When Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk with the military attache at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, defected in 1945, the documents he smuggled out uncovered just one Soviet spy network. The revelation that a Second World War ally was trying to steal atomic bomb secrets dragged Canada into a burgeoning Cold War, fanned the flames of U.S. anti-Communism, and sent high-level officials in both Canada and the U.S. to prison for espionage, but it only touched the surface of subversive activities by Communist agents in Canada.

"The other networks of which Gouzenko was aware were not uncovered," wrote the authors of The Gouzenko Transcripts, John "Jack" L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell, in 1982. "What they produced—and continue to produce—is unknown." What was once unknown is now coming to light with the release of a book based on copies of decades of KGB archives. Left-leaning academia's indifference or denial notwithstanding, important pieces of the Soviet spy puzzle are revealed in The Sword and the Shield (Basic Books), by Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew and Russian defector Colonel Vasili Mitrokhin. Col. Mitrokhin is a former KGB archivist who, like Gouzenko, smuggled secret papers to the West. Unlike Gouzenko, Col. Mitrokhin could not fit the documents under his shirt—he took six trunks with him.

"Mitrokhin seems to have had access to essentially all the files of the foreign intelligence directorate going back to 1918, and continuing up to his retirement in 1984," says Harvey Klehr, professor of politics and history at Emory University and co-author with John Haynes of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. "It puts to rest notions that local Communist parties were sort of democratic, grass-roots organizations that had no connection with subversive activities."

University of Toronto history professor Wesley Wark notes that the smuggled archival material is so vast—with information the British secret service would not allow to be included in the book—that this release is just the first installment of a planned two-volume work. "The revelations are actually quite stunning about the scale of Soviet espionage—surprisingly so, given this late date," Prof. Wark says. "There are new details to the whole story of the scale of Soviet espionage that we didn't know before, despite all the previous defections, defectors' memoirs and partial opening of archives."

Detailing KGB plans to blow up oil refineries and pipelines across post-1959 Canada in the event of war with NATO, The Sword and the Shield could become the definitive work on Soviet espionage in North America and Britain. It could be the most devastating indictment ever of Communist infiltration not only for what it reveals, but for what remains concealed: code names that, once deciphered, could implicate former agents still resident in Canada, says Toronto Sun founding editor Peter Worthington, a former confidant of Gouzenko who spent 1964 to 1967 as a Moscow correspondent. "There are going to be a lot of uneasy Canadians," Mr. Worthington says. (It has long been rumoured, for instance, that prime minister Lester Pearson was a Soviet agent. See story, page 25.)

The documents reveal that in 1959 spies based in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa began a 12-year-effort to map, pinpoint and photograph oil refineries and oil and gas pipelines across Canada. Communist agents hid caches of explosives near each refinery and pipeline from British Columbia to Montreal, to be detonated should the Cold War turn hot. Milder forms of sabotage were programmed in crises short of war. "I think this is new, I hadn't seen that anywhere else," says Emory University's Prof. Klehr. "It makes it clear that the KGB had gone to the extent of hiding munitions and bombs around the Western world."

Canadian authorities evidently had some whiff of such activity. The RCMP found 700 kilograms of dynamite in the basement of an elderly former Communist Party of Canada member who died four years ago, says John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute. Also found were notes of instruction for sabotage targets such as bridges and a factory he was supposed to blow up.

Canada was a prime target for the Soviets because of its energy links to the U.S. "They knew we had a common power and gas system so that if you cut a power line in the United States, power could be rerouted through Canada," Mr. Thompson says. Thus, according to the Mitrokhin material, besides being a critical staging point for sabotage and intelligence branch operations in the United States, Canada itself was a major target for bomb detonation.

The Sword and the Shield also confirms that the Canadian Communist party was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. The Canadian party received US$150,000 annually from the Soviets throughout the 1970s and 1980s and was used to funnel funds to Haitian communists. Moscow also channeled funds to the Canada-USSR and Quebec-USSR friendship societies and the journal Northern Neighbor.

Col. Mitrokhin spent 10 years copying top secret documents by hand and smuggling them from Soviet intelligence headquarters to be hidden in his country house outside Moscow. Retired after working 30 years in the KGB archives, he defected to Britain in 1992. Apart from the new revelations, the significance of his material is its confirmation that the "Red scare" was real—and dangerous.

Prof. Klehr argues that the Mitrokhin archive is a powerful blow against Cold War revisionism. "Yes, some innocent people were victimized," he admits, "but does the fact that a large number of Soviet spies, we now know, were driven out of government somehow balance the scales? I wouldn't deny that [Senator Joseph] McCarthy victimized some people—some people suffered greatly, but a lot of people that pretended to be innocent victims, it turns out, were not so innocent."

"On the one hand," says Prof. Wark, "the Mitrokhin book makes clear that the leadership of the Canadian Communist party was really quite leery of being seen to be involved in espionage because of its experiences in the Gouzenko affair, when it was badly burned. On the other hand, it's also very clear, and we've known this before, that the Canadian Communist party basically was dependent for its finances on Moscow, and was prepared to take direction from Moscow on the overall direction of its political pronouncements."

For decades, the left, in Canada and elsewhere, has denied this truth, argues Toronto historian Jamie Glazov. "What's really fascinating is that for years not only the Canadian Communist party had denied links with Moscow, but also my former colleagues at York University," he says. "Especially among the academics, there's this real theme they need to stress that Canada was really independent, that even our Communist party was independent."

