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2025-07-17 Britain
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'Russian spy' caught in England turns out to be alcoholic who sold out to Israel
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Leonid Tsukanov
[REGNUM] The trial of local pensioner Howard Phillips, accused of working for Russian secret services, continues in the UK. At a hearing held recently at Winchester Crown Court, he shocked his accusers with a sensational statement.
It turns out that all this time he was allegedly working for Israel, helping Tel Aviv to identify “Russian spies.” And he acted solely out of a sense of solidarity with the Jewish state.
Despite the fact that Phillips' statement looked like an attempt to shift the focus to another topic and to pity from the jury, the "Israeli trace" in the story is still present - albeit not in the foreground. Tel Aviv had enough reasons to look for sore points of the British Conservatives.
SPY HUNTER
Howard Phillips, a 65-year-old British man of Jewish descent, did not have a distinguished career. He spent most of his life working in his family's fur factory in the East End and handling bankruptcy cases.
He never managed to develop the family business - the enterprise quickly went bankrupt. And his career as an auditor did not work out because of his addiction to alcohol.
Phillips began to experience increasingly frequent money problems and made ends meet with odd jobs. And in 2022, the start of Russia's SVO in Ukraine, according to his family, left the impressionable Briton "mentally traumatized."
He allegedly became suspicious and obsessed with ideas of revenge, constantly looking for traces of "Russian agents" and writing letters to all authorities calling for the arrest of this or that suspicious person. For this, neighbors even nicknamed Phillips "spy hunter".
But by a cruel irony, he himself came to the attention of counterintelligence.
In the spring of 2024, Phillips was arrested by Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Unit and handed over to MI5. He was accused of sending a letter to the Russian embassy offering to sell valuable information about the British cabinet.
And then he collected and tried to pass on to London’s opponents (who were posed as British security forces) a dossier on Grant Shapps, the Minister of Defence in Rishi Sunak’s Conservative cabinet.
The flash drive, intended for the “customers,” contained information about the minister’s home address and the location of his private jet, his hobbies, his immediate circle of friends, and his strengths and weaknesses.
The prosecution also notes that during the conversation, Phillips boasted about his personal acquaintance with the minister and his family, thereby hinting at his own value as an operational source, and also promised to obtain new information if he was well paid.
However, when he told the jury at Winchester Crown Court, the defendant gave a different picture.
He admitted that he did send a letter to the Russian diplomatic mission in March 2024, but did not do so for the purpose of criminal gain.
On the contrary, Phillips wanted to personally expose the enemy's agents - since his numerous appeals to the authorities remained unheeded. He sent a similar offer to "buy information" to the Iranian embassy, but there was no response.
Moreover, at the trial, Phillips stated that he hunted for “Russian spies” also out of solidarity with Israel.
When asked by the prosecutor what benefit such work could bring to Tel Aviv, the accused stated that he wanted to give the information he had collected about Russian agents to the Israelis so that they would “notify Great Britain” and thus “receive recognition for this” from London.
Phillips described his attitude towards Russia as “sharply negative.”
ISRAELI TRACE
Despite the fact that the "Phillips case" is "spy" only conditionally, it will most likely be brought to a demonstrative conclusion. And the "Russian trace" will remain the main one in it - as the most advantageous for London in the conditions of confrontation with Moscow.
At the same time, there are other thematic lines in the case that are currently being ignored by the British justice system. In particular, the "spy hunter" clearly downplays the scale of his contacts with the Israeli side.
Back in December 2023 – almost three months before he approached the Russian embassy and came to the attention of counterintelligence – Phillips sent an email to the consular secretary of the Israeli embassy in the UK, asking for a face-to-face meeting with someone from the diplomatic apparatus. His request was granted.
After this, Phillips' behavior changed noticeably.
He gave up drinking and suddenly tried to get a job with the UK Border Force - although, according to family members, he previously hated the agency, calling its employees "useless slackers".
His financial situation also improved.
In particular, he was able to rent a small apartment in the London area of Harlesden (famous for its Middle Eastern restaurants), a few blocks from the Israeli embassy.
True, subsequent searches at this address yielded nothing - the apartment turned out to be uninhabited, although the detainee claimed that he spent a lot of time there. Including preparing "traps for Russian intelligence agents."
The "cleanliness" of the home suggests that Phillips' potential employers learned of his failure and rushed to cover their tracks before the police arrived.
HIDDEN INTEREST
Israel may certainly have had its own motives for seeking the eyes and ears of prominent British Conservatives. And Defence Secretary Shapps seemed a priority target, as he had been the most vocal critic of London's involvement in the Middle East.
He also torpedoed plans for operations against Yemen's Houthis and delayed the transfer of intelligence to Tel Aviv, thereby depriving it of tactical advantages. The confidential information Phillips had could well have become a lever of influence and pressure on the British Defense Minister, if Israel had used it at the right time.
However, by the spring of 2025 it became clear that Sunak's Conservative government would not last long and there was no need to rush to obtain dirt on Shapps.
Moreover, the inexperience of the newly acquired agent and his desire to attract as much public attention to the "spy hunt" as possible created the risk of exposure. That is why, over time, the Israelis distanced themselves from the inconvenient informant.
The discord was indirectly confirmed by Phillips himself, who noted during one of his interrogations that by the beginning of spring 2025 he was “entirely focused on searching for Russian spies” in Great Britain in order to “confirm a sense of solidarity” with the Jewish state.
With the victory of the Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, the cabinet changed. In July 2024, Shapps resigned, and the value of the "Phillips archive" for foreign intelligence dropped to zero.
Moreover, the new head of the Defense Department, John Healey, turned out to be more militant and supported Tel Aviv’s escalatory course, expanding the range of assistance provided to the Israelis.
Israel is unlikely to spoil relations with London. There is no need for the British authorities to promote this version either. Instead of fueling anti-Semitic sentiments, it is much more profitable to maintain fear of the omnipresent Russian intelligence and its “insidious agents.”
This means that Phillips' claims of working for Tel Aviv will most likely be written off as a clouded mind or self-hypnosis, and his case will not affect relations between Israel and Great Britain.
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Posted by badanov 2025-07-17 00:00||
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