A Spy Named Orphan
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Nineteen-forty-one was the pivotal year of the war: both the USA and the USSR came under attack and joined the conflict. It was also the year when the Cambridge Five were by turns essential, mistrusted, questioned and self-questioning. On 28 December 1940, shortly after his return from Moscow, Gorsky had made contact with Blunt, by now in a very good position at the heart of MI5. Blunt had had a hiccup in his early intelligence training at Minley Manor when his Cambridge Communist past came to light, but that had been forgotten by now. He had not been in touch with a Soviet controller for three and a half years. In January 1941 Blunt won back trust for them all for the moment when he passed Gorsky the debriefing reports of “Mr Thomas,” Walter Krivitsky, from the year before, no doubt hastening the defector’s death in the Washington hotel a few weeks later. Had Maclean not been so emotionally forceful in pledging himself earlier, Moscow Centre might have been even more alarmed by the Krivitsky evidence, even more concerned that the British had discovered his treachery and succeeded in turning him as a double agent.
Gorsky/Henry insisted on a much more rigorous observance of tradecraft than either Otto or Norma. If a rendezvous took place in Central London, it was in a park or a café. The correct code-words were to be exchanged every time, followed by a long journey by tube to the suburbs and back to ensure they were not being followed, before any further exchange of information could be carried out. Sometimes Gorsky would meet his agents in a far-flung tube station such as Park Royal on the western outskirts of London where papers would be handed over and a location arranged, often a public lavatory, where they could be returned the following morning. The spies were equipped with tiny Minox cameras for photographing papers at home, although the skill required to focus on words with such a small device meant that this was not really a practicable option. In the course of 1941 Maclean once again hit productivity highs with an extraordinary 4,419 documents supplied; Cairncross was next with 3,449.
In the first half of the year there was plenty of material that warned of the impending German invasion of Russia and the abrupt ending of the pact that had caused some of the agents such qualms. The Weekly Political Intelligence Summary compiled by the Foreign Office had been flagging up the offensive for two months before it happened; Maclean had seen a telegram about a conversation between Hitler and King Paul of Yugoslavia discussing the invasion, as well as a message from Lord Halifax in Washington (where he was now Ambassador) on the same topic and an extract from a bulletin on German military plans issued in early May by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), as MI6 was also known. But as Stalin was only willing to listen to intelligence that suited his potent mix of narcissism and paranoia, he was unwilling to believe that any invasion of his country could come before he was ready for it.
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During his enforced bachelorhood over the winter of 1940–1, Maclean started to show the occasional patterns of debauchery that were to become more pronounced, and more dangerous, in the years to come. Blunt and Burgess’s parties in Victor Rothschild’s flat in Bentinck Street, Marylebone, where they lived, were great tension-relievers during the worst of the Blitz (the flat was especially handy as it had a bomb-shelter in the basement). The gatherings were also a source of very useful high-level gossip, as Goronwy Rees recalled: “Guy brought home a series of boys, young men, soldiers, sailors, airmen . . . Civil servants, politicians, visitors to London, friends and colleagues of Guy’s, popped in and out of bed and then continued some absorbing discussion of political intrigue, the progress of the war and the future possibilities of peace.” As well as the occasional visit to the Bentinck Street loucheness, Maclean went sometimes as a guest to the Gargoyle Club, in Dean Street, Soho, already frequented by Guy Burgess. There was no discussion of spying or even acknowledgement of the other’s recruitment when they met. The Gargoyle, with its ballroom walls made up of fragmented mirrors and its art-nouveau lift, was “a cosmopolitan arena; an antic theatre of social, sexual and intellectual challenge.” During the war, exiled intellectuals, writers and artists, such as Arthur Koestler, George Weidenfeld, Romain Gary and Feliks Topolski, and the senior officers of the Free French, all found in it “familiar territory” alongside the likes of Cyril Connolly, Harold Nicolson, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Nancy Cunard and Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things. Maclean became an habitué of its liberating hedonism; in 1950, when he joined as a member, it was to become an essential and rather public escape valve.
