A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  The sense of fulfilment that his spying gave him could not make up for the widening divide within him, and that divide manifested itself from time to time in the Embassy as well as outside it when he was not charming the neighbours. Staying on in Washington suited both his British ambitions and his espionage soul, yet the outbursts about the place he had “no particular desire” to leave continued. When Lady Balfour, wife of the new senior Minister Sir John, said what a relief it was to be among friendly people who would “talk and smile on trains, even if you’re a complete stranger” after their previous posting, Moscow, she received “a very hard stare” from Maclean. He seemed to her to be making a great effort “to suppress some cutting reference to my naïveté and ignorance. The cross look . . . betrayed how strongly he felt.” He was barely keeping his mental turmoil under control.

  On one occasion his temper had a direct impact on a fellow diplomat’s career. Peter Solly-Flood was Second Secretary in the Embassy. He was politically right-wing, had served in the Polish underground with distinction and most of his Washington friends were “in émigré circles.” In many ways he was much less the stereotypical official than Maclean. Maclean may have been jealous of Solly-Flood, the man who did not have to keep his true beliefs hidden and yet could continue to serve his country; he may have been threatened by the openness of his junior colleague. And his tension spilled over into rage (which was again kept from his superiors) when Solly-Flood “fell in love” with Melinda’s sister Harriet. Solly-Flood’s advances were rebuffed, according to the Marlings’ over-dramatising Aunt Eleanor because Harriet discovered he “liked wild parties and . . . ‘sex orgies’ at the Egyptian Embassy.” His “extremely unbalanced character,” in Foreign Office terms, tipped over into even heavier drinking at which point Solly-Flood “became unstable.” Solly-Flood was sent back to London where the Foreign Office put him in the hands of Dr Wilson of Harley Street, the psychiatrist who took on their “problem” cases and who was to struggle to get to know Maclean. Whether or not his dismissal took place on Maclean’s direct orders or merely through his influence, Solly-Flood’s exit from Washington led to poison-pen letters about Maclean (he is an “awful swine”) and “remorse” from Maclean at treating a frequent visitor in such a way: “he much regretted his sudden attitude of hatred.”

  Maclean’s hair-trigger temper also exploded on an occasion when Christianity came up in the course of a casual conversation. He exclaimed, “Jesus was a shit—cause of all our troubles!” Behind that remark were the family prayers of his childhood and Sir Donald’s strong conscience, as if Maclean had to efface his background to justify his own morality and actions. The anguish of the double life, the importance of the papers he was seeing, the amount he was drinking, were all causing him to turn on his colleagues, friends, family and forebears. Yet no official complaints were made and he remained in place as Stalin’s most important spy during the rest of his time in Washington.

  *

  The new Ambassador arrived in May 1946, also from Moscow. Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, newly ennobled as Lord Inverchapel,‡ was the Australian-born Scotsman who had toasted Beria so surprisingly at Yalta and was in Rebecca West’s eyes “one of the most bizarre human beings ever to rise to the rank of ambassador, which is saying a very great deal indeed.” Inverchapel was involved in a discussion about baseball (seemingly a journalistic test of aptitude for the job) on his arrival in North America, but this time passed it, unlike his predecessor: he announced that he was looking forward to watching some baseball as cricket was “the dullest game ever invented” and he would rather watch spillikins. His press secretary had to return some time later to a puzzled press corps to explain that spillikins was a “bar-room game akin to skittles.” Although Maclean’s Scots blood was probably not stirred much when at official dinners Inverchapel had kilted bagpipers playing in the dining-room, he leapt at the chance to impress his new boss. Walter Bell, Inverchapel’s special assistant, noted that “Donald was obsessed with his work. No trouble was too much for him. When Philip Jordan, the Embassy press attaché who became quite a friend, arranged special background briefings for foreign correspondents, Maclean invariably enjoyed the business of parrying tough questions and giving as far as possible the reasons behind new policy decisions.” This work rate would also allow Maclean to become indispensable, as he had on the CPC, and gave him the Embassy equivalent of an unescorted pass, a licence to know exactly what was going on. He soon became as close to the new Ambassador as he had been to Halifax, and Inverchapel declared him “a sweetie.”

