Intelligence "Blowback"

Introduction

“In CIA jargon, "blowback" describes the unintended, undesirable consequences of covert operations, such as the funding of the Afghan Mujahideen and the destabilization of Afghanistan contributing to the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.”

                 -- blog entry on unintended consequences of May 21, 2017

Espionage blowback also occurs when a “cover” –such as pretending to be a medical doctor – is blown when someone suffers a medical emergency and the ersatz doctor is unable to offer any useful assistance.

                  = = = = = = = = = = Here is more detail about blowback = = = = = = = = = =

Blowback is a term originating from within the American Intelligence community, denoting the unintended consequences, unwanted side-effects, or suffered repercussions of a covert operation that fall back on those responsible for the aforementioned operations. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as "random" acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the intelligence agency acted—are unaware of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.

Etymology

Originally, blowback was CIA internal coinage denoting the unintended, harmful consequences—to friendly populations and military forces—when a given weapon is used beyond its purpose as intended by the party supplying it. Examples include anti-Western religious figures (e.g. Osama bin Laden) who, in due course, attack foe and sponsor; right-wing counter-revolutionaries who sell drugs to their sponsor's civil populace (see CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US); and banana republic juntas (see Salvadoran Civil War) who kill American reporters or nuns (e.g. Dorothy Kazel).

In formal print usage, the term blowback first appeared in the Clandestine Service History—Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran—November 1952–August 1953, the CIA's internal history of the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, sponsored by the US and UK, which was published in March 1954. Blowback from this operation would indeed occur with the Iranian Revolution and the Iran hostage crisis. Recent accounts of how blowback functioned in the War on Terror relation to US and UK intelligence and defense propaganda and became an important issue in a 21st Century media environment are discussed by Dr Emma Louise Briant in her book Propaganda and Counter-terrorism which presents first hand accounts and discussions of deliberate and unintended consequences of blowback, oversight and impacts for the public.

Examples

Nicaragua and Iran-Contra

In the 1980s blowback was a central theme in the legal and political debates about the efficacy of the Reagan Doctrine, which advocated public and secret support of anti-Communist counter-revolutionaries. For example, by secretly funding the secret war of the militarily-defeated, right-wing Contras against the left-wing Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which led to the Iran–Contra Affair, wherein the Reagan Administration sold American weapons to US enemy Iran to arm the Contras with Warsaw Pact weapons, and their consequent drug-dealing in American cities. Moreover, in the case of Nicaragua v. United States, the International Court of Justice ruled against the United States' secret military attacks against Sandinista Nicaragua, because the countries were not formally at war.

Reagan Doctrine advocates, such as the Heritage Foundation, argued that support for anti-Communists would topple Communist régimes without retaliatory consequences to the United States and help win the global Cold War.

Afghanistan and Al Qaeda

Examples of blowback include the CIA's financing and support for Afghan insurgents to fight an anti-Communist proxy guerilla war against the USSR in Afghanistan; some of the beneficiaries of this CIA support may have joined al-Qaeda's terrorist campaign against the United States.

Syria and ISIS

During the Syrian Civil War, United States and Saudi Arabia supported and aided anti-Assad armed groups. Some of those groups later shifted loyalty to ISIS.

Yevno Azef and Russian Imperial secret police

Yevno Azef, as a paid police informant, provided the Okhrana with information to allow them to arrest an influential member of the resistance. After the arrest, Azef assumed the vacant position and organized assassinations including those of the director of Imperial Russia's police and later Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav Plehve (1904), the Tsar's uncle Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovich (1905). By 1908, Azef was playing the double role of a revolutionary assassin and police spy who received 1000 rubles a month from the authorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_(intelligence)

Spy Ships -- an Overview

A spy ship or reconnaissance vessel is a dedicated ship intended to gather intelligence, usually by means of sophisticated electronic eavesdropping. In a wider sense, any ship intended to gather information could be considered a spy ship.

Spy ships are usually controlled by a nation's government, due to the high costs and advanced equipment required. They tend to be parts of the nation's navy, though they may also be operated by secret services.

Naval trawlers masquerade as civilian ships such as fishing trawlers, which could be reasonably expected to remain in a certain area for a long time.

