Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the Soviet embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, and a lieutenant of the GRU. He defected on 5 September 1945, three days after the end of World War II, with 109 documents on the USSR's espionage activities in the West. This forced Canada's Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada.
In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for allegiance to another, changing sides in a way which is considered illegitimate by the first state. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause, or doctrine to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.
Fred Rose was a Polish-Canadian politician and trade union organizer. A member of the Communist Party of Canada and Labor-Progressive Party, he served as the MP for Cartier from 1943 to 1947. He is best known for being the only member of the Canadian Parliament to ever be convicted of a charge related to spying for a foreign country.
The Petrov Affair was a Cold War spy incident in Australia, concerning the defection of Vladimir Petrov, a KGB officer, from the Soviet embassy in Canberra in 1954. The defection led to a Royal Commission and the resulting controversy contributed to the Australian Labor Party split of 1955.
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, codenamed HERO, was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) colonel during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Penkovsky informed the United States and the United Kingdom about Soviet military secrets, most importantly, the appearance and footprint of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) installations and the weakness of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. This information was decisive in allowing the US to recognize that the Soviets were placing IRBMs in Cuba before most of the missiles were operational. It also gave US President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban Missile Crisis that followed, valuable information about Soviet weakness that allowed him to face down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and resolve the crisis without a nuclear war.
Peter Maurice Wright CBE was a principal scientific officer for MI5, the British counter-intelligence agency. His book Spycatcher, written with Paul Greengrass, became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies. Spycatcher was part memoir, part exposé of what Wright claimed were serious institutional failures in MI5 and his subsequent investigations into those. He is said to have been influenced in his counterespionage activity by James Jesus Angleton, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1975.
Sir Roger Henry Hollis was a British journalist and intelligence officer who served with MI5 from 1938 to 1965. He was Director General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965.
William Leonard Higgitt was the 15th Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) from 1969 to 1973 and President of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) from 1972 to 1976. His background in intelligence and counterintelligence, during World War II and afterward, made him the preferred choice as RCMP Commissioner during the height of the Cold War. Higgitt also directed national security operations during the October Crisis of 1970, when members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped the provincial Labour Minister Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross; events which saw Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoke the War Measures Act for the first time in Canadian history during peacetime. As Commissioner, Higgitt also presided over the RCMP centenary.
Anatoliy Mikhaylovich Golitsyn CBE was a Soviet KGB defector and author of two books about the long-term deception strategy of the KGB leadership. He was born in Pyriatyn, USSR. He provided "a wide range of intelligence to the CIA on the operations of most of the 'Lines' (departments) at the Helsinki and other residencies, as well as KGB methods of recruiting and running agents." He was an American citizen as late as 1984.
The Embassy of Russia in Canada is the Russian embassy in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, It is located at 285 Charlotte Street, Also temporarily known as, Free Ukraine Street, at the eastern terminus of Laurier Avenue built by W.E. Noffke. To the south it looks out on Strathcona Park while to the east it looks out on the Rideau River. Russia also maintains consulates in Toronto and Montreal.
Vladimir Mikhaylovich Petrov was a member of the Soviet Union's clandestine services who became famous in 1954 for his defection to Australia.
Ignacy Witczak was a GRU illegal officer in the United States during World War II.
Sam Carr was an organizer for the Communist Party of Canada and its successor, the Labor-Progressive Party, in the 1930s and 1940s. He was born Schmil Kogan in Tomashpil, Ukraine, in 1906 and immigrated to Canada in 1924, living in Winnipeg and Regina before settling in Montreal in 1925. Carr became an organizer for the Young Communist League with Fred Rose.
The Gouzenko Affair was the name given to events in Canada surrounding the defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Union in 1945 and his subsequent allegations regarding the existence of a Soviet spy ring of Canadian Communists. Gouzenko's defection and revelations are considered by historians to have marked the beginning of the Cold War in Canada, as well as potentially setting the stage for the "Red Scare" of the 1950s.
Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko is a former high-ranking KGB disinformation officer in the Soviet Union. After 25 years of service in the KGB, he defected to the United States during an assignment in Rome. After providing the names of two U.S. intelligence officers as KGB agents and claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald was never recruited by the KGB, Yurchenko slipped from the Americans and returned to the Soviets. It is clear that his initial defection was illegitimate, because Yurchenko was awarded the Order of the Red Star from the Soviet government for the successful "infiltration operation."
The Iron Curtain is a 1948 American thriller film starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, directed by William A. Wellman. The film was based on the memoirs of Igor Gouzenko. Principal photography was done on location in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada by Charles G. Clarke. The film was later re-released as Behind the Iron Curtain.
Agatha Louisa Chapman was a British-born economist at the Canadian Bureau of National Statistics from 1942–47. She was the only female to attend the first United Nations Sub-Committee on National Income Statistics in 1945, which led to the United Nations System of National Accounts.
Main Intelligence Directorate, abbreviated GRU, was the foreign military intelligence agency of the Soviet Army General Staff of the Soviet Union until 1991. For a few months it was also the foreign military intelligence agency of the newly established Russian Federation until 7 May 1992 when it was dissolved and the Russian GRU took over its activities.
Jacques Georges Aubuchon was an American actor who appeared in films, stage, and on television in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Imants Lešinskis was a Latvian KGB agent and a double agent for the CIA who defected from the Soviet Union to the United States with his wife and daughter in 1978 while working for the United Nations in New York City. His daughter, Ieva Lešinska, made a film about her relationship with her father called My Father the Spy. His work in the KGB mainly consisted of denouncing and defaming, both domestically and abroad, those Latvians perceived as anti-Soviet.
