Text/Fast Wind
A man wearing a spooky hood mask was interviewed by an American host whose English with a Russian accent spread throughout the United States.
"Do you believe that if you appear on TV without a mask and expose your face, your life will be in danger?" The moderator asked.
"Yes." The masked man answered.
Igor Guzenko appeared in front of the camera for the first time
The man behind the mask was Igor Gouzenko, a former Soviet intelligence official and cryptographer who defected to Canada in 1945 to sell the network of Soviet intelligence agencies in the West, thus single-handedly sparking the Cold War.
At the time of his defection, Guzenko was 26 years old.
Born in Moscow in 1919, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture, joined the army after the outbreak of World War II and received a year of cryptography training. In the summer of 1943, he came to the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa as a subordinate of the military attaché of the embassy as a cryptographer.
Igor Guzenko during World War II
Guzenko acquired an apartment on Somerset Street outside the embassy and lived there with his newly married wife. On the surface, Guzenko was a man with extraordinary memory and a competent job, but no one could have imagined that he had secretly copied and stolen a large amount of confidential material.
Igor Guzenko's apartment in Canada
Guzenko later recalled that he was fascinated by the superior Western way of life, "incredible food offerings, restaurants, movies, open shops." When he learned in late 1944 that he would be recalled to Moscow, he decided to defect.
On September 5, 1945, Guzenko walked out of the embassy door with a briefcase containing Soviet codebooks and a large amount of deciphering materials.
Igor Guzenko was interviewed by an American reporter
Guzenko's defection path is comical.
First, he found the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but the officers on duty refused to believe his story. He then went to the editorial office of the Ottawa Daily, but the nightly editor on duty was not interested, thinking that this "stocky Soviet" was exaggerating and suggested that he go to the Ministry of Justice. When he arrived at the Ministry of Justice, he found no one on duty.
All day long he traveled between various Canadian government agencies, but no one believed him, and Guzenko panicked, worried that the embassy would find his own traces, and returned to the apartment to hide his family in the apartment opposite for the night. Sure enough, he saw Soviet intelligence officers enter his apartment at night and search it until the Ottawa police intervened before leaving.
Igor Guzenko and Western agents
The next day, an enraged Guzenko found the RCMP again, this time to a secret camp where he was jointly investigated by Canadian, British, and U.S. intelligence. Canadian Prime Minister William Mackenzie King sheltered him and placed protective custody of defectors and their families.
Igor Guzenko appears on American television
According to Guzenko, Western intelligence agencies believed that the Soviets were engaged in "espionage." As a result, former allies became nemesis, and in Canada, Britain, and the United States, large numbers of intelligence officers and scientists were convicted and even executed, and the Western public's perception of the Soviet Union changed dramatically.
Small people triggered big events, and the "Gutzenko Incident" opened a half-century-long Cold War. His story was made into the film Iron Curtain in 1948.
Poster for the movie The Iron Curtain
What happened to the defectors?
Fearful of Soviet reprisals, Guzenko changed his name and surname, spent the rest of his life under the pseudonym of George Brown, raised eight children with his wife, and lived a middle-class life in the Toronto suburb of Clarkson. He lived in seclusion, hardly interacted with outsiders, wore a mask when interviewed, and was terrified all his life, dying of a heart attack in 1982 and being buried in a cemetery in Mississauga, Ontario, but never dared to erect a tombstone.
Tombstone of Igor Guzenko
It wasn't until 2002, when the Canadian government designated the Guzenko Incident as an event of national historical significance, that his family erected a tombstone for him.