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Melinda’s return in May 1941 put a stop to Donald living things up and to an extent restored his evening equilibrium. She came back to England and to her exhausted husband on Pan Am’s luxurious Dixie Clipper flying boat (which provided separate dressing-rooms for men and women and six-course meals served by white-coated waiters) via stop-overs in Bermuda and neutral Lisbon. Her family had put pressure on her to stay in America, particularly after her ordeal, but she was “a person of stubborn loyalties,” as she was to prove again and again. It was not the last time that she had to make a choice between her own family and Maclean, but there was no vacillating on her part. They needed each other. This time, toughened by her experience, and with her predilection for living with danger, she always refused to go under cover when the air-raid sirens went off, saying she would rather die in her bed than face the stench and claustrophobia of the shelters.
By the time the couple moved into a new flat in Rossmore Court, Marylebone, Hitler had unleashed Operation Barbarossa. On 22 June, four million men (and nearly 700,000 horses) of the Axis armies crossed 1,800 miles of the Russian border. Barbarossa was stunning in its scale and speed—the largest and fastest invasion in history. When Stalin had heard that the German Ambassador to Moscow was hinting at the invasion a few weeks before, on top of the warnings from both overt and covert channels for months, he said, “Now disinformation has reached ambassadorial level!” On 10 June, the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, was able to dictate to Ambassador Maisky, by now a fixture on the London scene and a shrewd observer of it, the Axis troop deployments at the Soviet frontier. This was rebuffed by Moscow as “a clumsy propaganda manoeuvre” to get the USSR and Germany into the war. On the 21st, Maisky was warned by the British Ambassador to Moscow, Stafford Cripps, then in London, that the invasion was likely to be the next day. Maisky recorded in his diary that evening that “an imminent attack . . . seemed improbable.” With his certainty that he could set the timetable through the power of his will alone, Stalin had hoped to be given more leeway to build up his defences.
Barbarossa provided Britain with a lifeline. Much of the German war machine now headed to the east. Maclean was working for an ally (even if Churchill was careful not to use the word in his speech to the House of Commons on the evening of Barbarossa as being too dramatic a rhetorical reversal), and he could close the inner moral gap and comfort himself that he would be showing Moscow material that they should be allowed to see with their new status—information that could shorten the war. He could make good his employer’s failure. Anthony Blunt felt “a profound sense of relief” at the sudden alignment of his beliefs and the turn in the war. With Melinda at his side again and a common purpose in both his careers, Maclean must have shared that relief as his patriotism and his undimmed ideology were in harmony. After the misery of the past few years there was finally some order to his life.
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Much of what Maclean passed to Henry during his three years in London was extremely valuable to Russia, even if not always heeded by the Kremlin. In 1943 his report of what the Poles believed about the discovery by the Wehrmacht of the bodies of Polish soldiers in Katyń contributed to the break in relations between Moscow and the Polish government-in-exile. However, the sheer quantity as well as the quality of information that went to Moscow inevitably caused suspicion. Few people could produce material on such a scale, so the Soviet logic led to the conclusion that he was being fed it, either by his employers or by the other Cambridge spies. Others
, too, were proving very fertile: Blunt had gone into MI5 and between 1942 and 1945 sent 1,771 files, some of them original documents rather than photographs, from the heart of Britain’s intelligence, an “incomprehensible risk” to be so productive, according to Moscow Centre; Cairncross’s intercepts of German material from his current position at the Government Code and Cypher School, the code-breaking agency at Bletchley Park, were of critical importance before the pivotal Battle of Kursk. Yet none of the Five was passing on information that would harm British interests, which therefore meant they could not be real traitors to their country: even Philby’s pronounced Englishness in speech and dress made him somehow suspect. The flight to Scotland of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess in May 1941 was soon seen for what it was by Britain and Germany, the act of a man not quite in his right mind; Stalin, though, saw a plot between the two countries to make peace. In 1942 he wrote to Maisky, still his Ambassador in London, that “all of us in Moscow have gained the impression that Churchill is aiming at the defeat of the USSR, in order then to come to terms with Germany . . . at the expense of our country.” As late as October 1944 Stalin was raising a toast to the British intelligence services at dinner with Churchill which had “inveigled Hess into coming to England.”