  Inverchapel had brought with him a valet, a dwarf named Yevgeny Yost, a parting gift from Stalin, or, as he called him in a jokey comment that fell predictably flat, “a Russian slave given to me by Stalin.” Maclean was not the only one who looked with concern (some would say disdain) on “this incongruous little body servant from the steppes, who followed his master like a shadow and dressed up as a poor itinerant Cossack” and “insisted on poking his nose into every corner of the building, including the Registry.” Apart from the security concerns aroused by bringing a Russian into the heart of Washington diplomacy, Maclean might even have wondered in his more paranoid and drunken moments whether Yost was a Soviet plant to keep an eye on him. Yost himself took the same line as Lady Balfour on one occasion when Maclean asked him how he liked life in the US compared to the USSR. Yost (who was a Volga German of a type not much liked in Russia anyway) gave reasons why he much preferred America and “Maclean’s face dropped and he quickly left the room.” Maclean then led a campaign to get rid of Yost, and it was with some relief to all that the dwarf left with the Inverchapels on their first leave in July 1947 to retrain as a chauffeur and farm worker on their Scottish estate. There he was a source of equal bemusement, but without the added danger of reports to his homeland, or of criticising the country that the First Secretary had yet to visit but held in such high regard nonetheless.

  *

  Tension inevitably spilled over into Maclean’s home life. Melinda could not but continue to feel uncomfortable in her own country as her husband voiced his “distaste” for its citizens’ values. The false situation that his other life put her in meant that she still could not entertain as a First Secretary’s wife was expected to and was to be seen standing at the edge of diplomatic parties, often silently holding hands with her tall, unmistakably British husband. Shades of Donald’s mother standing with him on the fringes of London dances when he was first down from Cambridge. She was certainly shy on formal occasions, but there might also have been a justifi­able desire to stop her husband knocking back too many drinks and starting an argument about the moral standing of America. She disliked drawing attention to herself. On one occasion she ordered from a New York dressmaker a “dazzling new creation” that she thought “perfect” for wearing to a White House ball. But when the day came she left it hanging up and wore one of her sisters’ more modest dresses instead. Throughout their marriage Melinda was bored by politics and had seemingly been happiest living the bohemian life in Paris, but by now she appeared to have lost all taste for joining in on the social circuit, no doubt made tired and anxious by the strain of keeping up appearances as her husband became more unpredictable.

  Nicholas Henderson, later Ambassador to France and the US, remembers Maclean coming to the house he shared with another Embassy staffer after work of an evening, without Melinda, and “keeping late hours” until he became “dissipated.” Motherhood was a preoccupation for Melinda: Donald, the second Maclean son, known in the family as “Beany,” was born in New York by Caesarean section like his brother Fergus, in July 1946, at the beginning of the long American summer break. Beyond such family distractions, it is plausible that she simply refused to play her part in the diplomatic life because she knew too much about the other side of her husband, and the true reasons for the relief he sought in drink.

  Melinda told her friend and fellow Embassy wife Kathleen Cecil that Donald’s drunken forays “brought out the h
omosexual streak” in him. This is the first hint of homosexuality since Burgess’s boast that he had slept with Maclean at Cambridge and Toynbee’s urge to kiss him when they first met. There is no evidence that Maclean took part in the more lurid wartime goings-on in Victor Rothschild’s Bentinck Street flat, nor, even as Guy Burgess continued his countless and well-publicised affairs, did anyone else come forward to say that they had been involved with the buttoned-up diplomat who paradoxically might have found it hard to risk his official career to take part in this illegal act. His need for a secret life was being more than fulfilled by his espionage. Perhaps Melinda made this comment from puzzlement or anguish from lack of a sex life, or perhaps she used it to deflect attention from the real betrayal Donald was perpetrating against Britain.

  Melinda still spent long periods in New York, and all summer out of steamy Washington. The farm in the Berkshires was no longer available owing to her mother’s divorce from Dunbar, so the family rented houses on Long Island or Cape Cod. Much of the time she would be alone with her two boys, as in 1947 when they hired a young English nanny, Phyllis Smith: Donald met Smith from the boat in New York, treated her to the air-conditioned movies, visited the Empire State Building and put her up in the female-only Martha Washington Hotel. The next day they took the train to Harwich Port on the Cape and went to the Macleans’ simple rented house in the woods, Tree Pines. Donald flew back to Washington without even spending the night with his family. Smith rarely saw Melinda or her favourite sister Harriet, who was staying there (and liked to walk around the house naked, much to the teenage girl’s discomfort) as they were off socialising with other vacationers.

