The Gouzenko Transcripts: The Evidence Presented to the Kellock-Taschereau Royal Commission of 1946

Lovell Clark was Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

In September 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a young cipher clerk, fled the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with scores of documents which he turned over to the Canadian authorities. His revelation of a Soviet spy network operating in Canada, the United States, and Britain was one of the key episodes marking the advent of the Cold War and the growing disenchantment of the West with the Soviet Union following the end of World War II. Prime Minister Mackenzie King, at first reluctant to believe Gouzenko’s story and fearful of provoking a rift with the USSR, reacted with shock and dismay. After visiting President Truman and Prime Minister Attlee to acquaint them of the facts, King appointed a Royal Commission, headed by two justices of the Supreme Court, Robert Taschereau and R.L. Kellock, to hear the testimony of Gouzenko and of the people implicated by it. That testimony, taken in secret, was not made public until 1981, 35 years after the Commission rendered its report in 1946. (Some of the evidence brought before the Commission is still under wraps.)

Professors Bothwell and Granatstein have rendered a real service by providing this sampling of the hearings, no easy task in view of the fact that the total runs to some six thousand pages. Their 22-page Introduction is a lucid, mainly factual account of the government’s handling of the affair, along with a brief account of the people who were charged as a result of the Commission’s investigation and what happened to them. They draw attention to those aspects of the proceedings which are apt to trouble civil libertarians, but in the main the reader is left to ferret out his own conclusions from the testimony.

Gouzenko’s testimony comprises almost half the selection; it was clear, forthright, and damning. The military attaché, Colonel Zabotin, had been operating an espionage network that had roped in a number of Canadians, including scientists, public servants, and even a Member of Parliament (Fred Rose). The purpose was to gather secret information about Canadian wartime work in explosives, radar, and, most importantly, the atomic bomb, in the making of which Canada had cooperated with Britain and the United States. (There were parallel spy networks in the Embassy, including one operated by the NKVD, of which Gouzenko was aware but had no concrete evidence.) The people identified by Gouzenko from the pseudonyms and code-names in the Soviet files ranged from employees in the National Research Council to the Bank of Canada, from External Affairs to the office of the British High Commission. They were all taken into custody and held incommunicado, without benefit of counsel, sometimes for weeks, before being questioned by the Commission.

The testimony of some reveals a mixture of idealism about communism and an incredible naivety about the Soviet Union; none of them had mercenary motives for relaying secret information. The Commissioners sometimes adopted an inquisitorial manner, especially with those witnesses who had all-too-frequent lapses of memory, but in the main the questioning seems fair enough. It is interesting to note that a number of the hostile witnesses who refused to testify won acquittals in the subsequent court trials. The reader will have difficulty, however, in concluding that this was proof of innocence and not simply the benefit of having legal counsel and the other protections afforded by the courts.

It was an extraordinary situation, and there can be little doubt that the usual procedures of the law were set aside and the suspects were subjected to what was often harsh and arbitrary treatment. As the editors remark, the Canadian authorities came close to imitating the standards of the society that the Soviet spies sought to serve. The breaches of civil liberties that were committed troubled the Prime Minister very much, as they did many others at the time and since. Now, for the first time, interested Canadians can dip into those events of 40 years ago and judge for themselves.