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Heroes and Villians: Gouzenko vs Zarubin
[LAC/Wikimedia]
IGOR GOUZENKO
The Second World War ended on Sept. 2, 1945, with Japan’s official surrender. Three days later, a 26-year-old cipher clerk who had been posing as a junior diplomat at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa slipped out of his apartment with his wife and young son. Lieutenant Igor Sergeievich Gouzenko carried with him more than 100 documents detailing Soviet espionage efforts in Canada.
Gouzenko was the most junior of four undercover agents with the Soviet military’s intelligence agency (GRU) under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, the embassy’s military attaché. The clandestine GRU cell had begun work at the embassy in June 1943.
Gouzenko’s role was to encrypt and decipher coded transmissions to and from Moscow. This made him privy to reports detailing Soviet efforts to recruit and exploit Canadian politicians, scientists, bureaucrats and other officials. Primary targets included anyone with knowledge of the development of nuclear weapons—the Soviets were scrambling to catch up to their western Allies on this front. Accordingly, the team focused on penetrating the National Research Council Canada and the Defence Department’s research branch.
Everyone working in the embassy was closely surveilled by its resident secret police, the NKVD, for any hint of treasonous activity or attitudes.
His documents and testimony revealed to Canadian, U.K. and U.S. security services the extent and depth of Soviet espionage activities.
Gouzenko was entranced by the freedoms Canadians took for granted, but simultaneously feared the NKVD were closing in. “Even as I would breathe the clean, free Canadian air through the steel bars of the cipher-room window,” he said later, “there would come from behind and around me…ugly sounds.”
When Moscow ordered his return in September 1944, Zabotin—who liked Gouzenko—didn’t comply. Knowing time was running out, Gouzenko and his wife agreed to defect.
“I felt a great load lifted from me. The die had finally been cast.”
—Igor Gouzenko
“I felt a great load lifted from me. The die had finally been cast,” Gouzenko wrote in his memoirs. On Sept. 5, 1945, Gouzenko acted.
What ensued was farcical. During the family’s first 24 hours on the run, Gouzenko was rebuffed by government, police and reporters. He narrowly averted being caught by NKVD agents. Connecting with the RCMP the following day, Gouzenko was eventually taken seriously.
His documents and testimony revealed to Canadian, U.K. and U.S. security services the extent and depth of Soviet espionage activities. A chill between the West and Soviet Union developed, presaging the Cold War.
[Wikimedia]
GEORGI ZARUBIN
Igor Gouzenko’s defection caused panic within Ottawa’s Soviet embassy. Ambassador Georgi Zarubin became fully involved in efforts to get Gouzenko back to the Soviets. Two days after the defection, Zarubin wrote to the Canadian government.
He accused Gouzenko of stealing embassy money and that this led to NKVD agents raiding his apartment during the night of Sept. 6 (the police briefly detained the agents). Zarubin accused the cops of treating the agents “in a rude manner” and ignoring their diplomatic credentials. He demanded the officers be held “answerable for their actions” and that the federal government “take urgent measures” by arresting Gouzenko and surrendering him for deportation.
The government acceded to neither demand.
The same night that Zarubin submitted this letter, he and his wife met Prime Minister Mackenzie King at a garden party at the British High Commission. King noted in his dairy that Zarubin “looked quite concerned. Indeed, he had a very anxious look on his face.” Zarubin’s hopes that it might be possible to have Gouzenko secretly deported were dashed during a second meeting with King on Sept. 10. When King failed to mention Gouzenko at all, Zarubin realized the defection couldn’t be undone.
For his part, King was anxious to maintain the good relationship forged with Zarubin since he had opened the Ottawa embassy in May 1944. As autumn progressed, Gouzenko’s revelatory information exposed evermore Soviet perfidy. In December, King proposed using Zarubin to deliver a message to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin detailing everything the defector’s intelligence had revealed. King’s belief that both Zarubin and Stalin had been unaware of the spy activity wasn’t shared by Canada’s western allies, however, and they convinced King to abandon such communication.
Ambassador Georgi Zarubin became fully involved in efforts to get Gouzenko back to the Soviets.
Zarubin was soon recalled to Moscow and never returned. His career was seemingly unblemished, however, as he was appointed ambassador to the U.K. in 1946, then ambassador to the U.S. in 1952. He died on Nov. 24, 1958, in Moscow.
In Canada, a Royal Commission investigating Gouzenko’s claims led to 18 convictions, two more convictions in the U.K., and the eventual execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the U.S.
“He had a very anxious look on his face.”
—Prime Minister Mackenzie King
Gouzenko and his family were granted Canadian citizenship and new identities. He never appeared publicly without wearing a hooded mask to conceal his appearance. Gouzenko died on June 25, 1982.