Kim Philby reveals spy secrets in unseen video

One of Britain's most notorious spies spoke openly about his career as a Soviet agent in a video unearthed by the BBC.

Filmed in 1981, while giving a secret lecture to the Stasi, the East German intelligence service, Kim Philby describes his rise in MI6 and how he leaked its secrets to the KGB.

Addressing his audience as "dear comrades", the notorious spy, who was one of the Cambridge Five, boasts about what he calls his "30 years in the enemy camp".

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He also explains how he befriended the archivists in charge of secret documents by taking them out for drinks a couple of times a week, allowing him to easily steal secret documents.

"Every evening, I left the office with a big briefcase full of reports which I had written myself, full of files… documents taken out of the actual archives," he says.

"I used to hand them to my Soviet contact in the evening. The next morning I would get the file back - the contents having been photographed – take them back early in the morning and put the files back in their place. That I did regularly year in year out."

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"content_original","fid":"93003","attributes":{"class":"media-image"}}]]He also advised the East German agents how to react if challenged by the authorities.

"If they confront you with a document with your own handwriting, then it's a forgery. Just deny everything," he said. "They interrogated me to break my nerve and force me to confess and all I had to do really was keep my nerve. So my advice to you is to tell all your agents that they are never to confess."

The BBC unearthed the video in the official archives of the Stasi in Berlin. Philby died in 1988.