THE DOCUMENTS THAT WEREN'T THERE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000202330002-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 14, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: July 20, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/14: CIA-RDP90-00552R000202330002-1
ARTICLE APB _ - , NATION
ON PAGE - 20-27 July 1985
THE GOUZENKO CASE
The Documents
That Weren't There
WILLIAM A REUBEN
Gouzenko took with pointed to the extstence o a
twenty-seven-person Soviet spy ring operating in Canada and
other parts of North America. The apparat's primary target,
the commission concluded, had been the secret of the atomic
bomb, which the spies were said to have obtained with stun-
ning success. This winter, the evidence on which the com-
mission based its findings was declassified by the Canadian
government, making it possible for the first time to get a
comprehensive look at the affair.
The Gouzenko case is cited by historians as a watershed in
ast March the publication of Soviet d1P10mat relationsbetween the Soviet union and the west, the end of.
Arkady Shevchenko's memoir, B ng with
wartime amity and thabeg nning of cold war distrust. It was'
Moscow, an account of his secret life as an in- no coincidence that Winston Churchill, when declaring that
Amer for the Central IntelliaM Agency while ?an iron curtain has descended the Continent," in his across
serving as an Under Secreta*y-General of the UmtedNa- famous 1946,speech at Fulton, Missouri, placed the Cana-
tions, found its way to the front pages of the nation's press, - than "atom spies" at the top of his list of Soviet perfidies.
The Shevchenko affair, coming in the midst of othr_spy
allegations the latest, the John A. Walker Jr. spy ring, as
American as apple pie-has fueled the Admm~straaons
campaign to restrict freedom in the name of security.
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 seci n t pros eduresl
new restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act, a
drastic step-up in c o u n t e ri n t e ll i g e n c e activities and ._ a.
C.I.A.-sponsored equivalent of the Official Secrets ,AMA
Britain and Canada [see Lois Sheipfeld. "Washington. vs_
the Right to Know," The Nation, April 13 1.
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 Republic,
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 headlines about cold war spying.)
But for those still harboring doubt, new evidence has
just now come to light in the Gouzenko case 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
open society.
According to the two-man Canadian Royal Commission
that investigated the can in 1946, the secret documents
STAT
Other commentators, like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The
Vital Center, said that Gouzenko's evidence made it clear
that Communists' beliefs and speech were inseparable from
"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 aforeign
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
?Alan Nunn May, who was accused of being a member of the ring, pleaded
guilty in England. Under the provisions of Britain's Official Secrets Act,
full details of May's confession are still not available.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/14: CIA-RDP90-00552R000202330002-1