The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [385]
That there was also a Communist threat nearer to home was confirmed after the defection in September 1945 of Igor Gouzenko, a cypher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. This became known as the ‘Corby’ case, the name apparently chosen from the Corby’s Canadian whisky favoured by the officers working on the case. According to the SIS archives, the first notification London had about Corby was on 9 September, two days after Gouzenko and his family had been taken into protective custody by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The message, transmitted over secure SIS channels through Sir William (Bill) Stephenson’s British Security Co-ordination office in New York (as was all the cable traffic on the subject), was from Norman Robertson, Permanent Under-Secretary to the Canadian Department of External Affairs, to his British counterpart, Alexander Cadogan. A ‘statement made yesterday . . . by clerical officer of Soviet Embassy in Ottawa’, read the cable, indicated that ‘Soviet agents’ were operating in Canada. This was ‘supported by convincing documentary [evidence of] political and scientific espionage’. The investigation was ‘proceeding in consultation with Stephenson and F.B.I.’. Further details followed in a flurry of telegrams on 10 September, including the fact that Soviet espionage in Canada was being run by Nikolai Zabotin, the military attaché in Ottawa, who was running a GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) bureau with a staff of sixteen. A British atomic scientist working in Canada, Dr Alan Nunn May, was named as having passed both information and samples of Uranium-235 to the Soviets, and while the Soviet embassy were showing ‘signs of alarm at disappearance of official’, Ottawa had ‘no way of knowing to what degree they suspect that information about their activities has come to our knowledge’.6
While the Soviets may have suspected the worst from the start, they soon got confirmation from their man in SIS, Kim Philby. A signal on 17 September from Moscow to Philby’s Soviet intelligence controller in London, Boris Krötenschield, confirmed that information from ‘Stanley’ (Philby’s Soviet cover name) about ‘the events in Canada . . . does correspond to the facts’. At the London end, although Menzies was closely involved, the Corby traffic was primarily handled by Philby as head of the counter-intelligence Section IX, and he was also the principal point of contact for MI5, who naturally had a direct interest in the case. On 12 September Philby produced a draft précis of the case so far (probably for Menzies, who had to give Attlee a personal briefing about the matter on 13 September), which is notable for its cautious and soothing tone, including predictions of developments which he had already engineered himself. ‘It would appear’, he wrote, that the defector’s ‘information is genuine though not necessarily accurate in all details’. There were ‘signs that his disappearance has caused some alarm in the Soviet Embassy’, and it was also ‘possible, therefore, that other members of the network will have been warned, and in particular that the contact between May and the Soviet agent in the U.K. will fail to materialise’. In a covering note, Philby suggested ‘we send out to Canada someone who really knows what he is talking about in the matter of Soviet espionage . . . I doubt whether any of our officers on the spot are competent to tackle the problem.’ He suggested Jane Archer or Roger Hollis from MI5. His preference, significantly, was for Hollis rather than Archer, whom he considered the abler and more knowledgeable, and therefore more of a threat.7
Philby also attempted to restrict the circulation of Corby material. In his