Maclean had worked exceptionally hard in his stint at the General Department. At night he was on fire-watching duty and by early 1944 he appeared “tired and worn.” Melinda complained that she was “often unhappy” during their time in London, and that Donald was at times “irritable and neglectful,” and “drank too much.” He was exhausted by his official work and out of touch with Moscow for a long period thanks to the suspicious mind of Modrzhinskaya; there was mounting mistrust of Russia in the Foreign Office as policymakers started to look at the permutations of the post war world. Melinda understood and would have made some allowances for this in the most secret part of their marriage, but her complicity could not be revealed at the time of her complaint.
In fact, Maclean’s drinking was already at times far worse than Melinda later let on. He was buckling under the strain of his double life, being helped home at all hours of the night by well-meaning friends “with his clothes badly stained and reeking of whisky.” She defended her husband with her habitual “sweetness and understanding” and reassured Lady Maclean that he was simply suffering from overwork, while saying privately and disingenuously to friends that “Something’s worrying Donald to death and he won’t say what it is.”
Three years after Aubrey Wolton had commented on how “lost” the couple seemed, they still had few friends, and in a confidential internal Foreign Office report of January 1944 the answers to the all-important questions “Does he like going out and entertaining?” and “Do he (and his [‘intelligent and attractive’] wife) ‘represent’ well?” were an ill-informed and wishful “I think so” and “Within reason.” The form-filler was hedging his bets in the face of a lack of knowledge of the guarded personal life of his gifted colleague.
In his working life, Maclean managed to keep his front up. In his annual report for 1943 he was described as having a “first-rate ability and a most attractive personality,” with the caveat, again, that he was “lacking in self-assurance . . . and a trifle immature.” Comments about his immaturity remain a feature, but this time, in the wake of what he had worked on, seen and experienced in the four years since the last accusation, they are much more pointed and noteworthy. They might still refer to his guardedness, or to his slow start to the mornings after a late night out, or even to the occasional left-wing comment. Even so, his conscientiousness overcame these quibbles and unknowns and paid off handsomely in both London and Moscow. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden singled out his “admirably clear assessments” of any given situation and Maclean’s reward was to be told in April that he was being sent to Washington as Second Secretary. The congratulatory telegrams poured in. It was some relief for Melinda to be sailing for her home country at the end of April 1944, this time not in a dangerous convoy, for a fresh start in her marriage. She was three months pregnant.
When Winston Churchill was still trying to encourage the US to join the war in 1941, he had called diplomacy in Washington “the most important of all the functions outside this country that can be discharged by any British subject.” By 1944, weeks away from D-Day and the final stages of the war (and also weeks away from the first V-1 flying bombs landing on London), it was clear that the post-war landscape was to be set up from Washington and it was an immensely prestigious posting for Maclean. It was also one that would provide prime espionage material. Moscow Centre could not have done better if they had arranged the promotion themselves.
* Churchill’s great friend, F. E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, had commented long before Churchill’s own finest hour that “Winston has spent the best years of his life preparing his impromptu remarks.”
† Numbers themselves were encoded as words, for example “35” was written as “three five.”
8
Homer
Washington, Moscow and London were the three cities that moulded the post-war world, and Donald Maclean was a notable figure in all of them. He was a senior British diplomat with unparalleled access in Washington, which in his time there was transformed from an inward-looking capital to the nerve centre of the free world, the hub of the Western allies in the rapidly burgeoning Cold War. He was so valuable to Moscow that he was given a new code-name which reflected his influence. Yet in Maclean’s very first days in the States, before he had hit his considerable stride in his new posting, a tiny, seemingly insignificant mistake not of his own making became the smoking gun that doomed him.
