Melinda felt so insecure in this unpredictable environment that her shyness became almost overwhelming. If her husband invited a couple of mutual friends over for dinner he would not tell her in advance for fear that she would ask for the evening to be put off because she was so uncertain of how he might behave. The new atmosphere of mistrust, at work, at home and on the larger stage abroad, was soon to threaten their personal stability—and Maclean’s professional standing.
* £1,200 in 1945 is roughly equivalent to £36,000 (approximately $50,000) today.
10
Distant Thunder
The dramas in the second, pivotal, act of Donald Maclean’s life took place mostly offstage. For the first time in his career as a spy, there were serious threats of discovery, yet the most dangerous of all worked quietly in the background, unknown to him until years after it was too late. At the same time, the British establishment and security services received their first clear warnings that some of those in whom they had placed their trust might have put their ideology ahead of the Official Secrets Act, yet they did not institute retrospective background checks.
The atmosphere got chillier and chillier between the West and the Soviet Union, but Maclean’s access to both sides enabled him to play a part in preventing what could have been a bloody escalation of bad feelings into hostilities. And his most outstanding peacetime service to the Soviet Union was still in the future. Although the urgency of the war was now past, the post-war period had less clear rules and alliances, and more uncertain outcomes.
*
The first threat to Maclean’s charmed existence came from a country he would never visit. It would have been a disaster for him if Moscow Centre, the late Arnold Deutsch in particular, had not taken such care in building their top British network. The Cambridge Five, by now penetrating ever further into the vital and secretive branches of their government, had never come closer to exposure.
On 4 September 1945, Konstantin Volkov, the Soviet Vice-Consul in Istanbul, walked into the British Consulate with his wife and asked for a meeting with Chantry Page, his opposite number. Zoya Volkov was in “a deplorably nervous state” and Volkov himself “far from rock steady.” Page had had a letter from Volkov the previous month but had dismissed it as a prank, or maybe he had forgotten it as he was prone to memory lapses after being caught in a bomb blast in the city’s Pera Palace Hotel a few years before. He did not speak Russian, so he brought in a colleague to interpret. Volkov turned out to be the deputy chief of the NKGB in Turkey and prior to that had worked for years on the British desk at Moscow Centre. John Leigh Reed, the Russian-speaking First Secretary at the Embassy, sent a top-secret memo to London on the same day stating that Volkov had said “he had some information of great importance to give me. For the last two and a half years the Soviets had been able to read all the telegrams between the Foreign Office and the British Embassy in Moscow.” Moreover, the Russians had “two agents inside the Foreign Office . . . and seven inside the British Intelligence Service [including one fulfilling the function of head of a section of British counter-espionage in London] passing them information of great importance.” In Volkov’s flat in Moscow there was apparently a suitcase containing the names of 314 Soviet agents in Turkey, 250 in Britain, and “a great deal of other information connected with Soviet activities” which the putative defector would be grateful if the British could arrange to collect.
Volkov wasn’t prepared to divulge the names of the two Foreign Office agents unless the British were “interested” in the information he had to give, and begged that the note of this meeting go in handwritten form and not by telegraph, as the Russians had broken so many British ciphers. He would be in touch again in a few days. Volkov was not a defector who had fallen out of love with the system, as Krivitsky had been, but a frightened man who had had a blazing row with his Ambassador and wanted asylum and £50,000 for his information.* If he did not hear from Page within twenty-one days, he would assume the deal was off and take his business elsewhere.
The British did not believe that their ciphers had been broken but respected Volkov’s demand that the papers go via the diplomatic bag, which meant that it was some days before they reached “C,” the boss of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies. Menzies decided that the best person to assess the matter was his head of Soviet counter-intelligence, Kim Philby. Philby saw at once that the two agents inside the Foreign Office must refer to Maclean and Burgess and that the “head of a section of counter-espionage in London” was none other than himself. He “told the Chief that I thought we were on to something of the greatest importance” and that he would report back in the morning. His secretary was not to disturb him as he pondered the situation in his office, which gave him time to alert his handler, Boris Krötenschield, “Krechin.” Philby was in the unique situation of being asked to investigate something that would bring down the network he had built up, and there could be only one desired outcome. His persuasive sangfroid made him just the man for the job—he merely needed to be told to take it on.
However, Philby was greeted the following day with the news that C had met Sir Douglas Roberts, head of Security Middle East, the previous evening in White’s Club and had decided to put Roberts on the case instead. Luckily for Philby, Roberts was known to hate flying to the extent that it was in his contract that he would not have to do so. He planned to return to his base in Cairo by sea before travelling on to Turkey. This was the ideal pretext for Philby to suggest he go himself to save time on Volkov’s looming deadline. He could get there soon enough and could see through his scheduled meetings in London first.
