Working the Dead Beat (28 page)

He stood up for Nietzsche

I stood up for Christ

He stood up for victory

I stood up for less

I loved to read his verses

He loved to hear my song

We never had much interest

In who was right or wrong

His boxer's hands were shaking

He struggled with his pipe

Imperial tobacco

Which I helped him light.

Gordon Lunan

Spy

December
31, 1914 – October 3, 2005

G
ORDON LUNAN WOULD
probably have ended his days in obscurity if Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, had not defected in September 1945 and offered him up as a trophy in what came to be called the Cold War.

Compared with spies such as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, Lunan, a left-leaning advertising copywriter, hardly rated as a threat to national security or the safety of the free world, as it was called then. His story is significant because of the lives he damaged, what it reveals about the times, and how Canadians responded to the news that we harboured Soviet spy rings during the Second World War.

The Soviet Union was our ally against Nazi Germany in the war, but after the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the ground shifted under that carapace of loyalty. The Germans had lost the war; it was only a matter of time and resources before the British, Canadian, and American forces who were marching on the Fatherland from the west and the south met up with the Soviets, who were pushing towards the same target through the occupied territories of Eastern Europe.

When the tanks rolled to a halt and the guns stopped blazing, the map of Europe would be redrawn, but how the spoils would be divided depended on who reached Berlin — or beyond — first. The balance shifted again after the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Suddenly the U.S. had the power to destroy not only a sovereign enemy but the world. Fear of nuclear annihilation turned the Soviet Union and the United States, the two most powerful nations on earth, into enemies, despite the handshaking and speechifying at peace conferences. That abrupt shift in
realpolitik
put hapless fellow-travellers like Lunan on the wrong side of history.

DAVID GORDON LUNAN
was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, on December
31, 1914, one of four sons of a commercial traveller. When Lunan was nine, the family moved to London, where his father was put in charge of persuading the public to buy Congoleum, a cheap substitute for linoleum. He did so well that the company tried to renegotiate his contract to give him a smaller commission, a cheat that was not lost on his son, who tended even then to side with the underdog.

His father's earnings made it possible to send Lunan to Belmont, a feeder for Mill Hill, a non-conformist public school on the outskirts of London. A boarder from the age of ten, he liked school and did well, ending up as one of two head boys at Belmont. At Mill Hill he was taught music, theatre, and officer training along with standard school subjects. He graduated at seventeen in 1932 and immediately began an apprenticeship with the S. H. Benson advertising agency. It took him two years to secure a place in the copy department (where Dorothy Sayers had once toiled), becoming, at twenty, the agency's youngest copywriter.

Meanwhile, fascism was on the rise in Germany, where Adolf Hitler had become chancellor in 1933. The Soviet Union, ruled by Joseph Stalin, had joined the League of Nations in 1934 and become an active player in fascist/anti-fascist political machinations. In 1935 Mussolini invaded Abyssinia from the adjacent Italian territory of Somaliland.

A year later, Lunan visited Spain and saw the anti-democratic and repressive effects of General Francisco Franco's crusade to destroy the republican government. After returning to England, where Sir Oswald Mosley was gathering momentum for his British Union of Fascists, Lunan took a stand by joining the anti-appeasement movement. He was convinced that another war was inevitable. After British prime minister Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler's demands in Munich in September 1938, Lunan decided to immigrate to Canada and leave behind the politics that he found so cowardly.

He soon found a job with the A. McKim advertising agency in Montreal, took a lease on a large flat with friends on what is now Aylmer Avenue, and immersed himself in the city's left-wing artistic community. The Quebec of Premier Maurice Duplessis was rigidly authoritarian, overtly Catholic, and rampantly anti-Semitic. This was the era of the infamous “padlock law” that allowed authorities to shutter the premises of suspected communist sympathizers.

Lunan quickly turned from a left-leaning sympathizer into an activist with communist connections. He was part of a welcoming committee at Windsor Station for a trainload of veterans of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion when they returned in 1938 from the Spanish Civil War. Anticipating that the reception might get out of hand, the
RCMP
and the local press were out in force, and Lunan was snapped giving a clenched-fist salute.

In the spring of 1939 he met Phyllis Newman, a Polish émigré. Their family backgrounds could not have been more different, but they espoused similar political causes. They married right after Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939.

In January 1943, Lunan enlisted in the Canadian Army as a private. He earned a commission as a lieutenant in November 1944 and was seconded to the Wartime Information Board (later the Canadian Information Service). He was posted to Ottawa, where he edited a military journal,
Canadian Affairs
, which supplied a summary of Canadian news and editorials for troops stationed abroad and in Canada.

While in Ottawa he met frequently with Fred Rose, a union organizer, politician, and Communist Party member. The two men had known each other since the late 1930s in Montreal. While Lunan never joined the Communist Party, which had been banned early in the war, he was a member of its close affiliate the Labour Progressive Party. He also hung around with known Communists such as Rose and offered them space in his apartment for meetings. Lunan's sympathies for the Soviets were well known, and Rose persuaded him to keep up the good work by befriending Soviets working at the embassy in Ottawa.

As Lunan wrote in his 1995 autobiography,
The Making of a Spy: A Political Odyssey
, “I admired the Soviet Union for what I believed then to be its enlightened world view . . . but like most of my comrades, I suspect, I would not have wanted to live there or to make Canada over in its likeness . . . the real glue that bound me to my comrades and them to me was the shared desire for a more humane society, a fairer distribution of wealth.”

One morning, as Lunan later testified to the Kellock-Taschereau Royal Commission on Espionage, he arrived at his office on Sparks Street and found an anonymous note on his desk inviting him to an assignation with an unidentified person. The mystery date turned out to be Vasili Rogov, an assistant to Nikolai Zabotin, the Soviet military attaché to Canada.

