As a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and a GRU intelligence officer, Igor Gouzenko had access to the secret communications of the GRU and NKGB between Canada and the Soviet consulates and embassies in Britain and the US. He was even able to open the safe in the embassy’s cipher room, which contained such documents as officer dossiers and coded telegrams. Cipher clerks were the background players in the espionage world where spies were the featured performers. But in early September 1945, Gouzenko captured the limelight, bringing fame to his cryptic trade when he left his office never to return again, stuffing in his shirt 109 top-secret Soviet cables and more than a hundred documents outing Soviet spies in Canada, Britain, and the US, including some connected with atomic bomb espionage. It was “a dazzling cache of stolen GRU documents,” as one scholar later described the feat.
In the days ahead, Gouzenko sought asylum for himself, his wife, and their fifteen-month-old son, as he gave the bulging contents of his theft to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. After the RCMP informed the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, on September 12, sent an urgent message to President Truman about the defector and his claims, one of which was that Stalin had made “the obtaining of complete information regarding the atomic bomb the Number One Project of Soviet espionage.”
Because of Soviet mole Kim Philby, who was chief of British counterintelligence, the Soviets knew almost immediately about the defection. “For the Russians, the defection was nothing short of a disaster, calling for a thorough reexamination of their intelligence operations,” a scholar later wrote. Lavrentiy Beria, by then Stalin’s deputy premier, his “first lieutenant,” would soon send a cable to every rezidentura abroad, warning that “G.’s defection has caused great damage to our country and has, in particular, very greatly complicated our work in the American countries.” Instructions would soon be sent, he wrote, regarding ways to improve all agent networks and rules to tighten security. “The work must be organized so that each member of the staff and agent can have no knowledge of our work beyond what directly relates to the task he is carrying out.”
There was reason for panic, as Gouzenko had exposed Canadian and American spy networks and ignited a firestorm of counterintelligence searches for Communist spies on both sides of the border. Spies with whom Koval had ties were among those affected, such as Arthur Adams who, among other things, had once obtained a false Canadian passport through Sam Carr, head of the Canadian Communist party and one of the Soviet agents exposed by Gouzenko. Passport secrets were indeed among those the cipher clerk uncovered, showing the ways such fraud was devised.
Gouzenko unveiled numerous stars on the Soviet stage of spies, including an unnamed assistant to the US assistant secretary of state—later identified as Alger Hiss. He also outed Fred Rose, a member of the Canadian parliament. Considered to be one of the most important Soviet agents in Canada, Rose was the head of the GRU’s Montreal group of spies. As such he was connected to Pavel Mikhailov at the Soviet consulate in Manhattan, linking Rose indirectly to Arthur Adams, Benjamin Lassen, and thus to Koval. When Rose was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 1943, Mikhailov cabled Moscow, “Fred, our man in Lesovia [code for Canada] has been elected to the Lesovian parliament.”
Fred Rose, like Adams, Lassen, and Jacob Golos once had worked at Amtorg in New York. Both Golos and Lassen, through Mikhailov or World Tourists, had used Rose to obtain Canadian travel documents for agents they assisted. One of Rose’s spy duties was to help “with bogus documentation for Soviet illegals seeking entry into the USA and beyond.”
Whether Koval had ever met any of these people other than Lassen is unknown. But in the months ahead, Fred Rose’s organizational ties in both the Canadian and American spy networks would begin to surface, often in front-page news stories on both sides of the border. Hoover would send an urgent memo to his bureau chiefs announcing that the Gouzenko case must be their “no. 1 project” and that every resource should be used “to run down all angles very promptly.” It was in the midst of such exposures that Koval was offered the job at Monsanto in Dayton.
Like an aftershock to the Gouzenko earthquake, a few months later, another spy defected, this time an American by the name of Elizabeth Bentley, who had been the deputy and lover of Jacob Golos. After his death in 1943, Bentley took over two Golos networks of Communist informants: both headed by economists, one on the War Production Board and the other on the Board of Economic Warfare. Both men had ties to individuals known to Lassen. Though she likely did not know Koval, Bentley must have known Lassen because of his long-lasting ties to Golos and because Golos leased an apartment in the same building where Lassen maintained his principal office. The details she released would not be widely known to the public until the summer of 1948, but on November 6, 1945, when she walked into the FBI’s New York bureau and began to spill the names and operations of dozens of Soviet spies she had known for the previous seven years, Bentley would further shake the trembling foundation of Soviet espionage in the US. Her interviews, which filled a 115-page single-space dossier, revealed the details of a vast infiltration of Soviet spies in America, especially during the war years. The Bentley defection was quickly known in Moscow.
