A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  On his visits to the marble-floored, granite edifice of Moscow Centre, Krivitsky had heard about the starry young agent in the Foreign Office. He could have brought Maclean’s potent start in the world of espionage to a halt, but Krivitsky was not seen as worthy of a thorough debriefing in those more trusting times. He went to America when war became inevitable and was not brought to Britain until 1940. The Soviets, meanwhile, were out of contact with Maclean in the absence of Maly and Deutsch, were without an NKVD rezidentura, or station, in London and missed a wealth of intelligence as the storm clouds continued to gather over Europe.

  There was also concern in Moscow that Maclean had been turned back to the British as a double agent: they assumed that either Krivitsky had been able to identify him or that Maly’s contacts, including Lyric, had been unravelled after the Woolwich Arsenal case. They wondered if Maclean’s own conscience might have started to prick him in his increasing maturity when he was not in weekly or daily contact with Maly or Deutsch, that he “might be lost to us because we have gone far beyond the time period agreed for establishing contact with him.” But as always Lyric was desperate to feed his powerful hunger for secrecy, and completely unwittingly the Centre had stumbled on another craving of his—for love. The combination would turn out to be unorthodox in the extreme and yet wildly successful as the tradecraft rulebook was rewritten.

  *

  A new rezident, Grigori Grafpen, “Sam,” did not arrive in London until April 1938 to resuscitate the network. The skills lost with Maly and Deutsch were evident in an early telegram from Grafpen: he pointed out that “next to the Embassy there is a park [Kensington Gardens] which is convenient . . . for holding meetings with agents, as one can simply give the appearance of having gone out for a walk,” not understanding that a Russian in an ill-fitting suit emerging from the Embassy to meet a tall, well-tailored English diplomat might well be noticed and questioned. Luckily for him this was never put to the test because immediately after Grafpen’s arrival he was cabled with the news that a handler was being sent from New York and was to be used as the full-time liaison for Lyric. A rendezvous, between Lyric and the young, attractive and inexperienced (in agent-running terms, if not in life) “Norma,” was fixed for 10 April at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square. This was arranged by her calling him with a pre-agreed “wrong number” code to enquire about “Doctor Wilson’s surgery hours.” She would be holding A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, he would have a copy of Time magazine which he would switch from one hand to another. He would ask if she had seen his friend Karl, she would say she had seen him on 7 January. Then the briefing could start.

  Norma’s real name was Kitty Harris. She had been born in Whitechapel, on the impoverished eastern fringes of London in 1899 to parents from Białystok. Her family emigrated to Canada, where she started work in a cigarette factory at the age of twelve, cementing her belief in the rights of exploited workers and leading to her enrolment in 1923 in the Communist Party. The cigarette-factory work, with its associations with Bizet’s tragic heroine in the opera Carmen, along with her dark hair, flashing eyes and neat, boyish figure, was to earn her her first code-name of “Gypsy.” After moving to Chicago Kitty fell in with (and married, bigamously on his side as he had a wife and son in Russia) Earl Browder, who became secretary of the Communist Party of the United States. She travelled with him in Russia and worked as a courier on his behalf in Shanghai, before leaving him to go to Moscow for training and on to London to get Lyric speedily back on track.

  When Kitty made contact with him, Maclean leapt at the opportunity to be of use again. He wrote via her to Moscow to say “How glad” he was “to be in touch and working again.” He tried to lay to rest any fears that he had been turned and expressed his eagerness to get the flow of material going: “As you will have heard, I have no reason to think that my position is not quite sound, and that the arrangements we have made for work should not be all right . . . I will let you have, as before, all I can, which will chiefly be the printed dispatches & telegrams and particularly interesting papers as come my way.” But this declaration of his single-minded service to Moscow also gave away the immediate personal turn his professional relationship had taken with Kitty. Their new status emerged when Maclean signed off his first letter to Moscow since coming under Kitty’s control. He sent “best greetings to Otto and Theo” and signed off with his own code-name, Lyric, which he was not supposed to know. This caused consternation. In the perceived operational need to keep every agent as isolated as possible from the workings of the wider network, it was a serious breach given the atmosphere of suspicion in the Lubyanka building that housed Moscow Centre. For anyone other than such a star agent, it would have been the end of his career in espionage, and a death sentence for Kitty if not for himself. Kitty saved them both by revealing the truth: she had told Lyric his name in their pillow talk, and what was more had told him that her own code-name was Norma. And that she loved him.

