When Wilson went to see Vinogradov, he expected a very brief meeting, as would be normal: Vinogradov would pass the documents back to the Kremlin, which would look at anything emanating from the West from every paranoid angle before issuing the inevitably blocking or bullying instructions back up the line. It was therefore astonishing when Vinogradov took only “moments” to look at the document and then gave “forthright opinions on several of the proposals, and spoke at length about the stationing of foreign warships, which was anathema to the USSR.” Before a stunned Wilson could answer, Vinogradov dismissed the document out of hand, sneering at the Turks’ weakness and their war record with “bitterness and hostility.” Wilson was appalled and immediately wrote to Secretary of State Byrnes expressing his intense embarrassment and anger at the betrayal of trust. The leak was damaging to the British and very destructive to their relationship with the Americans, leaving Foreign Secretary Bevin feeling obliged to say to Halifax that “I do not propose to make any communications to the Turkish Government.” His Turkish counterpart remarked that “the effect of the American proposals [for an international commission] would be to turn the Black Sea into a Soviet naval base.” The American proposals were by now the only ones left on the table, and were unworkable in the face of such a reception.
Halifax, Foreign Secretary before the war had diminished so much of his country’s power, deeply regretted the leaks, which “will certainly increase American reluctance to share their intimate thoughts with us.” He did nothing to follow up on his promise to hold an inquiry. After all, he had told Byrnes “we would investigate the matter, but not that we would tell him the result.” Had the first part of that promise been followed through, particularly in the light of subsequent investigations into leaks, it would have been unthinkable that the outstanding Donald Maclean would have been suspected. Ironically, by passing on the material that ensured the provocative American plan was the only one on the table, Maclean had in all likelihood unwittingly prevented a lurch towards armed conflict, and enabled Russia to win the latest round in the centuries-old struggle over the Straits.
His outstanding post-war work was about to yield Moscow an even bigger prize.
* Around £1.5 million ($2.5 million) today; $200,000 is the rough equivalent of £50,000 in 1945.
† The NKVD and their successor agencies spent the next thirty-seven years searching for Gouzenko to punish him. When a Progressive Conservative MP, Thomas Cossitt, asked a question in the Canadian House of Commons about Gouzenko’s pension, they assumed the defector was a constituent of his, tried and failed to “befriend” Cossitt, and then until the MP’s death in 1982 dug into his private life to try to find material for blackmail.
‡ “Venona,” fittingly, has no definition in the dictionary.
§ The Rosenbergs were the only American or British spies executed during the Cold War.
¶ Less than 2 per cent of the 1942 traffic was readable and only 15 per cent of 1943 telegrams.
11
Access All Areas
Alan Nunn May’s brief courtroom appearance did not attract much public attention. At the time the British people were far more concerned with the trials and executions of wartime traitors such as William Joyce, who had broadcast from Germany as Lord Haw-Haw. Besides, Russia was the ally that had reached Berlin first. But as the memories receded of the German war and that awful, sneering voice broadcasting each evening on the radio, the realisation of the indiscriminate destructive force of the atom bomb, which had ended the Second World War by obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, began to take over. “The Bomb” would power the dreams, both waking and sleeping, the politics and the protests, of generations. It defined the Cold War. It became the most discussed diplomatic topic of the ensuing years, its cataclysmic potential of critical significance in the foreground and background of all the discussions about how the modern world should look. And, in what was to be a defining part of his life, Donald Maclean was at the heart of those discussions.
*
Britain lacked the resources to develop its own bomb. Roosevelt and Churchill had signed the Quebec Agreement in 1943 under which there should be “complete interchange of information and ideas on all sections of the Project” among the members of a top-secret Combined Policy Committee. The Hyde Park Agreement (named after Roosevelt’s home) of 1944 declared that the bomb should be kept in “the utmost secrecy,” and “full collaboration” for its “military and commercial development . . . should continue after the war.” So secret* was the agreement that Vice-President Truman had less knowledge of it than Stalin when he assumed the presidency. When at Potsdam Truman “casually mentioned . . . that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force . . . the Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ” That night Stalin ordered his own scientists to get a move on with making the Soviet bomb.
After “good use” of the bomb had been made, Truman was blunt about the US position: “The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal the secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.” Although the secrets were shared (and more widely shared yet by Klaus Fuchs, Nunn May and others) the essential ingredient—uranium—was still controlled by the two Anglo powers. As the world stock of uranium came from the Congo, this was reasonably uncontroversial during the war: the Belgian government-in-exile was based in London and the British could lead the negotiations for the mineral, a stock of which was sitting in a Staten Island warehouse. Under the Quebec Agreement, the British had surrendered their half-share of the uranium “on the basis of need” during the war, a clear recognition that the only bombs that were going to be produced in that period would be under the auspices of the Manhattan Project. In peace, they had expected that the shares would go back to being equal, and were horrified to learn that, in keeping with the new balance of power in the world and the size of their war debt to the US, the Americans were insisting upon a reallocation of uranium “on an actual use basis,” meaning that almost the entire world’s stock would go to America.
