Kim Philby...Traitor in Britain, Hero in Russia

Personal objects for the double agent, Kim Philby, displayed at the exhibition in Moscow. September 29. AFP
Personal objects for the double agent, Kim Philby, displayed at the exhibition in Moscow. September 29. AFP
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Kim Philby...Traitor in Britain, Hero in Russia

Personal objects for the double agent, Kim Philby, displayed at the exhibition in Moscow. September 29. AFP
Personal objects for the double agent, Kim Philby, displayed at the exhibition in Moscow. September 29. AFP

A new exhibition has made public for the first time secret documents that British double agent Kim Philby sent to his Soviet handlers.

Considered one of the KGB’s most productive Western recruits — and Britain’s biggest Cold War traitor — Philby passed information to Moscow from the 1930s until he was discovered and fled to the Soviet Union in 1963. He died in 1988 at the age of 76.

Philby is still celebrated as a hero by the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, and Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR.

SVR Director Sergei Naryshkin inaugurated the Moscow exhibition “Kim Philby in espionage and in life” at the Russian Historical Society in September, and it will run until Thursday, October 5.

“Philby was able to do a lot to change the course of history, to do good and bring about justice. He was a great citizen of the world,” Naryshkin said at the opening ceremony, where guests included KGB veterans mentored by Philby.

He was one of the Cambridge Five spy rings of upper-class men embedded in the British establishment who were recruited to spy for the Soviet Union during their time at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s.

Most of the documents displayed in the exhibition are from the 1940s and come from the archives of the SVR.

The British cables are marked “top secret” in red. Some of them have been translated into Russian, with one addressed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

“Thanks to Philby, all of these reached Stalin’s desk,” said Konstantin Mogilevsky, head of the Kremlin-backed History of Fatherland Foundation, which helped organize the exhibition.

“Philby was a patriot of both his homelands: Britain and the Soviet Union,” Mogilevsky said, claiming “he never put the lives of his British colleagues in danger”.

Mogilevsky compared Philby to Edward Snowden, who leaked details of US surveillance programs and was later granted asylum in Russia.

“What Snowden did was not for money or to make his life better — quite the opposite, he made it a lot worse. In that sense, they are similar,” he said. “Russia has always valued those kinds of motives.”

The exhibition also includes Philby’s account of fleeing Beirut on January 23, 1963, after a KGB handler warned him he had been uncovered.

After telling his wife at that time, Eleanor, he would meet her at a restaurant for dinner, he escaped on a cargo ship headed for Odessa in Ukraine.

Philby’s 85-year-old Russian widow, Rufina Pukhova-Philby, who met him after his defection, attended the opening.

She contributed cigars Cuban leader Fidel Castro gave to Philby and an armchair owned by Guy Burgess, another member of the Cambridge Five who defected to Moscow and died in 1963.

The Russian intelligence community had a sense of nostalgia for their Soviet heyday, said Sergei Grigoryants, a rights activist who studies Russia’s secret services.

“There is a huge longing for those years,” he said. “They are upset Russia’s current spies are people who are in it for money or as a result of blackmail — not for ideological motives like in the 1930s.”

However, for the Cambridge Five, the reality in Moscow proved far from the socialist dream they imagined back in Britain.

The exhibition makes no mention of Philby’s struggle to adapt to life in the USSR, where he was kept under surveillance and never fully mastered the language.

“He didn’t understand the world around him,” Grigoryants said.

Nevertheless, Philby remained an avowed communist until his death. The exhibition displays his address in 1977 to KGB officers on the 100th birthday of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky.

“May we all live to see the red flag hanging over Buckingham Palace!” Philby said.



Risk of Further Floods in Texas during Desperate Search for Missing as Death Toll Tops 80

05 July 2025, US, Ingram: A K9 unit with the Texas Game Warden conducts searches in flood damaged areas next to Camp Mystic in Hunt. Photo: San Antonio Express-News/Express-News via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
05 July 2025, US, Ingram: A K9 unit with the Texas Game Warden conducts searches in flood damaged areas next to Camp Mystic in Hunt. Photo: San Antonio Express-News/Express-News via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
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Risk of Further Floods in Texas during Desperate Search for Missing as Death Toll Tops 80

05 July 2025, US, Ingram: A K9 unit with the Texas Game Warden conducts searches in flood damaged areas next to Camp Mystic in Hunt. Photo: San Antonio Express-News/Express-News via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
05 July 2025, US, Ingram: A K9 unit with the Texas Game Warden conducts searches in flood damaged areas next to Camp Mystic in Hunt. Photo: San Antonio Express-News/Express-News via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa

With more rain on the way, the risk of life-threatening flooding was still high in central Texas on Monday even as crews search urgently for the missing following a holiday weekend deluge that killed at least 82 people, including children at summer camps. Officials said the death toll was sure to rise.

Residents of Kerr County began clearing mud and salvaging what they could from their demolished properties as they recounted harrowing escapes from rapidly rising floodwaters late Friday.

Reagan Brown said his parents, in their 80s, managed to escape uphill as water inundated their home in the town of Hunt. When the couple learned that their 92-year-old neighbor was trapped in her attic, they went back and rescued her.

“Then they were able to reach their toolshed up higher ground, and neighbors throughout the early morning began to show up at their toolshed, and they all rode it out together,” The Associated Press quoted Brown as saying.

A few miles away, rescuers maneuvering through challenging terrain filled with snakes continued their search for the missing, including 10 girls and a counselor from Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp that sustained massive damage.

Gov. Greg Abbott said 41 people were unaccounted for across the state and more could be missing.

In the Hill Country area, home to several summer camps, searchers have found the bodies of 68 people, including 28 children, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said.

Ten other deaths were reported in Travis, Burnet, Kendall, Tom Green and Williamson counties, according to local officials.

The governor warned that additional rounds of heavy rains lasting into Tuesday could produce more dangerous flooding, especially in places already saturated.

Families were allowed to look around the camp beginning Sunday morning.

One girl walked out of a building carrying a large bell. A man whose daughter was rescued from a cabin on the highest point in the camp walked a riverbank, looking in clumps of trees and under big rocks.

One family left with a blue footlocker. A teenage girl had tears running down her face as they slowly drove away and she gazed through the open window at the wreckage.

Searching the disaster zone Nearby crews operating heavy equipment pulled tree trunks and tangled branches from the river. With each passing hour, the outlook of finding more survivors became even more bleak.

Volunteers and some families of the missing came to the disaster zone and searched despite being asked not to do so.

Authorities faced growing questions about whether enough warnings were issued in an area long vulnerable to flooding and whether enough preparations were made.

President Donald Trump signed a major disaster declaration Sunday for Kerr County and said he would likely visit Friday: “I would have done it today, but we’d just be in their way.”

“It’s a horrible thing that took place, absolutely horrible,” he told reporters.

Prayers in Texas — and from the Vatican Abbott vowed that authorities will work around the clock and said new areas were being searched as the water receded. He declared Sunday a day of prayer for the state.

In Rome, Pope Leo XIV offered special prayers for those touched by the disaster. The first American pope spoke in English at the end of his Sunday noon blessing, saying, “I would like to express sincere condolences to all the families who have lost loved ones, in particular their daughters who were in summer camp, in the disaster caused by the flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas in the United States. We pray for them.”