*
The Queen Elizabeth docked in New York on 6 May 1944, a month before D-Day, after an uneventful and uncomfortable crossing: male and female passengers were segregated on the converted luxury liner and there were frequent evacuation drills in their convoy. Maclean’s establishment credentials served him well even before he sailed. The British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, took the unusual step of writing to him to welcome him on to his staff. The fox-hunting aristocrat dubbed the “Holy Fox” by Churchill for his political cunning, had succeeded Sir Donald as President of the Board of Education and shared his predecessor’s unimpeachable austerity as well as his strong religious faith. The tall, thin, impeccably dressed Ambassador, unmistakably an English gentleman, had been Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, one of the Munich appeasers had been offered the premiership in 1940. After banishment to Washington, Halifax had not endeared himself to Americans. He attended a Chicago White Sox baseball game at Comiskey Park and remarked that the game was “a bit like cricket except we don’t question the umpire’s decision so much,” and left his hot dog uneaten on his seat. The hot dog got front-page news, next to the comment that at least King George VI had eaten his in 1939 on the first-ever visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch. Halifax was seen as even more elitist when he took the day off to go hunting in Pennsylvania, but he regained sympathy when one of his sons was killed in the war and another had his legs blown off by a Luftwaffe Stuka in December 1942.
The Ambassador and the new Second Secretary became good friends. They played doubles tennis before breakfast on the court behind the residence of the handsome Lutyens-designed Embassy. Another player was George Middleton, who had arrived on the same ship as the Macleans and saw the legation as “the apogee of British diplomacy.” In spite of his useless left arm, Halifax was a keen tennis player with a very long reach. Maclean’s Paris and Cambridge colleague Robert Cecil, his career permanently entwined with and complicated by his association with the senior man, would eventually join them in Washington and sometimes on the court. The best of the Foreign Office was a small world, and Donald, although not always successful in suppressing his “visceral aversion” to his wife’s country during his time there, was in the vanguard of the new generation.
In the US the Macleans were free of rationing, free of bombing and at least geographically far away from the war for the first time in their marriage, with the possibility of living their new lives happily together with their forthcoming baby. On their arrival in New York they went straight to the 277 Park Avenue apartment of Hal and Melinda Dunbar: it was the first time the Dunbars and the Marlings had met their son-in-law of four years’ standing, and the first time they had seen their daughter and sister in the three years since her stay during the London Blitz and the stillbirth of her first child.
Donald’s mother-in-law was a formidable critic of anyone who came near her daughters and cruelly found the new arrival “supercilious and ineffective,” possibly misreading his British charm and shyness as he struggled in the face of her strong personality. On the positive side she, like many others, found him very good-looking, apart from his “bad, decayed teeth,” which were to be “fixed” while he was in America. Mrs Dunbar was determined that this pregnancy should not go wrong, and wanted to keep a close eye on Melinda. Melinda ignored her mother’s criticisms of her marriage, including her observation that her daughter was “passionate but unsatisfied” as a wife. Not for the last time, Melinda showed her determination to protect Donald.
Maintaining this loyalty was a test for Melinda. Her first surprise occurr
ed as the couple filled in their entry forms at the dockside in New York. She put “British Embassy, Washington” as her address. Donald corrected her and gave that as his address only, Park Avenue as hers. He plausibly claimed that she would be very uncomfortable in the mugginess of a Washington summer during her pregnancy, and should be close to her mother after her last awful experience of childbirth. He would be thrown into the immensely hard work of the Embassy in wartime and would have little time to attend to her. But condemning her to live with the Dunbars was tough. Tensions were running high in the household (the couple were to separate the following year) and Hal Dunbar continued to treat his stepdaughter as the “problem child” she had always been for him, in spite of her marriage to the good-looking and successful diplomat. Dunbar was so distanced from both women that he even charged them rent for living in his houses.
