Stalin needed to have this skilled civil servant’s distillation of the arguments. He was already mentally wrestling with a fear that any direct action taken by the Soviets in Yugoslavia (the Yugoslavs wanted to fight their own battle with Germany and set up their own government) would be seen by the allies as supporting their theory that he was using the war as an excuse to spread revolutionary Communism throughout the world, a line of attack which had led him to disband the Comintern the previous year. He had had an argument with Milovan Djilas, the former Communist leader of the country, ordering him to tell his men to take the red stars off their caps so as not to alarm the British. Or, as he put it, “the form is not important but what is gained.” Above all, Stalin’s suspicion of Churchill in the matter backed up Homer’s analysis of British policy when he said, “Churchill is the kind of man who will pick your pocket for a kopeck if you don’t watch him . . . Roosevelt . . . dips in his hand only for bigger coins.” To know the situation so immediately almost from the horse’s very mouth (“Yesterday H. [Homer] learnt of a change in the plans”) would give Stalin the bargaining advantage when the three leaders next met in negotiation.
*
“The budding paragon,” as he was known to his senior colleagues, worked ferociously hard, often staying in the office until 10 p.m. or later, and frequently taking work home. His reputation preceded him. He was viewed as “efficient and conscientious . . . amiable to meet, imperturbably good-tempered, elegant, exceedingly self-possessed, and with rather a cynical outlook on things that betrayed no particular ideological bias,” while at the same time a fellow diplomat didn’t “altogether care for a certain cold haughtiness of manner which showed through at times.” Once again, the self-possession and amiability, the conscientiousness with little evidence of flair, the distancing edge of cynicism, show a man keeping his thoughts to himself—the perfect Foreign Office man. However, when not on duty, maintaining his charming front without letting his true self show was not always easy, particularly when he was alone, unfettered by Melinda’s watchful eye. It did not need one as well versed in foreign affairs as he was to foresee the looming division of Europe, and his whole inner being despised the capitalist engine of his wife’s country. He increasingly quenched his discomfort with drink, which caused him to drop his daytime self-possessed polish and sowed the seeds of the destruction to come.
Maclean was welcome prey for the society hostesses who assumed him to be lonely and missing his wife and son when he first arrived. In fact, he rarely spoke of Melinda, but when pressed would show the excellent photographs he had taken of his family; he had become much more skilled at photography since his early days when he had depended on Kitty Harris to do all the technical work.
The Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin was not a conventional figure in the Embassy. He had been seconded from the Ministry of Information as a specialist attaché to write a weekly newsletter to London. He was more on the liberal side than many of his colleagues, happy to say disrespectfully that the Ambassador was “not of this century.” Maclean stopped by his desk early on to speak of people whom they knew in common such as the Bonham Carters, and to say that he was working “with Pentagon and State Department people. They’re all so pompous. I hear you know some New Dealers. Could you invite some?” The New Deal programmes had been launched in response to the Great Depression and are now broadly characterised under the headings “Relief, Recovery and Reform,” of more appeal to the left than to the “pompous” right-wing hawks complained of by Maclean. Berlin arranged for him to attend a small Georgetown dinner-party given by Katharine Graham, proprietor of the Washington Post, one of the celebrated and influential hostesses who saw the Macleans as “attractive, intelligent, liberal young people.”
Maclean, still not much one for small talk, said little early on but “drank hard” and started to come out of his shell—to such an extent that when Berlin repeated a witticism made by the acclaimed hostess Alice Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Maclean “berated him in slurred tones for being so crass as to repeat the words of the stupid and reactionary Alice.” Maclean could not but be honest in his cups, and Graham remembered him as going even further, calling Longworth “fascist and right-wing.” He was disappointed in Berlin and foresaw the time when a choice had to be made: “Life is a battle . . . We must stick to our side through thick and thin.”
When Berlin remonstrated with him, Maclean grabbed his colleague by the lapels and had to be pulled off him. Maclean later asked Berlin to lunch to make up, which was “amicable” until Berlin made the throwaway remark after the meal that he thought Vice-President Henry Wallace “had a screw loose,” at which point Maclean had “another tantrum” and shouted at him that he had slighted a man “much admired by his wife and her family.” Wallace was a strong supporter of the New Deal, “an unreconstructed liberal reformer” and such a strong advocate of softer policies towards the Soviet Union that his bid to become the Progressive Party’s presidential candidate in 1948 failed when he refused to disavow the endorsement of his candidacy by the American Communist Party. The liberal Berlin, who thought Maclean “very very nice,” nevertheless found himself “unable to forgive him” for this drunken, public exposure of the ideological divide between them, and they did not socialise again. It was the first report of such uninhibited behaviour, but not the last to remain within the tight Washington circle and kept from the Foreign Office files.
