Soviet spy Yevgeni Brik's photography studio on Bannantyne in Verdun

Yevgeni Brik in 1953

David Soboloff was a Russian immigrant running a photography studio out of 5381 Bannantyne. That was his story at least.

Soboloff was, in fact, Soviet spy Yevgeni Vladimirovitch Brik, who had came to Montreal in 1951, entering Canada under a fake name. 

Brik had grown up in New York City but his family returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, where he spent several years in the Soviet army during World War II. 

Brik would go out on photo shoots in Montreal which were, in fact, spying missions.

His main role was to ferry Russians through the porous border into the United States. Brik's home in Verdun was equipped with a shortwave radio to send information back to Russia but he sent little of interest.

Brik was a heavy drinker and missed his wife terribly. He fell in love with a woman who was married to a Canadian military official, who had been posted in Kingston, Ontario. She left her husband to be with Brik in 1953. 

Brik, in a moment of intimacy, blew his cover, confessing that he was a KGB spy and didn't want to return to the Soviet Union.

Brik then asked his lover to help him to defect to Canada. The RCMP was keen to have a man on the inside, as our British allies sought to locate some defectors living in Moscow. The RCMP put Brik on their payroll. 

Brik became a double agent with the code name Gideon. The RCMP shuttled him frequently to Ottawa for debriefings. His driver was Corporal James Morrison, code named Long Knife.

Morrison was a heavy-drinker who was bitter about his poor pay and inability to afford expensive suits and cigars.

When Morrison realized that his passenger Brik was a double agent, he sold that news to the Russians for $3,500, about one year's salary back in 1955.

The Soviets asked Brik to return for a debriefing in 1955 and the RCMP reassured him that it was safe. Brik was oblivious to the fact that the Russians were aware that he was now working for Canada.  The Soviets arrested and tortured Brik and sent to a gulag until the mid-1980s.

 

Brik's Canadian contacts assumed that the Soviets had executed him.

Morrison

Morrison, the man who had betrayed Brik, initially confessed after nine days of interrogation but a court ruled his confession inadmissible. He confessed again to journalist John Sawatsky in 1982 but a judge ruled in 1984 that Morrison could not be punished for a crime allegedly committed over 25 years earlier. 

After about 30 years of captivity, the Soviets finally freed Brik, who immediately phoned the emergency number the RCMP had given him decades earlier. It has not changed. He repeated the code word had been given so long ago. Another version has Brik surfacing at the British Embassy in Lithuania in 1992, which then informed the CSIS that he was still alive.

  
Canada organized to smuggle Brik out of the Soviet Union in a manner that remains classified. He was given a Canadian pension and lived in Ottawa with his second wife. 

Brik in 1992

Ottawa Citizen reporter Russell Mills attempted to interview Brik but he replied that he had signed a confidentiality agreement with CSIS. Publisher Conrad Black guaranteed to fund any legal action any such report might incur and Brik's secret story became public knowledge. 

Brik lived a normal life of a retiree in Ottawa before suffering dementia in the last years of his life before dying in 2011 at the age of 89.