  *

  Norma had rented a ground-floor flat in Bayswater until Grafpen redeemed some of his own tradecraft failings by pointing out the inherent operational difficulties of that arrangement, such as that drawn curtains in daylight would attract attention or that someone standing outside could listen in to conversations, at which point she moved to an apartment upstairs. At the beginning of their work together, Maclean would leave his flat in Oakley Street in the evening twice a week. His briefcase would be crammed with documents, even though Glading’s trial had led to a warning in the Foreign Office that green (secret) papers should “as far as possible” not be taken out of the office and that “red” (most secret) ones never should be. But nobody checked because they assumed that the edict would be heeded. Maclean would take a taxi for some distance before getting out on a street corner, walk a bit and then hail another cab which he would pay off around the corner from his destination. Kitty would photograph the documents and he would write down anything else that he had retained in his remarkable memory. One of the reasons that Moscow had decided that a woman was a suitable handler for Maclean was that they would have to meet often, so prolific was his supply of intelligence, and a couple was a good disguise; the other, more insightful reason was that it would recharge Maclean’s excitement in productivity. As Stalin’s great spy-master, General Alexander Orlov, had written in his Handbook of Counter-Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare, “idealistic young women” who became agent-handlers “acted as a powerful stimulus” for upper-class young Englishmen, deprived of female company at their private schools. But what had never been in any security service handbook was that a full-blown affair should blossom in the relationship between agent and handler.

  One evening in May 1938, Maclean came for their assignment with a bunch of roses, a bottle of wine and a box with a gold locket on a chain, a bold gesture that smacked of inexperience and eagerness to love. They had dinner sent over from a local restaurant and Kitty made them a favourite dish from her Canadian childhood, pancakes with maple syrup. They listened to Glenn Miller on her wireless set as they ate. Afterwards they went to her bedroom and made love. For a trained handler this was an astonishing development. The evening ignited a passion in Maclean that was fuelled by his subliminal need for fulfilment in a furtive private life, release of the tension generated by espionage and the months without contact or praise for his work, not to mention the sexual education that his second, much older, more experienced lover could bring him. In revealing to Deutsch that he “had an aversion to girls of his own class,” he had bared himself in a way that he did to very few people in his life. In Kitty he had found a mature woman who had not been brought up in the rigidity of Sir Donald’s shadow nor in proximity to the British public school system, and it changed his previously elusive confidence as he stood on the threshold of the most rewarding years of his double career.

  Kitty owed her survival not only to her honesty but to Maclean’s value to Moscow. Paradoxically, he had proved himself to be a true and singular agent through
what could have been a catastrophic error: any double agent would have been much more careful than breezily to run the risk of giving away code-names. However, new names were in order for them both: Maclean became the much more prosaic “Stuart,” Kitty “Ada.”

