As Maclean’s Foreign Office contemporary Robert Cecil put it, Spain was “the last chance to hold back fascism in Europe . . . In Italy and Germany nothing could be done; but in Spain history was being made under our eyes.” Nancy Maclean, who had not had the same moral and political clarity as Donald drilled into her by her parents, came back from a prolonged stay in Dresden in July 1936 and was surprised to be quizzed by her elder brother on what she had seen and heard. She had gone to Germany to enjoy herself, “not to keep copious notes on the state of the economy and the size of the military.” Her brother was building up his spy muscles at the same time as exercising his powerful, policy-based mind on behalf of his government. “The beautiful and irredeemably heterosexual” Louis MacNeice wrote in his poem of the times, Autumn Journal, that:
Spain would soon denote
Our grief, our aspirations;
. . . our blunt
Ideals would find their whetstone . . . our spirit
Would find its frontier on the Spanish front . . .
The British government, determined not to get involved in the war, set up a Non-Intervention Committee, bringing in the French. The committee effectively proposed that Germany, Italy and the USSR should play no part in the Spanish conflict, which was a distraction from Britain’s effort to maintain the balance of power within Europe. Sir Orme Sargent, supervisor of the Western Department, wrote, “If the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of Spain breaks down . . . it may well be that the first step will have been taken in dividing Europe into two blocs each based on a rival ideology . . . horrible development.” Sir Orme’s blocs did indeed come into being, but only after a war in which non-intervention was not an option. At the time, only Churchill, out of fashion as the prophet of war and champion of the need to rearm, saw the committee for what it was, “an elaborate system of official humbug.” Lord Halifax encapsulated Britain’s official aims for Spain in minimalist fashion when he stood in for Foreign Secretary Eden who was on holiday and did not consider this a sufficient crisis to warrant an early return: the government’s policy was “to localise the disturbance . . . and prevent outside assistance from prolonging the war.” Baldwin, who loathed extremes of any kind and had a “deep fear of ideas,” summed up the ostrich-like position of the government and his belief that the status quo would reassert itself around the world on the basis of British values when he said: “We English hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So, if there is somewhere that fascists and bolshevists can kill each other off, so much the better.”
In a dual career of such importance as Maclean’s, ironies will abound. In November 1936 the Third Secretary was entrusted by the Non-Intervention Committee with compiling “a summary of Soviet infringements of the Non-Intervention agreement,” in effect to identify the Soviet Union’s attempts to provide resources to Spain in order to prevent them. This was at a time when the Royal Navy was ordered to send supplies to the Nationalists through Gibraltar, and Shell-Standard Oil in the US neatly sidestepped President Roosevelt’s embargo on arms sales by supplying them with oil and raw materials on credit. Franco remarked that FDR had “behaved like a true gentleman.” Maclean commented privately much later in his life that he had achieved much more “underground” than he could have done “overground” during the Spanish Civil War. He felt that in transmitting British policy, such as it was, he was “acting, without their knowing it, as an intelligence officer for my own friends who had gone to fight . . . for the International Brigade.”
As a straight ideological arrow, unlike some of his coevals spying for personal glory or for the pleasure of troublemaking, Maclean could not always disguise the strain he was under in his hard-working double life. He did not always fully engage with the office, a remoteness attributed to his “somewhat diffident manner” which the mandarins suggested “will probably be corrected as he acquires greater confidence in himself.” A colleague’s comment that what his superiors dismissed as “the tiresome and ticklish work” of dealing with the refugees from Spain left Maclean “often very nervy . . . his ashtray always piled high with cigarette ends.” It was an indication of the addictive stress that was in time to wreak such devastation. He was among the first to see the British Ambassador’s telegram informing the Foreign Office that the Luftwaffe “had bombed [the ‘Basque spiritual capital’] Guernica to smithereens,” before sitting through the Imperial Conference in London in May 1937 to learn that Germany was apparently co-operating “loyally, efficiently and zealously” in non-intervention. By smoking, and by passing on all he could in the hope that it would help the embattled Republicans, he could at least find some release.
John Cairncross, the Marxist “Fiery Cross” of Cambridge, shortly to be recruited by Deutsch, arrived at the Foreign Office at the end of 1936. In best Soviet practice, he did not know that Maclean was already working for Moscow, and viewed his “new colleague and immediate superior” in the Spanish section as “a tall, mild-mannered figure . . . highly efficient, most competent in his work and always friendly, though he never expressed strong views either in conversation or on paper.” Maclean passed on a clumsily coded warning, to a man he knew held similar views, about the need for restraint and the presentation of a covering nonchalance when he said to Cairncross that he “did not make the right impression” through being “too spontaneous and oblivious of conventional behaviour: it was not so much a question of having the wrong views, though this was noted, as not coming from the right background.” Behind the social arrogance there is a chilling acknowledgement of the need to suppress true feelings, as Maclean had been taught to do when benefiting from his own “right background.” A few months later, when Cairncross was safely within the fold, he was reported by his handler as believing that “although Orphan has become a complete snob, he nevertheless retains a ‘healthy line’ in his work which shows that he has retained Marxist principles in his subconscious. What is more, he is of the opinion that Orphan has the best brains in the Foreign Office.” Cairncross, with his “prickly personality and lack of social graces,” found it much harder to dissemble without the Gresham’s training, and it was a relief to the social outsider, as well as a boon to Moscow’s desire to spread their agents throughout the corridors of power, when he was transferred to the more meritocratic Treasury in December 1938.
