Mr. Gouzenko unmasked Soviet spy rings
in Canada, the United States and Britain, Moscow's wartime allies,
and he disclosed Stalin's efforts to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb.
SOVIET DEFECTOR IGOR GOUZENKO
The defection was the very first significant international event of the Cold War --
coming just three days after the Japanese surrender ending the Second World War.
And yet "there was no marker, no plaque, no nothing."
Yesterday [April 2005] I read the obituary of the American nuclear physicist, Philip Morrison, who had helped the USA build the first atomic bomb even though he was a suspected Soviet agent who admitted his involvement with the Communist Party. See ATOMIC-BOMB SCIENTIST COMMUNIST
I just finished reading GOUZENKO, The Untold Story, by John Sawatsky, published in 1984 (two years after Gouzenko's death in 1982). It's not a biography but an oral history comprised of interviews by the author of people who came in contact with Gouzenko after his defection, ie nieghbours, RCMP bodyguards, journalists and historians:
Here's what the inside flap of the cover says:
On the evening of September 5, 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk, walked out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa carrying 109 top-sescret documents and went to the Ottawa Journal in an attempt to present this hightly sensitive material to the Canadian public. In a period of supposedly friendly relations with Russia, Gouzenko claimed to have proof that a ring of Canadians - including Member of Parliament - was spying for the Soviets. So devastating was this revelation that historians have credited Gouzenko's defection with having launched the Cold War. From that moment on, Igor Gouzenko became a man of mystery, a hooded figure whose identity and whereabouts were a closely guarded secret...
I had previously read an article about Gouzenko, in 2003, and am posting it now so readers can learn about one of Canada's most famous unsung heroes. ~ Jackie Jura
Remembering a Soviet defector
Local history buff persuades Ottawa to officially mark Gouzenko legacy
Jeff Sallot, Globe & Mail, May 31, 2003
OTTAWA -- Almost 58 years after the event, municipal and federal officials are marking what many historians say was the opening shot of the Cold War, the defection in Ottawa of Soviet embassy code clerk Igor Gouzenko. In a simple ceremony on Wednesday, officials will unveil a plaque in a city park across the street from the two-storey apartment building where the Gouzenko family lived at the time of the defection on Sept. 5, 1945. That it took almost four years of relentless lobbying by Andrew Kavchak, an amateur local history buff, to have the plaque erected highlights the controversy and the international political intrigue that still surrounds the Gouzenko case.
Mr. Kavchak, 40, has personal cause to want to explore the dark past of Soviet perfidy. His grandfather was among the thousands of Polish soldiers executed on Stalin's orders in the Katyn forest massacre in 1940. Mr. Kavchak became intrigued by the Gouzenko story as a university student in Toronto. He read Mr. Gouzenko's autobiography and prowled used bookstores for other accounts of the early days of the Cold War. Years later, living in Ottawa, Mr. Kavchak often walked his young son in the park across from the Gouzenko apartment at 511 Somerset St. West. He sat on the park bench where RCMP undercover officers kept watch the night four thugs from the Soviet embassy came looking for the missing Gouzenko family -- Igor, Svetlana and their baby boy -- to haul them back to Moscow. Mr. Kavchak thought about the drama of that night, the Gouzenko family's narrow escape and all that followed.
Mr. Gouzenko unmasked Soviet spy rings in Canada, the United States and Britain, Moscow's wartime allies, and he disclosed Stalin's efforts to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb. The defection, Mr. Kavchak said, "was the very first significant international event of the Cold War" -- coming just three days after the Japanese surrender ending the Second World War. And yet "there was no marker, no plaque, no nothing."
Mr. Kavchak decided to remedy the situation. A federal public servant, he thought he knew all about bureaucracies. But he was unprepared for the false starts, U-turns and the back and forth between municipal authorities and branches of the federal government on the issue of whether the defection is worthy of commemoration. The project was almost shelved when some Canadian diplomats, worried about how the Russian government might take a Gouzenko memorial, advised the city against the idea, Mr. Kavchak said.
"When Kim Philby [the former British diplomat who spied for the Soviets] died, they gave him a state funeral in Moscow. When Igor Gouzenko died [in 1982], he was buried in an unmarked grave because people were afraid the Soviets or their sympathizers would deface it. . . . We have a difficult time dealing with the concept of heroes in Canada."
Soviet code clerks, privy to the darkest secrets of Moscow's military and political intelligence officers abroad, "could have defected from any embassy anywhere in the world, but they didn't. It happened here in Ottawa. Gouzenko did it here because he knew he was in a free country, that Canada is a wonderful country," Mr. Kavchak said.
The hesitation of officials in the Department of Foreign Affairs parallels the concern of wartime prime minister Mackenzie King, who feared the defection would jeopardize relations between the Western allies and Stalin. Mr. King tried to keep the defection secret, and when the facts leaked out he was almost apologetic. Mr. Gouzenko defected a full six months before Churchill's famous speech in Fulton, Mo., warning that an "Iron Curtain" was descending across Europe. The Russians were still being hailed as close friends and allies. The full extent of Stalin's expansionary ambitions was not yet evident to many observers in the West.