  *

  It was a relief for Maclean to have the escape valve of his new lover, helping to alleviate the pressure arising from his hard work and from what was happening in Europe. She at least understood his politics and he could express to her what he had to keep hidden behind his façade. His new swagger earned him the nickname of “Fancy-Pants” Maclean to distinguish him from the exceptionally good-looking man of action Fitzroy “Fitz-Whiskers” Maclean, then serving in the Moscow Embassy and observing the kangaroo courts of the show trials. The first Foreign Office steps taken by Fancy-Pants had been so steady that Frederick Hoyer Millar, Assistant Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, wrote to Sir Eric Phipps, Ambassador in Paris, suggesting that as one of the current Third Secretaries there had asked to be transferred to Moscow (“rather an odd taste”) he be replaced by “Maclean, who has done extremely well during his first two years here and is one of the mainstays of the Western Department. He is a very nice individual indeed and has plenty of brains and keenness. He is, too, nice-looking and ought, we think, to be a success in Paris from the social as well as the work point of view.” These were all the requisite qualities for the high-flyer. On being told of his new, timely and prestigious posting, to be taken up in the last week of September, Maclean was “naturally delighted,” and made the unorthodox request to Moscow that Kitty accompany him. His confidence in both roles had been greatly boosted by his doubly secret love affair.

  A couple of weeks before he boarded the boat-train to Paris, Maclean went on a fishing holiday in Scotland with Robin and Mary Campbell (née Ormsby-Gore) and Mary’s father, William, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies. As they relaxed after the day’s sport, Ormsby-Gore would talk about the worsening situation in Europe, revealing the government’s views and plans, without of course realising that as soon as his guest got back to London any valuable gossip would be sent straight to Moscow. At the end of that month, Sir Vernon Kell, the first head of MI5 and the longest-serving head of any government department in the twentieth century, was able to declare confidently that Soviet “activity in England is non-existent”—just as the new star of Soviet espionage in England was to take his spy skills and his lover-handler to mainland Europe at one of the most dramatic periods in its history.

  * It later transpired that more than a hundred of Constantini’s leaks in 1935 alone were deemed important enough to be “sent to Comrade Stalin” for his personal attention.

  † The KGB’s own, probably understated estimate is nineteen million arrests in the years 1935–40, seven million of whom were either shot or died in the gulag.

  5

  City of Light

  Donald Maclean began his only book with the words “Foreign policy is an emotive subject.” By the time he hurriedly left Paris just ahead of the Nazis he felt a strong emotional undertow beneath the stormy surface of world events. On his arrival in September 1938, he must have been proud to have his first overseas posting as an up-and-coming official in the capital city of Britain’s foremost ally, “the only place in which a self-respecting young man could decently make his diplomatic debut,” as his diplomatic contemporary Valentine Lawford put it. He was no doubt excited by his life as a spy, in which he was already outstripping his potential and by his passionate affair with his handler, who was shortly to join him. But he must have been nervous about what the next few months would bring, wondering how he would acquit himself in both his public and his hidden lives, and how foreign policy would play out in the face of Hitler’s territorial ambitions.

  France’s Prime Minister Edouard Daladier had warned his British counterpart that Hitler’s aim was to “secure a domination of the continent in comparison with which the ambitions of Napoleon were feeble,” yet he had been pushed by Chamberlain and his voters to join the appeasement of the German and Italian dictators and opt not to form a common diplomatic front with the Russians against the Führer. In the days immediately preceding Maclean’s arrival the Red Army had mobilised sixty infantry divisions, sixteen cavalry divisions, three tank corps, twenty-two tank brigades and seventeen air brigades to stand by their treaty with Czechoslovakia, yet their diplomats were stressing that the Soviet Union would not “lend military assistance to Czechoslovakia except in common action with France.” Ambassador Phipps, who had previously served in Germany from where he sent back “a stream of despatches, etching Nazi leaders in acid terms,” was reporting the unwillingness of the French to slide into another war with Germany. He wrote to London on the same day that Maclean was being met by the uniformed Ernest Spurgeon, head Chancery servant, at the Gare du Nord: “All that is best in France is against war. We none of us wish for it, but they refuse to prepare; they are against it at almost any price.”

