Igor Sergeevich Gusenko

Igor Sergejewitsch Gusenko , also Gouzenko, ( Russian Игорь Сергеевич Гузенко ; born January 13, 1919 in Rogachevo, Moscow Oblast , † June 25, 1982 in Mississauga , Canada ) was a Soviet cryptographer at the embassy in Ottawa , Canada.

Gusenko's apartment in which he lived in Ottawa in 1945 .

He uncovered Soviet espionage activities aimed at acquiring nuclear know-how by handing over 109 secret documents, some of which were signed by Josef Stalin , to the Western Allies as defectors on September 5, 1945 . It was through him that it became known for the first time that Soviet sleeper agents lived camouflaged for years before they became active. One of the agents he uncovered was the British physicist Alan Nunn May , who was employed in Canada on the allied atomic bomb project, and who even gave samples of uranium isotopes to the Soviet Union. He was arrested in March 1946 and sentenced to ten years of hard labor, but was released in 1952.

After the end of the Second World War , the Gusenko affair changed the attitude of the Western Allies towards the Soviet Union, favored a course of confrontation and thus the Cold War .

Gusenko was the son of poor peasants and studied architecture. In World War II he was a pioneer officer and then joined the military intelligence service of the Red Army . As a civil cipher expert, he was assigned to Colonel Nikolai Sabotin , the military attaché at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, who had set up a spy ring in Canada. Gusenko and his wife liked it in Canada, and before his planned return to the Soviet Union he first went to the Canadian newspaper "Ottawa Journal" with his documents, which should make him credible as a defector, and asked for information and protection. There he was initially rejected. He was not taken into police protection until the next morning after members of the Soviet embassy searched his home.

literature

• The Defection of Igor Gouzenko - The Report of The Royal Commission etc. 3 volumes, Aegean Park Press, Laguna Hills 1984, ISBN 0-89412-066-2 ; ISBN 0-89412-067-0 ; ISBN 0-89412-068-9
• Janusz Piekalkiewicz: World history of espionage. Weltbild Verlag 1993, p. 424

Individual evidence

1. ^ Alan Nunn May, 91, Pioneer In Atomic Spying for Soviets , New York Times . January 25, 2003. Retrieved February 14, 2012.