a few records and my memory, thank heavens, is still very good, so I have this idea that I’ll tell you my story, complete with all my “dirty laundry,” and hopefully you will finish the job for me.”
Experience has taught me that the best question is often silence so I pause for several seconds. There’s a long sigh and he continues. “She’s right you know, I’ve let the lies go unchallenged far too long.” There’s another brief pause. “If you do what I hope and pray that you do—compare my story with the known facts—you can’t conclude anything other than what I am about to tell you is the truth, the absolute truth: Every word of it.”
I’m about to ask him his name when he hangs up!
I never talk to him again. A series of recorded tapes arrives three days later, carefully boxed and delivered by hand to the security desk at my office building.
I take them home and hole up there for a few days, unable to stop listening. His “Western” expressions puzzle me at first and make me suspicious, but when I learn he’s spent much of his life in the West and is a great fan of old Hollywood movies it all makes sense. When I finish, I am absolutely gobsmacked! And I know what I must do.
Here, with my occasional comments, and a few slight revisions to grammar and tense for clarification, is the story they tell.
Signed, “N”
October, 2009
Photograph of Dumbarton Oaks mansion, 3101 R Street NW, Georgetown, Washington, DC, USA
I Am Alive!
MY NAME IS IGOR GOUZENKO. You believe I am dead. The history books certainly say so. They report I died near Toronto in 1982, just as they claim it was I who triggered the Cold War by defecting from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa on September 5, 1945, bringing with me a long list of the names and secrets of Soviet spies operating in the US and Canada. Wrong! Dead wrong! While I cannot say at the age of 89 I am very much alive, I am nonetheless, as they say, still kicking, albeit with a few more aches and pains than I’d like.
As for the defection part, don’t feel badly if you believe it because at least for a while even that doddering old fool of a prime minister you had, Mackenzie King, and “the buck stops here” guy, American President Harry Truman, bought that one. How do you Canadians say it? Hook, line and sinker!
Actually, I now know that at some time fairly early in my ordeal, Truman was told of what they were doing to me, but in the fall of 1945 and spring of 1946, the President of the United States had a few things on his mind more important than the fate of one poor bugger from the Soviet Union.
And by the way, one of the facts you might start checking into is this: For 57 years Mackenzie King faithfully kept a very detailed daily diary, which included such personal matters as his conversations with his dead mother. That entire diary is in your National Archives today, complete except for one very curious thing. Two entire months are missing. Two months missing from 57 years of daily record keeping! What do you suppose those months might be? Check it out. Missing are November and December 1945.
Why is that time period so important? I’ll tell you why. Because during those two months in 1945, Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s government, along with the FBI and others, including perhaps the dreaded Soviet Secret Police were hunting me down like a dog so they could kill me. I’ll bet no history book you ever read told you that. Impossible, you say. Really! Well just listen to what I have to say. Listen to all of it. Then and only then can you make an informed decision. And if what I am about to tell you is not true, then the question remains. Why are those mysterious two months missing from King’s dairy?
Those who chronicle are correct with some facts. It is true I was born on January 13, 1919, in the small town of Rahachow, about 30 kilometres from Minsk in what is now Belarus but was then the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union.
As for the rest of it, well let me set the record straight.
None of what I am about to tell you would have happened, certainly not to me, if they hadn’t killed that poor wee fellow. That little boy. And we have no one but that rotten pervert Klaus Fuchs to thank for that. Oh I know, everyone today claims that skinny piece of dog dirt only sold out his country because of his political beliefs. The little bastard wanted to save the world from the terrible Americans is what some believe even today, but I know better.
There was nothing noble about Klaus Fuchs, believe me. He showed Stalin how to make an atomic bomb and handed over all the other secrets of the Manhattan Project to the Soviets only because it was Moscow supplying him with little boys. Good old Fuchs had a voracious appetite for three things: booze, cigarettes and boys. When it came to the latter, the more tender the years the better. Hell, he would have sold his mother to the devil for a ten-year-old!*
*FACT: Klaus Fuchs passed secrets concerning both the atom and hydrogen bombs to the Soviets. He was convicted of espionage in January 1950, and sentenced to 14 years in jail—the maximum penalty for passing military secrets to a friendly nation. Prior to the “Gouzenko Affair,” the Soviet Union was considered a friendly nation.
I know a lot about what really happened in those grim days and not just what J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI wanted you to know, but I admit I don’t know who killed that poor little boy, or why. I suppose his parents must have learned what was going on and threatened to turn Fuchs in to MI5 or the FBI or expose him to the newspapers for the pervert he was. I’m pretty certain Anatoli Yakovlev had a hand in it. He was the Soviet vice-consul in New York City at the time and he controlled Fuchs. From what I know of the delightful Mr. Yakovlev, he would gladly have set fire to the Vatican, rather than have the guy feeding him all the A-bomb secrets be tumbled by some snot-nosed kid. Yakovlev was a true acolyte of Stalin.**
**FACT: Yakovlev was indeed the Soviet vice-consul in 1945 and history records show that he “controlled” Klaus Fuchs.
And then, of course, there’s the role played in all of this by that uptight, snotty “superspy” Alger Hiss, the great “fixer” at Dumbarton Oaks and the Yalta Conference.* Wait until I tell you about him! I should have killed him when I had the chance!
Sad to say, I don’t remember the murdered boy’s name, but I do recall he was from Manassas, Virginia, and they found him, believe it or not, at the Civil War Battlefield Memorial Park in nearby Fredericksburg. It was made to look like he had tripped and whacked his head on one of those old cannons that rim the park, but I know different. It was murder pure and simple.
I may have forgotten the boy’s name, but as for the rest of it—it’s like it was yesterday.
*FACT: The Dumbarton Oaks Conference was held from August 21 to October 7, 1944, in a mansion in Georgetown, Washington, DC. The conference involving China, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom formulated proposals for a world organization that became the basis for the United Nations. Many of the issues raised there were resolved later during the Yalta Conference held in February 1945 attended by US President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the USSR. In addition to deciding to divide Germany into three zones of occupation after the war, it was announced at Yalta that a “conference of United Nations” would be held in San Francisco in April 1945. Alger Hiss, a senior member of the US State Department, helped organize and set the agenda for both conferences and was later revealed to be a Soviet spy.
Irish