The next strike against the spy networks connected indirectly or directly to Koval came within days of Bentley’s last November meeting at the FBI’s New York bureau. That was a four-part series about Soviet espionage in America published in the New York Journal-American, a widely circulated and highly conservative newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst. The writer, Howard Rushmore, was a former editor at the Daily Worker, the CPUSA official organ, and a former party member. He was expelled from both in 1939 when he refused to write an unfavorable review of the film Gone With the Wind—a task ordered by the Communist Party, so claimed Rushmore. At the Journal-American, Rushmore specialized in anti-Communist articles, and his boss at the paper was a former FBI agent effectively serving as a conduit to the Feds—thus, a grand source for a rich assortment of incriminating details about Soviet spies in the US. He was also the newspaper’s connection to Hoover, who was a master at using the press for his own purposes. In the case of Rushmore’s series, Hoover wanted to humiliate President Truman into taking a harder stand against Soviet spies. Arthur Adams was the focus of the first article of the series, on December 3, 1945.
Using the fictional name “Alfred Adamson,” Rushmore introduced an alleged Soviet agent under investigation by the FBI, who used a job at a music company located on Fifth Avenue as his cover work. The firm was owned by the same person who ran a small music store on West Forty-Fourth Street and who paid “Adamson” $75 a week. That person was clearly Eric Bernay, at whose store, The Music Room, Adams had first met Clarence Hiskey years before. Rushmore claimed that “Adamson” had once received atomic bomb secrets from a scientist based in Chicago and that he had carried a heavy case of documents on a ride in a black Plymouth sedan that bore the license plate of the Soviet consulate, a number registered under the name “Pavel Mikhailov.” He also outlined how Adamson sent cables to his American wife in Moscow through the wife of a Manhattan doctor who practiced on the Upper West Side. He stressed that it had been two years since the FBI had discovered a package of papers filled with atomic bomb details in the spy’s hotel room and that despite the mounds of information sent to the State Department proving Adamson’s espionage crimes, there had been “no action on his arrest.”
The point of the article was to shame the Truman administration for not apprehending Adams-Adamson. It was also a scare tactic. Rushmore reminded his readers: “The real name under which [Adamson] operates and the name of the hotel in which he is staying are known to the Journal-American.” This was a warning to Adams and his associates: Look at what we know. We’re on your tail. We’ll get you soon.
It must have worked with Mikhailov. On December 13, the tall, slim vice consul with a blond pompadour was driven in a black sedan from the Soviet consulate in Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey, where he boarded the SS Suvorov, a Soviet vessel headed for Murmansk, Russia. What effect the series had on Adams or exactly when he had become aware of the round-the-clock attention he was getting from FBI agents is undocumented. However, certainly before the Journal-American series, his instincts as a well-seasoned spy must have been on high alert. Months after the Feds began tailing him in 1944, Hoover had ordered the tapping of his phone calls and the bugging of his room, #1103 at the Peter Cooper Hotel on East Thirty-Ninth Street. FBI agents were tracking his every move, even sitting behind him in movie theaters.
In late spring 1945, a gentleman visiting Adams in his hotel room informed him that as he entered the hotel he was photographed by men with cameras in the windows of a building across the street, and that he was then followed by two men who stood nearby as he stopped to straighten his tie. The visitor asked Adams if he knew about this. Adams told him he did, and that it was just “some trouble” having to do with his work in the recording business, at Keynote. Then Adams quickly changed the subject to the Met Lab in Chicago, where his guest had worked with Clarence Hiskey. Adams made clear without saying too much that he knew about the atomic bomb research in Chicago and he wanted to find out more. “Don’t you feel that this thing you were working on belongs to humanity?” Adams asked. The man replied that he likely agreed with Adams, but with the qualification “only if the world were well ordered.” Adams then began asking questions about the making of the bomb, with a polite and direct suggestion that his guest tell him what he should know. The guest, aware now that this must be some sort of recruitment, said “No, as long as the over-all policy for secrecy is in existence, I feel I must conform to that, even though I could be in disagreement with it.” And then the conversation moved to the topic of the war, and the guest soon left. Clearly, Adams was unstoppable, or so it seemed.