Ships which are used to infiltrate spies or special forces are sometimes also called "spy ships.”

History of Spy Ships

Spy ships in the modern sense have been used at least since the early Cold War, and they are in use by all major powers. Their uses, in addition to listening in on communications and spy on enemy fleet movements, were to monitor nuclear tests and missile launches (especially of potential ICBMs).

One of the most important functions for both Cold War spy ship fleets, especially in the 1960s, was the gathering of submarine "signatures" – the patterns of noise that could often identify the specific type of submarine and were thus valuable in anti-submarine warfare. During that era, the United States fielded about 80 vessels, usually classified as "environmental research" craft, while the Soviet Union had around 60 ships, often converted trawlers or hydrographic research ships.

In the late 1980s, the Soviet fisheries fleet was known for having equipped many of their thousands of ships with sophisticated SIGINT and ELINT equipment, thus functioning as auxiliary spy ships tracking western naval vessels and electronic communications (though their main function remained commercial fishing.

Operation

A spy ship usually stays in international waters (or at least outside territorial waters), so as to not violate territorial borders. From there, it will use its electronic equipment to monitor sea and air traffic, radio and radar frequencies and also try to intercept and decrypt coded radio or phone communications. This is mostly done via passive means such as radio receivers or passive sonar. Sometimes however, active measures such as radar or sonar may also be used to detect the movement of aircraft, missiles, ships or other vehicles or troops. However, this risks revealing the ship's purpose.

As it is located much closer to the surveilled area than a fixed installation (given a close-by shoreline), the monitoring is usually much more efficient and in some respects better than even that of spy satellites.

Tracking vessels also have some of the capabilities of spy ships, and as they are controlled by their national governments, they are also intermittently used for similar purposes, such as tracking enemy missile tests.

Soviet AGI Trawlers

As the United States Navy began deploying ballistic missile submarines in 1960, the Soviet Union attempted to obtain more information about the capabilities of the UGM-27 Polaris missile and the locations of the submarines capable of launching them. While the Soviet Navy requested more sophisticated ships, they were allocated trawlers (called tral’shchiki) from the fishing fleet equipped with more sophisticated sensors and communication equipment. Very capable crews were assigned to these trawlers of unremarkable appearance. They were assigned to patrol stations off United States naval bases to photograph and report arrival and departure of United States warships and auxiliaries. Other trawlers of similar appearance would patrol weapons firing ranges used by the United States Navy to observe practice firings of modern weapons and record the acoustic and/or electromagnetic signature of the sonar, search radar, fire-control radar, guidance, and/or command electronics of each weapons system. The United States Navy officially designated these trawlers as Auxiliary, General Intelligence or AGI, and they were informally known as "tattletales".

An AGI might be assigned to a single patrol station for as long as six months. These ships were not fast enough to keep up with most warships, but they sometimes congregated around aircraft carriers conducting air operations of the United States Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean or United States Seventh Fleet in the western Pacific Ocean, or in suspected patrol areas of ballistic missile submarines. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized a counter AGI program for United States destroyers to come alongside the AGIs to push against them, foul their screws with steel nets, and focus high power electromagnetic transmitters to burn out the amplifying circuitry of their electronic sensors. The AGI crews then revealed their ship-handling skills using superior maneuverability to evade the destroyers' intentions. This jousting in international waters continued until signing of the U.S.–Soviet Incidents at Sea agreement in 1972.

List of Spy Ships

• Argentine ARA Narwal
• Chinese Navy:
• Type 813 spy ship
• Type 814A spy ship
• Type 815 spy ship
• Finnish Navy Kustaanmiekka (Decommissioned)
• French Dupuy de Lôme
• German Oste-class fleet service ship
• Italian Elettra multipurpose ship
• Royal Norwegian Navy
• Marjata (1992)
• Marjata (2016)
• Polish Navy has two officially acknowledged to be electronic surveillance ships
• ORP Nawigator, originally claimed to be a navigational training ship.
• ORP Hydrograf, originally claimed to be a research ship.
• Russian Navy
• See also: List of active Russian Navy ships#Special-purpose ships
• Primor'ye-class surveillance ship
• Balzam-class intelligence ship
• Vishnya-class intelligence ship
• Yanta
• Spanish Alerta, former East German AGI Jasmund refitted with modern equipment.
• Swedish Navy
• HSwMS Orion
• HSwMS Carlskrona
• United States Navy:
• USS Oxford
• USS Georgetown
• USS Jamestown
• USS Belmont
• USS Liberty -- Attacked and damaged by Israel in June, 1967
• USS Banner
• USS Pueblo -- Attacked and captured by North Korea in January, 1968
• USS Palm Beach
• USNS Private Jose F. Valdez
• USNS LT. James E. Robinson
• USNS Sgt. Joseph E. Muller
• USS Sphinx

