Canadian Author and Journalist Joyce Wayne Rolls Up the Soviets and Local Members of the Cold War’s Ottawa Spy Ring

Joyce Wayne has written a historical novel called The Last Night of the World about a Soviet female operative, a key player in the Gouzenko Affair. When Igor Gouzenko defected from the GRU to the RCMP in September of 1945 the west would see for the first time the extent of Soviet espionage activity in North America. His 200 pages of documents would reveal a covert ring of dozens of operatives working for Soviet military attaché and GRU Rezident Nicholai Zolotkin in the capital city.

In this interview Joyce lays out the setting of wartime Ottawa, the unassuming spy city just north of the American border. Aside from diplomatic and government centers, a target of intelligence collection was an hour and a half north of Ottawa at the atomic facility called Chalk River, which is still in use today as an active research facility.

Joyce’s fiction has the haunting credibility of a first-hand account. Her father was a member of Zolotkin’s ring and managed to avoid detection and prosecution throughout his life. He left the communist party in 1947, disillusioned with Stalin’s brutality. She explains the attraction of Communism in the 1930s and 40s and how this period, and the Gouzenko Affair, is not talked about much in Canada.

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More about the author at Joycewayne.com

Her book The Last Night of the World is available on Amazon.

Other works cited in this interview:

How the Cold War Began, by Amy Knight
The Fall of a Titan, by Igor Gouzenko
The Spy Who Changed the World: Klaus Fuchs, Physicist and Soviet Double Agent by Mike Rossiter

The Sound of Neutrons - Deep River Players - Chalk River, Ontario

Spybrary Episode with Joyce Wayne

Joyce Wayne on Spycast

Live Drop theme on electric cello by Danica Pinner danicapinner.com

More available at show notes on thelivedrop.com