In the aftermath of the Journal-American articles and Mikhailov’s sudden departure, Hoover sent a memo to the New York bureau instructing it to summon Adams and interview him “for the purpose of eliciting his comments regarding the articles and particularly for the purpose of obtaining from him positive statements regarding his immigration and citizenship status. Since the departure of his Consulate contact, Mikhailov, Adams may be willing to discuss in detail his actual mission in the U.S. The interviewing agents should exercise extreme caution to conceal from Adams the extent of the Bureau’s information concerning him and his cohorts since Adams may attempt to determine just what the Bureau does know.”
That interview never happened. Instead an exchange took place between Adams and Special Agent Leonard Langen at a bus stop at East Fifty-Third and Madison, on January 12, 1946, at 9 p.m., during which Adams tried to do exactly what Hoover feared: manipulate an agent into revealing details about what the bureau knew while putting on an act. When Langen saw Adams running for a Madison Avenue bus that was extremely packed, knowing Adams’s propensity for darting suddenly into a large crowd and disappearing, he moved to a position near Adams to be sure to board the bus with him— which he did. Then suddenly Adams jumped off the bus, as did the agent, as it pulled away, leaving him with the agent alone at the bus stop. And for the next hour and fifteen minutes, standing in the cold, they talked. Adams complained about the Journal-American article and vehemently denied that he was a Soviet espionage agent. He had never even been to Russia, he stressed. He said that he expected to remain in the US for the rest of his life and he was eager to become a US citizen as soon as he could gather the appropriate documents.
The last time any agents tracking Adams saw him was on January 23, 1946. At 1:30 p.m. that day, he visited Victoria Stone’s jewelry store on Madison Avenue, carrying a small black bag and a cardboard box. Stone was one of Adams’s intermediaries with Eric Bernay, Pavel Mikhailov, and others. He then walked to the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, where he read a magazine about machinery. At 4:35 p.m. he returned to his office at Keynote Recordings, never to be seen again. Though agents watched the building and were told by a confidential informant that at 5:05 p.m. Adams was still in his office, the New York bureau couldn’t find him. By 1 a.m. on the twenty-fourth, ten more agents were searching for him in Manhattan. Other field offices were notified. Immigration and customs personnel at all ports of departure from the US were placed on high alert. It was discovered that most of Adams’s belongings at the Peter Cooper Hotel had been removed. The only evidence that he was still alive would be a postcard sent a few days later to Victoria Stone. Postmarked New York, New York, January 26, 7:30 a.m., it read, “Victoria Dearest: This is to let you know that everything is O.K. Regards to my friends and much love to you. A.A. January 25, 1946.”
On February 16, the Journal-American ran a front-page story by Rushmore with the headline: “Red Atom Spy Eludes FBI as Canada Nabs 22; Ottawa Acts on Leak of Top Secrets.” It began: “The ring leader of the international Soviet spy network, whose efforts to steal atomic bomb secrets were exposed in the New York Journal-American last December 3, fled in haste from his midtown hotel room three weeks ago, it was learned today. A man named in the Journal-American as Alfred Adamson is linked with the 22 persons now being questioned by Canadian officials on charges of giving secret atomic information to Russia.” The article then discussed more details about “Adamson” and his ties to the Canadian spy ring, his mail-drop system of sending documents, and his link to the head of an electrical company who, the article said, “is now also under surveillance.” It is unclear to whom the story referred.
Two weeks later, on March 5, the New York Times ran its first story about the Gouzenko defection. The Times had waited for the release of the official Canadian reports of the investigation into the “network of undercover agents organized and developed by members of the staff of the Soviet Embassy at Ottawa under direct instructions from Moscow.” The first report made clear that information about the atomic bomb project was a high priority for the Soviet spies. The second report on the investigation was scheduled to be released on the day in mid-March when Fred Rose was arrested at his home in Ottawa, after returning from the first session of the 1946 Canadian parliament. He was the first public official in the West to ever be charged with spying for the Soviet Union. Under a photo of Rose on the front page of the Journal-American was the caption “How Many of These Are in the U.S.?”
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