I AM NOT WHO YOU THINK I AM

How a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son

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RUDI HERRMANN TOOK A DEEP BREATH AND ASKED HIS SON Peter to sit down. "I have a story to tell you," he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years.

He was about to tell his 16-year-old son that everything Peter thought he knew about their family was a lie.

The pair sat on a bench, and Peter waited quietly for whatever it was his father wanted to say. He was an academically gifted and unfailingly polite child, but he had been struggling psychologically.

He had few friends and felt overwhelmed at home. Rudi, an ambitious German-Canadian film-maker, was charming with colleagues and friends, but with his son he was something of a tyrant: not violent, but psychologically domineering. He was disdainful of American pop culture, insisting that Peter not waste his time on mind-rotting pursuits such as reading comics or listening to rock music. It was almost as if he was actively trying to sabotage Peter's efforts to fit in.

The endless upheavals in Peter's childhood had not helped him to feel settled. First, the family had moved from Germany to Canada when he was four. Then, when he started feeling at home in Toronto, he was pulled out of school and transferred to New York, where his new classmates roughed him up for lunch money. His parents had no living relatives, and the six-year age gap between him and his younger brother made it difficult for them to connect.

The only part of growing up in the Herrmann family that Peter did enjoy was the frequent travel: summer holidays in Europe and road trips across the US to accompany his dad on filming assignments.

In spring 1974, they took a trip to Chile. On the way back to New York, they stopped over in Peru. It was here in Lima that Rudi decided the time had come for his big reveal. As they walked through Miraflores, an upmarket neighbourhood of Lima perched on bluffs above the ocean, Rudi ordered his son to sit down on a bench overlooking the water.