*
Throughout the summer and autumn the information continued to flow through Maclean’s hands. He was always one of the first to arrive at the Embassy in the mornings to find the overnight cables “unbuttoned” by Wilfrid Thomas, the acting senior staff officer, so that they could be read without a code-book. Maclean’s ability to absorb, summarise and redirect these was legendary: Rebecca West was told that “in all the history of the British Embassy at Washington it was probably never so exquisitely efficient, so impeccably organised” as when he was there in the closing year of the war.
Political matters were of much greater interest to the Russians than anything the King might have to say to Halifax. Even after a debauched evening, “which he himself would liken to an alley cat’s prowl round the garbage pails,” Maclean could arise and address himself to some problem assigned to him by his Ambassador and “collect the relevant information with an inspired competence not to be surpassed by any of his colleagues.” He carried his bulging briefcase home with him, often after leaving work at 10:00 p.m., and summarised what he had not managed to photograph. At this stage he could still be comfortable that he was not so much betraying confidential information as helping shape a more equitable Europe after a war won by both those he served. Everything was running smoothly.
The British and Americans were unable to outflank Stalin in their preparations for Europe after the now inevitable defeat of the Nazi regime because so much of their thinking was revealed to him. On 5 September Pravdin passed on to Fitin the news that Churchill and Roosevelt were planning to meet in Quebec in the next few days “to discuss matters connected with the impending occupation of Germany,” information passed on to him by Homer, who had also had a hand in setting the leaders’ agenda. It did not matter that Stalin had not been invited; Maclean supplied him with the full minutes of the meeting which took place two days later. The allies had discussed the British economic situation and the Lend-Lease aid programme, the Pacific War, the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialise Germany, and Greece, where Churchill hoped to maintain the monarchy and resist Russian influence.
Greece was an issue which inspired Maclean to speak out, to guide Stalin and Molotov in a way that crossed a moral espionage line between supplying information and influencing Soviet policy, thereby betraying his government’s interests. It is the first time that the stress of the divisions between the allies showed through in his espionage work. There was a chaotic vacuum in Greece after the German retreat with pro- and anti-Communist resistance forces and the Greek monarchy-in-exile determined to
govern. British forces were going in to stabilise the country with the clear aim of restoring the monarchy to prevent Communist control. In a telegram sent to Moscow Centre, Maclean spoke in a directly partial voice: “Homer hopes we will take advantage of these circumstances to disrupt the plans of the British.” In May 1944, Stalin had agreed that Romania should be primarily a Russian concern while allowing the British the same influence in Greece, to the disgust of the Greek Communists, as Maclean knew well. He desperately wanted to make his own voice heard and his own Communist ideals to be realised in the urgent reshaping of Europe. It was a hope that was bound to be dashed, and Soviet policy disregarding his advice must have been a bitter blow. This was one of the first points of self-questioning as to whether he could keep his beliefs and careers on a parallel course, a difficulty exacerbated now that the Comintern had been disbanded: Maclean understood, if he had been in any doubt through the Great Terror and the Red Army’s conduct of the war, that he was working directly for Stalin.
*
Maclean’s long hours did not change much in January 1945, when Melinda and baby Fergus joined him. The family moved to 2710 35th Place, a mere ten-minute walk across Observatory Circle from the Embassy. Melinda did not find the move to the busy capital or being in charge of her own household for the first time in her life easy. Donald was distracted and not very companionable when he was at home. Their house was in a peaceful and smart part of town: the previous British tenant had been David Bowes-Lyon, Queen Elizabeth’s brother and a director of Cunard’s shipping lines. Melinda initially hired two maids from Jamaica (one to help with the baby), but both needed to “be sent back because they proved to be unsatisfactory.” Neither she nor Donald could bring themselves to carry out the dismissals, so Mrs Dunbar, always summoned at her daughter’s times of need, came from New York to sort things out. Robert Cecil, who had had a hand in the hiring, claimed that it was the discovery by the FBI in a routine check that one of the maids was a Communist and therefore had to be deported that might explain Donald’s unwillingness, skilled negotiator and diplomat that he was, to engage with the situation. The Jamaicans were replaced by Marie Morvan, whom Donald had known in Paris. There was even a “diaper man” who came each morning to take away the previous day’s nappies and bring fresh ones.
Melinda, who had escaped the less stuffy New York society life for Paris in 1938, did not take to the political and social discourse that was the currency of the city, although she did on occasion dutifully host Embassy dinners as befitted the wife of a senior member of the legation. Her stepfather, with the usual rancour he voiced about the Marling family after he had divorced Melinda’s mother, described her as “a social misfit” who “seemed to look down upon American social life,” but this sounds truer of her husband.
Throughout it all, Donald’s drinking grew worse. He was becoming increasingly anti-American as the fault-lines of the post-war world split more clearly between capitalism and socialism; when drunk this became a catch-all loathing for his wife’s country, standing as it did for capitalism and mortgage-holder for his country since the early years of the war. He ranted about “his contempt . . . for their naïve way of thinking, their inability to converse as adults, their instinctive vulgarity . . . ” and offered other insults directed particularly at American women. Not only was this deeply offensive to Melinda but the risk of such talk outside the home must also have been alarming to her given his position and the people with whom he socialised.
