Book Review | How The Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies

CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
Studies in Intelligence, 2006

How The Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies

Amy Knight. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2005), 358 pp., endnotes, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

The defection of GRU code clerk Igor Gouzenko on 5 September 1945 in Canada, set in motion a series of counterintelligence investigations and arrests in that country, the United States, and the United Kingdom that eventually brought an end to the era of the communist-inspired ideological agents in the West. The Gouzenko case is not new to the public literature nor are the stories of the many Soviet agents exposed by the documents Gouzenko brought with him. When combined with the agents identified in the VENONA decryptions, it was evident that Soviet intelligence in America had been severely weakened. Drawing from documents obtained under the Canadian freedom of information laws historian Amy Knight adds some new and relatively minor details to the Gouzenko story. While they do not change the substance of the case, they do describe more of Gouzenko’s personal life after the defection. But this is not enough to justify the book and only gradually does the real reason Knight wrote it become apparent: Ms. Knight argues that the primary product of the Gouzenko defection was the damage done to innocent lives due to the “unrelenting witch-hunt for spies.” (11, 295) This is a popular and loaded phrase, implying, as it does to many, that the putative spies, as with the mythical witches, did not exist. But even Ms. Knight identifies a number of Soviet agents caught by the RCMP, the FBI, and MI5. She goes on to ask rhetorically, whether “the harm that was done to the West by those who did spy, justified the widespread abuse of individual rights, the vast expenditures of public resources, and the shattering of so many innocent lives?” It is clear she prefers letting the spies spy.

A close reading of the book leads to some problems on these points. First, she provides little, if any, evidence of those accused unjustly—failure to prosecute does not qualify. Some of her examples include Alger Hiss, of whom she suggests there is still good reason to doubt his identification in the VENONA decrypts (338, fn 8), though she doesn’t explain why. Then turning to Harry Dexter White, she admits that while he was “shown by VENONA decrypts to have met with Soviet agents (read intelligence officers) and passed information, there is no evidence that he was doing this with the intention of subverting American policies.”(301) She fails to realize that the intent was evident in the act. To strengthen her argument she notes that her position “is convincingly demonstrated” in Bruce Craig’s biography of White, Treasonable Doubt, while neglecting to mention that even Craig concluded White had committed “a species of espionage,” a term of art that still defies definition.

Ms. Knight adds other examples, the best known being Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman, a Cambridge University communist in the 1930s who lied about it to his government and eventually committed suicide in Cairo. In this case, she blames the convenient scapegoats of McCarthyism and a US Senate investigating committee for harassing him to death. This is a popular myth in Canada, but there is still no evidence that anything but his lies led to his suicide. As a last example, though many others are available, she states that “even having one’s name listed in the address book of another suspected spy was tantamount to being guilty” (295); not inspiring reasoning. Another problem with the book is the author’s reading of counterintelligence history. To suggest, as she does, that the United States had “conducted surveillance against the Soviets and their Communist contacts throughout the war,” (5) is a gross exaggeration. It was spasmodic at best, despite informants with specific detail and other clues. Similarly, she shocks those familiar with the case by suggesting —without evidence—that Gouzenko may well have been a British agent for some time before he defected. (42)

One the other side of the accuracy coin, she is probably correct when, after counting the number of pages of documents removed by Nosenko as revealed in the archival record, she casts legitimate doubt on Gouzenko’s story that he removed approximately 250 pages under his shirt on the night he defected, an observation so far overlooked. A prolonged period of extraction is indeed more likely.

In sum, while the case facts are accurate and well-documented, when conflated with the politics of the day, the conclusions reached amount to considered opinion, nothing more. The Cold War may well have begun with the Gouzenko defection and the espionage it revealed, but no evidence is presented that the treatment of Communist Party members was even a contributing factor. This is a weak case study.