                                        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_ship

Actor/Singer John Lloyd Young

John Lloyd Mills Young is an American actor and singer. In 2006, he won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his role as Frankie Valli in Broadway's Jersey Boys. He is the only American actor to date to have received a Lead Actor in a Musical Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World Award for a Broadway debut. Young sang lead vocals on the Grammy-award winning Jersey Boys cast album, certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Young reprised his role as Frankie Valli in Warner Brothers' film adaptation of Jersey Boys, directed by Clint Eastwood and released June 20, 2014.

                                                                  John Lloyd Young
Young was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.  He was sworn-in by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on November 21, 2013. He resigned from the President's Committee in August, 2017, co-signing a letter of resignation that said in reference to President Trump, "Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions."

Early Life

Young was born in Sacramento, California, the son of Rosemarie Joan (Cianciola) and Karl Bruce Young, a Strategic Air Command tanker-squadron commander. His father had English, Welsh and German ancestry, and his mother was of Italian descent.

Career

After moving to New York City, Young worked his way up through the ranks of the theater scene with roles in numerous regional and off-Broadway plays, including the New York-area premiere of Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy with actor John Mahoney; "Charlie" in Julia Jordan's The Summer of the Swans; "Moritz" in the Douglas Langworthy translation of Wedekind's Spring Awakening; and "Claudio" in Rinne Groff's The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem for the Target Margin Theatre.

He was named one of the Best Featured Actors in a Play by the New Jersey Star-Ledger as "Danny Saunders" in Aaron Posner and Chaim Potok's dramatic adaptation of Potok's book, The Chosen, opposite Theodore Bikel, directed by David Ellenstein.

He failed to land the part of Frankie Valli in the pre-Broadway run of Jersey Boys, but a year later and after several more auditions, he was asked to headline the show on Broadway, where he played the role for over two years. During his tenure at Jersey Boys, which now has several companies playing worldwide, Young performed at the White House, Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, the New York City Marathon, New Year's Eve in Times Square, Yankee Stadium and Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Young's run with Jersey Boys concluded on November 9, 2007, followed shortly thereafter by a sold-out-in-a-day solo concert debut at Lincoln Center.

After moving to Los Angeles, Young starred as Marius in an all-star production of Les Misérables at the Hollywood Bowl and was the first guest star invited to appear on Glee.

Young debuted his visual art in May 2010 in "Food for Thought," a show benefiting AIDS Project Los Angeles, at Willis Wonderland, the home of Young's friend, Grammy-winning songwriter Allee Willis. Young's art is represented by Hollywood's Hamilton-Selway Fine Art Gallery. His first art commission was for famed Beverly Hills, CA, restaurant, Spago.

Young's debut album, "My Turn...", was released on July 3, 2012. The album was executive-produced by Dona R. Miller and Young's Under the Skyway Productions, with production from Tommy Faragher of Fox's hit show, GLEE, whose cover of "Teenage Dream" was the first song from the show to reach NO. 1 on the Billboard Charts. The album was expanded and re-released with eight new tracks in 2014.

He made his debut at New York's Cafe Carlyle in February 2013. Young reprised his Frankie Valli role in the Broadway production of Jersey Boys from July 3 - September 30, 2012. In March 2014, Young made his West End Theatre debut, starring in the musical's London production. He reprised the role in director Clint Eastwood's film adaptation of Jersey Boys, which was released in June 2014.

Young's extensive charity work includes frequent appearances with and support of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, amfAR, Paul Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang, AIDS Project Los Angeles and the United Service Organization (USO). Young has been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union since 1995.

