Guy Burgess: the Soviet spy who was one-quarter Canadian
CBC found British defector in Moscow eight years after he fled the West
It was a revelation that rocked the NATO alliance in the early 1950s.
A group of British spies, later known as the Cambridge Five, shared Western intelligence with the Soviet Union before and during the Cold War.
In 1951, two of the suspected spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, disappeared from England and resurfaced in Moscow five years later.
'All my life ... I've been a socialist'
CBC cameraman Erik Durschmied found Burgess there in 1959, and interviewed him for the current affairs program Close-Up.
Burgess, speaking to an audience in the West for the first time since his defection, denied he was a traitor and said there was only hearsay evidence of it.
Rather, he said he chose to live in the Soviet Union because he was a socialist.
"You are broadcasting on the Canadian system. Canada was populated by emigrants, including my own grandparents from England," he said. "There are still a lot of people who leave England to live abroad for various reasons ... I live in the Soviet Union because all my life, since I was a student, I've been a socialist."
Burgess's maternal grandmother, Maud Hooper, was born in Montreal in 1860 and married an Englishman, Portsmouth banker William Gillman, in 1880.
Durschmied, the CBC cameraman, was a globe-trotting correspondent who interviewed Fidel Castro in Cuba just weeks before the 1959 revolution and also filed reports from Hungary and Beirut that year.
Discovered decades later
This interview didn't make much of an impression when it first aired in 1959, and it lay in the CBC archives for over 60 years before being rediscovered by archivist Arthur Schwartzel.
Burgess died in Moscow in 1963 and is buried in his native England.
