A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  * The Cheka, the original Soviet intelligence agency, had by 1934 evolved into the NKVD, which became the NKGB (February 1941), NKVD again (July 1941), NKGB again (1943), MGB (1946), MVD (1953) and KGB the following year.

  † Cairncross, who displayed “sex-pol” traits in his writings more than in his actions, wrote a history of polygamy, on which his friend Graham Greene commented, “This is a book which will appeal strongly to all polygamists.”

  4

  Lyric

  Maclean’s entire Foreign Office career was one of treachery alongside immensely hard work. He had been recruited as a “sleeper,” encouraged to learn his tradecraft and not expected to pass anything on from his lowly post as Third Secretary in the League of Nations and Western Department. Deutsch was clear that his real value to Moscow would come as he climbed the ladder and became privy to ever more important secrets. As he arrived for his first day at work on 11 October 1935 his nervous excitement was about the insights he would get on the worsening world situation rather than about the prospect of immediately nourishing his secret soul. Yet nothing about Donald Maclean’s life as a diplomat was ever conventional, and before long his speed of mind, his impatience to serve and belong and the opportunities that came his way meant he was soon producing prodigious amounts of valuable intelligence. He made such an impression on Moscow Centre, the NKVD headquarters, that his spying career could have been brought to a humiliating end almost before it began, and he even needed to be allocated his own handler—with whom he promptly fell in love.

  *

  The ambitious new Third Secretary, smartly dressed in his “black coat and striped trousers,” could not have failed to be impressed by his new office as he arrived on that first day. The Italianate building with its grandest rooms looking across Horse Guards to St James’s Park, a brief walk from the Palace of Westminster, is the most impressive in Whitehall. With the British Empire still remarkably intact amid the uncertainty of the 1930s, the Foreign Office lived up to its purpose of symbolising and endorsing British power in the world. The most remarkable part of the building is perhaps the Durbar Court of the old India Office, a vast granite and marble courtyard three storeys high complete with pillars and curved arches.

  Maclean’s own office was a humbler affair, down several long and defiantly unornate corridors. The Western Department consisted of three rooms, one occupied by the head of department, a smaller one for his secretary, and a large one shared by the three or four junior officials. The juniors’ room was miserably furnished, according to Valentine Lawford:

  the mahogany Office of Works hat-stand hung with unclaimed umbrellas and unattractive “office coats” with glacé elbows, the screen with its gruesome pin-ups of Himmler, Streicher and Roehm, the jaundice-coloured distempered walls, hanging light-bulbs under China shades, and generically threadbare, grey-blue-bistre carpet of the kind that one had dismissed at one’s private school as “probably made by convicts out of coconut fibre in the Andaman Islands.”

  Even as he was learning how to handle the telegrams that flooded into the department, Maclean saw their, and his, importance at a critical period for Europe and the world. His arrival coincided with the first major test for the League of Nations since its foundation in 1920 as Benito Mussolini, keen to restore Italian pride and power by creating an empire, had invaded Abyssinia on 3 October 1935. The League imposed sanctions on Italy, but Britain stopped short of embargoing supplies of oil for fear that Il Duce would attack British territories in Africa.

  The latest Nuremberg Rally and its display of determined Nazi might had been held the previous month. The vital coal-producing region of the Saar, taken from Germany after the Great War and awarded to France, had just voted overwhelmingly to return to the Fatherland. Hitler saw the League’s reaction to the Abyssinian crisis as evidence of pusillanimity and was encouraged to invade the Rhineland in March 1936. At a meeting of the League Council in London, only the Soviet Union delegate, Maxim Litvinov, proposed sanctions against Germany, and found his proposal rejected. Hitler countered with an offer of “a twenty-five-year non-aggression pact” in Europe, yet he did not clarify what he meant by that. Mussolini summed up his contempt for the League on which their opponents had pinned their hopes when he declared that it was “very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out.”

