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"The Gouzenko Affair - The
Start of the Cold War" - presentation by Andrew
Kavchak
 Mr. Andrew Kavchak, who's
grandfather was killed in the Katyn forest massacre,
gave an excellent presentation about Igor Sergeyevich
Gouzenko. This
event was attended by a very large number of people,
including significant number of Poles.
Gouzenko was a cipher clerk stationed at the
Soviet Union’s Ottawa embassy during the Second World
War. On the evening of 5 September 1945, he walked out
of the Soviet embassy for the last time, carrying 109
top-secret documents.
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
being the first significant international incident of
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...
Gouzenko exposed the names of the Canadian Communist
agents. One of them, Fred Rose, was actually a Member
of Parliament.
Canada and the
Soviet Union became allies after Nazi Germany invaded
the USSR in June 1941. The governments in Ott awa and Moscow agreed
in June 1942 to open diplomatic relations, and soon
after the Soviets established their first legation in
Ottawa. From that base, they built a network of
espionage and intelligence-gathering agencies,
utilizing and expanding upon assets they already had
in the small Communist Party of Canada.
Before the war, there was little about Canada that was
of interest to the Soviets. But during the war, Canada
played an important role in the Allied war effort.
Canadians in sensitive positions were privy to
diplomatic, scientific and military secrets; including
highly classified information concerning research on
radar, code-breaking and the atomic bomb. Ottawa had
become a strategic site for the GRU, the Main
Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff.
Gouzenko’s defection and the contents of his documents
caused enormous concern for the security of Canada and
its American and British allies. Leaders at the Soviet
embassy were also anxious. Zarubin demanded that the
Canadians hand Gouzenko over to him as a thief who had
stolen money. Canadian authorities claimed not to know
where he was. For their protection, the Gouzenko
family was moved to Camp X, the top-secret spy
training school near Whitby, Ontario, where
representatives of the RCMP, FBI, BSC, MI5 and MI6
continued their questioning.
News of the discovery of the Soviet spy operation was
withheld from the public until 3 February 1946, when
American journalist Drew Pearson broke the story. The
next day, King informed his Cabinet of the Gouzenko
Affair for the first time. He also appointed two
justices of the Supreme Court of Canada to head a
Royal Commission on the matter.
The investigation
led to the arrests of 39 suspects, of whom 20 were
charged, 10 convicted and 10 acquitted. Among them
were MP Fred Rose and Sam Carr of the
Labor-Progressive Party (see Communist Party of
Canada), and Canadian Army captain Gordon Lunan.
In the United Kingdom, nuclear physicists Alan Nunn
May and Klaus Fuchs were convicted and sent to prison.
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 was the very first significant
international event of the Cold War - coming just
three days after the Japanese surrender ending the
Second World War.
The Gouzenko Affair sparked investigations in the
United States that eventually led to the 1953
executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason.
The Canadian government expelled Soviet embassy staff
members who were implicated in the affair.
Igor Gouzenko's
defection was a turning point in the Cold War, by
revealing the Soviet Union to be a terribly dangerous
enemy, and his contribution to Canada and other
Western nations cannot be overstated. The Soviet Union
relied on espionage to get the technology to build
nuclear weapons, and it relied on the propaganda
activities of sympathizers in Western nations to
weaken the resolve of their governments to counter
Soviet aggression.
Polish
connections in the Gouzenko affair.
Fred Rose,
born Fishel
Rosenberg (December 7, 1907 – March 16, 1983), was a
Canadian politician and trade union organizer. A
member of the Communist Party of Canada and
Labor-Progressive Party, he is best known as the only
member of the Canadian Parliament ever convicted of a
charge related to spying for a foreign country.
Rose was born to
a Polish Jewish family in Lublin. One of the six
children in the family, he attended the "Gymnaste
Humaniste de Lublin", a Jewish high school, where he
learned to speak French. He emigrated to Canada as a
child in 1920, where he attended Baron Byng High
School.
In 1925, he
became involved with the Young Communist League of
Canada, and then joined the Communist Party of Canada
(CPC) while working in a canning factory. Later, the
CPC changed name to the Labor-Progressive Party (LPP)
and Fred Rose won a seat in the Parliament during
Canadian federal by-election, August 9, 1943. He was
the only communist elected to the Canadia Parliament.
He was also candidate of the LPP in the Canadian
federal elections in 1945.
Rose was alleged
to lead the ring of up to 20 Soviet spies, which were
primarily targeting atomic weapon research from the
Manhattan Project. Raymond Boyer, an alleged
co-conspirator, testified that Rose was involved in
the operation. Rose refused to testify before the
commission, which he said was designed to "smear
honest and patriotic Canadians". Rose was ultimately
found guilty of conspiring to turn over information
about the explosive RDX to the Soviets, and was
sentenced to prison for a term just one day longer
than was required to deprive him of his elected seat
in the House of Commons.
Rose was released
from prison in 1951 after four and a half years with
his health broken. Attempting to find work in
Montreal, he was tailed from jobsite to jobsite by the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who pointed out
to employers and workmates that he was a convicted
spy.