He is a practitioner and student of Chinese Chan Buddhism.

                                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lloyd_Young

D Day 75 Years Ago

[Seventy Five years ago today] The Western Allies of World War II launched the largest amphibious invasion in history when they assaulted Normandy, located on the northern coast of France, on 6 June 1944. The invaders were able to establish a beachhead as part of Operation Overlord after a successful "D-Day," the first day of the invasion.

Allied land forces came from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Free French forces. In the weeks following the invasion, Polish forces and contingents from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece and the Netherlands participated in the ground campaign; most also provided air and naval support alongside elements of the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and the Royal Norwegian Navy.

The Normandy invasion began with overnight parachute and glider landings, massive air attacks and naval bombardments. In the early morning, amphibious landings commenced on five beaches codenamed Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah, with troops from the United States landing on Omaha and Utah, Britain landing on Gold and Sword, and Canada landing on Juno. During the evening the remaining elements of the airborne divisions landed. Land forces used on D-Day sailed from bases along the south coast of England, the most important of these being Portsmouth.

Planning the Invasion

Allied forces rehearsed their D-Day roles for months before the invasion. On 28 April 1944, in south Devon on the English coast, 749 U.S. soldiers and sailors were killed when German torpedo boats surprised one of these landing exercises, Exercise Tiger.

In the months leading up to the invasion, the Allied forces conducted a deception operation, Operation Fortitude, aimed at misleading the Germans with respect to the date and place of the invasion.

There were several leaks prior to or on D-Day. Through the Cicero affair, the Germans obtained documents containing references to Overlord, but these documents lacked all detail. Double Cross agents, such as the Spaniard Juan Pujol (code-named Garbo), played an important role in convincing the German High Command that Normandy was at best a diversionary attack. U.S. Major General Henry Miller, chief supply officer of the US 9th Air Force, during a party at Claridge's Hotel in London complained to guests of the supply problems he was having but that after the invasion, which he told them would be before 15 June, supply would be easier. After being told, Eisenhower reduced Miller to lieutenant colonel [Associated Press, June 10, 1944] and sent him back to the U.S. where he retired. Another such leak was General Charles de Gaulle's radio message after D-Day. He, unlike all the other leaders, stated that this invasion was the real invasion. This had the potential to ruin the Allied deceptions Fortitude North and Fortitude South. In contrast, Gen. Eisenhower referred to the landings as the initial invasion.

Only ten days each month were suitable for launching the operation: a day near the full moon was needed both for illumination during the hours of darkness and for the spring tide, the former to illuminate navigational landmarks for the crews of aircraft, gliders and landing craft, and the latter to expose defensive obstacles placed by the German forces in the surf on the seaward approaches to the beaches. A full moon occurred on 6 June. Allied Expeditionary Force Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had tentatively selected 5 June as the date for the assault. The weather was fine during most of May, but deteriorated in early June. On 4 June, conditions were clearly unsuitable for a landing; wind and high seas would make it impossible to launch landing craft from larger ships at sea, low clouds would prevent aircraft finding their targets. The Allied troop convoys already at sea were forced to take shelter in bays and inlets on the south coast of Britain for the night.

It seemed possible that everything would have to be cancelled and the troops returned to their embarkation camps (which would be almost impossible, as the enormous movement of follow-up formations into them was already proceeding). The next full moon period would be nearly a month away. At a vital meeting on 5 June, Eisenhower's chief meteorologist (Group Captain J.M. Stagg) forecast a brief improvement for 6 June. Commander of all land forces for the invasion General Bernard Montgomery and Eisenhower's Chief of Staff General Walter Bedell Smith wished to proceed with the invasion. Commander of the Allied Air Forces Air Chief Marshal Leigh Mallory was doubtful, but Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Admiral Bertram Ramsay believed that conditions would be marginally favorable. On the strength of Stagg's forecast, Eisenhower ordered the invasion to proceed. As a result, prevailing overcast skies limited Allied air support, and no serious damage would be done to the beach defences on Omaha and Juno.