Elena Modrzhinskaya, alias “the Blue-Eyed Gretchen,” was one of the few women in Moscow Centre. Polish in origin and head of the British section, she had no feel for Britain whatsoever. But she had joined the NKVD at the height of the purges in 1937, which had enabled her to rise rapidly by double-thinking everything that came her way. By 1942 she had learned a huge amount from Anthony Blunt during the year when he worked as assistant to Guy Liddell of B Division of MI5. B Division ran the Double-Cross system whereby every German spy in Britain had been identified through code-breaking ingenuity and successfully turned.
With all the material heading east, and admiring Double-Cross as she did, there was plentiful reason in Modrzhinskaya’s mind to assume that the Russians too were being played and that the Cambridge Five were working for their own side. She actually put her finger on something fairly fundamental which eluded her well-mannered British contemporaries when she asked how could such self-confessed university Communists, “aristocrats” at that, be allowed to serve their country in such important posts? If they were sincerely working for the Soviets, “why had not a single valuable agent in the USSR or in the Soviet Embassy in Britain been exposed”? Blunt had said that MI5 were not watching the Soviet Embassy in London; Philby that MI6 were not spying from the British Embassy in Moscow. How could this be unless there was double-dealing going on? How could the spies bring out quantities of original documents without being noticed? In fact, the British restrictions on spying on the Soviets were imposed after Barbarossa: one did not spy on one’s allies in wartime even if one had the manpower. And security was nearly non-existent. Espionage common sense in Moscow Centre seemed about to undo them all.
And if Maclean was indeed a double agent, why would he be so productive when a few carefully selected intelligence items would do just as well? The answer must be that he was the only one who had not been turned, yet was being manipulated by the others, as he was passing on very little about German affairs that actually harmed British policy. A Russian surveillance team was sent to trail their prized spies, but soon got lost (luckily for them as their shabby, ill-cut Russian suits would soon have given the game away) and covered their backs by reporting that their targets, clearly trained to a higher level of tradecraft by their British masters, had shaken them off deliberately. But then some excellent intelligence-gathering reasserted a sense of trust. In May 1944 Blunt supplied a complete copy of the deception plan around D-Day two weeks before the Normandy landings took place, and followed up in July with a list of all the double agents involved in that plan. Eventually, in August that year, two years after the Soviets had started chasing their own tails, an exhaustive analysis of material from Philby in particular was checked and cross-checked against other sources, and the Five were exonerated. Maclean had used up another life.
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Barbarossa, the very operation that gave Maclean’s espionage some form of moral legitimacy, also became a factor in his future unmasking through such an unlikely chain of events that without large helpings of luck and genius it might never have come about. He was undone by the most basic and essential tool of the spy’s armoury—the code-book.
The ending of the Nazi–Soviet Pact naturally led to a vast increase in the coded traffic to and from Moscow. The speed of Barbarossa put the Soviet code-makers on the back foot as much as it did Stalin’s military machine. The NKVD had perfected the use of the one-time pad, by which the agent sending the message (via a Soviet intelligence officer who would translate if necessary and use cover-words and names unknown to most agents) and the cipher clerk receiving it have identical pads made up of random groups of numbers. The agent would write out a message in as concise a form as possible. Most words, punctuation and many phrases had a four-number code,† and those that did not were spelt out using a separate “spell table” by which the instruction “Spell” (in code) would precede a number-by-number coded spelling of the word, followed by the instruction “Endspell.” These were similarly broken down into four-number groups, whatever the length of the word. As a further initial disguise, the resulting four-number groups were then converted into five-number blocks by pulling numbers forward from the following groups.
