Documents shed light on 'atom spy' who triggered Cold War

BY CANWEST NEWS SERVICEMARCH 10, 2007

It was arguably the clandestine Canadian encounter that launched the Cold War.

Just days after the first atomic weapon was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, a traitorous British scientist working in Canada met with a Russian agent in Montreal and handed him two samples of enriched uranium - precious specimens in the early days of a global arms race when Soviet scientists were rushing to match American firepower and construct their own A-bomb.

"The man gave me some dollars (I forget how many) in a bottle of whisky, and I accepted these against my will," Alan Nunn May, a Cambridge-educated nuclear physicist, later confessed. "The whole affair was extremely painful to me and I only embarked on it because I felt this was a contribution I could make to the safety of mankind."

May, who had been seconded by Britain to the National Research Council of Canada in January 1943, was outed as a Communist spy just a month after his illicit uranium transfer. That's when Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, defected with about 100 telegrams and other classified documents he'd stolen from a consular safe, exposing an extensive espionage ring - including scientists, bureaucrats and even the Montreal-area socialist MP Fred Rose - operating in North America and Britain at the end of the Second World War.

Now, hundreds of documents related to May's espionage activities, all recently declassified by the British government, have been posted on the website of Britain's National Archives, offering an unprecedented inside look at the Canadian spy case that sparked the Gouzenko Affair and ultimately reshaped 20th-century history.

Among the secret dispatches revealed by Gouzenko, and now viewable online, were detailed accounts of the handover of radioactive material by May - code-named ALEK in several secret missives from the Ottawa embassy to Moscow. Soviet telegrams about the uranium coup were the showpiece evidence in a growing file of documents that eventually gave Gouzenko confidence that he had the goods to convince Western authorities of a Communist conspiracy in their midst, and to grant him and his young family asylum in Canada.

The revelations stunned officials in London, Ottawa and Washington. The head of the nuclear lab in Montreal, John Cockcroft, produced for the British a list of the secret technologies and materials May could have passed to Soviet agents: "Working knowledge of properties of Uranium 233," notes his grim litany. "Knowledge of methods of separating Plutonium and U. 233.... Had access to small samples of U. 233.... May have obtained access unofficially to Uranium metal irradiated in the X. pile and containing Plutonium.... Such samples would be of great value in starting up chemical separation work...."

The Soviet capital, too, was rocked as it became clear that Moscow's carefully cultivated overseas intelligence network had been unearthed.

The fallout was far-reaching and - according to many experts - the episode locked the U.S., Britain and their allies into a political and military standoff with the Soviet Union that would dominate global politics for nearly 50 years.

Among the files opened by the British archives are typed translations of the coded messages sent between Moscow and the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa reporting May's espionage activities; exchanges between British and Canadian officials as they planned surveillance of May after his exposure as a traitor; transcripts of phone calls recorded by agents tailing the scientist-spy; and finally, after his arrest, the typewritten record of May's February 1946 confession.

"About a year ago whilst in Canada, I was contacted by an individual whose identity I decline to divulge. He called on me at my private apartment in Swail Avenue, Montreal. He apparently knew I was employed by the Montreal laboratory and he sought information from me concerning atomic research," May admitted. "I gave and had given very careful consideration to the correctness of making sure that the development of atomic energy was not confined to the U.S.A.

"At one meeting I gave the man microscopic amounts of U. 233 and U. 235 (one of each). The U. 235 was a slightly enriched sample and was in a small glass tube and consisted of about a milliogramme (milligram) of oxide. The U. 235 was about a tenth of a milliogramme (milligram) and was a very thin deposit on a platinum foil and was wrapped in a piece of paper...."

Many of the documents have been examined previously by historians, most notably the Swiss-based scholar Amy Knight, author of the acclaimed 2005 study How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies.

But her book just scratches the surface of the records made available by the British archive, which detail virtually every move made by May after Gouzenko's disclosures alerted the RCMP and British security forces to the researcher's duplicity.

One of the telegrams obtained from Gouzenko revealed plans for May to meet with a Soviet operative in front of the British Museum in London after his planned return from Canada in September 1945. The trip home to Britain was to come just days after May's final duty in Canada: a two-day inspection of the Chalk River nuclear facility near Ottawa.

"Alek shall have under his left arm the newspaper Times, and the contact man will have in his left hand the magazine Picture Post," says Moscow's order, dated Aug. 22, 1945, to the Soviet military attache in Ottawa.

The memo adds that the contact man will ask: "What is the shortest way to the Strand?" to which May would reply: "Well, come along. I am going that way."

Eager to have the scientist proceed with the rendezvous and thus expose a Soviet agent in London, Canadian officials agreed to postpone May's arrest, allow him to take a flight to Britain and let British officials take over the surveillance and, eventually, prosecution of the "atom spy."

But there were concerns May could pass further information to the Soviets or disappear during his trip home to Britain. Another document labelled "TOP SECRET" detailed plans for an RCMP officer, "Detective Sergeant BAYFIELD," to accompany May on the flight out of Canada, but "under cover as Mr. Bayfield, special courier for United Kingdom High Commissioner in Canada."

After landing in Britain, Bayfield was to make contact with a British counterpart, who would ask the Canadian: "How do you like our lowlands weather?" The Mountie was to respond, "I have not seen much of it yet, but it's rather like our Maritime provinces," before confirming May's identity and handing over surveillance duties to the British agent.

May didn't keep the appointment at the British Museum. It is widely believed that Kim Philby - at the time a top British intelligence officer, but later revealed to be a Soviet spy - tipped May to the planned sting.

The archival documents also shed light on the diplomatic tensions caused by May's treachery. In one document, the British High Commissioner in Ottawa, Malcolm MacDonald, advises Sir Alexander Cadogan, British undersecretary of foreign affairs, that the Canadian government "draws my attention to the fact that vetting of United Kingdom scientists sent to Canada on project was responsibility of British Government and if these leakages on further investigation prove as serious as they appear at moment then H.M.G. (Her Majesty's Government) will be liable to criticism by United States Government."

May was eventually charged and convicted of passing official secrets to the Soviets. He was sentenced to 10 years hard labour, but served only six before his release in 1952.

He worked as a scientific researcher in Ghana until the late 1970s, and died in Britain in 2003.

British intelligence documents released by the archive indicate that the uranium samples stolen by May were ferried to Russia by Petr Motinov, a Soviet Embassy staffer in Ottawa. In her book, Knight quotes an account given years later by Motinov of his arrival with the uranium in Moscow, where he was met by top secret service officials, including Lavrentii Beria - the man who, later in the 1940s, would head the Soviet Union's successful atomic and hydrogen bomb projects.

"With great care I pulled the valuable ampoule out from under my waist-band and handed it to the director. He walked slowly to a black car, which stood on the tarmac, and put the ampoule inside. I then asked the director 'Who was in there?' 'That's Beria,' whispered the director. Up to this day, I still have from that uranium an agonizingly painful wound, and must get my blood changed several times a year."