In 1953 he went
to Poland to attempt to set up an import-export
business and to obtain health treatment he could not
afford in Canada. He
lived in the apartment in the Old Town in Warsaw. He
worked for many years as English-language editor of Poland,
a government magazine of Polish culture and
civilization designed for sale in the West. While
living in Poland, his Canadian citizenship was revoked
in 1957, and he was unable to return to Canada to lead
the fight to clear his name. He also wrote to the
Canadian Communist Tribune, the communist
weekly, under assumed name George Lambert.
His appeal
against revoking his citizenship was denied, although
in 1958 Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Ellen
Fairclough amended the Citizenship Act with a
so-called "Fred Rose amendment" so that such a removal
of Canadian citizenship could never happen again.
Years later, former federal cabinet minister Allan
MacEachen acknowledged the pages of Prime Minister
William Lyon Mackenzie King's diary dealing with Rose
had gone missing, as had most of the other records
dealing with his case.
Fred Rose died in
March 1983, while in exile in Warsaw.
You may watch video decdicated to this Soviet spy
elevated to the communist hero status: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpadpJAztGE
David Shugar
(born 10 September 1915 in Józefów, Poland – died 31
October 2015 in Warsaw, Poland).
 When he was three, the
family immigrated to Montreal, where his father, an
Orthodox Jew, supported the family as an egg candler,
testing eggs for freshness. In 1936 he concluded his
education of physics at McGill University in Montreal
and obtained his doctorate in 1940. Since January
1941, he did research in biophysics in the laboratory
of Research Enterprises, Limited, a Crown Company in
Leaside near Toronto. In 1943, he married Grace Wales,
an activist and labour organizer he met at McGill,
where both attended meetings of the Student Christian
Movement, then a left-leaning organization.
Later served in the Canadian Marines with the rank of
Electrical Sub-Lieutenant R.C.N.V.R. In 1946 he
entered the employ of the Department of National
Health and Welfare.
David Shugar was detained by the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police in 1946 and charged with conspiring to
hand over official secrets to the Russians. The
government tried to charge him twice; however, in both
situations there was not enough evidence to do so.
David Shugar was working for the Department of
National Health and Welfare when he was detained by
the RCMP in 1946. He had worked for the British and
Canadian navies in developing anti-submarine equipment
and had served on the executive of the Canadian
Association of Scientific Workers. The Gouzenko
espionage commission accused him of spying for the
Soviets because of his known association with Fred
Rose and Sam Carr. The commissioners were also
suspicious of Shugar because “his explanations failed
to convince us.” The documents that Igor Gouzenko had
stolen from the Soviet embassy also suggested that
Shugar had conspired directly with the Soviets,
although there was never any evidence of his criminal
activities.
Shugar was the first of the suspects to be acquitted
in court. The ruling was handed down before the
commission completed its final report, yet the
government refused to change the report to indicate
that he had been found innocent at trial. Even more
surprising was the commissioners’ decision to comment
on his trial. Specifically, their report criticized
the judge’s verdict and argued that, under the
Official Secrets Act, there was sufficient evidence to
find Shugar guilty. Despite his innocence, Shugar was
later dismissed from his job at Health and Welfare.
The espionage commission’s final report gave the
following brief sketch of Shugar:
“Shugar,
who on his discharge from the Navy, entered the
employ of the Department of National Health and
Welfare in 1946, had entered the Canadian Navy on
February 5th, 1944, as an Electrical Sub-Lieutenant
R.C.N.V.R. He had been born in Poland in 1915,
coming to this country at the age of four or five.
He received his B.Sc. in physics from McGill
University in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1940. For a
short time he was employed in the Department of
Physiology of that University and then entered the
employ of Research Enterprises, Limited, a Crown
Company, at Leaside, near Toronto, in January, 1941,
where he remained until he joined the Navy as above
mentioned.”
He continued
working as a researcher, first at the Pasteur
Institute in Paris in the years 1948-1950, and later
at the Center of Nuclear Physics of the Free
University of Brussels until 1952.
On the invitation of professor Leopold Infeld, an
associate of Albert Einstein, he moved to Warsaw,
where he took the post of the head of the Institute of
Biochemistry at the National Institute of Hygiene.
Since 1954, he conducted research at the Institute of
Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of
Sciences. In 1965, he created the Biophysics
Department of the Faculty of Physics of University of
Warsaw. The same year he was elected the Chairman of
the Polish Society of Medical Physics. He was a member
of the Polish Academy of Sciences since 1983.
David Shugar obtained in 1969 the honorary degree from
Ghent University and in 1995 from the University of
Warsaw.
In 1999, Professor David Shugar, the founder of the
Division of Biophysics and an architect of The Polish
School of Molecular Biophysics, was inducted into The
Royal Society of Canada.
His spouse, Professor Grace Wales Shugar (1918 -
2013), created the Center of the Developmental
Psycholinguistics at the Faculty of Psychology of the
University of Warsaw.
He died at the age of 100 on 31 October 2015.
Did you miss the “Gouzenko Affair
and the State of the Cold War” by Andrew Kavchak?
Visit the FCWM Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/FriendsCWM/videos/815332985490486/
… to view the complete presentation.
NOTE: there was an audio problem
around 29:30 till 35:00 minutes, please be
patient.
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By-the-way, there will be another
interesting presentation in the Canadian War Museum
on Thursday, 18th of April 2019. Another Polish
Canadian, Edward Poznanski, will have a presentation
titled "Canadian-Polish Relations in Wartime,
1914-1945". See more details above in the Kalendarz
Ottawski.
Czesław Piasta
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