Kim Philby

The Private Life of Kim Philby: the Moscow Years

Rufina Philby. St. Ermin's Press, 1999.

It has taken me a long time to get here. My journey started in a London park on a sunny afternoon more than forty-three years ago

The most famous member of the Cambridge Spy Ring was addressing an audience of KGB officers in 1977, some 14 years after he had fled to the Soviet Union. In a previously unpublished memoir he recalls the day in 1934 when he was recruited.

I met my friend, as arranged, at Chalk Farm...We then began one of those journeys which were to become exasperatingly familiar: taxi, bus, underground, a few minutes on foot, then underground, bus, taxi - or in any other order. Two hours after our meeting in Chalk Farm, we were walking across Regent's Park. A man rose from the grass in front of us, and my friend stopped. "Here we are," he said. "On the dot." I shook the stranger's hand and looked around. My friend was already walking away

The stranger introduces himself as Otto (he was actually Arnold Deutsch, a senior officer of the OGPU/NKVD). 'We sat down on the grass. He placed himself facing one way and me the other, suggesting that I should keep an eye open for anyone paying us undue attention. Our conversation lasted less than an hour, but within a few minutes it was clear that, although Otto said nothing in so many words, I was being approached with a view to recruitment into one of the Soviet special services'. See also the John Cairncross entry, where Otto strikes again.