He also outed Fred Rose, a member of the Canadian parliament.
Gouzenko unveiled numerous stars on the Soviet stage of spies, including an unnamed assistant to the US assistant secretary of state-later identified as Alger Hiss. Passport secrets were indeed among those the cipher clerk uncovered, showing the ways such fraud was devised. Spies with whom Koval had ties were among those affected, such as Arthur Adams who, among other things, had once obtained a false Canadian passport through Sam Carr, head of the Canadian Communist party and one of the Soviet agents exposed by Gouzenko. There was reason for panic, as Gouzenko had exposed Canadian and American spy networks and ignited a firestorm of counterintelligence searches for Communist spies on both sides of the border. “The work must be organized so that each member of the staff and agent can have no knowledge of our work beyond what directly relates to the task he is carrying out.” Lavrentiy Beria, by then Stalin’s deputy premier, his “first lieutenant,” would soon send a cable to every rezidentura abroad, warning that “G.’s defection has caused great damage to our country and has, in particular, very greatly complicated our work in the American countries.” Instructions would soon be sent, he wrote, regarding ways to improve all agent networks and rules to tighten security. “For the Russians, the defection was nothing short of a disaster, calling for a thorough reexamination of their intelligence operations,” a scholar later wrote.
Edgar Hoover, on September 12, sent an urgent message to President Truman about the defector and his claims, one of which was that Stalin had made “the obtaining of complete information regarding the atomic bomb the Number One Project of Soviet espionage.”īecause of Soviet mole Kim Philby, who was chief of British counterintelligence, the Soviets knew almost immediately about the defection. In the days ahead, Gouzenko sought asylum for himself, his wife, and their fifteen-month-old son, as he gave the bulging contents of his theft to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was “a dazzling cache of stolen GRU documents,” as one scholar later described the feat. But in early September 1945, Gouzenko captured the limelight, bringing fame to his cryptic trade when he left his office never to return again, stuffing in his shirt 109 top-secret Soviet cables and more than a hundred documents outing Soviet spies in Canada, Britain, and the US, including some connected with atomic bomb espionage. Cipher clerks were the background players in the espionage world where spies were the featured performers.
He was even able to open the safe in the embassy’s cipher room, which contained such documents as officer dossiers and coded telegrams. As a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and a GRU intelligence officer, Igor Gouzenko had access to the secret communications of the GRU and NKGB between Canada and the Soviet consulates and embassies in Britain and the US.
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