The Germans meanwhile took comfort from the existing poor conditions, which were worse over Northern France than over the English Channel itself, and believed no invasion would be possible for several days. Some troops stood down and many senior officers were away for the weekend. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel took a few days' leave to celebrate his wife's birthday, while dozens of division, regimental and battalion commanders were away from their posts conducting war games just prior to the invasion.

Allied Order of Battle

The following major units were landed on D-Day (6 June 1944).

• British 6th Airborne Division.
• British I Corps, 3rd British Infantry Division and the British 27th Armoured Brigade.
• 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade
• British XXX Corps, British 50th Infantry Division and British 8th Armoured Brigade.
• British 79th Armoured Division
• U.S. V Corps, U.S. 1st Infantry Division and U.S. 29th Infantry Division.
• U.S. VII Corps, U.S. 4th Infantry Division, U.S. 101st Airborne Division, U.S. 82nd Airborne Division.

The total number of troops landed on D-Day was around 130,000–156,000, roughly half American and the other half from the Commonwealth Realms.

Subsequent Days

The total troops, vehicles and supplies landed over the period of the invasion were:

• By the end of 11 June (D + 5), 326,547 troops, 54,186 vehicles and 104,428 tons of supplies.
• By 30 June (D+24) over 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies.
• By 4 July one million men had been landed.

Naval Participants

The invasion fleet was drawn from eight different navies, comprising 6,939 vessels: 1,213 warships, 4,126 transport vessels (landing ships and landing craft), and 736 ancillary craft and 864 merchant vessels. There was a total number of 195,700 naval personnel.

The overall commander of the Allied Naval Expeditionary Force, providing close protection and bombardment at the beaches, was Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay. The Allied Naval Expeditionary Force was divided into two Naval Task Forces: Western (Rear-Admiral Alan G Kirk) and Eastern (Rear-Admiral Sir Philip Vian).

The warships provided cover for the transports against the enemy—whether in the form of surface warships, submarines, or as an aerial attack—and gave support to the landings through shore bombardment. These ships included the Allied Task Force "O".

                               https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Normandy

1989: Tiananmen Square

The Tiananmen Square protests, commonly known in mainland China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing during 1989. The popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests is sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement. The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the military to occupy central parts of Beijing. In what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, troops with assault rifles and tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundreds to up to 2,600, with thousands more wounded.

Set off by the death of pro-reform Communist leader Hu Yaobang in April 1989, amid the backdrop of rapid economic development and social changes in post-Mao China, the protests reflected anxieties about the country's future in the popular consciousness and among the political elite. The reforms of the 1980s had led to a nascent market economy which benefited some people but seriously disaffected others, and the one-party political system also faced a challenge of legitimacy. Common grievances at the time included inflation, corruption, limited preparedness of graduates for the new economy, and restrictions on political participation. The students called for democracy, greater accountability, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, although they were highly disorganized and their goals varied. At the height of the protests, about 1 million people assembled in the Square.

As the protests developed, the authorities responded with both conciliatory and hardline tactics, exposing deep divisions within the party leadership. By May, a student-led hunger strike galvanized support for the demonstrators around the country, and the protests spread to some 400 cities. Ultimately, China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and other Communist Party elders believed the protests to be a political threat and resolved to use force. The State Council declared martial law on May 20 and mobilized as many as 300,000 troops to Beijing. The troops advanced into central parts of Beijing on the city's major thoroughfares in the early morning hours of June 4, killing both demonstrators and bystanders in the process.

The international community, human rights organizations, and political analysts condemned the Chinese government for the massacre. Western countries imposed arms embargoes on China. The Chinese government made widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, suppressed other protests around China, expelled foreign journalists, strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press, strengthened the police and internal security forces, and demoted or purged officials it deemed sympathetic to the protests. More broadly, the suppression halted the policies of liberalization in the 1980s. Considered a watershed event, the protests set the limits on political expression in China up to the present day. Its memory is widely associated with questioning the legitimacy of Communist Party rule and remains one of the most sensitive and most widely censored topics in China.

Shanghai, Hong Kong and Overseas

University students in Shanghai also took to the streets to commemorate the death of Hu Yaobang and protest against certain policies of the government. In many cases, these were supported by the universities' own party cells. Jiang Zemin, then-Municipal Party Secretary, addressed the student protesters in a bandage and 'expressed his understanding' as he was a former student agitator before 1949. At the same time, he moved swiftly to send in police forces to control the streets and to purge Communist Party leaders who had supported the students.