The Sword and the Shield also confirms Communist influence in the FLQ crisis of 1970, in which a group of young Quebec nationalists kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross and murdered Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. The book shows the KGB was interested in and attempting to manipulate FLQ extremists, Mr. Glazov says. "Fake documents had suggested that the CIA was actually working with the FLQ—it was really in the Soviet interest to continue trying to aggravate relations between Canada and the United States," he says. "We do know that the KGB did influence the Quebec independence movement in that period. It's still debatable to what degree, but the attempt was there."

Yet even among non-leftists the tendency today is to reply: So what? Didn't the CIA do the same? "Then it becomes an ideological debate for the people who believe the Cold War was just two bullies on the block and that there was moral relativism, that there was not one side more evil than another," Mr. Glazov says. "There is a major difference in the sense of one scholar who said, 'All you really have to do is read [Alexander Solzhenitsyn's] The Gulag Archipelago to know what started the Cold War.'" He concludes that whatever criticisms may be leveled against American Cold War conduct, the "Evil Empire" (as Ronald Reagan described it) was a totalitarian regime bent on imposing its brutal genocidal regime everywhere.

Moreover, Soviet infiltration and espionage exceeded that of the West if only because the KGB had free societies in which to work. "In our dreams we would have liked to have done the same thing as the Soviets, but I don't think we were as successful," says Prof. Klehr. "The fact is that the Soviet Union was a far more closed society than the United States or Canada, and we had nowhere near as many spies as they did, nor the freedom of movement within the country that their illegals were able to obtain."

Ingrained anti-Americanism among Canadian academics makes it difficult for them to acknowledge the barbarity of the former Soviet Union or its Communist collaborators here, Mr. Glazov argues. "When evidence comes out that confirms that the Soviets had started the Cold War and aggravated it, it is very difficult for many left-wingers in academia to accept that, because once you accept the pernicious and aggressive nature of the Soviet regime, you might have to acknowledge that the United States was legitimate in the Cold War," he says. "It's very difficult for many Canadians to do that."

Robert Johnson, director of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto, is one of those wary of giving wholesale acceptance to books such as The Sword and the Shield. Having not yet had the opportunity to obtain the book, Prof. Johnson says of the emerging Russian spy book genre that it does not always deliver what it promises. Close examination, he insists, indicates such books are not really based on Soviet archives, or, in the case of books such as Special Task by Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold and Leona Schecter, they are full of "hysterical misrepresentations."

"Not that there wasn't espionage, but that the form that it took is almost certainly very different from that which is alleged by some of these people," Prof. Johnson says. "Sudoplatov was in fact in a position to know, and yet by the time he was dictating his supposed memoirs, he was in failing health and failing memory. And as far as I can judge from the interviews given by the two American co-authors, the Schecters, they cleaned up the narrative, which may almost have amounted to putting words in his mouth."

Likewise, Prof. Johnson is doubtful that members of the Communist Party of Canada were widely involved in Soviet espionage and sabotage during the Cold War. The Party operated on two distinct levels, he says: the infiltration of trade unions, peace organizations and the like to mobilize public opinion in favour of the Soviet Union and its goals; and, secondly, a much smaller circle engaging in espionage to collect top secret information, including military secrets and nuclear preparations. The wider, grassroots membership of the Canadian Communist party did not share the same subversive intent as the smaller circle of agents, he argues.

"I haven't seen any evidence that would convince me that it was so," Prof. Johnson says. "It goes back to the McCarthy-era efforts of some writers and academics of the 1950s who wanted to justify investigations by suggesting that subversion of the second type was really so widespread that it was necessary to crack down on every writer, every schoolteacher, every Hollywood director, who had ever been a member of the Communist Party or any organization that has shown any sympathy to the Communist Party."

Casting a generalized doubt on the evidence, without specific factual objections, is the standard defence of many leftist academics in their nearly reflexive desire to exonerate the Soviet Union, responds Mr. Glazov. This defence has been employed since the 1973 publication of The Gulag Archipelago, he says—people from the Gulag telling their stories and then having their character challenged by the left. "First they say it's unreliable, but then when you prove that these are authentic documents and these are former witnesses, then they say, 'We're not interested in necrophilia,'" he says. "And these are historians that say this, that it's not worth digging up old ghosts. It's just unbelievable."

Such indifference would surely not be manifested in response to historical evidence of National Socialist Germany, Augusto Pinochet's Chile or South Africa's apartheid regime, Mr. Glazov adds. As for the assertion that most Communist Party members were not involved in subversion of Western society, Mr. Glazov questions the notion of benign infiltration. "No, obviously not all people were spies—many were spies, others served the interests of the Soviet Union in other ways," he says. "But let us consider this: the Soviets ended up getting the atomic bomb because of the recruitment of spies and 'benign infiltrations.'"

Journalist and author David Horowitz, a former hardcore U.S. Marxist activist who later became a Reagan conservative, says growing up in a Communist family made it clear to him that all members had the potential for subversive action. "These spies were my family friends," Mr. Horowitz says. "Everybody in the Communist left was capable of spying. Not everybody was asked to, and that's the only difference."

The Mitrokhin documents have created a sensation in Britain, as now aging spies are being exposed. Canadians may react more quietly, jaded by previous revelations about Soviet designs when the empire unraveled earlier this decade, says Prof. Granatstein, now director of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Canadian Communist party members throughout the Cold War supported the Soviet agenda for various reasons—altruism, idealism or naivete, not just malice against the West—and only a small minority were directly involved in subversive activities, he says. Still, he argues that much of the leftist intelligentsia underestimates the subversive impact of Party member activities and the Cold War danger of Soviet designs in light of recent revelations. "There are a lot of that group that Lenin so aptly called 'useful idiots,' and they are still out there," he stresses. "They haven't changed, and they won't change." BCR

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