Igor Gouzenko

The Second World War had just ended Japan had just surrendered. Canada along with the United States and Britain had been war time allies with the Soviets.

This was until a man named Igor Gouzenko had come along. Igor Gouzenko was a Russian cipher clerk who had worked at the Russian embassy in Ottawa. Working at the embassy he saw documents that indicated that the Soviets were spying on their western "allies!"

After stealing the documents, Gouzenko went to the editor of the Ottawa Journal with his evidence but was told to go come back "when no one was on duty". Gouzenko then went to the RCMP and told them what he had found but they too turned him away. He then had no choice but to return to his apartment pictured here (upper right corner) but even then he realized that the Soviets would notice the missing documents and the missing cipher clerk. This gave him no choice but to get his pregnant wife and young son to safety. They hid in a neighbors apartment and watched in horror through a peep hole as Soviet agents broke into their home and searched for the missing documents. Also watching however from across the street were RCMP officers who decided that Gouzenko should be taken seriously. Gouzenko and his family were then taken to safety and debriefed by the government. With the Information that the Government found out they began to stop thinking of the Soviets as wartime allies and Started thinking of them as a cunning enemy!