On April 19, the editors of the World Economic Herald, a magazine close to reformists, decided to publish a commemorative section on Hu. Inside was an article by Yan Jiaqi, which commented favourably on the Beijing student protests, and called for a reassessment of Hu's 1987 purge. Sensing the conservative political trends in Beijing, Jiang Zemin demanded that the article be censored. Many newspapers were printed with a blank page. Jiang then suspended lead editor Qin Benli. His decisive action earned trust from conservative party elders, who praised Jiang's loyalty.

In Hong Kong on 27 May, over 300,000 people gathered at Happy Valley Racecourse for a gathering called Democratic songs dedicated for China. Many Hong Kong celebrities sang songs and expressed their support for the students in Beijing. The following day, a procession of 1.5 million people, one fourth of Hong Kong's population, led by Martin Lee, Szeto Wah and other organization leaders, paraded through Hong Kong Island. Across the world, especially where ethnic-Chinese lived, people gathered and protested. Many governments, including those of the United States and Japan, issued travel warnings to China.

                 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests.

Spies Started The Cold War

Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko (January 13, 1919 – June 28, 1982) was a cipher clerk for the Soviet embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. He defected on 5 September 1945, three days after [Japan surrendered, which marked] 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.

Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The "Gouzenko Affair" is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was "the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion" and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was "absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa". Granville Hicks described Gouzenko's actions as having "awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage.”

                                                             Gouzenko on TV in 1966

Background on Gouzenko

Gouzenko was born on January 13, 1919, in the village of Rogachev near Dmitrov, Moscow Governorate (now Moscow Oblast), 100 kilometers north-west of Moscow. he was the youngest of three children.

He studied at the Moscow Architectural Institute. While at the institute he met his future wife Svetlana (Anna) Gouseva; the couple married soon after meeting. At the start of World War II, he joined the military where he trained for a year as a cipher clerk. His position gave him knowledge of Soviet espionage activities in the West. Gouzenko worked under the leadership of Colonel Nikolai Zabotin.

Defection

In September 1945, upon learning that he and his family were to be sent home to the Soviet Union and dissatisfied with the quality of life and the politics of his homeland, he decided to defect. Gouzenko walked out of the embassy door carrying with him a briefcase with Soviet code books and deciphering materials. He initially went to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but the RCMP officers on duty refused to believe his story. He then went to the Ottawa Journal newspaper, but the paper's night editor was not interested, and suggested he go to the Department of Justice but nobody was on duty when he arrived there. Terrified that the Soviets had discovered his duplicity, he went back to his apartment and hid his family in the apartment across the hall for the night. Gouzenko, hidden by a neighbour, watched through the keyhole as a group of Soviet agents broke into his apartment. They began searching through his belongings, and left only when confronted by Ottawa police.

The next day Gouzenko was able to find contacts in the RCMP who were willing to examine the documents he had removed from the Soviet embassy. Gouzenko was transported by the RCMP to the secret World War II "Camp X", comfortably distant from Ottawa. While there, Gouzenko was interviewed by investigators from Britain's internal security service, MI5 (rather than MI6, as Canada was within the British Commonwealth) and by investigators from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (as the CIA had not yet been founded).

It has been alleged that, though the RCMP expressed interest in Gouzenko, Prime Minister of Canada William Lyon Mackenzie King initially wanted nothing to do with him. Even with Gouzenko in hiding and under RCMP protection, King reportedly pushed for a diplomatic solution to avoid upsetting the Soviet Union, still a wartime ally and ostensible friend. Documents reveal that King, then 70 and weary from six years of war leadership, was aghast when Norman Robertson, his undersecretary for external affairs, and his assistant, H. H. Wrong, informed him on the morning of September 6, 1945, that a "terrible thing" had happened. Gouzenko and his wife Svetlana, they told him, had appeared at the office of Justice Minister Louis St. Laurent with documents unmasking Soviet perfidy on Canadian soil. "It was like a bomb on top of everything else", King wrote.^[7] King's diaries assembled after his death were missing a single volume for November 10 to December 31, 1945, according to Library and Archives Canada.

