Canada: THE DOMINION: Five Years for No. 6

Neither before nor during his trial would he talk. Harold Samuel Gerson, 41, Montreal-born Communist spy, preferred to keep his own secrets, though as an engineer in Canada’s wartime Munitions Department, he had given away several Canadian state secrets to Russia. Government officials had appealed to him, “as a Canadian citizen, to assist his Government by supplying any information in his possession regarding Soviet espionage.” Gerson snapped: “No.”

Last week in Ottawa a jury convicted Gerson of conspiring to communicate state secrets to Soviet Russia. He was the sixth defendant convicted in the spy case. With no visible flicker of feeling he listened to Justice G. F. McFarland’s scathing words: “I am not going to lecture you. You are too intelligent, even brilliant, not to understand fully why you are here.” The sentence: five years in Kingston Penitentiary.