  As Maclean saw the telegrams coming in and going out while the fascist dictators ran roughshod over world diplomacy, he was painfully aware that the League on which he, and British politicians including his father, had pinned such hope was being shown up as toothless. His faith in Communism was not only cemented, but was increasingly shared in the most unlikely official quarters. King George V told his former wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George that he “would go to Trafalgar Square and wave a Red Flag myself” in protest if there was a question of war over the Abyssinian crisis. The monarch died the following year before he could fulfil his promise. Anthony Blunt justified his own impending recruitment when he said that “the Communist Party and Russia constituted the only firm bulwark against fascism” in the mid-1930s, as “the Western democracies were taking an uncertain and compromising attitude towards Germany.” The rapid events of the “dark valley” of the 1930s were a similar spur to action for Maclean, action that did not feel like betrayal because he was helping Britain’s cause in the fight against fascism, lessening his frustration with his government. The sleeper was awakened early through the fast-moving diplomacy he was immediately engaged in. At the age of only twenty-two, Donald Maclean found his prolific espionage career taking off.

  *

  The Third Secretaries saw all the incoming telegrams from the embassies and would pass them up to the Second Secretaries for sifting and sending further up the chain. Rarely was anything locked in the safe of the head of department, and even those documents marked “Secret” could be taken home by employees without checking them in or out. Security was an alien subject until the Second World War broke out, and even then it was administered by one officer rather than by a department. When it became apparent that there was a major leak from the Rome Embassy in 1937, Colonel Valentine Vivian of MI6 was called in. He quickly identified the source as a Chancery servant called Secondo Constantini, yet the Ambassador refused to believe that such a thing could happen and made sure that both Signor Constantini and his wife were asked later that same year to the coronation of King George VI as a reward for his long service.*

  Nobody questioned the hard-working Maclean as he took papers with him to his small flat in Oakley Street, between Chelsea’s King’s Road and the River Thames, to work on at night. The more he was able to familiarise himself with the rapidly shifting events in Western Europe and the British response to them, the greater his efficiency in the office. As his anxiety grew in line with the worsening international situation, his briefcase bulged more and more each evening. Deutsch would meet him on the way home, take the files to his photographer and then meet Maclean again in Chelsea late in the evening so that he could give the documents back for their return to the office.

  As well as these near-daily encounters, Maclean had lengthier meetings with Deutsch most weeks. Deutsch was an “illegal,” not on any diplomatic or trade delegation lists, and free to use a variety of aliases but unable to plead diplomatic immunity to avoid prosecution should he be caught doing anything wrong—should he be discovered in discussion with anyone from the Foreign Office, for example. He was quite relaxed about sitting on a park bench in one of London’s “remoter open spaces” such as Hampstead Heath with his charge, or to have Maclean visit him in his Lawn Road flat near by. But Deutsch’s own preparations were much more elaborate and NKVD-textbook: he would be driven out of town, both he and the driver checking to see that they were not being followed, before Deutsch came back by at least two forms of public transport. He would be careful to ensure that the film of the documents was concealed in the false backs of items such as hairbrushes or household utensils that he might legitima
tely have in a briefcase or about his person. These films, and letters written in secret ink, would be sent on to Moscow via the Copenhagen diplomatic pouch.

  The sheer quantity of material coming from the eager young diplomat, the only one of the Cambridge recruits to have penetrated the citadels of power, was overwhelming. Deutsch also had Philby and Burgess (completing the trio known to Moscow as “the Three Musketeers” until Blunt and Cairncross joined their ranks to make them “the Magnificent Five”) to keep in play. He begged Maclean to slow down, to bring more material out on a Friday night and less on other days so that his sleepless photographer had more time over the weekend to take it away and record it efficiently somewhere more conducive to the production of good images.

  Deutsch sent a memo to Moscow asking for help in sharing the load: “Taking into consideration the importance of the above-mentioned material . . . in addition to the importance of other cultivations and recruitments . . . I consider the question of the Foreign Department’s assigning an experienced and talented underground rezident to head the field station in the British Isles to be extremely pressing.” Moscow did not send a rezident, who would have had official cover and diplomatic immunity, but one of their greatest illegals, Teodor Maly.

