went to the justice building but asked instead to see the Minister of Justice, Louis St Laurent, only to be told to come back the next morning.

He returned the next morning with both Anna, now pregnant with their second child, and young Andrei. Anna carried the stolen documents in her handbag. Gouzenko insisted that he talk only to the Minister of Justice. A trip to the minister’s other office on Parliament Hill was in vain. The Gouzenkos returned to the justice building and waited with growing impatience as messages went back and forth.

The Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was informed. ‘It was like a bomb on top of everything and one could not say how serious it might be or where it might lead’, King wrote in his diary later that night. King was concerned that a high-profile defection would sour relations with an important wartime ally. ‘My own feeling is that the individual has incurred the displeasure of the Embassy and is really seeking to shield himself, he concluded. The message came back two hours later that Gouzenko should return to the Soviet embassy and return the documents he had stolen.

The Gouzenkos fared no better back at the
Ottawa Journal.
Although Gouzenko was now able to make his intentions clear to a journalist, the newspaper’s editors decided against running his story, concerned at what publication might mean for Canadian-Soviet relations. ‘Nobody wants to say anything but nice things about Stalin these days’, he was told. The journalist suggested they take out naturalisation papers. If they became naturalised Canadian citizens, she suggested, perhaps this would put them out of reach of the Soviets.

They left Andrei with a neighbour and headed for the Canadian Crown Attorney’s office on Nicholas Street. They were given naturalisation papers, and told to return the next day to arrange for photographs. Only then did Gouzenko think to ask how long the process would take. ‘Oh,’ he was told, ‘I can’t tell you for sure. A few months, perhaps.’ Anna burst into tears.

Gouzenko now poured out his story to a sympathetic secretary at the Crown Attorney’s office. She promised to help, and called the RCMP. A Mountie came over to the office to talk to Gouzenko but concluded that there was nothing he could do. The secretary then called the RCMP’s assistant chief of intelligence, who at first claimed ‘we can’t touch him’, but eventually agreed to see Gouzenko the next morning.

Gouzenko was by now certain to have been missed at the Soviet embassy, and he and Anna were now in real fear for their lives. On returning to their apartment, Gouzenko spotted two men watching from a park bench across the street. He presumed they were NKVD agents. The Gouzenkos entered the building unobserved by a back entrance and collected Andrei from their neighbour. Not long after settling back in their own apartment, at No. 4, 511 Somerset Street, somebody began pounding on the door and shouting Gouzenko’s name. Gouzenko recognised the voice. It was Zabotin’s chauffeur. They held their breath. Eventually the chauffeur walked away.

Gouzenko now sought help from another neighbour, Harold Main, at No. 5. The Mains were cooling themselves on their balcony. Gouzenko
explained his situation and Main, a corporal in the Royal Canadian Air Force, offered to contact the Ottawa police. Two police constables arrived shortly afterwards and agreed to keep the apartment under surveillance. The Gouzenkos were given temporary shelter by another neighbour, at No. 6. The police seemed to know what was happening, and Main thought that they had already been in contact with the RCMR Later that evening four ‘sleazy-looking’ Russians led by NKVD agent Vasily Pavlov broke into the Gouzenkos’ apartment and started searching for the missing documents.

They were soon confronted by the police constables as Gouzenko watched from across the hallway. Pavlov claimed that the apartment was Soviet property, and that they had permission from the owner to enter it. One of the constables observed wryly that if they had permission to enter the apartment, why had they forced the door? Various exchanges ensued, and Pavlov insisted that the police constables leave. The constables had by now called their inspector to the scene and refused to leave until he arrived. The inspector arrived and continued the interrogation. The Russians eventually backed off, and departed.

A policeman remained with the Gouzenkos in their neighbours’ apartment until the next morning, when they were taken into protective custody by the RCMP. In fact, the two men watching the apartment from across the street were RCMP officers, not NKVD agents. The Gouzenkos were moved to a safe house, where Igor’s lengthy de-briefing began. He bought the documents, totalling about 250 pages, with him.

