THE DOCUMENTS THAT WEREN'T THERE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000606090018-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 20, 2010
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: July 20, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/20: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606090018-3
ARTICLE Ar?' , r - NATION
ON PAGE 20-27 July 1985
'f'EIE GOUZENKO CASE
The Documents
That Weren't There
WILLIAM A. REUBEN
Gouzenko took vtn
twenty-seven-person Soviet spy ring operating in Canada and
other parts of North America. The apperat's primary target,
the commission concluded, had been the secret of the atomic
bomb, which the spin were said to have obtained with stun-
ning success. This winter, the evidence on which the com-
mission based its fisdinp was declassified by the Canadian
government, making it possible for the first time to get a
comprehensive look at the affair.
The Gouzenko use is cited by historians as a watershed in
Last March the publication of Soviet diplomat relations.between the Soviet Union and the West, the end of.
Arkady Shevchenko's memoir, Breaking with wartime amity and tbe~begianing of cold war distrust. It was
Moxow, an account o his secret life as an in. no coincidence that Winston Churchill, when declaring that
former for the Central I,rtdtiMCe Aaatcy while "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent," in his
serving as an Under Secretary- Gencr$I of the United Na- famous 1946?speech at Fulton, Missouri, placed the Cana
bons, found its way to the front cages of the nation's eras. - than '-atom spies" at the top of his list of Soviet pe
dies.
rfi
The Shevchenko affair, coming in the midst of other_ 07 Other oaarneatators, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The
allegations-the latest, the John A. Walker Jr. spy ring, as Ktal CentaA said that Gouzenko's evidence made it clear
American as apple pie has fueled the Admintstraatm's that Communists' beliefs and speech were inseparable from
campaign to restrict freedom in the name of sacuri y.
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger suggested that
convicted spies should be shot. The House of Represent-
atives passed a bill setting the death penalty for military es-
pionage during peacetime and permitting polygraph ex-
aminations for as many as 4.5 million civilian and military
employees of the Pentagon. Recently, there have been
calls for wholesale revision of Federal secluriq prooedures~
new restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act. a
drastic step-up in coup erim dtiaM activities Md. a.
C.I.A.-sponsored equivalent of the Official Secrets Acts of
Britain and Canada [see Lois Sheinf . -Weshiingtoa vs.
the Right to Know," The Nation, April-pl.
Not since September 5, 1945, when Igor Gouzenko, a
26-year-old code clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa,
defected to the West, has a Soviet turncoat caused such a
brouhaha. Yet the Shevchenko story seems to have begun to
unravel. Edward Jay Epstein, writing in The New Repub k,
has identified a series of contradictions and falsehoods in
the Shevchenko account which have led him to conclude,
"Shevchenko's book is a fraud on the same level as Clifford
Irving's fake about Howard Hughes."
The dangers of passing hasty "security" measures in an
overheated political atmosphere should by now be obvious.
(For example, the Internal Security Act of 1950-providing
for, among other things, compulsory detention of --security
risks" in time of national emergency-was passed in
response to newspaper headline-about cold war spying.)
But for those still harboring doubt, new evidence has
just now come to light in the Gouzenko awe that, at a
minimum, should serve as a dramatic reminder of the im-
portance of insisting on hard facts and documentation
whenever cold war imagery of spies, espionage and threats
to national security are invoked to justify intrusions on our .,h, Nunn May, wo was aa?s4 of being a member of the ring, pleaded
open society, in Enshnd. Undo the provisions of Britain's Official Secrets Act,
According to the two-man Canadian Royal Commission of May's confession are stria not available.
that investigated the can in 1946, the secret documents
"illegal acts" and thus threatened national security.
The standard view of the Canadian spy case, in terms of
the damage to national security, is summed up by William
Manchester in his social history The Glory and the Dream.
The Canadian spies, Manchester wrote, stole "hundreds of
pages of closely written data describing in detail" how to
construct an atomic bomb. He concluded, "The Russians
could scarcely have learned more about nuclear weapons
had they been full partners in the undertaking."
What is not widely known is that all the published evi-
dence for the existence of a Canadian atom spy network de-
rives from the 733-page report the Royal Commission issued
June 27, 1946. The men and women the Royal Commission
identified as spies on the basis of "cover names" contained
in the secret documents Gouzenko removed from the Soviet
Embassy were tried for various offenses in the 1940s. But
not one of them was indicted, tried or convicted of es-
pionage-that is, of passing secret information to a foreign
power-in Canada.. Indeed, in none of the trials did the
government allege they had stolen atomic secrets. Moreover,
sixteen members of the alleged ring were cleared of all
charges. Of the others, five were found guilty of a con-
spiracy to obtain fake passports to enable Canadian na-
tionals to fight on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil
War, and five were convicted of violations of Canada's
sweeping Official Secrets Act. In the end, people went free
or were convicted based on the degree to which they
acknowledged their political beliefs and activities, not
(as far as any documentary evidence shows) because of
what Gouzenko's documents supposedly revealed about
them.
Another nagging issue in the case is the credibility of
Gouzenko himself. The accused were never confronted with
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/20: CIA-RDP90-00552R000606090018-3