  *

  Maly, born in 1894, was as tall as Maclean at six feet four inches, his gold front teeth shining between a dark moustache on his “short upper lip” and a “slightly cleft chin” and with the “typical shiny grey complexion of some Russians and Germans.” Inevitably, most of those with whom he came into contact remembered him quite clearly, so that if his own side had not taken against him first he might not have survived long at liberty to weave his spell over the still-raw and enthusiastic agent from the Foreign Office. Maly, code-named “Man,” approached his Communism as a spiritual matter. Like Deutsch, he came to strong political beliefs from religious ones. Although his passport said he was born in Austria, he was in fact a Hungarian who had entered a Catholic monastery after leaving school and become a priest. He had been called up as a chaplain in the Austro-Hungarian army, and been taken prisoner in the Carpathians on the Russian front in June 1916. As a result of the horrors he had seen and the indoctrination he received from his captors, he lost his faith in his old God and emerged from captivity a revolutionary Communist who then fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War until 1921.

  After working in Crimea and Moscow in various intelligence roles, Maly and his wife Lydia arrived in London as Paul and Lydia Hardt, representatives of the Amsterdam textile company Gada, in the business of exporting rags to Poland. The cover for the business was poor, especially considering the sums of money Gada brought into the country, £4,700 in eighteen months into one account alone at a time when the salary of a Third Secretary in the Foreign Office was £144 a year. When Gada was investigated long after Maly had left the country, “all the persons interviewed said Hardt did not know anything about the business . . . or the intricacies of the rag trade . . . None of the firms had heard of ‘Gada’ before February 1936.” Notwithstanding this dodgy but successful piece of tradecraft, Maly was a forward-thinking planner to the extent that before he left Britain “he had recruited fishermen off the coast of France, Belgium and the Netherlands in order for the Russians to have access to radio transmission in the event of war.”

  Maly exerted a calming influence on Maclean and was credited in Moscow with teaching the frenetic diplomat “patience.” He tried to bring focus to Maclean’s productivity, exhaustedly reporting in May 1936 that “tonight Waise arrived with an enormous bundle of dispatches . . . Only a part of them has been photographed . . . because we have run out of film and today is Sunday—and night-time at that. We wanted [Maclean] to take out a military intelligence bulletin but he did not succeed in doing this.” When these films were developed in Moscow the results were greeted with delight as Orphan had been able to send a report which showed “the state of German ordnance factories with exact figures of armaments production of each plant given separately,” and another “describing the mobilization plans of various countries, Germany, Italy, France and the Soviet Union.”

  The Committee of Imperial Defence was at the heart of government policy in the making of preparations for war. Maclean’s greatest early coup was to supply its minutes which summarised the contingency plans throughout the still-extensive Empire and former colonies. These constituted such welcome intelligence that Maclean’s feat in sending them on was celebrated in NKVD circles.

  Prime Minister Baldwin frequently attended the sittings of the committee. Plans being made about the “organisation of British industry for war purposes . . . about procurement for government arsenals and plants, and about the adaptation of private industry and transport companies for a smooth transfer of the country in the event of war” in Europe were discussed; there was even a strategy for “British army procurement in the event of war with the USSR.” On 20 December 1936 the committee deliberated on such matters as broadcasting and the defence of government buildings in wartime, and the lack of oil for both the British and the Australian navies. The secrecy of such deliberations was stressed: it was decided that “the shortage of fuel should be kept absolutely secret, since its disclosure would lead to serious political complications,” but no steps were taken beyond assuming that all those present were gentlemen who would keep their word to ensure confidentiality. The issue of fuel might have been unimportant anyway as the number of “Cruisers available for service . . . is likely for some years . . . to be below the number required.” Another document picked out for special attention in Moscow contained the minutes of a conversation between Hitler and the British Ambassador in Berlin about a secret pact for exchanging technical air force data between Britain, Germany and France. The British report said Hitler had been adamant about not sharing with the French because “if France were trusted with these materials, they would immediately fall into the hands of the Soviet Union.” The references to the state of German and British war-readiness run through the files sent to Moscow as a commentary on the urgency of the times, including the thoroughgoing minutes of the 1937 Imperial Defence Conference “to review current problems and liabilities.” The references to the fledgling Government Code and Cypher School, later GCHQ, and the steps it was taking to crack the codes of overseas powers, especially Soviet, was a harbinger of future machinations, but at that time a leak from within the ranks seemed unthinkable. In a very short time, this trust was to mean that the first of Donald Maclean’s many charmed lives in espionage was used up.

