Anthony Blunt, completing the ring of Cambridge agents who remained faithful, affected a nonchalance after his exposure in 1979 that he may not have felt at the time when he said that the pact “was simply a tactical necessity for Russia to gain time . . . to re-arm and to get stronger to resist what was clearly going to happen.” The commitment of many other prominent Communists was extinguished and the CPGB changed its leadership to present itself as an organisation working for the Comintern ideal of world peace through Communism. Extraordinarily, given the suspicious tendencies of the NKVD, there were no doubts expressed in Moscow as to the loyalty of the remaining spies in the face of the “bombshell”: this brutal distrust would follow, much to the detriment of their own intelligence gathering. The Soviets had of course bought themselves some time, but they still needed first-class material for whatever came next.
Louis MacNeice, who never actually joined the Party but for whom “comrade became a more tender term than lover,” wrote more optimistically from the darkness right at the end of his Autumn Journal, published in 1939:
There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later,
And the equation will come out at last.
Maclean’s office colleague Valentine Lawford, hurriedly recalled from leave in England at the end of August, failed to see the lackadaisical British part in the Nazi–Soviet Pact and was “appalled by German and Russian hypocrisy, duplicity and cynicism.” Maclean could not show his frustration with the progress of the negotiations and the Anglo-French hauteur that he had observed so closely. When Lawford, to lighten the atmosphere, “declared that the only course left for decent people like us was to join the Polish or Hungarian cavalry and die fighting against hopeless odds,” Maclean “professed to agree and laughed uproariously.” Uproarious laughter is not something anyone associated with Maclean at any point in his life, and in its falsity suggests the conflict he was experiencing with his loyalties, and the anxiety he felt about his future. Meanwhile, he could continue to work as hard as ever for the Foreign Office in the hope that he would at the same time gather material that would be important to Moscow.
*
In November 1939 there was a build-up of several hundred thousand Finnish and Soviet troops on both sides of their common border, swiftly followed by Soviet incursions into a region which contained nickel and ore mines vital for the German military machine. Britain provided aircraft and, with the French, considered sending troops in response to a request from Finland; at a Cabinet meeting on 29 January 1940 it was minuted that “the Prime Minister observed that events seemed to be leading the Allies to open hostilities with Russia.” Ambassador Maisky had commented in his diary the previous December on “the frenzied anti-Soviet campaign in Britain” caused by the invasion; by now, “the general curve of Anglo-Soviet relations continues its downward path.”
The British and French began to hatch a plan to land around 35,000 “volunteers” (conscripted men would be too interventionist as neither country was at war with the Soviet Union) at Narvik to seize control of the iron-ore fields, stop the Soviet invasion of Finland and gain the side benefit of bringing Norway and Sweden into the war on the side of the allies. The talks took place in Paris, which was ideal for Maclean given his access and the speed at which he could gather and transmit intelligence. They involved discussion about attacking the essential Soviet oil fields at Baku, a pet project of Churchill’s for the past twenty years. On 21 April 1940, Foreign Secretary Halifax reported to the Cabinet that the French had asked, via Ambassador Phipps, for discussions about “operations in the Caucasus.” Before any such operations could take place, but not before the Germans had seized Norway and Denmark, triggering Chamberlain’s replacement by Churchill, Stalin withdrew his troops from Finland. Although it is not always possible to assess the precise impact of a spy’s work, in this instance Stalin’s reversal took place just as if he had knowledge of the talks and the Cabinet discussions. One of the ironies of the episode is that the retreating Russian soldiers left some half-burnt code-books behind in their haste: in years to come, these helped to set the clock ticking on their star British agent.
*
Maclean was to come under much more immediate danger. He had survived Russian suspicions following Walter Krivitsky’s defection two years earlier, but now the former NKVD general was, unknown to him, once again posing a threat. Krivitsky, dismissively described by the British security services as “a small man, a Pole” where others saw “an explosive inner strength” behind his “menacing blue eyes,” had operated at a high level, working in the Red Army Intelligence Department since 1919. By 1937 he was a major-general with “responsibility for Soviet secret operations in all Western European countries.” This job description alone made Krivitsky a sure candidate for purging, even before his disloyalty in choosing to warn a fellow illegal, Ignace Reiss, of his impending assassination, following which he defected in Paris the year before Maclean’s arrival there. Reiss, also known as Ignace Poretsky and, less credibly, as Walter Scott, had seen the purge writing on the wall and absconded to Switzerland where the NKVD soon found him anyway. Krivitsky had lived with his wife and child in Paris and The Hague, and in a world where there was so little suspicion of Russians living and working abroad, his sieve-like art-bookseller cover story did not matter. He was disappointed by the lack of seriousness with which he was treated by the French government when he tried to warn them about Stalin’s first overtures to Hitler and sailed for New York in November 1938.