  Negotiations over Czechoslovakia and the worsening situation in Spain made for a dismal European outlook. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement (which was driven in part by the need to give Britain time to rearm, as some had been advocating for rather longer than he had) had culminated in the Munich Agreement of September 1938. Just before the Agreement was signed, Hermann Göring denounced the Czechs as “a vile race of dwarfs without any culture”: the German-speaking Czech Sudetenland had been sacrificed to the increasingly territorial and violently racist Nazi regime.

  As a part of the surge of art and literature which crisis encourages, Louis MacNeice pointed out both the short-termism and the inhumanity of the Munich Agreement:

  Glory to God for Munich.

  And stocks go up and wrecks

  Are salved and politicians’ reputations

  Go up like Jack-on-the-Beanstalk; only the Czechs

  Go down and without fighting.

  Munich had shocked those on the left; they agreed with Stalin who could see it would do nothing but “whet the aggressor’s appetite.” Maclean consoled himself and justified his espionage when he said that he believed that the information he passed on helped the Soviet government “throw whatever weight it had against the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.” Stalin himself had not been invited to the meeting as according to Lord Halifax, now Foreign Secretary, there had not been time to issue the invitation. Within the next year Stalin would find his own accommodation with Hitler, which would shock many of the young idealists of Cambridge days, already shaken by what they knew of “the other side of the moon, the corruption of Stalinism,” enough to turn them away from Communism. This soul-searching was to have potentially catastrophic results for the Magnificent Five. The onrush of war would also bring Walter Krivitsky out of hiding to Britain to tell all he knew of the important Foreign Office spy. Paris was a short posting for Maclean, but the one in which the seeds of jeopardy were sown and the patterns of his conduct under stress emerged that were later to flourish and almost overwhelm him.

  *

  Maclean’s office was a small room in the Chancery building, once the stables of Pauline Borghese’s beautiful house in the Faubourg Saint Honoré, acquired by Wellington from Napoleon’s sister and turned into the British Embassy after he had defeated her brother at Waterloo. On 30 September the new arrival leaned out of the window to watch the crowds cheering Daladier, back from Munich, as he slowly made his way towards the Elysée Palace. On the same day, Chamberlain arrived back in London to announce in a rather lower key not only “peace with honour” but “peace for our time” with Herr Hitler. Herr Hitler himself, a dismayed MI6 operative concluded, was “at the beginning of a ‘Napoleonic era’ and [the Reich’s] rulers contemplate a great extension of German power.”

  As he watched the ecstatic throng, Maclean must have felt that tug between decisions made in government that he would have to see through and objectives that he felt to be right for the world. It was a frustration that was to oppr
ess him on many occasions, eventually to the point of collapse. The pusillanimity of the Munich Agreement, offering Germany expansion to the east and leaving Russia to stand alone against the tide of fascism in the final months of the Spanish Civil War, was symbolised by the flimsiness of “the paper which bears his [Hitler’s] name upon it” that Chamberlain brandished at Heston Aerodrome on his return from Germany. On a human scale, the agreement was shocking: the Czechs were not allowed into the conference room during the negotiations, yet the Sudetens were expected to “leave only with the clothes they stood up in. Homes, furniture, animals all had to be abandoned.” Two British diplomats resigned from the service over Munich, but, much as he admired them for doing so, that was not an option for Maclean, who had his secret outlet to ease his frustration.

  As often in his life, Maclean dealt with his anxiety partly by hurling himself into hard work, salving any conflict in his conscience by doing his exceptional best both for London and for Moscow. Yet with diplomacy so much in the open there was little of value to the Kremlin in his daily round. The Soviets needed to gauge the willingness, or lack of willingness, of the British and French to stand up to Hitler, and could read Munich for themselves. Maclean saw copies of virtually all the Embassy’s correspondence, and his room-mate reported that he “was always willing to take over the more boring jobs. He never frowned if I had an engagement to keep or wanted to leave early.” Missing any sort of official engagement would not have been a trial to someone who disliked formal events, was ambitiously hard-working and wanted the opportunity to gather as much material as possible.