Robertson told the Prime Minister that Gouzenko was threatening suicide, but King was adamant that his government not get involved, even if Gouzenko was apprehended by Soviet authorities. Robertson ignored King's wishes and authorized granting asylum to Gouzenko and his family, on the basis that their lives were in danger.

Ramifications of the Defection

In February 1946, news spread that a network of Canadian spies under control of the Soviet Union had been passing classified information to the Soviet government. Much of the information taken then is public knowledge now, and the Canadian government was less concerned with the information stolen, but more of the potential of real secrets coming into the hands of future enemies.

Canada played an important part in the early research with nuclear bomb technology, Canada along with the UK being part of the wartime Manhattan Project, and that kind of vital information could be dangerous to Canadian interests in the hands of other nations.

Gouzenko's defection "ushered in the modern era of Canadian security intelligence". The evidence provided by Gouzenko led to the arrest of 39 suspects, including Agatha Chapman, whose apartment at 282 Somerset Street West was a favourite evening rendezvous; a total of 18 were eventually convicted of a variety of offences. Among those convicted were Fred Rose, who was the only Communist Member of Parliament in the Canadian House of Commons; Sam Carr, the Communist Party's national organizer; and scientist Raymond Boyer.

Chapman was later acquitted; the judge in her case announced that "No case has been made out and, as far as this trial is concerned, the accused is dismissed."

A Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate espionage, headed by Justices Robert Taschereau and Roy Kellock, was conducted into the Gouzenko Affair and his evidence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada. It also alerted other countries around the world, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, that Soviet agents had almost certainly infiltrated their nations as well.

Gouzenko provided many vital leads which assisted greatly with ongoing espionage investigations in Britain and North America. The documents he handed over exposed numerous Canadians who were spying for the Soviet Union. A clerk at the External Affairs, a Canadian Army captain, and a radar engineer working at the National Research Council were arrested for espionage. A spy ring of up to 20 people passing information to the Soviets led by Communist Party MP Fred Rose was also exposed. In the United States the FBI tracked down a Soviet spy Ignacy Witczak at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.

Life in Canada

Gouzenko and his family were given another identity by the Canadian government out of fear of Soviet reprisals. Gouzenko, as assigned by the Canadian government, lived the rest of his life under the assumed name of George Brown. Little is known about his life afterwards, but it is understood that he and his wife settled down to a middle-class existence in the Toronto suburb of Clarkson. They raised eight children together. He was, however, involved in a defamation case against Maclean's for a libellous article written about him. The case was eventually heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Gouzenko remained in the public eye, writing two books, This Was My Choice, a non-fiction account of his defection, and the novel The Fall of a Titan, which won a Governor General's Award in 1954. Gouzenko also appeared on television to promote his books and air grievances with the RCMP, always with a hood over his head.

Death

Gouzenko died of a heart attack in 1982 at Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Svetlana died in September 2001 and was buried next to him. His grave was unmarked until 2002, when family members erected a headstone.  In June 2003, the city of Ottawa and in April 2004, the Canadian federal government put up memorial plaques in Dundonald Park commemorating the Soviet defector. It was from this park that RCMP agents monitored Gouzenko's apartment across Somerset Street the night men from the Soviet embassy came looking for Gouzenko.

Motion Picture Made in 1948

The story of the Gouzenko Affair was made into the film The Iron Curtain in 1948, directed by William Wellman, with screenplay by Milton Krims, and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney as Igor and Anna Gouzenko, produced by Twentieth Century Fox.

                                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Gouzenko

A Summary of "The Cold War"

The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states (the Eastern Bloc), and the United States with its allies (the Western Bloc) after World War II.  [The Cold War actually started on September 5, 1945, in Ottawa, the capital of Canada – see tomorrow’s blog entry].  A common historiography of the conflict begins between 1946, the year U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow cemented a U.S. foreign policy of containment of Soviet expansionism threatening strategically vital regions, and the Truman Doctrine of 1947, and ending between the Revolutions of 1989, which ended communism in Eastern Europe as well as in other areas, and the 1991 collapse of the USSR, when nations of the Soviet Union abolished communism and restored their independence. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The conflict split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany and its allies, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences.

