Maclean enjoyed his friendship with those like McAlmon whom he did not meet in the course of his duties, but he was conventional enough to want a wife. Arnold Deutsch had identified “the infantile need” for the “praise and reassurance” that he did not get from his father. He needed to be admired and loved. Kitty Harris was feeding that need as well as his craving for a hidden, illicit life: it did not get much more hidden and illicit than an affair with an older woman that could not be revealed to the world because she was also his handler. In Melinda Goodlett Marling he found the person he could share his secret life with, who admired him and his intellect, who was in tune with his politics without being particularly interested in them. He single-mindedly set his cap at her.
Melinda was pale-skinned and slight with curly, dark hair. She had been born in Chicago in 1917, four years after Maclean, and was brought up with her two younger sisters, Harriet and Catherine, by their strong-willed mother after their parents separated in 1928. Her mother was also named Melinda and also the child of a broken home. Melinda the younger was used to living a fractured life, and to being with others who did the same. The close-knit Marling girls did not often see their father. Divorce was uncommon at that time and in that society (Francis Marling, who had emigrated to the US as a child, was the advertising manager for the Pure Oil Company in Chicago) and may explain why Mrs Marling took her daughters to live in Switzerland for two years from 1929 to 1931, where they were schooled at Vevey, near Lausanne. Switzerland remained a place of good memories and escape for mother and daughter, and eventually became the last European home for them both.
After her divorce had been finalised, Melinda senior married Hal Dunbar, who came from a moneyed Oklahoma family and was a vice-president of Whitaker Paper. The family lived the New England life of the comfortably off, with an apartment on New York’s Park Avenue and a farm at South Egremont, Massachusetts. Melinda finished her schooling at the prestigious Spence School, and was not keen to take her education further. Her stepfather, who was funding this existence, resented the fact that she “went to top-rate schools . . . but proved to be a problem child” who abandoned her studies. From time to time she “would have pangs of conscience at her lazy, carefree life” and set out to find a job: she took a secretarial course and worked for a while in Macy’s book department, but found it hard to know what she wanted, craving travel, excitement and ultimately danger. In 1938, with a little inherited money and a favourable exchange rate, she decided to follow a well-trodden trail for smart American girls with means but not aims and enrolled at the Sorbonne to take a course in French literature and artistic appreciation. She and her sister Harriet rented a room at the Hôtel Montana, next door to the Café Flore.
Melinda was a figure of contradictions, popular wherever she went but lacking self-confidence, vague but determined at the same time, “apparently frail and defenceless but in fact tough and self-reliant, and although she was generally tractable, she could on occasion be quite dominant.” She was small in stature, always tidily turned out and had about her a soft-voiced helplessness—her accent was often described as “almost Southern”; she was also what her immensely supportive brother-in-law, Alan, called a “hard little nut,” perhaps inevitably after an upbringing that required such a degree of self-reliance. Mark Culme-Seymour, the rakish friend of both Donald and Melinda who hung out in the same circles as the off-duty diplomat and the student, remarked that she was “pretty and vivacious, but rather reserved . . . a bit prim.” Her primness did not interfere with her habit of smoking fat Havana cigars. She too had two distinct sides to her personality, the conventional and the one that craved adventure. And that was to be her life from that December evening onwards: the Foreign Office bride, excitement of a not always welcome kind, mingled love, loyalty and loathing for her husband until betrayal became her path as well as his. Her attraction was elusive even as it was undeniable. Donald and Melinda’s hidden, often contradictory depths ensured that they suited one another.
*
Melinda had rather naively, or perhaps bravely, as an early indicator of her keenness to live with risk, elected to stay in France after the outbreak of war two months earlier. Her sister Harriet, more politically astute and conventional, a steadying figure to Melinda, had followed the American Embassy advice to return home. Robert Cecil, who was soon introduced to Melinda by his colleague, said “she found politics and economics boring.” And ideology “did not feature in her vocabulary. It was interaction with people that brought colour into her cheeks and made her eyes shine.” Certainly the instant attraction between Melinda and Donald was not based on an intellectual union—yet they could each fill in the gaps of the other. She lacked confidence in her intellect and savoir-faire but was natural and at ease in company; he was tightly buttoned up in his divided life, suppressing any turmoil he may have felt about his commitment to espionage after the Nazi–Soviet Pact, not enjoying his official roles. Donald could bask in being the superior intellect to an attractive, admiring woman who was under-educated and slightly at sea in the milieu she had chosen, yet affectionate and popular where he was withdrawn, giving nothing of himself away. Although she had had a difficult upbringing, her psychological conditioning did not include the ingrained need for a secret life, nor would the ideological opportunity to explore Communism in any detail have appealed to her.
Her mother Melinda Dunbar believed the union was “one-sided from the point of view of true affection.” Melinda was “a very mixed person [who] loved Donald very much . . . [but] he was devoted to cultural, highbrow conversations with intellectuals, a form of entertainment to which Melinda was unable to make any form of contribution; she was guided more by impulse and emotion than reason. She would be content to leave such a discussion and retire to her room and read some magazine relating to the cinema.” She had “practically no friends” either in the US or in Paris, so it was a meeting of two lonely souls. Melinda, like Marie in Brittany and Kitty Harris in the immediate past, could be said to be not “of his class,” the prerequisite for a relationship he had mentioned to Deutsch, if the definition were extended to women who were not British and less able to scrutinise his inscrutability and the reasons behind it.