When Philby did finally leave, the weather played into his hands: a storm over Malta forced his plane to land in Tunis, and then by the time he got to Cairo it was too late to catch the flight on to Istanbul. He eventually reached the city on 26 September, five days after the Turkish Consulate in Moscow had given visas to two “diplomatic couriers,” in fact Moscow Centre assassins, to travel to Istanbul. Since Philby had arrived on a Friday afternoon, the Ambassador had already left to sail his yacht on the Black Sea for the weekend and could not be contacted. Philby went to the British Consulate on the Monday to meet Reed and Page. They rang to speak to the Soviet Vice-Consul, and after some clickings and unexplained transfers, a voice on the other end said that Volkov had left for Moscow. He and his wife had indeed gone home, heavily sedated and carried to a waiting aircraft on stretchers, en route to their inevitable fate. Philby wrote a report on what he thought might have happened to alert the Russians: perhaps the couple had been seen to act nervously. “Another theory—that the Russians had been tipped off about Volkov’s approach to the British—had no solid evidence to support it. It was not worth including,” he coolly wrote. Such dismissiveness had the desired effect of making the Volkov episode disappear from official view. It had indeed been “a very narrow squeak indeed” for him and for Maclean.
*
Maclean was in perfect ignorance of all that went on in Istanbul, fortunately for his increasingly fragile temperament. He did get to hear about the next moment of danger. The day after the unfortunate Volkov had presented himself at the British Consulate, a twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk working for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) in Ottawa put 109 documents inside his shirt and left the Soviet Embassy, sucking in his stomach and “hoping that as the evening was so warm . . . a sloppy-looking shirt wouldn’t arouse undue interest.” Igor Gouzenko then took a streetcar downtown and into the Ottawa Journal building. Just before he knocked on the editor’s office door he realised in a panic that an important newspaper like the Journal would surely have NKGB moles on the staff, and promptly ran out. At home, his wife (who had earlier told him he looked pregnant with his contraband, and was herself heavily pregnant) told him to calm down and try again—but by this time the editor had gone home for the night. Gouzenko incoherently offered the documents to a man with a green eyeshade, who could not read Russian and said he thought it really sounded like a matter
for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
A Mountie on the street pointed out that, as it was midnight, whatever it was he was trying to say could just as well wait until morning. After a sleepless night, Gouzenko tried the Journal again, which showed no interest, and the Ministry of Justice, whose staff thought he wanted to take out Canadian citizenship rather than asylum effective immediately. In desperation he and his wife followed the Ministry’s advice and went to the Crown Attorney’s office to enquire about naturalisation, which would give them the protection of Canadian citizenship; they wept when they were told that it would take months. They had no recourse except to go back to their flat. By the time they got there, the Soviets had realised that both he and the papers were missing (the cause of all this was that Gouzenko had been summoned back to Moscow to explain why he had left classified documents unlocked one night, and they were keeping an eye on his paperwork security) and had arrived to break down the door to his flat. Under Soviet rules, the family should not have had a flat of their own so that junior operatives could keep an eye on each other, but Gouzenko’s boss’s wife could not bear the crying of the baby when they had cohabited, so that rule had gone by the board. The Gouzenkos clambered over the balcony with their terrified two-year-old son and into the next-door apartment, where a Royal Canadian Air Force sergeant lived. The Russians were soon beating on his door. The police arrived to find the Gouzenko flat being ransacked by NKVD rezident Pavlov and the matter went back to the Ministry of Justice and to Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Gouzenko had at last found sanctuary after one of the most challenging defections of the century.†
When the papers that had been inside Gouzenko’s shirt were translated, they revealed the existence of a comprehensive infiltration of Parliament, Royal Canadian Air Force intelligence, the Department of Supplies and Munitions, and allied atomic research laboratories. Among the code-words Gouzenko passed on were “neighbours” for the NKGB, “roof” for a front to conceal espionage operations and “shoemaker” for a forger of false passports. In the course of twenty-four hours, Prime Minister King was awakened to the new reality of espionage and went from being prepared to hand the man back to the Russians (who were now claiming he was on the run because he had stolen money from them) to shock and despair at what had been perpetrated. On the night of 7 September, he wrote in his diary that “it is all very terrible and frightening” and that it could “mean a complete break-up of the relations we have depended upon to keep the peace. There is no saying what terrible lengths this whole thing might go to . . . I can see that from now until the end of my days, it will be this problem more than any other that, in all probability, I shall be most closely concerned with.” The FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent two agents to Ottawa on the Monday to question Gouzenko. On Wednesday the 12th Hoover reported to the White House that Gouzenko’s spoils showed that a British physicist, Dr Alan Nunn May, who had been working at the Chalk River establishment (the Canadian equivalent of the US Manhattan Project) in Ontario since January 1943, had been leaking atomic secrets to Russia. The news that any atomic information had leaked only a month after the highly classified Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs had ended the Second World War was momentous.
