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Early on Feb. 15, 1946, David Shugar was awakened by a pounding on the door.

A posse of burly RCMP officers, reeking of liquor, unceremoniously bundled him into the back of a car and whisked him to a secret detention centre in Ottawa, where he would be interrogated for four weeks on suspicion of spying for the Soviet Union.

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Just hours earlier, life seemed to be brimming with promise for the brilliant, 30-year-old physicist from Montreal, who had recently started a job as a research scientist for the federal Department of Health and Welfare in Ottawa.

An officer in the Royal Canadian Navy during the war, Shugar had been happily married for two years to the love of his life, Grace.

But suddenly, he found himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare that would cost him his job, his reputation and his country.

Unbeknownst to Shugar, the defection of a Russian cipher clerk five months earlier was about to change his life forever — along with the course of world history.