Money was anyway a further cause of resentment for Melinda in that Donald, presuming that she had enough of her own, did not give her any. As he had found in Paris, his colleagues tended to have private incomes and a correspondingly more carefree attitude. Maclean could stay only a few days in New York as the man he was replacing had been struck down with mumps and he was needed sooner than planned. To his brief good fortune in later life, Maclean’s file in the Foreign Office never recorded his new starting date or the reason for it. Just after he got on the train to the capital for the first of his many trips, Melinda went to the family farm, Merriebrook, at South Egremont in the Berkshires, for the summer. Their son, Fergus, was born in New York by Caesarean section on 22 September.
Melinda was perhaps more forbearing of her living situation when she grasped its most compelling reason beyond what Donald had said in public. His predecessor in the Embassy Chancery was in no doubt that it would be “unusual” for an officer of his standing to make trips to New York “because of the high pressure of work at the time.” But it was crucial in those early days that he did visit the city and have a cast-iron excuse to do so. The war was reaching its endgame, the invasion of Europe was being planned by the British and the Americans to take place in just one month, the Red Army was on the move from the east and it was essential to Moscow Centre that their prime spy hit the ground running.
Such was the speed of his transfer, though, that Gorsky had not been able to set up his own simultaneous move to Washington, so a handler was needed in New York. Once a month Donald Maclean would come in to Pennsylvania Station, a journey of around three hours, and make his way to Grand Central to take the train to Hillsdale, New York, when heading for the Berkshires and the Dunbar farm. Between stations, or between Grand Central and Park Avenue if he was stopping in Manhattan, he would visit his new handler on a bench in Central Park or in a crowded bar. Melinda and her pregnancy were the perfect alibi.
*
Washington, its code-name “Carthage” no doubt expressing the Russian hope that it would meet the same end as the ancient city, had swollen in wartime from being a southern town to the bustling capital of a vast nation at war. Its population in 1945 stood at a record 802,000 (it was only 602,000 in 2010). Scarcity of accommodation was an added and convenient excuse for Donald to be alone at the start of his posting: he stayed at the Hotel Lafayette for most of June (where Melinda joined him for a fortnight in the middle of the month) until he moved in with his chain-smoking colleague Michael Wright in Kalorama Road. Ambassador Halifax wrote to London asking whether the allowances for Maclean and Middleton, also married but with his wife by his side, could be raised to $200 (unfurnished) and $250 (furnished) respectively, and on that basis it certainly would have been possible for the Embassy housing office to find them a home, as it did for others. But until Melinda and the baby came to join him in January 1945, Maclean did not have a home of his own, nor did he have time to find one amid the swirl of activity. His arrival in Washington was of such importance to Moscow that an unnecessary telegram, sent to impress no less a figure than chief of NKGB foreign intelligence, Lieutenant General Pavel Fitin, and in part the result of turf wars in the New York rezidentura, would have irreparable consequences.
Stephen Apresyan was twenty-eight, a well-read polyglot, who had never been out of the Soviet Union before his arrival in New York at the start of the year. He was employed under the cover of the consular service. His presence was bitterly resented by his much more experienced deputy, Vladimir Pravdin (also known as Roland Abbiate), posing as the TASS news agency chief in New York. Pravdin’s prevous service to the NKVD/NKGB had been as an assassin: he had liquidated Reiss/Poretsky in Switzerland, despite Krivitsky’s warning to his friend. As his parents had returned to their native France when their son (who had been born in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg) was eighteen, he obviously could not be trusted to look after an agent as important as Maclean for fear of his contaminated ideology. Pravdin and Apresyan sent resentful reports about each other back to Moscow (the former hit-man saying that the more insular Apresyan was “utterly without the knack of dealing with people”); the “Tyre” (as New York was code-named) office was in a state of “civil war” until the spring of 1945 when Apresyan was relocated to San Francisco, or “Babylon” as the witty code-namers called it in honour of its free-wheeling reputation. Yet it was the more experienced Pravdin who dealt with Maclean alone before Gorsky finally came to Washington, and who soon made the tradecraft blunder, possibly distracted by the need to show off his closeness to his important subject, that was to cost Maclean, the Foreign Office and Moscow Centre so dearly.