The importance of Mr. Gouzenko's defection cannot be doubted, said Martin Rudner, the director of Carleton University's Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies. "It was absolutely explosive, probably the single most important event in counterintelligence."
Mr. Gouzenko's information and the secret documents he brought with him from the Soviet embassy were the first pieces of hard evidence that the Soviets were spying on their allies, Prof. Rudner said. Mr. Gouzenko disclosed the existence of Soviet "sleeper networks" -- spy rings consisting of secret agents recruited at early ages and kept in place for years until they attained positions from which to influence the policies of their native countries or steal important scientific, military or political secrets. Until that point, Western leaders could not conceive of the idea that there might be traitors at high levels in their own governments, Prof. Rudner said.
The Gouzenko case probably prevented the sleepers in place in 1945 from recruiting second- and third-generation agents in Canada, Britain and the United States who could have done damage for decades, he said. The secret documents not only provided direct evidence of Soviet treachery; they gave Western code breakers texts that helped them decipher many other intercepted Soviet messages. "This was a great breakthrough. . . . If Gouzenko hadn't defected, the Soviets probably could have continued tracking American nuclear technology, missile technology, and saved themselves remarkable effort right through the Cold War," Prof. Rudner said.
A later defector to the West, former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin, brought a treasure trove of documents that included a damage-assessment report on the Gouzenko case. It indicated that Mr. Gouzenko's defection effectively paralyzed Soviet espionage efforts in Canada for 15 years. The Mitrokhin archive, however, also suggests that the Soviets had a Canadian sleeper who survived the Gouzenko affair and whose identity is still a mystery.
People made wildly exaggerated claims about the extent of Communist infiltration and influence from almost the moment of Mr. Gouzenko's defection. On the very day the King government confirmed the defection, syndicated U.S. newspaper columnist Drew Pearson reported in The Globe and Mail that "the Russian agent taken by the Canadians has given the names of about 1,700 other Soviet agents operating not only in Canada, but also in the United States."
Despite the continuing controversy, Mr. Kavchak persuaded the city and the federal government to recognize the defection officially as a historic event. If the Russians can confront their past since the collapse of Soviet communism, certainly Canada, with the kind of freedom and democratic tradition that so appealed to Igor Gouzenko, can remember its role, Mr. Kavchak said.
"History is history."
Top Secret plan for Soviet invasion in Blackpool. The Times, May 2, 2005 (A map of the Lancashire resort, labelled in Russian, has come to light and has been seized upon as evidence of a cunning Cold War plan to attack Britain by landing the Red Army on Blackpool Pleasure Beach. A second wave of troops would have come ashore at Cleethorpes, on Humberside, and the Soviets would have sliced Britain in half within 24 hours. The conspiracy is to be revealed in a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Balalaikas in Blackpool, this month....A spokesman for Blackpool Tourism said: "The Russians brought a big party of press and military attachés to what was to be a big seaside knees-up. This map was produced for them and one must have been taken back to Russia. It has reappeared years later and is now being touted as an invasion plan. If that is the case, Blackpool council were Soviet collaborators.".... A BBC spokesman said: "The map was one in a series of over 200 prepared by the Russians of major British cities, ports and railheads between 1964 and 1988. The director of tourism for Blackpool was a contributor to the programme and didn’t raise any concerns about the map's authenticity."...
Physicist helped build first Atomic-bomb (admitted involved in Communist Party). Telegraph, Apr 29, 2005. Go to 13.Weapons & 6.Superstates & 35.Brotherhood & ATOMIC-BOMB SCIENTIST COMMUNIST
CANADA'S RED TRUDEAU, by Elizabeth Thompson
RUSSIA IS HELL'S INFERNO (book review of Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State)
MOSCOW MUSIC, by Jackie Jura
STALIN'S LIAR IN NEW YORK, by Paul Jackson
MCCARTHY GLIMPSED VISCIOUS TRUTH, mainstream editorial
REIGN OF TERROR AGAINST MCCARTHY, by Albert Burns
SUPERMAN A SOVIET - CLARK KENT A COMMIE, by Jeet Heer
COMMUNISTS COINED "MCCARTHYISM" (book "The True History of A Great Patriot"), by Larry Lawrence Lent
ORWELL'S "CRYPTO-COMMIE" LIST, by Jackie Jura
COMMUNIST CRIMES EXPOSED, by Jackie Jura
LENIN BEHIND ENVIRONMENTALISTS, by Jackie Jura
STALIN: KOBA THE DREAD II (another review of Martin Amis book)
STALIN: KOBA THE DREAD I (review of Martin Amis book)
CANADA'S SOVIET SCHOOL, by Barrett Hooper
Jackie Jura
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