WAS A RIDICULOUSLY EASY TARGET. I was young—only 24 when I arrived in Canada in 1943—in a strange country with strange customs. All of my family murdered and I so lonely I would sometimes lie on my bed at night and cry, if you can imagine a grown man crying. I didn’t know a soul in dull, drab, dark and gloomy Ottawa. My social life was pretty well restricted to the odd feeble grunt from a fellow worker at the Soviet Embassy. I missed my family, especially my mother, terribly. Thank heavens for my night course in the English language at the University of Ottawa. Otherwise, I think I might have gone mad with boredom and homesickness.
My instructions were to befriend one of the professors at the university who was involved in some of the work underway at the nuclear laboratories at Chalk River; in other words to do some spying. But I was a miserable failure at this, unable to interest the professor in even having a coffee with me. I suspect he had been warned.*
*FACT: The Chalk River Nuclear Research Laboratories were opened in 1944. The following September (the month of Gouzenko’s reported defection) the first nuclear reactor outside the United States went into operation at Chalk River. On the Ottawa River about 125 miles upstream from Canada’s Capital, Chalk River was part of the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear bomb. Among those who visited Chalk River at least once was Klaus Fuchs.
“You were easy pickings for a sharp little cookie like Patsy Regan,” one of Hoover’s men told me later.
She was something, that’s for sure, almost worth what she cost me. Tiny, not much more I wouldn’t think than, how does that song go…five foot two, eyes of blue? Except she had green eyes. Irish eyes that, yes indeed, did smile, most of the time they looked at me anyway. Long black hair that she always seemed to get fanned out on the pillow as she lay beneath me. Small but perfectly shaped breasts whose nipples she loved me to nibble on. Altogether a package which would have, I am sure, incited Gandhi to trade in his toga for a suit and tie. Of course, I now know they were paying her for doing a job, but even today I kind of think it wasn’t all work for her.
Sex? Oh my goodness, we’d sometimes go at it four or five times a night. In all my life I never have run across anyone quite like her. “Please!” she would say at each thrust. “Please! Please!” Then at the end she’d shout “Oh, thank you!” I don’t think it was all an act, but then I suppose I’m probably engaging in wishful thinking, one of the few luxuries left for an old man. You can just imagine after a couple of weeks of that she could have led me over the cliffs of hell and I would gladly have followed. Which, come to think of it, is pretty well exactly what I did!
She has it firmly in an encouraging grasp, trying to breathe some life back into a pretty weary little fellow when she launches the pitch that almost kills me. Taking an even firmer grasp, she feeds me the news that we’ve been invited to dinner with a friend of hers the next night. With something else very much on my mind, I don’t actually recall if I agreed, but the following evening, there we are in a lovely semi-mansion on the edge of McKay Lake in Rockcliffe Park. Ferried from my dumpy little second-floor, one-bedroom apartment on Delaware Avenue in downtown Ottawa by a white-gloved, uniformed and apparently mute driver at the wheel of the latest edition of a Hudson Super Six.* Impressed? Well I guess so!
*FACT: That would be a 1942 model, since no Hudsons were built from mid-1942 until late 1945 because of the war.
If you have ever been inside one of those embassies, high commissions, or millionaires’ homes in Rockcliffe Park you’ll have a pretty good idea what confronts us. Thick broadloom and much bowing and scraping from servants, dark polished wood, sparkling glass with not a hint of fingerprints, and huge crystal chandeliers screaming money in every room. All the while Patsy is clutching my hand and oohing and ahhing like she’s floating off into another one of her noisy orgasms.
If I had been just a little smarter I would have beelined the hell out of there, realizing this was no place for a little Irish girl and a guy who grew up on a threadbare collective farm where a sign of opulence was a lump of pork floating in a pot of boiling cabbage.
Our “host” for this gay little gala is a tall, thin, very friendly and polished man named Harry Sowell. International man of business, he claims. He’s all charm. You know the kind—perfect-toothed smile, hangs on to your every word as though it was the most fascinating thing he’s ever heard. “Patricia here is my favourite niece,” he smiles as he puts his arm gently around her shoulder. This is a little puzzling since blood hasn’t been mentioned before, but let’s face it, the Irish can be a little strange. I know a fellow who swears he once attended a wake in an Irish pub where the patrons kept plying the poor dead chap with Guinness!
I admit to being pretty impressed with the fact Harry doesn’t quiz me about my work at the Soviet Embassy or even about life back home. My brief experience in the West until then has been that once people find out where I work, they start pumping me with questions: “ What do I think of Stalin? Are you really a Communist? What is life like in the Soviet Union?” You know, honest-curiosity things like that.
Fully aware that anyone even slightly critical of “the good life” back home is likely to just mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth, or show up bleeding in the dirt, you can be certain all my public reviews are very glowing indeed. Two big thumbs up, as they say. Amazingly, many people seem to actually believe me! But all Harry Sowell seems concerned with this night is making sure his favourite niece and her consort are having a wonderful time. After the second bottle of wine I stop wondering why.
In spite of the 6.5 Richter scale hangover the next morning and a gut ache from all the rich food, it was indeed a wonderful evening. Harry, bless him, helped us into the Hudson sometime past 2:00 a.m. grasping my hand with both of his with a good-old-embassy-row really, really sincere handshake. Patsy gets a little uncle-peck on the cheek. “We must do this again,” he says.
All in all I have little choice but to conclude I am truly a marvelous fellow to deserve all this.
“I guess Uncle Harry was doing a little, not so subtle, boasting
about the benefits of capitalism last night,” I muse the next day, as the pains and rumblings begin to abate. Patsy smiles in what I believe is full agreement.
I now know that good old Harry was just sizing me up. Seeing just what kind of suckerfish his “niece” has hooked onto.
• • •
The official line today is that I was married at the time to someone named Svetlana, or Anna as some accounts claim. All the history books and even a couple of movies made about the so-called “Gouzenko Affair” portray me as a kind and gentle, if somewhat erratic, family man so struck by a sledgehammer of conscience, I decide to save the world from the evils of communism and betray my own country. The fact is, to this day, I have never been involved with anyone named Svetlana and at the time had only one thought on my mind—getting more “pleases” from my little Irish lass! Those who claim young men can only think about one thing at a time aren’t all that wrong you know!
If I had been thinking I might have wondered how a beautiful woman like Patsy Regan fell so easily into my lap. Bumping into me like that on the street as I walk home from the Embassy. The twisted ankle. Her phone call that evening to thank me for assisting her to her home, or what she claimed was her home, and the breathless invitation for me to join her for lunch the next day. All of it fairly commonplace in today’s world with its terribly loose morals and speed dating, but in 1945, I assure you it was a young man’s dream-come-true. Especially for one as shy and inexperienced as I when it came to romance.
As I look back on it today I don’t blame myself for what happened. I now realize there was no possible way I could have believed that it was anything other than good looks, good fortune, and the pure, sweet innocence of youth that made Patsy