Maclean had been sharing information about uranium since he was based in the General Department in London in the early days of the war, and he was well up to speed on its usage and importance. He had been cited in Moscow as the source of “a most secret report of the Government Committee on the development of uranium atomic energy to produce explosive material which was submitted on 24th September 1941 to the War Cabinet.” He was able to disclose that General Leslie Groves and his Manhattan Project scientists were planning to use 600 tons of uranium a year, which could only mean acceleration rather than a slowdown in output. Groves himself had been in no doubt when he joined the project in September 1942 from whom the real secrets needed keeping: “There was never, apart from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy. I didn’t go along with the attitude of the country as a whole that Russia was a gallant ally. I always had suspicions and the Project was conducted on that basis.” †
The lines between the three allies that determined the shape of the Cold War with respect to its most terrible weapon were thus already in place before Maclean arrived in Washington. The commanding figure of Sir Roger Makins, as charming as he was tall, who brought his infectiously booming laugh to the Embassy staff in January 1945 as Economic Minister, was the link between the Ambassador and the British missions in Washington created to co-ordinate the supply of products and services (including the all-important Treasury and Food missions) to war-deprived Britain. “But my most important task was under cover, for I was the Embassy official at the operating level who dealt with atomic energy.”
Makins’s significant role in the last years o
f Maclean’s Foreign Office career began in early 1947. The Combined Policy Committee (CPC) had been set up in 1943 by Churchill and Roosevelt to co-ordinate Anglo-American atomic energy research and policy. Makins, who was appointed Joint Secretary of the committee, had no hesitation when he recruited as his deputy the Embassy’s “faultlessly efficient and hard-working” First Secretary. Maclean was entrusted with these vital global matters on the grounds that he was “meticulous in security matters.” The importance of his seat is easily shown by a list of some of those present at his first meeting, when he stood in for Makins on 3 February 1947: Secretary of State Byrnes; Under-Secretary of State Acheson; Secretary of War Patterson; Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development Vannevar Bush; the British and Canadian Ambassadors; Field Marshal Lord Wilson.
The Soviets may have been delighted with this dazzling access, but even as Maclean fed back the extraordinary information, it only increased his unease. The Americans were taking the lead and hardening their stance ever more determinedly in the Cold War, hosting and dominating the United Nations, and lessening what had been full atomic co-operation with Britain. They had set up the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), in which Britain had no role, in 1946. Maclean’s patriotism and his moral centre, the twin pillars of his life, were simultaneously affronted. His “distaste for the Americans” was to play out more often, now both professionally and within his own circle. But for the immediate and critical future the meticulous outer man was to continue to serve Moscow Centre well.
*
The British response to increasing American atomic hegemony was to open the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, where the Soviets were adequately represented for scientific information through the person of the German-born Klaus Fuchs, head of the Theoretical Physics Division. Fuchs had been leader of a group of Communist students at Kiel University and a prominent member of the KPD, the German Communist Party, until the Reichstag fire in 1933 made plain the future of left-wing opposition to the Nazis. He fled to England. His strong left-wing views hardened when he was interned in a Canadian camp as an enemy alien at the start of the war, but his ideals and principles were not investigated prior to his Harwell appointment. In the mass of paperwork brought back by allied intelligence officers from the ruins of Nazi Germany was Fuchs’s Gestapo file, which stated that he was a Communist and instructed that “he was to be arrested as and when” the Gestapo caught up with him.
Fuchs and Maclean did spend a few days in each other’s company. In November 1947 both men attended a conference held in Washington to discuss which wartime secrets could now be declassified, mostly an ironic waste of time given what had already been leaked by at least two of the delegates. Strangely, the two spies found themselves on opposite sides of the declassification debate: Maclean was delighted that the British “managed to get declassified a lot of borderline documents,” and that he was able to interpret American intransigence as “useful clues as to the productive areas to pursue” (in both his roles, presumably); Fuchs was much more conservative, and often the lone vote for secrecy among the eight scientists. Maybe this was rather naive cover, or he could simply afford to play it this way as it would ultimately make no difference. He never named Maclean among his contacts. Once again, the care Moscow Centre took to separate their agents proved essential. When they failed to do so, the results could be catastrophic.
At the Washington conference, one of the main topics was how long it would take the Russians to build their own bomb—estimates were between five and ten years, based more on hope and expectation than on science. Thanks to Maclean and his seat on the CPC, the Russians did not have to get involved in this sort of guesswork when assessing American strength. The number of bombs, and therefore the extent of the stockpile, could be measured by the detailed reports they were getting on the world supplies of uranium and thorium, the essential ingredients. Through the latter half of 1947 and 1948 the British and Canadians were brought back into the political fold at least because good relations with Commonwealth countries and Belgium were vital in the extraction and transport of the minerals. Once again, Maclean’s indispensability gained him unparalleled access to the right information. His knowledge that the Americans were buying 2,547 tons of uranium in 1947–8, for example, enabled the Russians to calculate that around fifty bombs would be made in 1948.