The gauche young Maclean who had been standing at the edge of the debutante balls was now on firmer ground, growing into himself as he became more purposeful and felt more needed. The earlier “amiability and weakness” pointed out by Connolly had gone now and he “seemed suddenly to have acquired a backbone, morally and physically” through the work he was doing for both his masters. Although he could be “priggish” in the presentation of his Marxist views, in the pubs and bars of bohemian Chelsea where he used to spend his evenings with Mark Culme-Seymour, another boon companion, as well as other friends, he was at least able to drop some of his office stiffness, helped by large amounts of whisky. Yet he was also able to move back into official mode: “he could switch to a magisterial defence of Chamberlain’s foreign policy and seemed able to hold the two self-righteous points of view simultaneously.” Holding the establishment line while not letting go of his principles was still possible, and was serving him well.
*
Maclean’s fluency and supply were rewarded and echoed, wittingly or not, in the new code-name he was given, “Lyric.” While solitariness is perhaps an essential prerequisite to one who is living a secret life, nevertheless Orphan had grown in his brief operational time into a fluent poet. Under the Foreign Office career structure, he was due for a posting abroad towards the end of 1937, but such was his productivity and his belief in his usefulness to both sides that he wrote to the Personnel Department in June to say that “I would very much rather stay where I am for as long as possible. I hope this wish isn’t unhelpful . . .” In fact, his employers were keen to meet his wishes. His immediate boss praised his “good memory and a sure grasp of deta
il,” and added that he was, as the Soviets also appreciated, “a quick worker . . . most willing and good-tempered.” He was already showing “signs of developing sound political judgement” and a growth in confidence that would propel him to the front rank of British diplomacy and ensure that he served the NKVD as a guide and interpreter as well as an informant when the future battle lines were drawn up.
But just as the flow from the newly anointed Lyric was at its peak, he was to be cut adrift, no longer praised for and nourished by spying. The whole laboriously built edifice of Soviet espionage was on the point of being pulled down as Stalin’s purges of anyone he suspected might be a perceived enemy of true Bolshevism gathered pace in the face of potential war. Millions were arrested, put into concentration camps or executed, or simply disappeared, and a prime target for suspicion in the Great Terror was the organ of state security, the NKVD itself.† The NKVD had a staff of some 24,500 in 1936; by January 1938, a total of 1,373 of these had been arrested, 3,048 dismissed, 1,324 transferred to other departments and 153 executed via the chillingly named Association of Special Tasks. After Trotskyists, anyone who had served abroad was suspect, and by the twisted logic of the purges anyone who had had a hand in intelligence was likely to know too much that could be used against the state. And the more they denied it, the more guilty they were. Stalin’s instruction to his interrogators was “Give them the works until they come crawling to you on their bellies with their confessions in their teeth.” Darkness did truly seem to come at noon as “terrified to death, the Soviet man hastens to sign resolutions . . . He has become a clod,” in the words of one NKVD general who refused the call to Moscow.
Maclean’s handler Maly was an early target for suspicion because of his religious background which at one time had lent him faith in something other than the system. He was fatalistic about his recall to Moscow in June 1937: “I know that as a former priest I haven’t got a chance. But I’ve decided to go there so that nobody can say: ‘That priest might have been a real spy after all.’ ” The man of religion became a martyr to his politics. The torture broke all its victims in the end: the accused was interrogated and beaten without being given water for as long as it took for him to “confess”; after sleeping, he almost invariably retracted and the process began again until his only wish was to be sentenced, even if that meant execution; at least he was then allowed to sleep all he liked. In the cellars of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the secret police, Maly confessed to being a German agent and was given the Genickschuss, the single bullet in the back of the neck. What Maly and the NKVD did not know was that MI5 was already on his trail and had been on the point of arresting him in London. A careful watch prior to his planned arrest would have astonished the security services if they had caught Maly meeting the rising star of the Foreign Office.
The government had been concerned about the possibility of subversion and agitation since the General Strike of 1926; revolution had come closer during the short-lived naval mutiny at Invergordon in 1931. MI5 combated the “Red Menace” through penetration of the Communist Party of Great Britain and one of their most effective secret weapons was “Miss X,” the twenty-five-year-old Mancunian daughter of a night editor of the Daily Mail. Miss X, Olga Gray, had been recruited by the legendary Maxwell Knight and was now working as a highly valued secretary for the Comintern and the CPGB. In 1934 she was asked to be a courier to take money and instructions to Indian Communist leaders, although this was so incompetently planned by the CPGB that she was about to arrive in the monsoon season. Maxwell Knight found himself in the peculiar position of having to make the clandestine arrangements himself to keep his agent in play as the Communists “did not realise that an unaccompanied young English woman travelling to India without some very good reason stood a risk of being turned back when she arrived as a suspected prostitute.” He “was faced with a peculiar situation whereby Miss X had to be assisted to devise a cover story which would meet the requirements necessary, without making it appear to the Party that she had received any expert advice. This was no easy task but eventually a rather thin story of a sea-trip under doctor’s orders, combined with an invitation from a relative in India met the case.”