The capitalist West was led by the United States, a federal republic with a two-party presidential system, as well as the other First World nations of the Western Bloc that were generally liberal democratic with a free press and independent organizations, but were economically and politically entwined with a network of banana republics and other authoritarian regimes, most of which were the Western Bloc's former colonies.  Some major Cold War frontlines such as Indochina, Indonesia, and the Congo were still Western colonies in 1947. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was a self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist state that imposed a totalitarian regime that was led by a small committee, the Politburo. The Party had full control of the state, the press, the military, the economy, and local organizations throughout the Second World, including the Warsaw Pact and other satellites. The Kremlin funded communist parties around the world, but was challenged for control by Mao's China following the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. As nearly all the colonial states achieved independence 1945-1960, they became Third World battlefields in the Cold War.

India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia took the lead in promoting neutrality with the Non-Aligned Movement, but it never had much power in its own right. The Soviet Union and the United never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat. However, both were heavily armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war. China and the United States fought an undeclared high-casualty war in Korea 1950-53 that resulted in a stalemate.

[The Cold War increased in sheer pressure in 1949 when the Soviet Union obtained the technology for nuclear weapons as a result of a crash program to match the United States.]  Each side had a nuclear strategy that discouraged an attack by the other side, on the basis that such an attack would lead to the total destruction of the attacker—the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Aside from the development of the two sides' nuclear arsenals, and their deployment of conventional military forces, the struggle for dominance was expressed via proxy wars around the globe, psychological warfare, massive propaganda campaigns and espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race.

The first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR consolidated its control over the states of the Eastern Bloc, while the United States began a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power, extending military and financial aid to the countries of Western Europe (for example, supporting the anti-communist side in the Greek Civil War) and creating the NATO alliance. The Berlin Blockade (1948–49) was the first major crisis of the Cold War. With the victory of the Communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–1953), the conflict expanded. The USSR and the US competed for influence in Latin America and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. The Soviets suppressed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis (1956), the Berlin Crisis of 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which was perhaps the closest the two sides came to nuclear war. Meanwhile, an international peace movement took root and grew among citizens around the world, first in Japan from 1954, when people became concerned about nuclear weapons testing, but soon also in Europe and the US. The peace movement, and in particular the anti-nuclear movement, gained pace and popularity from the late 1950s and early 1960s, and continued to grow through the '70s and '80s with large protest marches, demonstrations, and various non-parliamentary activism opposing war and calling for global nuclear disarmament. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new phase began that saw the Sino-Soviet split complicate relations within the Communist sphere, while US allies, particularly France, demonstrated greater independence of action. The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization program in Czechoslovakia, while the US experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War (1955–75), which ended with the defeat of the US-backed Republic of Vietnam, prompting further adjustments.

By the 1970s, both sides had become interested in making allowances in order to create a more stable and predictable international system, ushering in a period of détente that saw Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the US opening relations with the People's Republic of China as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union. Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. The early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of KAL Flight 007 and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises, both in 1983. The United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. On 12 June 1982, a million protesters gathered in Central Park, New York to call for an end to the Cold War arms race and nuclear weapons in particular. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reorganization", 1987) and glasnost ("openness", c. 1985) and ended Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. Pressures for national independence grew stronger in Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Gorbachev meanwhile refused to use Soviet troops to bolster the faltering Warsaw Pact regimes as had occurred in the past. The result in 1989 was a wave of revolutions that peacefully (with the exception of the Romanian Revolution) overthrew all of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control and was banned following an abortive coup attempt in August 1991. This in turn led to the formal dissolution of the USSR in December 1991 and the collapse of communist regimes in other countries such as Mongolia, Cambodia, and South Yemen. The United States remained as the world's only superpower.

The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy. It is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage (notably the internationally successful James Bond book and film franchise) and the threat of nuclear warfare. Meanwhile, a renewed state of tension between the Soviet Union's successor state, Russia, and the United States in the 2010s (including its Western allies) and growing tension between an increasingly powerful China and the U.S. and its Western Allies have each been referred to as the Second Cold War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War [with two additions in square brackets by the blog author]