Nunn May was a brilliant scientist, but an unassuming man, with the perfect cover appearance of “rather a mousy little chap like a suburban bank clerk.” He had not only been at Cambridge at the same time as Maclean but at the same small college, Trinity Hall. Nunn May had been no more noticeably left-wing than anyone else at the university but he was less public about it than Maclean. After he left Cambridge he had been in close contact with Communists, but that never emerged as a possible issue. Following the award of his PhD in 1936, Nunn May went to continue his studies in Leningrad and on his return joined the editorial board of the Scientific Worker, from where he “continued his unobtrusive, persistent support of the left.” He came to the notice of the security services only once, in 1938, when he attended a “Communist Party fraction meeting” at the British Association of Scientific Workers conference in London. Like many scientists, he believed that scientific knowledge should be freely shared around the world—particularly to allies in time of war. Seconded to Tube Alloys, as the British atomic research programme was originally code-named, and without any background checks whatsoever, Nunn May travelled to the safety of Canada in 1942 with his fellow scientists to continue the work there; he passed to the Russians scientific material and samples of uranium (in return for a faintly insulting $200 inside a Haig whisky bottle). He was now back at King’s College, London, working on his research, unaware that he had been fingered by Gouzenko.
The news of the defection was fed back to London via the Washington Embassy. Although Maclean had not been a particular friend, personal or political, of Nunn May (who did not feature in the CUSS) even as a fellow left-wing student in a small college, and had had no contact with him since, who knew what else Gouzenko might know and be saying, or what links might be made by a suspicious mind in London to more vociferous Cambridge Communists? If Maclean was chilled by the news, Philby was highly “agitated” as Krechin reported, coming as it did at the same time as the Volkov bombshell.
The natural interrogator for Gouzenko in London would have been Jane Archer, who had done such a superb job in opening up Krivitsky in 1940. If better use had been made of her reports, she could have ended the careers of both Maclean and Philby, as Philby knew from recently checking the file. The difference this time was that Philby had become her boss after she had moved from MI5 to MI6, and understood how skilled she was. So in order to neutralise her Archer’s next job was to analyse intercepted radio activity in Eastern Europe while Philby got word to Moscow that it was imperative that Nunn May’s London rendezvous with his controller, the first of which was due to take place the following month, be aborted. The scientist’s security tail did not see him, as they had hoped they would following Gouzenko’s testimony, walking up and down outside the British Museum, a rolled-up copy of The Times under his arm. MI5 were thwarted in their determination to catch the traitor red-handed, the only sure way to a decent legal case should he deny everything since Gouzenko’s evidence could not be admitted in court for reasons of national security, not to say of national embarrassment. But Nunn May had no stomach for a fight and gave a relieved partial confession: he had been approached in Canada by a Soviet agent and had given him a report on atomic research and two samples of Uranium-235 “because he thought it was in the general interest that the Russians be kept in the picture” as allies. Influential voices supportive of this view were thin on the ground, but Joseph E. Davies, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and an outspoken admirer of Stalin’s, wrote in the New York Times in February 1946 that Russia “in self-defense has every moral right to seek atomic-bomb secrets through military espionage if excluded from such information by her former fighting allies.”
In May 1946, the first of the atom spies was handed down a ten-year sentence. The Attorney-General Sir Hartley Shawcross, who had been Britain’s Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, prosecuted this “somewhat squalid case.” The trial lasted only a day, “a rehearsal in an empty theatre” with the judge’s summing-up accusing Nunn May of “crass conceit . . . wickedness . . . and degradation.” After his conviction, Nunn May said, in his mild-mannered way, that “the whole affair was extremely painful to me and I only embarked upon it because I felt this was a contribution I could make to the safety of mankind.” When the news reached Los Alamos, fellow scientist and spy-at-large Klaus Fuchs commented that he didn’t believe Nunn May knew much of importance anyway.
The exposure of Nunn May shook the British security services, and awakened them to the need to look at their own more closely. John Curry, who had spoken for many of his MI5 colleagues when he said he had felt “an acute sense of shame” after Munich, argued for increased counter-espionage resources: “We are now in a position vis-à-vis Russia similar to that [which] we had vis-à-vis Germany in 193
9/1940 in the sense that we have little positive knowledge of the basic structure of the organisation which we have to counter.” His plea fell largely on deaf ears in the war-exhausted departments of Whitehall. A stretched MI5 never looked into other prominent left-wing contemporaries or possible indoctrination in formative university years. Although the investigators realised that Nunn May must have been working for the Soviets in London before he went to Canada, because it emerged that the Soviet Military Attaché in Canada had been “instructed to approach him and give him a password,” the link between early Communism and later espionage had not been made.
The Washington Embassy was the forwarding office for the traffic between Ottawa and London, so Maclean had an uneasy if informed view of the proceedings, though he was ignorant of Philby’s role in them. His first recruiter, the man he had barely seen since, was taking up the protective role that would be his for the next few years, for self-interested reasons as much as any. When Philby eventually became aware of the secrets Maclean had been conveying, he could see all the more clearly the importance of this protection to both source and recipients. They “dealt with political problems of some complexity, and on more than one occasion Homer was spoken of with respect” by the normally callous Moscow Centre. The stakes were getting higher.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 19