It had all been far from straightforward. It had taken Gouzenko two days, but he had now successfully defected to the West.

Codename Alek

The documents that Gouzenko had taken from the Soviet embassy included GRU dossiers on its spies, a series of cables between Ottawa and Moscow, a mailing list and numerous notes prepared by Zabotin and his assistant. Some were handwritten in Russian, some were written in shorthand, making them difficult to decipher. They provided evidence of two spy rings,
one operated by Zabotin and the GRU and a second run by Pavlov for the NKVD. Implicated were Canadian Communist Party officials, members of the Canadian government and the Canadian Department of External Affairs, the Canadian armed forces and scientists and engineers. The list of spies exposed by Gouzenko was not limited to Canada. Also implicated were officials in the American State Department, the British High Commission in Ottawa and the British intelligence services. The documents even exposed a Soviet spy ring operating in Switzerland.

One of the most important of the spies identified by Gouzenko was Alan Nunn May, referred to by his codename ALEK in the cables that had gone back and forth between Ottawa and Moscow. This was a major embarrassment to MI5 and the British government. May had made no secret of his Communist sympathies while at Cambridge and it now transpired that he had never been security screened before joining Tube Alloys. May was scheduled to return to Britain on 15 September to take up his lectureship at King’s College London. He was put under surveillance during his last few days in Montreal and shadowed by an RCMP officer during his flight to London. On arrival in Britain, surveillance duties were passed to two officers of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, a specialist police unit dealing with counter-terrorism and subversion.

Zabotin had sent a cable to Moscow at the end of July with suggestions for the protocol to be followed to re-establish contact with May in London:

We have worked out the conditions of a meeting with ALEK in London. ALEK will work in King’s College, Strand. It will be possible to find him there through the telephone book. Meetings: October 7.17.27 on the street in front of the British Museum. The time, 11 o’clock in the evening. Identification sign: A newspaper under the left arm. Password: Best regards to Mikel.

The dates referred to 7 October, with fall-back options of 17 and 27 October if the meeting on the 7th failed to occur for whatever reason. Zabotin had received a reply on 22 August recommending that the time
be changed to 8:00pm and a slightly more complex series of recognition signals and passwords be adopted. Gouzenko’s evidence against May was in itself insufficient to warrant an arrest, so MI5 laid plans to catch May in the act of meeting his Soviet contact.

The meeting never happened, on 7 October or on the fall-back dates. Some time later, May declared that he did not keep the appointment because ‘this clandestine procedure was no longer appropriate in view of the official release of information and the possibility of satisfactory international control of atomic energy’.

There is another possible explanation, however. Both MI5 and the British SIS had been alerted to Gouzenko’s defection soon after 7 September. Stewart Menzies, the head of the SIS, received information about the case channelled through William Stephenson, the Canadian-born representative of British intelligence in the Western hemisphere.
³
Menzies and his chief of counter-intelligence, ‘Kim’ Philby, followed the developments very closely. Philby was also an NKVD ‘mole’, and was sending warnings about Gouzenko to Moscow within weeks of his defection. Philby assessed the evidence against May and, although he reasoned that this was inconclusive, he may have warned May that he was under surveillance.

The Canadian, American and British administrations and their intelligence services were by now embroiled in a debate about what to do next. Opinions varied. King was eager to deal with the matter quietly and diplomatically, confronting the Soviets with evidence of their wrongdoing and asking them politely to stop. Truman favoured keeping the Gouzenko case under wraps for the time being, fearing that a major diplomatic incident would greatly damage efforts to reach an international agreement on the control of atomic energy. Truman and his Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson recommended that May not be arrested by the British unless this became absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile Roger Hollis, MI5’s chief of counter-intelligence against Communist subversion, appointed by Philby as the principal British intelligence liaison on the Gouzenko case, argued that any action short of arrest would be perceived ‘as weakness and the effect of this would be to worsen and not to improve relations’. Hollis feared that May’s defection to the Soviet Union was imminent.