Yet when sober he became the charming diplomat once again. His neighbours found him “a splendid person” and “companionable, cheerful, with perfect manners.” Robert Cecil, who had joined his old colleague in April 1945, commented that he heard nothing said against their hosts by “the coming man.” Maclean’s shipmate George Middleton painted a picture of a relaxed husband and father, in spite of perhaps having “too few interests away from his work.” The Middletons “shared a common interest in gardening, played tennis together, met sometimes on Sundays for a pre-lunch drink.” Away from the possibility of work of any and all kinds, on their vacations on Long Island or in Florida, the tension dissolved, and the tennis-loving, devoted family man reappeared. But he needed the release that Melinda offered, and she in turn put up with a lot from the man she loved and admired.
*
The arrival of Gorsky from London in September 1944 as rezident was a great relief to Maclean. Gorsky could share the hard work of copying and transporting the material to New York, from where it was still transmitted to Moscow, as well as taking over part of Melinda’s role as Maclean’s escape valve. Maclean continued to go to New York, although less frequently, unquestioned by his colleagues because the trips had now become habit as well as out of respect for his seniority. Gorsky too shared in the success of his agent: he was publicly promoted to Counsellor in the spring of 1945, and more quietly became a colonel and was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War. Maclean became First Secretary in April 1945.
Maclean was so well connected that often he could see a message before it got to the State Department across town. In August 1944, “Doc” Matthews, Deputy Director of European Affairs in the State Department, was puzzled to get a call from his old British friend from Paris days asking about a memo which had not yet reached him and which he did not know existed but which had emerged from a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting in the White House, a mere hundred feet away. He cut the conversation short to consult with Admiral Leahy, Roosevelt’s White House Chief of Staff and the senior officer of the JCS, and made a note that “Maclean did not say where it had been obtained.” Maclean had got hold of it through his membership of the Combined Civil Affairs Committee which dealt with war-related political and economic problems. This particular item would have highlighted a problem to the Russians as it dealt with a strategy for driving the Japanese out of Indochina and with the setting up after the war of political spheres of influence to be decided by a Chinese–British–American Committee. But the exigencies of the time and the impeccable reputation of Maclean meant that this conundrum was not puzzled over by the Americans. It was a puzzle that was not brought to mind again until 1951.
The stepping up of OSS counter-espionage measures caused Gorsky concern as Washington rezident about the risks of receiving material directly from Maclean. He urged Moscow Centre to find an American courier who would arouse less suspicion were such potential, often blameless, lapses as that involving Matthews to be investigated; at one point he even suggested Melinda. Although Gorsky did not say whether she knew about her husband’s secret life or not, the implication was clear. But Maclean’s ability to interpret and process information quickly in these high-volume days made him indispensable and the idea was not pursued. Pravdin gave an assessment of Homer which highlighted the very skills that made him such a success in both his official careers: he “impressed one as a man of great initiative who does not need to be prompted in his work. He also orients himself very well to the international situation and understands what questions represent our major interests. I do not feel a desire on his part to evade working with us. Instead, he thinks that meeting too infrequently does not give him an opportunity to pass along operational information in a timely way.”
Once again in the twisted logic of Moscow Centre some saw this very assiduity as confirmation of his being a double agent after all. But for now these doubts were put to one side. The material was far too accurate and far too useful for such an accusation to be formally made at that moment. As the Grand Alliance of Britain, the US and the USSR approached its end with the imminent defeat of Germany and the formation of a new world order, Homer’s espionage was about to become even more vital even as that first telegram from New York was lying encrypted in the files.
9
Iron Curtain
The Yalta Conference of February 1945 shaped post-war Europe. The geographical situation at the end of the war was now reasonably clear: the Western allies’ troops had still not crossed the Rhine into German
y and were making little ground in Italy; by contrast, the Red Army had reached the banks of the Oder, with Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, Poland and a large part of Germany already behind them. They were closing in on Berlin. When the “Big Three,” Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, met at the resort town on the Black Sea, Stalin not only had the upper hand in terms of territory, but held the intelligence trump cards. He was exceptionally well prepared for the conference, thanks in very large part to Donald Maclean of the British Embassy in Washington and Alger Hiss of the US State Department. But the end of the war and the new dispositions came at a cost to Maclean that would set the tone for the rest of his career as a spy and a diplomat. The risks he and the Soviets had taken during wartime would be much harder to get away with as peace brought new priorities.
*
British and American observers were denied access to news from Poland but from the government-in-exile in London they had heard tell of deportations and executions of those who opposed Communism. Stalin was so in control of the planning for the conference that, notwithstanding President Roosevelt’s illness and obvious decline, he claimed that “any change of climate would have a bad effect” on his own health. So the ailing Roosevelt and the elderly Churchill and twenty-five aeroplane-loads of officials travelled to meet the General Secretary in his own country and enjoy his remarkable hospitality.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 17