Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

How the Cold War started in Canada

In the snowy evening of an Ottawa winter, shortly after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a family of three huddled in a small apartment. The curtains were drawn, the conversation quiet. Fear cloaked the room.

In the snowy evening of an Ottawa winter, shortly after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a family of three huddled in a small apartment. The curtains were drawn, the conversation quiet. Fear cloaked the room. They should not have been living away from the embassy residences but their crying baby and the legendary verbal fights between his boss and wife next door which often lasted well into the night had given this family more flexibility in housing than most embassy staff.

Earlier that day, the husband had placed his family in danger. His name was Igor Gouzenko. He was a cypher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa although that title is misleading. He was responsible for coding and decoding messages to and from the embassy. Prompted by an ominous recall to Moscow, Gouzenko felt it was time to make a break. Seeking to escape the Stalinist regime behind the Iron Curtain he had gathered secret documents that had come before him and hid them away in his office.

During the War, Churchill, Roosevelt, Canada's Mackenzie King, and DeGaulle from France had welcomed Stalin's Soviet Union as an ally. The USSR would play the major role in the defeat of Hitler's Germany. In the years before, following the First World War, the allies had viewed the Soviet Union as an evil source of communist agitation throughout the globe. Stalin, who had taken over the reins of government after Lenin's death was a villain, a man who would kill and starve his own people in pursuit of his goals. At the war's start he had joined Hitler in devouring Poland. When Germany attacked the USSR, Stalin needed arms and equipment badly and the allies were there to provide it, often at great cost in lives. To make Stalin and the USSR more acceptable to their populations, the Allies commenced massive public relations efforts to make Stalin "Uncle Joe" and his regime the friend of the Allies in the public mind. That effort was very successful. The USSR was a friend with whom one shared plans and weapon development.

Except for one item -the fruits of the Manhattan Project and the ways to make a nuclear bomb.

In the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Gouzenko handled documents that disclosed a wide swath of spies and scientists who had obtained access to American nuclear and other secrets. On his final day at the rmbassy, these were now stuffed under his shirt. Even though Canada was not a full partner in the Manhattan Project, the Soviet embassy kept in contact with Soviet spies around North America including those attempting to gain access to nuclear bomb information.

Gouzenko quickly found defecting was not as easy as he had thought.

His escape from the embassy was only the start of what had turned into a bad day. With attaché case in hand he stopped at the offices of the Ottawa Journal, no doubt hoping his story if published would give him and his family some security. It was not to be. The newspaper turned him away, failing to understand his mission. He left, shaken, and then returned to try again but the answer was the same. The Journal staff suggested he go to the RCMP. Instead, as the dark evening hours he stopped at the Department of Justice finding it closed for the day. After asking a policeman on duty to see the Minister of Justice, he was told to come back the next morning.

After a tense night, he, his wife, and their young child again tried to see the Canadian Minister of Justice. After waiting two hours they trudged back to the newspaper offices. By now, the Embassy would know about the missing documents and the missing clerk. Gouzenko and his wife returned home and left their son with a neighbour to look after then headed to the offices of the Crown Attorney. A secretary took it upon herself to call the RCMP and a constable arrived. After listening to their tale he told them he could not help and left. Growing ever more frantic, the couple did manage to telephone a member of the intelligence wing of the RCMP who agreed to meet them the next morning.

They returned home and remained silent as a Russian Embassy staff member pounded at their door. From his balcony Gouzenko asked for help. His neighbour hopped on his bicycle to contact the local police as another neighbour took the family in. The local police were as helpful as the RCMP had been that morning.

The family was certain that the embassy would not stop and thankfully took a neighbour's offer to stay in her apartment. Around midnight, a couple of Soviet Security members broke into the Gouzenko apartment and started to turn it upside down, an act that waived the diplomatic status. The local police removed, but did not arrest, the Soviet agents as the Gouzenkos watched through a keyhole from the adjoining apartment. Finally, the next morning, the RCMP took in the family.

Advised of all this, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, fearful of antagonizing Stalin, initially refused asylum. The arrival of a senior British intelligence officer, perhaps the head of MI-6, turned the tide. The family was spirited away to a cottage on a nearby lake and, after a time of debriefing, King notified President Truman of the defection and the Soviet spy activity in both Canada and the USA.

The Cold War had started.

Gouzenko and his family would remain under protective custody in a small Ontario town for years, fearful of reprisal. When he did appear on a Canadian television program years later he was concealed under a bizarre white hood. He family continued to live in a small Ontario town under an assumed name, still under RCMP protection. Gouzenko even wrote a novel - The Fall of a Titan - that won the annual Governor-General's Award in 1954. Earlier, a movie based on his defection was released by Hollywood.

Gouzenko's defection triggered an "anti-Red "purge in the Western Allies. In the USA, Senator Joe McCarthy started his horrendous witch-hunt and soon the "bomber race" became the "missile race", then the "nuclear race" leading to the policy of "mutually assured destruction" ("MAD"). School children had bomb drills during which they hid under their desks or in a school basement and only chance and one man's decision prevented the Third World War during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The days of nice Uncle Joe were over.