*
In the same month as the Washington conference, November 1947, Maclean’s trustworthiness (and a degree of luck) got him the espionage golden ticket. He was given a permanent pass to the AEC’s headquarters, a pass “which was of a character that did not require him to be accompanied while in the building.” Members of the US Cabinet and Congress were not allowed in unescorted. Even J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, was unhappy at being required to have an escort. Admiral Lewis Strauss, head of the Commission, was told after Maclean had left Washington that “from the records maintained by the guards at the building entrances . . . this particular alien was a frequent visitor in the evenings after usual work hours,” even though at the time “high Army and Navy officials were required to have escorts in going through the building.” Strauss had no suspicions about Maclean, whom he had met “several times in agreeable circumstances”; he simply objected on principle to anyone, especially a non-American, having such access. As well he might do in the light of Britain’s financial war debts to the US and its poor security as revealed by Nunn May’s treachery.
When the FBI looked into the pass in the 1950s, all those whom they spoke to, with one exception, commented that Maclean seemed an “able, stable and capable person.” The exception was Joseph Volpe, General Counsel to the Commission in Maclean’s time, who found him to be of a “nervous temperament,” which he put down to the Briton being “a hard worker” with “heavy responsibilities.” The FBI weakly concluded that Maclean had been given his pass because the Combined Policy Committee met in the building. The late workers trusted and enjoyed seeing the tall, familiar figure in his pinstriped suit as he walked the hallways, and did not question what he was doing there at a time when his fellow diplomats were plunged into the evening round of cocktail parties. His farewell lunch from the atomic community at the Hay Adams Hotel the following year was a most “comradely” occasion, and such a significant one that Roger Makins delayed his own departure for London to attend it. What Maclean found out informally as he prowled the building was passed on to Moscow via New York along with the formal proceedings of the AEC itself. What was in his mind on these solitary wanderings in one of the world’s most sensitive buildings is open to conjecture, though no doubt the planned scale of potential destruction deeply troubled the man who had been working for peace, or so he rationalised it, since his schooldays.
The most dramatic and critical piece of information from Maclean’s privileged position was that the Americans were far less advanced in their work than might have been expected and than Cold War brinkmanship would allow them to admit. “Pincher,” a war plan drawn up in mid-1946, assumed fifty bombs a year later; by April 1948, only a dozen were available and no more than twenty-seven B-29 bombers had been modified to deliver those bombs, and these out of range of the Soviet Union, being based only in Britain and the Cairo–Suez region. When the Chairman of the AEC reported back from his visit to inspect the nuclear arsenal at Los Alamos in April 1947, “the shock was apparent on Truman’s face.” With so much of America’s weaponry destroyed or mothballed, and no appetite for a peacetime draft to increase the size of the services, US military strategy was tenuous without these weapons, and its rhetoric hollow.
To complicate matters further, the British assessment in March 1946 was that “the USSR will not have atomic weapons before the early 1950s and . . . that the numbers of atomic weapons . . . will not be significant until about 1955–60.” These estimates were based on projecting the speed of research and development of the Western allies on to the Soviets, assuming they too were working from scratch in spite of what Nunn May a
nd others may have told them. The Americans were astonished when they analysed rainwater samples from contaminated clouds coming from Asiatic Russia which confirmed that the Russians had exploded a bomb on 29 August 1949. This was just days after Venona had identified an agent “within the British Mission to the Manhattan Project” who had leaked complicated scientific information about the gaseous diffusion process. Once they had triangulated this with his Gestapo file, Klaus Fuchs was arrested.
*
Maclean had a clear idea of his standing when his posting was up in October 1947. He wrote to London to ask whether there were plans to move him or whether he should make new housing arrangements, as “we are still happy here and have no particular desire to move. If I go, some other arrangement will have to be made about the special work which I do for Roger Makins.” Amid the other matters he was handling so deftly, it is hard not to read some sort of threat into the mention of his “special work,” as well as a statement of its importance in his mind, since it served his Soviet masters so well. In the end, the importance of the “special work” and the excellence of Maclean’s performance in the crucial Embassy meant London did not hesitate to extend his effective tenure. The family moved to 3326 P Street, in Georgetown, the classiest area of town, where two retired admirals lived on either side. Once again, Maclean made a good impression on his neighbours: Mrs Owings, two doors down, said the family were “fine people” and that Donald was very “fond of his children”; she added that when he came to visit her he refused a second glass of sherry, which presumably was a comment on her sherry. He could quite often be absent-minded and “would leave his automobile with the door open allowing dogs and cats to climb into the car and sleep there.” The cohabitation of dogs and cats is puzzling, as is the fact that this clearly happened on more than one occasion; it is possible that absent-mindedness is an innocent synonym for coming home intoxicated, or that Mrs Owings had had more than one glass of her own sherry.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 21