  *

  If politics had started to become an urgent business at the time of Maclean’s arrival in Whitehall, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was the defining event, the rehearsal for what was to follow from 1939, and the drama on to which all could project their concerns. It unassailably put the left-wingers on the side of decency in a country where Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the Blackshirts, was starting to gain some traction. Maclean’s position in the department responsible for Spain in a war where Soviet interests were closely involved was a bonanza for Russian interests. A few months into his first job, the war also introduced the first moment of tension between government policy, where he had to be an impartial observer and toe the line, and his core beliefs. This was to be a test for what was to come as the divisions within him grew ever greater.

  The roots of the war lay buried deep, and were bound up in the global crisis as well as in more local issues, such as the poverty of many of Spain’s citizens, and the power of the clergy, who sometimes banned the teaching of reading in schools to prevent the children being “corrupted” by Marxist texts. In July 1936 General Franco led the right-wing Nationalist uprising against the left-leaning government, and what was meant to be a swift coup became a bloody three-year struggle. Across the world, idealists of the left flocked to join the International Brigade, on behalf of the Republicans, including many of the Cambridge Communists well known to Maclean. David Haden Guest, John Cornfor
d and Julian Bell were all killed alongside 500 British volunteers, from Oxbridge intellectuals to miners. An estimated 2,500 joined the International Brigade from Britain, over 5,000 from the United States under the name of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, a total of 32,000 from around the world. The passion felt by these people for the cause ran deeper than the patriotism of the Great War; this was about saving the world for the freedom of future generations. Wogan Philipps, driving an ambulance for the Republicans, wrote to his wife, whom he had abandoned in England with their two young children, to say that he was doing “a tiny bit to make the world better for them. If you saw women and children bombed to pieces night after night as I have you would be enraged, and think as I do. If you saw these young Spanish boys fighting to keep their liberty—they are so young, so gay, lively, friendly—just children.” Kim Philby was still under his right-wing cover when he went to Spain as a reporter, first freelance and later for The Times, in January 1937—a good disguise should he have succeeded in getting near enough to carry out his orders from Moscow to assassinate Franco. He returned in May, somewhat depressed, without having come close to fulfilling his suicidal mission.

  The war galvanised political debate in Britain: the publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club soon had 57,000 members and 1,500 discussion groups in offices, factories and community centres. Titles in the distinctive yellow livery included George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, Spanish Testament by Arthur Koestler and Days of Contempt by André Malraux. Maclean, who wherever he was throughout his life kept up with the latest literary movements, subscribed to the club. On the far right, in the London County Council elections of 1937 the British Union of Fascists polled up to a quarter of the vote in the wards in which its candidates stood. But as the debate sparked into life, the establishment worked hard to steer a passive course that maintained the values, not to say the patrician condescension, that had served it until now. Walter Greenwood wrote the widely noticed Love on the Dole, a powerful novel of unemployment in Salford, outside Manchester, set between the General Strike in 1926 and 1931. A stage adaptation was produced in 1934, but the British Board of Film Censors twice refused a film version to be shown on moral (swearing) and political (the unemployed fighting the police) grounds. They said it was “a very sordid story in very sordid surroundings.” The film was not released until 1941, when fascism had acquired a more universal hue.