GOUZENKO'S GIFT TO THE FREE WORLD

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000202330001-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 14, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: September 18, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/14: CIA-RDP90-00552R000202330001-2
ARTICLE APPEARED
ON PAGE 3212
....
WASHINGTON TIMES
1.8 September 1985
Gouzenko 's
Free World
ARNOLD BEI ..
Forty years ago this month, a
short and stocky young Red
Army lieutenant left the
Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. for
return: to the apartment he shaved
with a wife and infant son. The one.
architectural student hRWBeen-
manw ino the UK% the Soviet
qQ_
e at that time
was kwm as
the WVQ.) Bv 1945.
the BiWer cleft had vior1rad for two
ears at the Soviet
2S-year-old Soviet officer, Igor.
Gouzenko, carried with him 109 doc-
uments that he had lifted from a fil-
ing cabinet in the secret recesses of
the embassy. For some time he had.
been accumulating. documents.
which incriminated more than a
score of Canadiarfs''* 81'iik? *l-
onage. He had left these papers in.
the file cabinets with their corners,
crimped so that he could select them
out of the files in a hurry when he
was ready to make the final break'
and ask for political asylum.
After a lot of needless hassle with
police, newspapers, and government
that night and the next day, he was
finally able to bring those doc-
uments to the attention of then Cana-
dian Prime Minister Mackenzie.
King. On June 27, 1946, a Canadian
Royal Commission that had studied
these once-secret documents for,
nine months, wrote:
"In our opinion, Gouzenko, by
what he has done, has rendered
great public service to the people of
this country, and thereby has placed'
Canada in his debt:'
This little-remembered episode.
in postwar history was recalled last
week by the announcement that the
KGB station chief in London, Oleg
Gordievski, 46, had defected from
the Soviet secret service. The Lon-
don news story reported that some
2S Soviet diplomats and non-
diplomats, presumably identified by
their one-time commanding officer,
were being expelled from Britain.
The Soviet retaliatory action a few
to the
days later was little more than
Mikhail Gorbachev's expression of
contempt for Britain's action.
However important the. grew
British coup in closing a Soviet Intel.
ligence pipeline, and even more
important subsequent expoabs, it
was the Gouzenko affair 40 years ago
which, as 'an event in world history,,
wa& of tremendous significance in rt
heightening the political con-
sciousness of the Western democra '
cies about the threat of communises
Because of the admirable, even.
heroic, Red Army exploits during,
the war, Western public opinion
ignored warnings that Stalin and his
inner core of Marxist-Leninists had
no intention of installing democracy.
in Central Europe or, for that matter,
anywhere else.
Foreign-policy realists had pre-
dicted to no avail that Stalin would'
use every possible means to impose
Soviet totalitarianism on his
neighbors first, and then, if success,
ful, on the rest of the world. Stalin
had opened the Cold War. Demon
racy was now the enemy.-
W hat the Gouzenko dossier
revealed was that Stalin had
successfully organized -
in Canada, the United States, and,
Britain - bands' of traitors in the
heart of the decision-making pro-
cess of the three democracies. Mr.
Gouzenko helped locate nine spy
rings in the United States, in New
York, Washington, and Los Angeles,
and other subversives in Britain and
Canada. The Canadian Royal Com-
mission report, which contained
copies of the Soviet documents,
described these rings as a "fifth col-
Mr Gouzenko's information led to
Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, the
Rosenbergs, the Philby penetration
of British counterintelligence, Klaus
Fuchs, and the atom spies. Mr.
Gouzenko told of a telegram he had
deciphered a few months before his
defection, one sent to all Soviet
secret agents, which said that
uncovering American and British
technical experience in the con-
struction of the atomic bomb was
Stalin's No. 1 espionage project. It
must be remembered that this was a
time when a former U .S. ambassador
to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies,
had stated publicly that Soviet espi-
onage to obtain the atomic bomb
secret was justified.
'Because of Mr Gouzenko, 20
Canadians were tried for espionage-
related crimes. Half were convicted,
including a member of the Canadian
Parliament, who later returned to
his native, but now-Communist,
Poland,where he died years later. As
Peter Worthington, a close friend of
Mr. Gouzenko for 15 years and a
tough-minded Canadian editor, has
written in his just published auto-
biography, Looking for Trouble:
"Undeniably, Gouzenko provided
the most significant postwar. espi-
onage breakthrough; his disclosures
resulted in- the West's attitude
toward Soviet benevolence being
changed forever. The wartime
Grad Alliance of the U.S.S.R and
the West was finally dead and buried
by Gouzenko's revelations of per-
fidy." -
Yet even with these revels-.
tions, says Mr. Worthington,
"it is ironic that no country in
the Free ... World has a record as
for failing to catch and prosecute
Soviet spies. And no country is as
regularly used by the Kremlin as an
espionage center or as a cover for its
spies.... Canada doesn't want to
catch spies and traitors, either
because it thinks that doing so might
be seen as an unfriendly act and
annoy the Kremlin to the point
where it might refuse to purchase
our wheat - or because our system
is thoroughly infiltrated with secret
Soviet sympathizers:'
Mr. Worthington is leveling this
charge not only at the previous Th.i-
deau government but equally at the
so-called conservative government
under Prime Minister Brian Mul-
roney.
British investigative journalist
Chapman Pincher, in his book Their
Trade Is Treachery, has written that
"public knowledge about Gouzenko's
original revelations has been
severely limited by a series of suspi- '
cious events:' Crucial documents
dealing with these events have disap-
peared from Canadian government
archives. One of some 50 volumes of
diaries kept by Prime Minister Mac-
kenzie King has disappeared, the
volume which dealt with Mr.
Gouzenko's interrogation by British
MIS.
According to Mr. Pincher, the con-
fidential papers of the Report of the
Royal Canadian Commission that
investigated the Gouzenko charges
Continued
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/14: CIA-RDP90-00552R000202330001-2