Miss X’s cover still held by 1937, when Percy Glading, an officer of the Communist League against Imperialism, asked her to rent a flat in her name at CPGB expense that he might use for meetings. She found a place in Holland Road, Kensington. In April Glading visited the flat with two men. One was a Mr Peters, a name which she knew had to be false for a man with such an accent, but the description she gave of him is an instant giveaway: six foot four inches tall, moustached, “shiny grey complexion” and prominent gold teeth. With the unmistakable Maly was another man, short and “rather bumptious in manner.” Deutsch’s charisma, so powerful to the Cambridge Five, had failed to win the day with Miss X. Deutsch and Maly were running a spy ring inside Woolwich Arsenal, home of Britain’s weapons design and manufacture, where Glading had worked until he had been sacked a few years earlier; he wanted to use the flat to photograph documents he received from his former colleagues in the arsenal. Deutsch and Maly often used to send the “take” from both Maclean and Glading in the same diplomatic bag, informing Moscow Centre that “we are sending you the films from Lirik as well as the shrapnel samples from G.” One day Glading was trailed to Charing Cross Station and arrested in the act of receiving a briefcase from an arsenal employee. A search of his flat uncovered a photographed copy of A Manual of Explosives and the blueprint of an aircraft design. He was given a six-year sentence. Olga Gray, now blown as an undercover agent, was extravagantly praised by the judge for her part in the operation, yet, depressed by her experiences as a spy, she left to begin a new life in Canada. By this time, Maly had gone to meet his fate in Moscow and his terminally bad luck was a reprieve for the Cambridge spies as the only significant pre-war counter-intelligence operation came to a halt.
Before his recall, Maly had written to Moscow Centre that Lyric “was an idealist and we must be careful not to destroy his idealism.” To the Soviet Union’s great gain in the years to come, what remained firm in this period of inactivity and purge was Lyric’s belief in the justice inherent in the Soviet system. Maclean’s friend in later life, George Blake, the post-war spy with a strongly Calvinist conscience, explained the justification of the true ideologue for the Great Terror and other terrible crimes committed in the name of Communist ideology: they “were not an essential part of its creed, which itself represented the noblest aims of humanity and in many respects sought to put into practice the virtues preached by Christianity.” The overtones of religious faith surely resonated with Maclean, used as he was to hearing its tenets throughout his childhood.
As an Austrian Jew with a suspect past in “sex-pol,” Deutsch was an obvious target for liquidation too. His student visa was expiring, and although he used his cinema-magnate cousin Oscar as a guarantee to get it extended, his desire to stay on in Britain was also suspicious to the Soviets, as was the fact that Oscar was president of his local synagogue. Deutsch was recalled in November 1937, almost certainly just ahead of investigation by the British security services—had he been questioned, no doubt his psychological skills would have been valuable in any interrogatory jousting. His fate remains mysterious: he was possibly purged by Stalin; possibly executed by the Nazis after he had gone back to his native Austria; possibly drowned when the transport ship Donbass, on which he may have been travelling from Iceland to the United States in 1942 to take up a new post in Latin America, was sunk by German aircraft.
By the end of 1937, Maclean’s first links to his recruitment, the charismatic and brilliant Arnold Deutsch and the passionate ideologue Teodor Maly, had been severed. The first reports of Stalin’s purges to reach the Foreign Office gave him some strong clues as to what might have happened to his handlers. He no longer had his weekly meetings with his handler and nowhere to take his bulging briefcase on Friday evenings. His life as an agent of consc
ience seemed over almost before it had begun and just as it seemed he would be needed more than ever.
*
At the very moment when Maclean’s secret life was suspended, the evidence that should have ended it altogether was about to emerge.
Walter Germanovich Krivitsky had been born Samuel Ginsberg in 1899 but adopted his new name, derived from the Slavic word for “crooked” or “twisted,” when he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. An ascetic workaholic, Krivitsky was chief illegal in the Netherlands, running agents across Northern Europe in the disguise of an antiquarian art bookseller in The Hague. It was an unlikely cover for a mining engineer, soldier and career agent-runner, as “he knew nothing about art whatsoever.” Krivitsky, wise to the fate of so many of his colleagues, chose to ignore his own instructions to return home and defected in Paris instead. He gave his cogent and still committed reasons in The Times in December 1937: “I have sufficient reason to know how the [show] trials are being got up and that innocent people are being killed. By remaining abroad I hope to assist in the rehabilitation of the . . . so-called spies who in reality are the most devoted fighters for the causes of the working classes.”
A Spy Named Orphan Page 9