On September 3 1939, Soviet spy Kim Philby met his future wife. The matchmaker was his long-time friend and influential Zionist Flora Solomon, who eventually helped unmask him
September 6, 2019 08:58
On 3 September 1939 — the day on which Neville Chamberlain announced Britain was at war with Germany — Kim Philby met his future wife.
It was, Britain’s most infamous double-agent later recalled, “a date well remembered, because it was disastrous for the world and to myself”.
Philby and Aileen Furse’s match-maker was his long-time friend Flora Solomon. Nearly 25 years later, however, she was to play the key role in exposing his treachery, leading to the master spy’s flight to Moscow.
Philby’s life ended where Solomon’s began. The daughter of a Jewish-Russian oil and gold tycoon, her story reads like a novel.
Solomon’s father tangled with Rasputin and, as a young woman, she had an affair with the short-lived Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. After the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, the family fled Russia for Britain.
But it was also a life devoted to good works: helping find homes for refugees from the Nazis, establishing the famed Marks and Spencer staff welfare department and passionately advocating for Zionism and the young Israeli state.
Her “personal trinity” she described as “Russian soul, Jewish heart, British passport”.
Philby’s legacy was less benevolent. After he was recruited by the Soviets in 1934, he spent the next three decades betraying his country, at the cost of countless lives.
In 1951, after his fellow members of the Cambridge Spy ring, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, slipped the closing British intelligence net and fled to Moscow, Philby came under suspicion. Recalled to London, he was interrogated by MI5 who, despite being convinced of his guilt, were unable to marshal the evidence against him. Philby was allowed to quietly resign from MI6 but, thanks to the continuing belief in his innocence of some of his former colleagues, he was later publicly exonerated by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
With MI6’s help, Philby was rehabilitated: as a cover, journalistic jobs working in Beirut for the Observer and Economist were procured for him. The old spy began once again to take his pay from the intelligence service while passing its secrets to the Russians.
He might have continued to do so for many more years were it not for Solomon and a conversation which took place more than two decades before. In 1937, Philby had made a barely veiled bid to recruit Solomon to the communist cause, telling her that he was “doing important work for peace”. “You should be doing it too, Flora,” Philby hinted.
In August 1962, Solomon struck. At a reception in Israel she fell into conversation with an old friend, Victor Rothschild. Now a member of the House of Lords, Rothschild was a former MI5 officer. “How is it the Observer uses a man like Kim?,” she asked. “Don’t they know he’s a communist? You must do something.”
Back in London, Rothschild lost little time in doing so. An interview between MI5 officers and Solomon was arranged at which she recounted Philby’s attempt to recruit her in 1937, as well as a further conversation a year later in which he claimed to be “in great danger”.
As journalist Phillip Knightley, with whom the exiled Philby extensively spoke, suggested, Solomon’s motives were “far from clear”. Peter Wright, the MI5 officer who listened in to her interview, described Solomon as “rather untrustworthy” in his controversial book, Spycatcher. And, in an account which betrayed his own sexism, he wrote that she “rambled on about the terrible way he treated his women”.
That reference, Ben Macintyre, author of A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, believes, stemmed from Solomon’s feeling that Philby was “directly and personally responsible” for Aileen’s suicide in 1957. Solomon depicted her decision to shop Philby as motivated by her anger at what she saw as his anti-Israel dispatches for the Observer from Beirut.
Philby himself appeared to hint at both of these factors. He clearly recognised the slow-burning fuse lit by that “disastrous” meeting with Aileen in September 1939, as well as arguing that while she was once “hard left” Solomon had later become “very pro-Israeli and seemed to change”.
Either way, Solomon’s actions led to Philby’s unmasking. While the defection of a KBG officer to the west in December 1961 had set MI5 back on Philby’s trail once again, it was Solomon who delivered the fatal blow.
“MI5 had been hunting him for years and Solomon’s account was the hard evidence of guilt they had always lacked,” Macintyre has argued. “By denouncing Philby when she did, she changed the course of British history. Had she not done so, this country’s most notorious traitor would probably have got away with it.”
