Kim Philby may have been unmasked as a Soviet double agent greater than a decade earlier than his eventual defection had MI5 not missed a possibility to query his shut buddy Flora Solomon, in line with newly launched intelligence information.
Solomon, born in Russia to a rich household, was a former lover of Alexander Kerensky, the Russian chief deposed by Lenin. She advised MI5 in 1962 that Philby had tried to recruit her as a Soviet spy in 1937-38.
Philby, a British intelligence officer, was suspected to be the “third man” who tipped off Man Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of the “Cambridge 5”, in 1951 once they fled to Moscow. He was exonerated in 1955, and subsequently labored in Beirut as a journalist for the Observer.
However in 1962, Solomon, then the welfare superintendent at Marks & Spencer and the widow of an English military officer, approached MI5 via the previous MI5 officer Victor Rothschild. She stated she had identified Philby since he was a toddler, and that he had an infatuation together with her.
She stated that, after getting back from masking the Spanish civil warfare, Philby had met her for lunch in a “extremely agitated state” and stated: “Don’t you see … I’m 100% on the Soviet aspect, and I’m serving to them … I’m carrying [out] a terrifically vital and tough project, and I’m in peril.”
He then tried to enlist her, she stated, however she refused, telling him: “I’m not of that kind. It doesn’t curiosity me,” in line with information launched by the Nationwide Archives on Tuesday.
Her info “clinched” the case towards Philby, who had already been named by a Soviet defector to the US, in line with the Spycatcher writer Peter Wright, then an MI5 agent engaged on the case. Philby would defect shortly afterwards, in January 1963.
When the MI5 agent who interviewed her requested her why she had not come ahead in 1951, Solomon replied: “Look, in case you had come to me, if I had been straight approached … I definitely would have come out.”
In response to a 1971 report on the case by Stella Rimington, the safety companies had been alerted to Solomon in 1951-52 on account of phone tapping at Philby’s house. However Solomon was judged on the time to be “innocuous and pretty inconsequential”.
Solomon, an ardent Zionist, advised MI5 she was at one time sympathetic to the Russian trigger however that modified with the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. She had come ahead in 1962 as a result of she wished to unburden her conscience, and since she wished to in some way stop Philby writing articles that had been, she stated, violently anti-Israel.
In her report, Rimington, who would go on to turn out to be the primary feminine director common of MI5, questioned Solomon’s motives for not coming ahead sooner. She may need – as Solomon’s sister claimed – had an emotional tie to Philby, a youthful man who had “swept her off her ft on the finish of her affair with Kerensky”.
She may also been below the management of the Russian intelligence service on the time, although Rimington thought if that was the case Solomon would have a extra convincing purpose for not coming ahead apart from her “feeble excuse”.
It couldn’t be discounted, nonetheless, that the Russians wished Philby to defect to flee the clutches of western intelligence however he was refusing to take action, and that Solomon’s story was meant to exert extra stress so “they may extra simply persuade him to defect”.
It was arduous to know “why having saved this story to herself for therefore lengthy, she got here ahead with it on the time which seems to be so consonant with Russian curiosity”, stated Rimington, acknowledging that due to Solomon’s declining psychological state in previous age they might most likely by no means know.