The 1959 Burgess Interviews

A Canadian cinematographer and war correspondent travelled to Moscow to cover UK Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s winter 1959 visit to the Soviet Union. Erik Durschmied managed to obtain Guy Burgess’s phone number on the black market. Over drinks, he convinced Burgess to record an interview for Western television audiences in which the defector discussed his politics, interests, and desire to visit the UK. Parts of the interview were broadcasted by the CBC, but it never aired in Britain. The film was rediscovered in the CBC archives over fifty years later.

In the 1950s-60s, Canada’s Joint Intelligence Bureau conducted interviews with Canadians returning from countries of interest abroad. An intelligence interview with Durschmied surveyed his impressions of Burgess's life and work as a translator in Moscow, and the defector's sense that “the Russians had no use for his abilities and that the future held nothing for him.” There were few opportunities for Burgess to indulge his passions for fast cars and cocktail parties. Burgess “expressed a desire to go back to England, if he could be assured of an unconditional pardon for his defection.” The journalist's overwhelming impression was that “fright and frustration had reduced a once brilliant man to a washed-up alcoholic.” Durschmied believed he was probably under Soviet surveillance in Moscow. But his ability to record the interview with Burgess and subsequently renew his Soviet visa were interpreted by the JIB as possible indications of “Burgess’s present insignificance in Soviet eyes.” In other words, the famous spy was a spent asset.

The journalist unsuccessfully tried to get Maclean’s phone number and address from Burgess. Burgess did confirm that Maclean was living in Moscow, so the former co-conspirators occasionally saw each other. Durschmied planned to try to locate the Foreign Office’s other Cambridge spy-turned-defector during another forthcoming visit to Moscow with Canadian historian Pierre Berton.