With the message now in numerical form, the cipher clerk would look at his one-time pad, each page of which had sixty five-digit numerical groups known as the additive or the key. The first group of numbers on the pad would be used to indicate which page of which pad was in use. Thereafter the one-time pad would be placed over the five-number groups that needed to be sent and the two sets of numbers added together, without carrying (so if the number 9 is over the number 4, it becomes 3 on the cipher). Each number then corresponds to a letter (which did not change from pad to pad) so the message was then transformed into five-letter groups and sent. At the other end, the process was followed in reverse: letters turned back into numbers, which would then be subtracted using the matching page of the one-time pad and then the numbers turned back into words using the code-book.
Such a system involved an extraordinary amount of manpower to produce the number of pads required given their single usage; hence the German decision to go to Enigma machines, where the cipher was produced by a primitive electromechanical computer and could therefore be broken by a superior computer made by a superior engineer, in this case Alan Turing of Bletchley Park.
With the rocketing demand for and dwindling stocks of one-time pads in the middle months of 1941, there was a crisis in the Soviet cryptography department; they simply could not produce enough to keep up. Over 8,000 pads were needed for the London rezidentura alone. When the US joined the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the shortage got worse. The solution, introduced either by a panicky official or unilaterally by an overworked cryptography department, was to use duplicate key pages, manually inserting a sheet of carbon paper into the typewriters used to create the pads. By 1942 these duplicate pages were in tens of thousands of pads. Many of them by now were, technically, two-time pads. Even so, as the duplicate pages were shuffled into different pads, often with different page numbers, and sent around the world, only a code-breaker with huge resources and skill would be able to use this error to crack the codes.
The US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service had both: in September 1939 it had a staff of nineteen; by the time of Pearl Harbor that had grown to 400, and by the end of the war it numbered 10,000. Its headquarters was at Arlington Hall, a former girls’ boarding school, across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. The new staff, as with Britain’s Bletchley Park, were drawn from a range of disciplines—linguists and philologists, mathematicians, engineers and technicians, and brilliant English majors who revelled in solving crossword puzzles. And the service was soon to be heade
d by a genius.
The first breakthrough came immediately after the end of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. The Soviet Consulate in Petsamo, a warm-water port providing access to the Barents Sea in the extreme north of Finland, was overrun by Finnish troops with such speed that the NKVD/NKGB staff who had been stationed there since December 1939, during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union on which Maclean had reported to Moscow, had time only to burn parts of four of their code-books, a costly piece of corner-cutting. The Finns placed great emphasis on cryptography, especially in relation to Russia, and they went to work with a vengeance. They were particularly interested in some cables they deciphered between the general staff and the military attachés in Berlin and Helsinki. Although the Finns did not crack any of the actual Soviet ciphers, they understood some of the “general characteristics” in the cables, including standard information about weather, and polite sign-offs praising the Revolution and the Motherland. In November 1944, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA), bought 1,500 pages of code and cipher material from the Finns, and the Signal Intelligence Service could get to work despite the objections about spying on one’s allies raised by Secretary of State Stettinius. A trail that had a long distance to cover in the years to come and that would require a great deal of ingenuity and hard work had been started which would unravel everything, at the very point when Maclean could single-mindedly and with a clear conscience be of greatest service to the Soviets in their joint aim with Britain of defeating fascism.
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For the Maclean family, 1943 brought the loss of Donald’s eldest brother, Ian, a navigator in the RAF, shot down over Denmark while helping the resistance there on behalf of SOE, the Special Operations Executive; his younger brother, Alan, had joined the 11th Hussars on leaving Cambridge, and later crossed the Rhine in the allied advance on Berlin. Nancy was working for the Registry of MI5 in London, much visited by Anthony Blunt, first of all in HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs (it was not easy to operate in a workplace where most of the offices had no electrical sockets and had handles only on the outside of the doors), until that was bombed and the Registry had to move to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.