How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies

On September 5, 1945, Russian cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko walked away from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, with his pregnant wife and two-year-old son in tow. Contacting local authorities, he alleged that a military espionage network was operating in North America. His defection, occurring only a few weeks after the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, sent shockwaves through Washington, London, and Ottawa. The three allies--until recently aligned with the Soviets--feared that key atomic secrets had been given to Russian agents, altering the balance of postwar power. In a riveting narrative, Amy Knight chronicles how Gouzenko's surprise defection, and the events it triggered, fanned Cold War fears and quickened the course of modern history. Using newly declassified intelligence files, memoirs of eye-witnesses, and interviews with key players, Cold War scholar Amy Knight explains how this historic defection propelled Western governments into a feverish hunt for Soviet spies and a breakdown in relations with the Soviet Union. As tragic and unwarranted violations of civil liberties occurred in Canada and the U.S., the FBI initiated a campaign to incriminate such Truman Administration officials as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Meanwhile, in London, double agent Kim Philby was keeping his own Soviet masters apprised of what Gouzenko was reporting to his handlers. As Knight explores Gouzenko's motives--creating a rare personality study of a defector--she brilliantly connects all these events to the accelerating pace of the Cold War. [In this book] Knight chronicles a nearly forgotten but seminal episode from the early days of the Cold War, which occurred just as the Truman Administration was planning to remove stewardship of the atomic bomb from the control of the War Department and place it under civilian commission reporting to the president.--Book jacket flaps.