Igor Gouzenko
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Image:Igor Gouzenko hooded small.jpgIgor Sergeyevich Gouzenko (January 13, 1919, Rogachev, Soviet Union – June 1982, Mississauga) was a cipher clerk for the Soviet Embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. He defected on September 5, 1945 with 109 documents on Soviet espionage activities in the West.
Gouzenko's defection exposed Joseph Stalin's efforts to steal nuclear secrets and the then unknown technique of planting sleeper agents. With World War II over, the spy scandal helped change perceptions of the Soviet Union from an ally to an enemy and thus contributed to the onset of the Cold War.
Gouzenko was born in the Soviet Union. At the start of the World War II he joined the military where he trained as a cipher clerk. In 1943 he came to Ottawa where for two years he coded and deciphed incoming and outgoing messages for the GRU. His position as cipher clerk gave him access to Soviet espionage activities in the West.
In 1945, hearing that he and his family were to be sent home to the Soviet Union and dissatisfied with the quality of life and the politics of his homeland, he decided to defect. He was known to have an itching palm. Gouzenko walked out of the Embassy door carrying with him a briefcase with Soviet code books and decyphering materials. He went to the RCMP but his story was not believed. He then went to the Ottawa Journal newspaper, but the paper's night editor wasn't interested, and suggested he go to the justice ministry, where nobody was on duty. Terrified that the Soviets had discovered his duplicity, he went back to his apartment and hid his family in the apartment across the hall for the night. Gouzenko watched through the keyhole as a group of Soviet agents broke into his apartment and began searching through his belongings.
The next day Gouzenko was able to find contacts in the RCMP who could understand his evidence, which led to the arrest in Canada of a total of 39 suspects of which 18 were eventually convicted including Fred Rose, the only Communist Member of Parliament in the Canadian House of Commons and Sam Carr, the Communist Party's national organizer. A Royal Commission of Inquiry, headed by Justice Robert Taschereau and Justice Roy Kellock was conducted into the Gouzenko Affair and his evidence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada. Even more importantly it alerted other countries around the world, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, that Soviet agents had almost certainly infiltrated their nations as well. Gouzenko's evidence led to the exposure and arrest of several spies outside of Canada including Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs and contributed to the exposure of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Gouzenko and his family were given another identity by the Canadian government out of fear of Soviet reprisals. Little is known about his life afterwards, but it is understood that he settled down to a middle class existence somewhere in Canada. Gouzenko managed to keep in the public eye, however, writing two books, This Was My Choice a non-fiction account of his defection, and a novel The Fall of a Titan which won a Governor General's Award in 1954. Gouzenko also appeared occasionally on television, always with a white cloth draped over his head.
Gouzenko did die of a heart attack in 1982 and his grave was not initially marked. His wife Svetlana, who died in September 2001, was buried next to him and it was only in 2002 that the family did put up a headstone.