{{Short description|Academic and Soviet spy}} {{Use dmy dates|date=May 2025}} {{Infobox person | honorific_prefix = | name = Arnold Deutsch | honorific_suffix = | native_name = | native_name_lang = | image = | alt = | caption = | birth_name = | birth_date = 1903 | birth_place = | death_date = {{circa|1942}} (aged 39) | death_place = | death_cause = | resting_place = | resting_place_coordinates = | monuments = | nationality = | other_names = | alma_mater = University of Vienna | occupation = Soviet spy, academic | years_active = | employer = | organization = | known_for = Recruiting the Cambridge Five as Soviet spies | notable_works = | title = | party = | movement = | opponents = | boards = | spouse = | partner = | children = | parents = | relatives = Oscar Deutsch (cousin) }} '''Arnold Deutsch''' (1903–1942?), variously described as Austrian, Slovak or Hungarian, was an academic who worked in London as a Soviet spy, best known for having recruited Kim Philby. Much of his life remains unknown or disputed.
==Early life== Born to a Jewish merchant parents from present-day Slovakia,<ref>{{Cite web |title=Arnold Deutsch |url=https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Arnold_Deutsch |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20251003144118/https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Arnold_Deutsch |archive-date=2025-10-03 |access-date=2026-02-03 |website=www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at |language=de}}</ref> Deutsch was a cousin of Oscar Deutsch, the proprietor of the Odeon Cinemas chain. Though he claimed to be an observant Jew to disguise his role as a Communist agent, Deutsch was in fact lapsed in his religious beliefs.
At the age of 24, Deutsch received his PhD with distinction in chemistry from the University of Vienna.<ref name="Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin 2000">{{cite book |title=The Mitrokhin Archive : The KGB and the West|year=2000|isbn=0-14-028487-7|author=Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin|pages=56}}</ref> He was also a follower of Wilhelm Reich and his "sex-pol" movement.<ref name="Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin 2000" />
==Espionage career== At the same time, Deutsch embarked on his lifelong involvement with Communism and the Soviet Union. In the 1920s he was working for the OMS, the International Liaison Department of the Comintern. A co-worker of his there was Edith Suschitzky, whom he met at 1926 in Vienna and who would be instrumental in his later espionage career.
Soon after leaving university he married an Austrian woman, Josefine. The couple were both recruited by the Comintern and worked for OMS, its international liaison department. Over the next couple of years they travelled around the world working as couriers.<ref>[http://spartacus-educational.com/Arnold_Deutsch.htm Biography of Arnold Deutsch]</ref>
In 1933, Deutsch was arrested by the Nazi authorities in Germany, but was freed with the help of Willi Lehmann, the highly placed Soviet agent within the Gestapo.<ref>{{cite news |url= http://einestages.spiegel.de/static/topicalbumbackground/5042/moskaus_guter_draht_zur_gestapo.html |title=Stalins Mann in der Gestapo |date=29 September 2009 |author=Klussmann, Uwe |work=Der Spiegel}}</ref>
Deutsch then travelled to Britain under his real name, so that his university credentials would be valid.<ref name="William E. Duff 1999">{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cHlWhjZEwXYC|title=A Time for Spies: Theodore Stephanovich Maly and the Era of the Great Illegals|year=1999|isbn=0-8265-1352-2|author=William E. Duff}}</ref> Upon arriving in England, Deutsch studied psychology at graduate level at the University of London, as his cover for espionage work in England.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>
In the mid-1930s, Deutsch occupied Flat 7 of the Isokon building in Lawn Road, Hampstead, north London.<ref>{{cite web |last=Wheelwright |first=Julie |author-link=Julie Wheelwright |volume= 64 |issue= 5 |date= May 2014 |url=http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/05/lawn-road-flats |title=The Lawn Road Flats |publisher=History Today |orig-year= 2014-05-05 |access-date= 2018-04-29}}</ref>
The writer Nigel West (Rupert Allason) asserts, based on the information provided in 1940 by Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, that Deutsch had been an assistant of the Latvian-born senior Soviet spy Adam Purpis, who according to the same source was between 1931 and 1934 the NKVD Illegal Rezident (i.e. agent operating outside the embassy) in the UK.<ref>MI5 report on intelligence gained from interviewing Krivitsky in 1940, published as an appendix to Nigel West ''Mask: MI5's Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain'', 2005, quoted [http://www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/wostwag/purpiss.htm here] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080513121921/http://colley.co.uk/garethjones/wostwag/purpiss.htm |date=13 May 2008 }}</ref>
Deutsch's legacy from his time in the UK is to have come up with a highly successful agent recruitment strategy.<ref>{{cite book|last=Andrew|first=Christopher|title=The Sword and the Shield|date=23 September 1999|publisher=Basic Books|location=New York|isbn=0-465-00310-9|pages=[https://archive.org/details/swordshieldmitro00andr/page/57 57–58]|url=https://archive.org/details/swordshieldmitro00andr/page/57}}</ref> Deutsch observed that the high quantity of Communist students and constant turnover due to matriculation and graduation provided an excellent recruiting ground. The idea was to select capable, idealistic students and have them publicly distance themselves from Communism so that they could penetrate the British government and intelligence spheres. The students' former involvement in Communism would be overlooked by the British as a mere youthful mistake. This strategy produced many well-placed agents, especially the Cambridge Five, the first of which was Kim Philby, whom Deutsch recruited directly.<ref>Lownie, Andrew (2016). ''Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess.'' London: Hodder and Stoughton.</ref>