After Krivitsky’s expedited release from Ellis Island he was introduced to Isaac Don Levine, an émigré from present-day Belorussia, a journalist, author of biographies of Lenin and Stalin, and publisher of letters from Soviet prisoners. Levine saw the commercial potential in the new arrival and soon they had signed up with the Saturday Evening Post to produce eight articles for the staggering sum of $5,000 each, to be split 50/50. The sensational serialisation (“My Flight From Stalin,” “Stalin’s Hand in Spain,” all parts of a book to be called I Was Stalin’s Agent) caused outrage: the American left was appalled that he should be over-dramatising his story and betraying them by making up stories about Soviet machinations and brutality, most particularly as Krivitsky was accurately anticipating the unthinkable Nazi–Soviet Pact; the right failed to understand why a man who had held such positions was allowed to remain in their country. The Communist New Masses “launched a savage campaign . . . to the effect that Krivitsky was really an Austrian denizen of Paris night clubs who had never been a general in the army.” The British Foreign Office minuted in May that Krivitsky’s claims about Stalin’s secret dealings with Hitler were “twaddle,” “rigmarole” and “directly contrary to all our other information,” once again displaying an alarming lack of overt or covert insight into Soviet policy towards fascism.
On 4 September 1939, Britain’s first full day of war with Germany, Levine, who believed that Soviet spies presented an immediate risk to British wartime security, went to the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC, and met Victor Mallet, the chargé d’affaires. He got off on the wrong foot by saying he had been “anti-British because of Palestine” but was now for them “on general grounds, but still hopes that HMG will open the doors of Palestine to refugees.” Mallet replied with diplomatic understatement that Palestine “might become rather a danger spot for refugees if the Mediterranean became a theatre of war.” They could then move on to the main point of the visit, which was the startling news that:
he knew through Krivitsky that there were two Soviet agents working, one in the cipher room of the Foreign Office and one in what he called the “Political Committee Cabinet Office” (?Committee of Imperial Defence). The name of the one in the Foreign Office is “King.” He has for several years been passing everything on to Moscow for mercenary motives . . . [Krivitsky] does not know the name of the other man . . . the man was not acting for mercenary motives but through idealism . . . and may
now be on our side owing to Stalin’s treachery . . . The man is a Scotsman of very good family, a well-known painter and perhaps also a sculptor.
Krivitsky later said that that the “Scotsman” “wore a cape and dabbled in artistic circles” and commented that King’s predecessor had been a spy who drank heavily and committed suicide. This fitted the description of a cipher clerk called Oldham, whose lonely, alcoholic death the security services later claimed in a propaganda move was an assassination. A brief investigation into Captain J. H. King, who did indeed work in the cipher room, soon turned up a mistress with £1,300 given to her by her lover in cash in a safe-deposit box. A confession from the crushed King (including the admission that he had passed information to his controller about the British reaction to the Nazi–Soviet Pact) preceded a trial in camera in early October on charges that “in 1935, 1936 and 1937 [he] unlawfully did use certain information in his possession in a manner prejudicial to the safety and interests of the State.” King was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude.
King had been recruited by Maly’s predecessor Hans Pieck in 1934, when he and his mistress were taken on an expensive motoring tour of Europe, which Pieck’s wife described to Moscow as “incredibly boring” and “a real ordeal.” Encouraged by this swift success and proof of Krivitsky’s truth-telling, Colonel Valentine Vivian of MI6, where he was in charge of Section V, counter-intelligence, suggested that they might now turn their attention to the “ugly unsolved puzzle” of the other, less identifiable agent in the Foreign Office. They looked into the garbled description Krivitsky had given and realised that they would have to bring him over for interrogation if they were to get any further. Krivitsky, or “Mr Walter Thomas,” boarded a Royal Navy submarine in New York, spent the ten-day crossing reading Gone with the Wind and arrived in England on 19 January 1940.
At first the interviews, held at the St Ermin’s Hotel in London’s Victoria (where, among notable espionage events, Kim Philby had been recruited) did not go well: Krivitsky denied all knowledge of any Soviet secret activities in Britain whatsoever, and seemed unable to remember the names of any of his friends and associates in Europe. After this frustrating start, MI5 realised that this amnesia was due to understandable terror arising from his knowledge of the purges that any admission would lead either to a “ ‘full examination’ as understood by citizens of the USSR” or his whereabouts becoming known to the NKVD with assassination the consequence. He even shied away from accepting a saccharine tablet in his tea (sugar was unavailable owing to rationing), convinced it was poison.
His interviewers, led by MI5’s first female officer, the brilliant Jane Archer, finally got him “to come out of his shell” by talking about King, and impressing him with what they already knew. He began to open up, and told how, via Maly, “Imperial Council [by which he meant the Committee of Imperial Defence] information of high Naval, Military, Air Force and political importance” from 1936 on began to arrive in Moscow; he had seen the photographs of the documents that were sent from London. There were enough pages to make a book, and Stalin’s copy had the original photographs attached to it. Krivitsky had “little definite knowledge” of the sender of the material, but:
is certain that the source is a young man, probably under thirty, an agent of Theodore Maly, that he was recruited as a Soviet agent on purely ideological grounds, and that he took no money for the information he obtained. He was almost certainly educated at Eton and Oxford and . . . is a “young aristocrat,” but agrees that he may have arrived at this conclusion because he thought it was only young men of the nobility who were educated at Eton. He believes the source to have been the secretary or the son of one of the chiefs of the Foreign Office.