Maclean monopolised Melinda that first evening and afterwards was rarely seen out of her company in his off-duty hours. As he had in his Brittany dalliance and in his pursuit of Kitty, he fell obsessively in love with her. But she remained unsure about her commitment: she wrote to her mother frequently throughout her life and, soon after she and Donald had met, she told Mrs Dunbar, “I am not really in the least bit interested by him.” Maclean had by this time shed the effeminacy that his contemporaries had picked up on in London, and according to Cyril Connolly “had grown much handsomer and his tall figure, his grave long face and noble brow . . . were severe and distinguished.” From this point on, there are no more comments about his girlish looks or mincing walk.
Part of Melinda’s reticence may have been to do with his drinking. At that time when alcoholism was widely seen as a moral failing it is possible that the silence surrounding her father and her mother’s short marriage was related to Francis Marling’s drinking problem. She was certainly alert to Donald’s intake: when in early 1940 she took herself to the South of France to get some distance and give herself thinking time, she wrote to him in Paris, “If you do feel an urge to have a drinking orgy, why don’t you have it at home—so at least you will be able to get safely to bed? Anyway, do try to keep young P from completely demolishing your apartment.” “Young P” was Philip Toynbee, who had arrived in Paris for his honeymoon (such was his confidence that the German army would wait for him to have his trip), but chose to spend much of that time drinking with his old Serpentine-bathing companion. Donald “used to join us with his delightful American wife [in fact the Macleans were still unmarried], as soon as his duties at the Embassy were over. ‘Us’ at that time meant a haphazard group at the Café Flore consisting of the sculptor Giacometti, the ex-Dada
impresario Tristan Tzara, and a whole community of minor French and English artists.” And then on to the rue de Bellechasse, leaving “the wives” to go to bed. Toynbee’s effect on her husband was a cross that Melinda would find insupportable a decade later when apartment-demolishing took on a new level of meaning.
Kitty Harris noticed on one of her visits to Maclean’s flat that everything was much tidier than normal and most tellingly that there were two toothbrushes in the bathroom. It did not take her long to find a “gossamer-thin nightdress” hanging next to the suits in the wardrobe, but she put the needs of Moscow Centre ahead of her own emotions to accept the change to a more conventional agent–handler relationship. Maclean saw the need to appease the NKVD over this turn of events and to allay any fears they might have about a shift of loyalties. He told them that on that first encounter in the Café Flore he had initially been taken with Melinda’s political views: “She’s in favour of the Popular Front and doesn’t mind mixing with Communists even though her parents are quite well off. There was a White Russian girl, one of her friends, who attacked the Soviet Union and Melinda went for her. We found we spoke the same language.” It was essential that such politics as she did espouse were recorded and sugar-coated because what he told Kitty next could have ended his career—if not his life. This was the first grave risk that Maclean took in his life, personally and professionally, and far from the last.
*
He had told Melinda that he was a spy. He needed a secret sharer in his life, someone to admire him, and he had appointed Melinda. She remained a silent witness, her own enigma, for as long as she needed to. He claimed he made the admission to her both to excuse his lateness for their meetings when he was handling documents and making rendezvous, and “to make myself look better and more important than she thought.” The latter reason rings truest. Kitty immediately called a meeting with her superior, code-name “Ford,” at the Soviet Embassy. Ford’s report to Moscow has the staccato disjointedness of his fear at the turn of events:
Ada had noticed recently that Stuart had become close to some woman, though he himself did not tell Ada anything about it. Having noticed a number of changes about his behaviour and the arrangement of his room, Ada decided to ask Stuart about it straightforwardly. The latter was surprised that Ada knew about it and confessed that he had become intimately close with, loved, a young American woman. This American woman, Melinda Marling, is of liberal ideas—the daughter of well-to-do parents living in the United States without any particular interest in politics.
Stuart admitted . . . that he had told Melinda Marling about his membership of the Communist Party and about his link with us “in the spy business”. . . Ada assures us that . . . Stuart’s action is explained by “boyish lightmindedness” and that, as before, he works with us sincerely and with enthusiasm.
This “boyish lightmindedness” was born of a keen desire for Melinda to be impressed by him, to open all sides of his life to her, to woo and interest her, to show passion outside the constraints of his job, to show the depth of his commitment to her as he showed her the whole man. He had found someone who thrilled to danger and could share his burden; even telling her was to take a risk in a life already fraught with risk, which he was revelling in even as it stressed him. He later explained that “when we first met each other, she had no reason to think I was anything more than an ordinary official of the British diplomatic service. After some time she came to the conclusion that my way of life as a diplomat made our relations impossible and she left. I told her about the reason why I led such a life. Then she came back and we have been together ever since.” Even though this is stated in a document written for Russian eyes only, it is notable that he elevates his espionage work to the top spot; his diplomacy was the vehicle for changing the world through leaking. Kitty had given him sexual confidence, mentored him and praised him in espionage matters, and he had become more masculine. Now there was someone with whom he could share everything in his life. Melinda had no idea how vital her role would be in his secret world.