When Philby and Litzi Friedmann, who had just married in Vienna, arrived in London in 1934, Edith Suschitzky suggested to Deutsch that the NKVD should recruit Friedmann and Philby as agents.<ref name="William E. Duff 1999" /><ref>{{cite book|title=The Philby Files – The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby|year=1994|isbn=0-316-10284-9|author=Genrikh Borovik|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/philbyfilessecre0000boro}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lR6nuEkieQ8C|title=Mask: MI5's Penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain|year=2005|isbn=0-415-35145-6|author=Nigel West}}</ref> Deutsch recruited Philby in Regent's Park, London, on 1 July 1934.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/magazine/kim-philby-and-the-age-of-paranoia.html?pagewanted=8|title=Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia |date=10 July 1994|work=The New York Times | first=Ron | last=Rosenbaum | access-date=25 April 2010}}</ref>
Deutsch told Philby that he must break off all communist contacts and establish a new political image as a Nazi sympathiser.<ref>[http://spartacus-educational.com/SSphilby.htm Biography of Kim Philby]</ref> "You must become, to all outward appearances, a conventional member of the very class you are committed to opposing," Deutsch told him. "The anti-fascist movement needs people who can enter into the bourgeoisie." Deutsch gave him a new Minox subminiature camera and gave him a codename (Sohnchen). He began to instruct Philby on the rudiments of tradecraft: how to arrange a meeting; where to leave messages; how to detect if his telephone was bugged; how to spot a tail, and how to lose one. His first task was to spy on his father, Harry St John Bridger Philby, as it was believed he had important secret documents in his office.<ref>Ben Macintyre, ''A Spy Among Friends'' (2014), p. 41</ref>
Deutsch then went on to recruit Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess in 1934.<ref>''The Mitrokhin Archive'' Vol. I p. 79</ref> Using the code name Otto, Deutsch was the controller for the Cambridge Five spy ring from 1933 to 1937, when he was replaced by Theodore Maly. Whilst in London, Deutsch also acted as handler for Percy Glading, who was operating a spy ring within Woolwich Arsenal, which obtained blueprints of Britain's brand new—and highly secret—naval gun.<ref>{{cite book|title=Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov|last=Volodarsky|first=B.|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2015|isbn=978-0-19-965658-5|location=Oxford|page=85}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=The Spy who Came in from the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage|last=Burke|first=D.|publisher=Boydell & Brewer Ltd|year=2008|isbn=978-1-84383-422-9|location=Woodbridge|page=92}}</ref>
During his time in the United Kingdom, Deutsch was given the task of evaluating an American recruit, Michael Straight, who did not impress him.<ref name="Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vasilliev 2000">{{cite book |title=The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era|year=2000|isbn=0-375-75536-5|author=Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vasilliev}}</ref> Deutsch's evaluation of Straight was to be borne out almost thirty years later, in 1963, when Straight decided to voluntarily inform Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a family friend, about his communist connections from his student days at Cambridge University, a confession which led directly to the exposure of Anthony Blunt as a recruiter and member of the Cambridge Five spy ring.
In September 1937, in the midst of Joseph Stalin's fatal purges in the Moscow show trials, Deutsch was recalled to Moscow.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=liQao7myLLsC|title=Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity|year=2005|isbn=90-420-1786-4|author=Shulamith Behr and Oleg Gordievsky}}</ref> At that time, Deutsch was at great risk of being discovered in Western Europe because of the defections of the highly placed Soviet operatives Ignace Reiss and Walter Krivitsky; he had been familiar with some elements of their operations.<ref name="ReferenceA">''Deadly Illusions: The KGB Orlov Dossier'', by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Crown 1993</ref>
Back in Moscow, Deutsch was extensively debriefed, and managed to escape execution – which, at the time, was the fate of many completely loyal Communists. He was employed as an expert on forgery and handwriting, and was not allowed to go abroad again until the early 1940s.
==Fate unknown== Deutsch's final fate is uncertain.<ref>Boris Volodarsky (2014): Stalin's Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov. {{ISBN|978-0-19-965658-5}}.</ref> Among theories which have been proposed by various authors, Deutsch was said to have been captured and shot by the Nazis after parachuting into Austria; or as having drowned when his ship was sunk by a U-boat while en route to New York, where he was supposed to work with NKVD recruits.<ref>{{cite book|title=Anthony Blunt: His Lives|year=2002|isbn=0-374-10531-6|author=Miranda Carter|url=https://archive.org/details/anthonyblunthisl00cart}}</ref>
Kim Philby's fourth and last wife, Rufina, cites the drowning story, but says that the Russian sources are divided on where Deutsch was headed when his ship, the ''Donbass'', was sunk on its way to the United States.<ref>{{cite book |title=The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years |year=2003|isbn=0-9536151-6-2|author=Rufina Philby}}</ref> She says that Volume 3 of the KGB History states that Deutsch's eventual destination was Latin America, but then says that Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vasilliev, citing KGB files, write, in ''Haunted Wood'',<ref name="Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vasilliev 2000" /> that Deutsch was headed to the New York residency to expand its operations.
==Portrayal in fiction== In the 2003 four-part BBC television drama about the ''Cambridge Spies'', Deutsch was portrayed in the first two episodes by Marcel Iures.
==References== {{Reflist}}
{{The Great Illegals}} {{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Deutsch, Arnold}} Category:1903 births Category:1942 deaths Category:Alumni of the University of London Category:Austrian spies for the Soviet Union Category:Austrian Jews Category:Slovak Jews Category:Soviet spies Category:University of Vienna alumni Category:Austrian emigrants to the Soviet Union Category:NKVD officers Category:Austrian civilians killed in World War II Category:Deaths due to shipwreck at sea