Paul Simpson: A Brief History of the Spy

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 Ottawa Journal and the Canadian Ministry of Justice in his story, but no one listened. Eventually his neighbour, a Canadian Air Force officer, took pity on him, and allowed Gouzenko to hide on his property. He then contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who watched from Dundonald Park as NKVD agents searched Gouzenko’s apartment, desperately looking for the defector.

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 Umnitsa (Miss Wise) by Moscow, continued with his spying activities, now reporting to Iskhak Akhmerov, the leading NKVD agent in the USA. The CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder supported her desire to keep agents reporting via her, rather than directly to Akhmerov, but in June 1944 Browder changed his mind. ‘I discovered then that Earl Browder was just a puppet, that somebody pulled the strings in Moscow,’ Bentley would later say, suggesting that this was what led her to defect.

Soviet intelligence began to become mistrustful of Bentley when she began dating Peter Heller, who they suspected worked for the FBI. They suggested that she emigrate to the Soviet Union, but Bentley refused. Instead, she visited an FBI field office in August 1945, but didn’t defect at that stage. After a row with her new controller, Anatoly Gorsky (who had come over to deal with the American networks following his successes with Philby and the other members of the Magnificent Five in London from 1940 onwards), she realized that she was in serious danger from Moscow Centre — and Gorsky indeed recommended that they get rid of her. When she learned that Louis Budenz, one of her sources, had defected, her mind was made up.

Elizabeth Bentley began to tell her story to the FBI on 7 November 1945, and from that date onwards provided reams of information that would reveal the extent of Soviet infiltration of all levels of American society. She named around 150 agents working for the Soviet Union, including thirty-seven federal employees, and informed the Bureau that ‘the Russians are most interested in placing someone in the employment of the FBI, especially as a special agent… The Russians have been trying for two years to place someone in the employment of the FBI, with negative results… The FBI was the only government agency that they could not crack and money was no object to accomplish this.’

Perhaps buoyed by the news that the Russians considered them impregnable, the FBI thought that they were on the verge of rounding up multiple spy rings, particularly when the information Bentley provided tallied with the material from Igor Gouzenko — but once again, Moscow Centre seemed to know everything ahead of time, and the various agents were no longer contacted by their Russian controllers. The reason? Once again, in his role with MI6, Kim Philby was kept in the loop — and passed on the bad news to Moscow, who cabled out to their American agents to ‘cease immediately their connection with all persons known to Bentley in our work [and] to warn the agents about Bentley’s betrayal’.