Flora Solomon Waited Until 1962 to Report Kim Philby to MI5

By Vera Kessler · August 20, 2026

For more than twenty years, a confidante of the Cambridge Five kept silent about a recruitment attempt by a Soviet agent, a secret finally handed to MI5 in 1962.

Flora Solomon carried the weight of a betrayal for twenty-odd years, knowing a close friend was a Soviet mole while the British state remained blind. This silence left a gap in the defense of the West and placed her own loyalty under a shadow that lasted until the 1960s.

The file's catalogue entry records (KV 2/4634) that Solomon was a "friend and confidante" of the man who would become the most damaging mole in the history of British intelligence: Kim Philby. She was not merely an acquaintance; she moved within the inner sanctum of the Cambridge Five, knowing others in Philby's circle, including Guy Burgess.

In the "late 1930s," Philby did something rare for a deep-cover agent. He confessed his role as a Soviet agent to her. According to the catalogue description, he went a step further and "tried to recruit her to help him." Solomon claimed she refused the offer, but she did not say a word to the British authorities for more than two decades.

Late 1930s

To understand the danger Solomon navigated, one must look at the orbit Philby moved in. Related files (KV 2/4724) note that Philby had become a committed communist at Cambridge University in the early 1930s. He was recruited in 1934 by Arnold Deutsch, an officer of the Russian Intelligence Services (RIS), becoming the first of the ring of spies that would later be known as the Cambridge Five.

Philby's life was a series of overlapping loyalties and carefully constructed masks. He had married Lizy Friedmann in 1933, a committed communist he met in Vienna. As noted in file KV 2/4667, it is likely that Lizy encouraged his commitment to communism. Solomon, a Jewish Russian émigré, existed at the intersection of these political and social currents. In the 1930s, the lines between intellectual curiosity and state espionage were often blurred for those in these circles.

For Solomon, the stakes of Philby's confession were not merely political. To hold the knowledge that a high-ranking official was spying for the Soviet Union—and to have been personally asked to participate in that espionage—placed her in a precarious position. Had she been discovered by the British state, she risked being viewed as a co-conspirator. Had she betrayed Philby too early, she might have drawn the attention of the RIS.

"Russian soul, Jewish heart"

Solomon was a woman of significant influence in her own right. The public record describes her as the first woman hired to improve working conditions at Marks & Spencer in London and as the mother of Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International. She described her own identity as a "personal trinity" consisting of a "Russian soul, Jewish heart, British passport."

Yet, the catalogue description for KV 2/4634 highlights a stark contradiction between her public contributions to social reform and her private silence. While she helped shape the labor standards of a British retail giant and supported the foundations of global human rights, she sat on a secret that could have dismantled a Soviet spy ring decades before it finally collapsed.

The silence of a "confidante" is rarely neutral. In the context of the Cold War, silence was often a form of protection—either for the agent or for the person holding the secret. The record does not explain why Solomon waited. It only notes that she "claimed she refused" Philby's recruitment attempt. The gap between that refusal in the late 1930s and her eventual report in 1962 is a void where the real story of her motivations resides.

A Full Account

It was not until 1962 that Solomon finally approached the British authorities. According to the catalogue entry, she gave an "apparently full account" of her interactions with Philby and his circle to MI5.

The timing is critical. By 1962, the shadow of the Cambridge Five had long since darkened the halls of British intelligence, though the full extent of the penetration was still being parsed. Philby had already been under suspicion for years, and he would eventually defect to the Soviet Union in January 1963. Solomon's decision to speak came just as the window for capturing Philby was closing.

The Security Service's personal files (PF Series) categorize Solomon as a "subject of security service enquiry." This phrasing suggests that while she provided information, she remained a person of interest. The state does not typically grant unconditional trust to a witness who waits twenty-three years to report a recruitment attempt by a foreign power.

The archival record leaves us with a list of connections: Philby, Burgess, and the witness who saw the machine working from the inside. We have the dates—1934 for Philby's recruitment, the "late 1930s" for the confession, and 1962 for the report. What remains missing is the interior logic of the intervening years.

Was the "apparently full account" actually full, or did it omit the reasons for her long silence? The record does not say.