To make matters worse, Truman was having to deal with a burgeoning spy scandal of his own. On 6 November, Vassar graduate Elizabeth Bentley had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union and offered to defect. She had acted as a courier between NKVD agent Jacob Golos (with whom she had had an affair) and a number of American government officials. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover asked that no action be taken in the Gouzenko case until the FBI had had the opportunity to analyse and corroborate her evidence.

In the meantime, May continued to behave perfectly normally. He delivered his lectures, moved into rooms at Stafford Terrace in Kensington and lived a relatively quiet life.

UN Atomic Energy Commission

Truman’s concern to avoid a major diplomatic incident over the Gouzenko affair betrayed a growing anxiety over the question of the international control of atomic weapons. He had sought advice from Oppenheimer in October 1945, suggesting that his administration first deal with the issue of domestic controls, then international controls. ‘The first thing is to define the national problem,’ he told Oppenheimer, ‘then the international.’ Oppenheimer disagreed. He thought it imperative to define and resolve the international problem first.

Oppenheimer went on to voice his own misgivings. ‘I feel we have blood on our hands’, he remarked. Truman was indignant. The scientists might have discovered atomic energy but it had been his decision to use the bomb against Japan. The last thing he needed was a ‘cry baby’ scientist. ‘Never mind,’ he told Oppenheimer, ‘It’ll all come out in the wash.’ But although Truman did not share Oppenheimer’s sense of guilt, he had
grown increasingly concerned about the indiscriminate destructiveness of the bomb. He had begun to realise that this was a weapon that could never be used again.

Truman met British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King in Washington on 11 November. The problem they now wrestled with was one of basic atomic physics. The materials and production processes required to use atomic energy for peaceful, civilian purposes could not easily be disentangled from the materials and production processes required for atomic bombs. The civilian use of atomic energy required the building of nuclear reactors for power generation. However, the spent fuel rods of certain kinds of nuclear reactors were potential sources of plutonium that could be used to produce atomic bombs. While the leaders of the three countries in possession of the knowledge essential to the use of atomic energy accepted the importance of the free interchange of scientific knowledge, they were not convinced that spreading specialised atomic information was wise until appropriate international safeguards had been put in place.

In their joint declaration, issued on 15 November, Truman, Attlee and King acknowledged what Bohr had understood immediately on arriving at Los Alamos in early 1944:

We recognize that the application of recent scientific discoveries to the methods and practice of war has placed at the disposal of mankind means of destruction hitherto unknown, against which there can be no adequate military defence, and in the employment of which no single nation can in fact have a monopoly.

The declaration went on to call for an international commission to be established under the auspices of the United Nations:

In order to attain the most effective means of entirely eliminating the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes and promoting its widest use for industrial and humanitarian purposes, we are of the opinion that at the earliest practicable date a commission should be set up under
the United Nations Organization to prepare recommendations for submission to the organization.

In his discussion with Terletsky, Bohr had commented on the meeting in Washington, and expressed hope for a further consultation on international control with the Soviet Union. ‘We have to keep in mind,’ he told Terletsky, ‘that atomic energy, having been discovered, cannot remain the property of one nation, because any country which does not possess this secret can very quickly independently discover it. And what is next? Either reason will win, or a devastating war, resembling the end of mankind.’

Byrnes had learned at the Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London that the Soviet Union was not about to be cowed by the threat of atomic weapons. A week after the Truman-Atdee-King declaration was issued, Byrnes suggested to Molotov that he host a further, interim, meeting to include the American, British and Soviet foreign ministers, in Moscow in December. Molotov immediately accepted. Relatively little had been agreed at the London conference, so the agenda of the Moscow meeting would be virtually identical. This time, however, Byrnes wanted international control of atomic weapons high on the agenda. Molotov, still minded to be stubborn, moved it to the bottom.