The rush of excitement for Melinda must have been intense as she embarked on the relationship so far from home in the tense atmosphere of wartime Paris. She understood the weight he was carrying, and that to his mind working for strong beliefs was more important than working for the government of the day. She could turn to a figure of principle and hidden depths to protect her at such a potentially deadly time. Years later, when the couple were living in very different circumstances, a letter from Melinda came to light which ended: “You have got two lives to lead, I have only one.” It must have been a compelling relief for Maclean to share his secret life after the burden of carrying it alone (Kitty’s compromised position apart) through the political dramas of the last year. He had found another place of emotional belonging, and this time one he felt could become permanent.
*
As well as Melinda coming on to the scene, things became more complicated still for Kitty. She reported in the first week of May (the week when the Germans swept across Holland and Belgium into France, having already seized Denmark and Norway in April) that she had heard from Philby via Maclean. Philby was surprised not to have had contact from the Russians for some time, and had “some very interesting information” that he wanted to get to Moscow. But Moscow had broken with him, unsure how he was reacting to the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Philby trusted the man he had recruited at his Kilburn supper table without necessarily knowing if he had forsaken the cause, but “didn’t doubt that even if something had radically changed in his life, he would never betray me” so “asked him to help me repair the broken liaison.” Maclean checked in with Kitty, she with Moscow, and a week later the two men met in a Paris café. Maclean told Philby everything he “needed for a rendezvous—the time, place and password.” Moscow Centre slowly started to rebuild the links with Philby, more energetically when later in the war he showed his usefulness as he became a counter-intelligence instructor, and above all after the war when he was an invaluable agent, not least in protecting Maclean, whom he did not meet again for decades. When they did become close once more, it was a short-lived, dramatic and inevitably betrayed renewal of their friendship and comradeship.
The British Embassy was in its last stages of evacuation by early June 1940. Kitty signed off on her lover and agent of the previous two years. It was the end of a great passion as well as her most rewarding professional relationship. Her future now looked very uncertain. She kept the locket Maclean had given her until she died. They could have met again in later life but did not. She deliberately and elegiacally used his code-name from a period when he had been at his most productive, to protect him as well as her own usefulness in her final report to Moscow: “Lirik is a good comrade and the work he does means everything to him.” His only concern is that “his work should be appreciated,” his familiar need. “He felt that his work in France was not as important as what he did in London . . . He has enormous confidence in the Soviet Union and the working class. Bearing in mind his origins and his past and the fact that he’s been totally detached from Party work where he might have grown and learned, Lirik is a good and brave comrade.” When the Germans occupied Paris in June, Kitty found her way back to Moscow and later continued her staunch service to the NKVD from Los Alamos in New Mexico, home of the “Manhattan” atomic bomb project. Her star agent now once again found himself without a handler in his successful dual career. From his arrival at the Foreign Office in 1935 to the end of her tenure, he had supplied what was later to be gathered into forty-five boxes in Moscow, each one containing approximately 300 pages, a colossal amount of intelligence to have photographed, processed and despatched.
*
The first few months of Donald and Melinda’s relationship passed in the Phoney War period of constant false air-raid warnings that were ignored, with the fashionable women of Paris “sporting chic new gas-mask cases.” After the lightning invasion of France launched on 10 May 1940 and the bloody drama of th
e evacuation by the “armada of little ships” of almost 340,000 allied soldiers from Dunkirk it was only a matter of weeks before most of the country was under German control. The advance had happened at a speed that caught everyone off guard, including Stalin, who had hoped for a couple of years of entrenched warfare to buy himself time to build up his own defences.
At this terrifying point Maclean asked Melinda to marry him. She begged him for time to think, and asked whether she could go home to mull it over as the American Embassy was now urging US citizens to leave without delay. But if she left now and decided that she did want to be with him, she might find it hard to return to Europe during wartime. Eventually she told him she could not marry him and he offered to drive her to Bordeaux and find a boat to take her home. But the speed of the German Blitzkrieg was astonishing and Paris was already being evacuated. Wives and “lady members” of the Embassy staff had been sent home on 16 May, by which date the bonfire of documents in the Faubourg Saint Honoré gardens had already been lit. Events had overtaken Melinda’s deliberations.
With German forces less than a week from Paris, and the Embassy in a state of emergency, Maclean wrote on 8 June to Victor Mallet, now back in London:
I want to marry an American girl living here. As we have burnt our circulars along with all other archives, I am not sure whether I need permission to do this. In case I do, I am writing with the Ambassador’s knowledge, to ask whether I may get married . . . Melinda Marling has been in France for about two years . . . and was to have returned to America with her sister . . . in September last, but didn’t do so; I have been responsible for her staying on until now. Our intention is, in view of the situation, to get married as soon as possible, i.e. in eight days’ time, and she would then probably go to a less exposed spot, possibly to America if need be, until things are better.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 13