This is a garbled identification of Maclean, who had not been educated at Eton and Oxford, and was not an aristocrat although he had been to public school and Cambridge, and his father was a knight, so it is excusable given the near-impenetrable social hierarchy of British life for Krivitsky to have been confused on both counts. Sir Donald had not been high up in the Foreign Office but was in the Cabinet instead, quite an easy elision to make. There was no attempt to match this later description to the one given to Mallet in Washington, and include the artistic leanings of Maclean (who indeed moved among Chelsea artists and writers) and the Scottish angle, which would have radically narrowed the list of suspects. They had stopped a clear and visible leak with the lowlier King’s imprisonment, but secrets from the pre-war Committee of Imperial Defence seemed not worth much now that war was under way. It was a mistake born of lack of suspicion and rigour that was to cost the West dearly, and was a remarkably close call for the unwitting spy.
Following his debriefing, which was at least useful in providing insight into the structure, reach and power of Russian intelligence, Krivitsky went back to Canada to join his wife and son. In February 1941, he checked into the Bellevue Hotel in Washington, DC, where he was found by the maid next morning, the doors locked, fully dressed, no fewer than three suicide notes in the room, a massive head wound to his temple. The bullet was never found, but the wound was presumably from the gun near his body, although the weapon was lying on the same side as the exit rather than the entry hole of the bullet, and at quite a stretch from the dead man’s arm. The rooms on either side were occupied and the gun had no silencer, yet the shot in the night had not been heard by anyone. Krivitsky’s lawyer, Louis Waldman, shouted murder. His client had said to him more than once, “If ever I am found dead and it looks like an accident or a suicide, don’t believe it. They are after me. They have tried before.” In spite of the doubts of the US intelligence community and most of those who knew Krivitsky, it remained a suicide on the books. Krivitsky’s wife, Tonia, believed he was forced to shoot himself to keep her and their son safe. Whatever the truth of Krivitsky’s death, while he was being questioned in London the oblivious Maclean was still working in Paris, still meeting and sleeping with Norma and destroying superfluous documents by making a flushable paste of them. The long arm of the NKVD was very much in evidence to protect him and ruthlessly despatch anyone who betrayed or threatened their highest-calibre spies, particularly those who had remained loyal in spite of “Stalin’s treachery” as Krivitsky saw it. Even after Krivitsky’s death, his evidence continued to smoulder in the files for years, until Kim Philby decided it needed another airing.
*
For the next few years, Donald Maclean was going to be assessed by both sides on the basis of his prodigious capabilities in wartime. But only after his most important, most lasting and most puzzling relationship had begun.
* Drax was the holder of the Order of the Bath, which the Russians could only translate as “washtub,” much to their own amusement.
6
Left Bank
One snowy evening in December 1939, Donald Maclean and Robert McAlmon were “prowling around” the Rive Gauche. They went into the Café Flore, haunt of Sartre, de Beauvoir and other left-wing sages, artists and philosophers, where “they saw through the steam and smoke the waif-like face and trim figure of Melinda Marling.” McAlmon made the introductions and the central human drama of Maclean’s life, one of loyalty and secrecy, a circle of desertion and reconciliation, of love and solitariness, had started.
*
Maclean, as Kitty Harris had reported in December 1938, hated the stuffy artificiality of the social life associated with his posting. Every time the Ambassador came into the room, the other diplomats had to stand, and even if they had met earlier in the day they had to shake hands with each other on meeting again in a different setting. Maclean’s inclination towards the more intellectual and raffish side of life, channelling Cecil the bohemian from his Granta “interview” of a few years before, led him more naturally to the Left Bank with its bars, cafés and artists. He was a popular figure in the “heterogeneous society” around Saint Germain des Prés. His taste in friends turned more naturally to Bob McAlmon than to the delightful but traditional (and Foreign Office tradit
ional at that) Cecils. McAlmon, in his mid-forties, had escaped his South Dakota upbringing and moved to New York in 1920, where he had worked on a small poetry magazine and life-modelled for an artists’ colony. Homosexual (he wrote a novel, The Scarlet Pansy, under a pseudonym), he had married a British shipping heiress, a lesbian, the following year, which gave him the money to move to Paris where he found work as an assistant to James Joyce, typing and retyping Ulysses. He formed a small publishing company, Contact Editions, specialising in works written by the expatriate community, including Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Nathanael West. The previous year his memoir Being Geniuses Together (“the office boy’s revenge,” as his former employer Joyce put it), written with Kay Boyle, had been published and was a great discussion point among the denizens of the Left Bank. Although McAlmon’s later years were ones of embittered disappointment, alcoholism and early death, in 1939 he represented to Maclean all that was glamorous about Parisian literary life, and sexual freedom.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 12