Rogov recruited Lunan as a spy with the code name Back. His quasi-journalistic career was the perfect cover for organizing a coterie of informants, several of whom thought they were legitimately chatting to him in his capacity as editor of
Canadian Affairs
. Lunan passed along whatever information he was able to glean, even about the most inconsequential matters, and tried to enlist others in the cause. “Far from damaging Canada,” he wrote fifty years later in his self-serving memoirs, “my motive — and I assumed it must have been theirs also — was to help Canada by helping our most powerful and effective ally and thereby shortening the war.”

Indeed, the Canadian Army thought Lunan was doing such a good job he was promoted to acting captain in June 1945 and sent to London by the Canadian Information Service. One of his supervisors described him as “a very ordinary, likeable chap with not too much imagination but very industrious.”

The war was over in Europe and the first meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations was about to take place in Westminster Central Hall in London. Lunan was supposed to be helping with the publicity but ended up working as a pinch-hitting speechwriter for Paul Martin Sr., then secretary of state in Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's Cabinet.

Back home, his world had begun to collapse with Igor Gouzenko's defection in September 1945. The Soviet cipher clerk brought documentation with him about an extensive Soviet espionage network linking Canada, the United States, and Britain that was directed at finding information about the U.S. atomic bomb program. Gouzenko implicated Lunan as a “recruiting agent” and the leader of a cell of three informants who were passing information to Soviet intelligence on trends in Canadian politics and military weapons.

The alleged informants were Israel Halperin (for a fuller account of his life, please see Service), a mathematician on military leave from Queen's University to work at the Canadian Army's research and development establishment in Ottawa; Durnford Smith, an electrical engineer at the Canadian National Research Council; and Edward Mazerall, also an engineer at the
NRC
. None of them produced anything that was either secret or innovative, but everything, including Halperin's personal address book, took on sinister overtones in the overheated atmosphere of the Cold War.

Five months after Gouzenko's defection, in February 1946, Lunan was summoned back to Ottawa for an “important assignment.” After his plane landed in Montreal, he was surrounded and restrained by three men in plain clothes, frisked, and taken to the
RCMP
barracks in Rockcliffe, a suburb of Ottawa. Two days later he was read a detailed surveillance record dating back to 1939 and a list of his alleged co-conspirators.

Civil liberties were legally trampled in the roundups and detentions that followed, even though the War Measures Act had expired at the end of the Second World War. The Mackenzie King government had secretly extended one of its provisions a month after Gouzenko's defection through special order-in-council PC 6444. It gave the prime minister and the justice minister the power to arrest and detain people suspected of passing secrets to the enemy.

King was so twitchy about this potential national and international crisis that he didn't tell his full Cabinet about Gouzenko's defection until February 5, 1946, according to historian Amy Knight in her book
How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies
. That was five months after the fact and, more important, two days after American journalist Drew Pearson had broken the news on a national radio broadcast of a “gigantic espionage network inside the United States and Canada.” At the same time, King appointed the Royal Commission on Espionage, headed by two Supreme Court justices, R. L. Kellock and Robert Taschereau. Within days the
RCMP
had started rounding up suspects and detaining them without access to legal counsel or to their families.

Under heavy interrogation, and fearing that as a member of the Armed Forces he might be shot as a traitor, Lunan crumpled and agreed to co-­operate with the espionage commission on February 20, 1946. Lunan implicated Smith, Mazerall, and Halperin, although not his pal Fred Rose, the Communist MP who had recruited him as a spy in the first place. Late in March 1946, he was jailed for contempt after refusing to answer questions at Rose's preliminary hearing.

At trial, Lunan was brought before Judge James McRuer, whose outrageous rulings set the precedents for later accused. McRuer allowed transcripts of the espionage commission to be admitted into court, even though the accused had been interrogated without benefit of counsel. Ignorance of the law was not a defence, he argued, and the accused should have demanded protection under the Canada Evidence Act to avoid incriminating themselves.

Lunan was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Official Secrets Act in November 1946. Before his sentence was handed down, he told the judge: “I do not consider myself guilty of the charge either in law or in fact.” Nevertheless, he spent the next five years in Kingston Penitentiary, with extra time tacked on for refusing to testify in court about some of the colleagues he had implicated earlier.

His marriage with Newman, the mother of his daughter, held together while he was in prison but fell apart quickly thereafter. He met his second wife, Miriam Magee, at a party thrown to celebrate his release. They were married in Montreal, where Lunan was again working in the advertising business.

He eventually opened his own agency and retired with his wife to the countryside near Ottawa in 1975. He spent the rest of his life growing strawberries, cooking gourmet meals, espousing social justice principles to his step-grandchildren, and writing two memoirs,
The Making of a Spy
and, a decade later,
Redhanded: Inside the Spy Ring That Changed the World
(2005). The major difference between the two books is an epilogue in the second one in which Lunan explains, more explicitly than ever before, that he acted “naively, stupidly and admittedly outside the law” in the “best interests of winning the war against Nazism.” He also acknowledged that the Gouzenko affair helped trigger the Cold War and expressed regret that he “played a part in making it happen so soon.” By that time the Soviet Union had collapsed and all most Canadians could remember about Gouzenko were his bizarre appearances with a paper bag or a pillowcase over his head on the popular current affairs show,
Front Page Challenge
.

Not a huge
mea culpa,
by most definitions. Still, Lunan did serve his time for betraying his country, however ineffectually and naively. In researching his second memoir, he made a freedom-of-information request for his
RCMP
dossier and learned that the security force had been keeping tabs on him until the mid-1970s — when he was in his sixties.

Shortly after finishing the manuscript, he suffered a bad fall and died two weeks later in hospital in Hawkesbury, Ontario, on October 3, 2005. He was ninety.