On 25 June, Maclean made his first visit to New York since his arrival to see Melinda and establish contact with Pravdin. Three days later Pravdin sent the telegram to Fitin to reassure him that contact had been made, but “Maclean did not hand anything over.” The agent would be able to travel regularly to New York “where his wife is living with her mother while awaiting confinement,” and arrangements were in place for him to summon help “in case of need.” Above all else their prize asset needed protecting.
From then on the conscientious diplomat handed over copious quantities of material, mainly photographic and often by necessity, given the volume of material he would otherwise have to take out of the Embassy, from his own capacious memory. His discipline was almost extraordinary. Every paper going through the Embassy in frenetic wartime Washington was accessible to him and, as he settled in, it might have been too much to have had his new family there as a distraction. As he was to show throughout the rest of his life, he was a proud father of his sons, however neglectful a husband, and it must be assumed that he minded this absence even amid this frantic, important and satisfying work. When Maclean later looked back on his life as a spy, this period confirmed to him “a dozen times over in all its grimness the chief assumption upon which my decision to take on underground work was based,” though he acknowledged that not even he could have foreseen the path of fascism in that time.
His ability to take in and synthesise facts and opinions stood him in good stead in both his legitimate and his illegitimate work: First Secretary Roddie Barclay commented after they had worked together on the peace treaty with Italy that he had been immensely impressed with the new man’s “skill at drafting and his ability to unravel complex issues.” Even in the fragments of the telegrams that have been decoded, we can hear his own voice coming through to précis, interpret and speed the transmission of material. This was possibly unique in modern espionage, and operated to his detriment in the end.
As he came so forcefully back into play, Maclean needed a new code-name to go with his new job, and was christened, with the literary skill that Moscow Centre frequently displayed, “Homer.” The lonely “Orphan” of 1935 has moved through the generic “Lyric” poet of 1940 to become a fully fledged individual with a proper name, able to take on an importance in literature that could echo down the ages as a commentary on great events. And, of course, the identity of the original Homer, who sang of war, has never been established, just as it was hoped that the new poet of war would remain anony
mous.
The scope of Maclean’s role was outlined in a telegram to Moscow sent on the night of 2 August. It refers to a committee “on economic and political questions” and “the European Advisory Commission,” and states that Maclean “is present at all the sessions.” And, best of all, that the Soviets now had access to documents “including the secret telegraphic correspondence of Boar with Captain.” In another happy piece of code-naming, “Boar” is Churchill, and “Captain” is Roosevelt. The Soviet Union had access to two of the planners of the future map of the world, who were clearly mistrustful of the third.
What was of greatest importance to Stalin was the post-war division of Europe. That same telegram stated that Britain’s “vital interests lie in the North Sea” and that therefore after Germany’s defeat British troops should occupy the north-west quadrant of the country, as duly happened, even though at the time “Roosevelt did not agree with this plan.” Useful as it was to know which likely future enemy would be bordering the Soviet spoils in Germany, this telegram gives even more valuable information to Russia about attitudes towards the spheres of Communist influence that seemed possible in the near future, as it refers to Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia. After revealing that Operation Anvil, the US and British landings on the southern coast of Europe, would now take place later that month, the telegram notes that Churchill had tried to persuade Roosevelt to stage the landings on the Adriatic rather than the Mediterranean coastline, in order to take Trieste and advance into Yugoslavia and the Balkans, through the Alps and into Austria ahead of the Red Army. It was pleasing to the Russians to see that their allies could not agree on military strategy and, even better, it was a relief that the strategy was not going to encroach on their own territorial goals. Homer also spoke out to give his succinct, personal summary of the “aims that are being pursued” by each country: “Britain—strengthening of her influence in the Balkans; the USA—the desire for minimum involvement in European politics. . . .”
A Spy Named Orphan Page 16