Igor dreamed of becoming an architect, and while studying in Moscow he met and married Svetlana (Anna) Gouseva. But Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941, put an end to personal dreams.. After basic training in the Red Army, Igor received a year of training as a cipher clerk.
In May of 1943, the 24 year old Lieutenant was reassigned to the Soviet Embassy on Charlotte Street in Ottawa, Canada (above), to work coding and decoding messages for “spymaster” Colonel Nicolai Zabotin.
As an officer in the GRU - Soviet Military Intelligence, - Colonel Nicolai Zabotin (above) was aware of how much he depended on the talents of the young Igor, which is why Zabotin obtained permission for Igor’s pregnant wife, Svetlana , to join him in Ottawa in October of 1943. It was a not a boon the Stalinist security structure usually granted.
And to accommodate the wife of his favorite code clerk, Zabotin even gave them an apartment, at 511 Somerset Street in Ottawa (above). The couple were stunned. "In Moscow," Igor would later say, "a place that size would have been shared by four or five families." And it was while living in such relative opulence, in June of 1944, the loving couple welcomed a bouncing baby boy.
In September of 1944 the NKGB - the Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs - ordered the happy couple and their 3 month old son to return home to Soviet Russia. Because he had two more years left of a standard tour of duty, Igor believed he was suspected of some violation, or perhaps had made a mistake. And even if he could defend himself, he feared that because he knew so much about Soviet espionage in Canada and the United States, he would likely be imprisoned in a Siberian gulag (above) to keep him quiet. And if he were lucky enough to be allowed to return to Canada, his son and wife, who was now carrying their second child, would not be permitted to join him The families of agents overseas were effective hostages, should an agent contemplate making a dash for freedom.
Lieutenant Gouzenko appealed to Colonel Zabotin, who granted him a year’s extension. But as that extension began to run out in August of 1945, Igor decided to run out, too. He began to stuff what would eventually be 109 top secret cables and documents under his shirt and wear them home. Then, shortly after 8:00 pm on 5 September, 1945, just days after Japan formally surrendered bringing the Second World War to an end, Igor walked out of the embassy for the last time.
Unsure of just what to do next, Igor asked his next door neighbor, an officer in the Canadian Air Force, for advice. He suggested they should approach the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And that was what Igor immediately did, showing up at the headquarters with his family. But end of war celebrations were still going on, and the few people on duty had no idea what to do with their would-be Russian defectors. True, Igor had plenty of documents which indicated some sort of Soviet spy ring operating in Canada and the U.S.. But at the time the Russians were Canadian allies. The RCMP weren't even sure they should be looking at this stuff. They told Igor and his family they should come back tomorrow.
That night, while Igor and his family huddled, terrified, in the dark, on the floor of their apartment, there was an ominous pounding on their front door. They returned to the RCMP first thing the next morning. The officers asked some questions, and wrote down the answers, but then sent them home yet again.
That night their neighbor allowed the exhausted couple and their infant to sleep in his apartment. They heard more pounding on their door across the hall. It seemed likely that Colonel Zabotin had finally noticed the 109 documents that were missing from Igor’s desk. After another fruitless visit to the bewildered RCMP, Igor spent the day walking about the Canadian capital trying to find someone in some government agency who was interested in a desperate young man who had the code names and covers of an entire Soviet spy ring in their midst. He even applied for Canadian citizenship. Nobody was interested in his story.
In desperation that evening he walked into the newsroom of the Ottawa Journal (above) and blurted out to the night editor, “Its war. It’s Russia.” The editor suggested he go to the Department of Justice. The Gouzenkos tried, but found the offices of the Canadian Department of Justice were closed.
The calm of the next night was shattered when four burly men burst into Igor’s apartment and ransacked the place. Fortunately Igor and his little family were again sleeping on their neighbor’s furniture. But this time the neighbor called the police. The four men were detained long enough for all to be identified as employees of the Soviet embassy. But while the police officers looked the other way, the Russians escaped. The following day the embassy protested the brief detention of their staffers, and demanded the immediate return of the “criminal” Igor Gouzenko..
When Canadian Prime Minister, 70 year old William Lyon Mckenzie King, was told of the Soviet's demands, his first instinct was to hand Gouzenko and his family over. But before he could act,
Lieutenant Gourzenko and Svetlana suddenly appeared at the office of Justice Minister with their collection of documents. And this time somebody with a knowledge of intelligence actually looked at them. King would later claim, ""It was like a bomb on top of everything else."
On his own initiative, Under Secretary for External Affairs, Norman Robertson had the desperate Russian and his family swept up and transported to the secret "Camp X" on Lake Ontario (above), used during the war for the training of underground intelligence and sabotage agents inserted into occupied Europe. By this time, Igor was threatening suicide. And without asking Prime Minister King, Robertson granted the family asylum.
Prime Minister King asked the British Foreign Intelligence Service, MI-6, to evaluate Igor's information. The service sent two agents from their section 9, Kim Philby (above) and Roger Hollis, to interrogate Igor. What no one knew at the time was that both of these trusted and respected high ranking British intelligent agents were lifelong Communists, Russian moles right in the core of British Intelligence.
It appeared as if poor Igor was about to be betrayed, branded a fraud, and handed over to the murderous NKVD. But just a few days into his interrogation, the secret arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing of scientists Alan Nunn May (above) broke in the press. Until March he had been building the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor just outside of Ottawa, and handing the top secret designs directly over to Colonel Zabotin,. May was prominently mentioned in Gouzenko's documents. Even more importantly, shortly before all of this, a Soviet code book had been captured in Norway, which allowed the decoding of hundreds of secret Soviet transmissions. While everything to do with the code book was still top secret, it all confirmed everything Igor had been telling the Canadians. After all of this, to have questioned Gourzenko's information would have merely raised questions about Philby and Hollis. So they recommended the Canadians accept Igor as genuine and grant him asylum.
Among the 39 Soviet spies arrested because they were mentioned in Igor's documents was Fred Rose (above), a Communist Party member of the Canadian Parliament from Cartier, Quebec. He was in the perfect position to betray Canada and sway government policy in favor of the Soviet Union. He was convicted of espionage by the secret Kellock-Tascherau Commission, and served 4 1/2 years in prison. Stripped of his Canadian citizenship, Rose lived out the rest of his life in Warsaw, Poland, where he died in 1983.
Colonel Zabotin (above) was returned to the Soviet Union under arrest by the NKVD, where he was convicted as an enemy of the Soviet People for allowing his trusted cipher clerk to escape. He served 4 years in a labor camp. After that, nothing is known about his life. In six years Kim Philby would retire with honors from MI6, and in 1961, just before he was unmasked as a traitor, he would defect to the Soviet Union.
The cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, became George Brown. He and Svetlana, now Anna, were moved to Clarkson, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto. He wrote two books, and made publicity tours, always hidden inside a cloth hood.
The Browns lived middle class lives in Canada, raising 8 children and 16 grandchildren. Igor died in 1982, of complications of diabetes. Anna died in 2001. Their legacy was a victory for average people who just want to live their lives without becoming the playthings of ambitious egos, like Joseph Stalin.
And that is how the cold war started.
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