Eager Igor

Since 1945, when he fled from Ottawa's Soviet embassy to make the first major exposure of Communist espionage in the West, Igor Gouzenko has been living undercover, with an assumed name and a 24-hour police guard. Last week the former Soviet cipher clerk was back in the limelight, the center of a swelling controversy between Canada and the U.S.

Gouzenko's seclusion was broken late last month when he gave an interview to Chicago Tribune Correspondent Eugene Griffin in which he said he would be willing to talk to U.S. congressional investigators about "spy networks [that] still function in the United States and Canada."

Hidden Documents. The U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, headed by Senator William Jenner, was immediately interested. The documents that Gouzenko carried with him when he fled helped convict eleven spies, including a Canadian M.P. and a British scientist, Allan Nunn May, and gave leads on some 400 other suspected Red operatives in the West. The Jenner committee, through the State Department, asked Canada to let its investigators talk to Gouzenko.

With Canadian newspapers storming against "McCarthyism in Canada," the Canadian government quietly finessed the request. External Affairs Chief Lester Pearson announced that Gouzenko had nothing new to tell, and now said that the Chicago Tribune had misquoted him. The matter might have ended there but for Gouzenko, who is soon to publish his first novel. He stood by his statement that he wanted to talk. With that, the Jenner committee forwarded a second request for an interview.

Secret Rendezvous. Mike Pearson, who was en route to a U.N. session in New York, hurried back to Ottawa as soon as the second U.S. note was received late last week, and called a press conference to repeat that Gouzenko had "nothing more to offer." That same day Gouzenko issued a 350-word sworn statement. Said Gouzenko: "Mr. Pearson was ill-advised . . . I can give advice which . . . would have good chances of bringing exposure of present Soviet spy rings in the U.S."

Gouzenko elaborated on his statement in an interview with a TIME correspondent, who arranged through an intermediary to meet Gouzenko and his blonde wife Anna. Gouzenko. a slim, blond 34-year-old, was obviously upset over the furor, which he blamed on Canadian animosity to Senator Joseph McCarthy. His English fractured badly as he protested: "As soon as you touch McCarthy, it is getting everybody make scream."

Chased by NKVD. Despite the screaming, however, the onetime Soviet intelligence clerk still insisted he wanted to talk to U.S. investigators, not to offer new information or name new names, but to give them "advice . . . which can be discussed only in secret." Said Gouzenko: "There is no reason or excuse not to let them come here."

As a Canadian citizen, Gouzenko is legally free to travel to the U.S. himself or to talk privately with U.S. visitors in Canada. But there is a compelling reason why he may not follow either course: the Canadian government, which supplies a full-time police guard for the Gouzenkos and their two children, has strongly hinted that the guard will be withdrawn if Gouzenko chooses to abandon his own security arrangements. Gouzenko, who was chased by NKVD agents in Ottawa after his break for freedom in 1945, still fears that the Reds would kill him to set an example for other doubters and "to prove that they have a long arm."

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