  Although their French maid, Renée, was frequently in tears when she had to clear up the mess made by his all-male drinking parties in a summer Washington largely empty of families, Maclean wrote to his wife during one of these separations to say, “I scarcely get drunk at all, although you are not here to remind me of the morrow’s sorrows. I think it must be that we drink so much whiskey every day anyway that it don’t signify to have a few extra; also it disappears in sweat.” This collusive nudge at Melinda is simultaneous confession and denial.

  *

  As the wartime and diplomatic population of Washington thinned out after 1945, and the tall, distinctive figure of Donald Maclean became better known, Moscow Centre decided that he should be briefed on what to look for and extract by Anatoli Yakovlev, a nuclear expert working undercover as a Vice-Consul in the Soviet New York Consulate. Gorsky (by now code-named “Al”) remained his main handler. But his six-hour round train trip to see Yakovlev when his family was in Washington now left him exposed. Robert Cecil asked Maclean to lunch at the Wardman Park Hotel, so that they “might talk undisturbed.” As they walked there through Rock Creek Park, Maclean was “strangely silent,” and when Cecil said, “It’s about going to New York that I want to talk to you,” “the tension was palpable.” What he wanted to discuss was whether the acting head of Chancery would grant him leave to go to New York to hear weekly lectures by the exiled Russian mystic-philosopher P. D. Ouspensky. Cecil later realised that Maclean’s fear was that he might start to interrogate him over their hotel lunch. Although the two men had known each other since they were undergraduates, and Cecil was his junior, a trigger to Maclean’s ever-alert nervous system might have been that Cecil had served for two years before his arrival in America as personal assistant to the head of SIS, “C.” At the time, Cecil was surprised that, once he had given his explan­ation, Maclean was short with him, asking if it was really important that he went and telling him to make up the time on Saturday afternoons.

  Worse was to come. After Gorsky had left in the aftermath of Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony, there was a handling crisis, a breakdown in the critical link between Moscow and their spies, in Washington. Moscow Centre did not know who had been comprom­­­­ised and who had not, although they were confident they had taken the necessary steps to protect Homer. It was important that he was handled in the capital again, not least because of the amount of material he was producing. Boris Krotov, who had been the rezident in London for the last three years, took over in December 1947. The frequency with which Maclean needed debriefing became apparent the following June, when the highly trained Krotov detected that he was under surveillance from the more flat-footed FBI while on his way to a meeting with his mole; he broke off contact. The station then told Maclean to leave all his material in dead letter drops such as in hollow trees or under stones, mostly at designated points in Washington’s Rock Creek Park, which he found unsatisfactory as his ability to synopsise and remember large quantities of material meant the personal contact was essential. If he was caught separated from his material, it would also be much harder to give a plausible explanation for why it was stashed away in the park. After years of painstaking, even intimate, care taken with Maclean by the Russians, this first disruption between spy and handler could have had a disastrous effect on someone who had shown signs of fragility. A compromise was reached: Maclean and Krotov would meet every third week, but in the intervening weeks the system of dead letter drops would hold. This compromise was to see Maclean through his last great productive period.

  *

  The political stakes were rising throughout 1947 and 1948. In January 1947, the austere figure of General George C. Marshall§ replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State. In March, it was revealed to Congress that $400 million would be sent in aid to Greece and Turkey as part of the global commitment to the struggle against Communism, a bitter blow to Maclean. At the end of April, Marshall returned from a meeting with Stalin about the future of Germany at which he had realised that the General Secretary was hoping that all the Eastern European economies would continue their post-war collapse, allowing Communism to flourish. At the Harvard Commencement ceremony on 5 June 1947, where he was being given an honorary degree alongside T. S. Eliot and Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb, Marshall made a speech of a mere seven minutes in which he announced the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan as it soon became known, by which massive investment in Europe would allow those countries, particularly divided Germany, to get their economies moving—and keep Communism in its place. Rarely has such a game-changing announcement been made in such an unreported setting. The British knew nothing of this in advance, but Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, was galvanised by it, calling it “a life-line to sinking men.” The Marshall Plan would reinvigorate post-war Europe.

  Stalin saw the plan as America trying to subjugate Europe to its own political ends. He wanted to plunder Germany’s resources as repayment for its wartime destruction and to keep as weak as possible the country that was the bulwark between his empire and the West. The Marshall Plan included Europe’s eastern countries and indeed the Soviet Union, where some, Molotov included, argued that they should accept the American dollars. They would be their only source of hard currency.

  Stalin did not need his army of bankers and experts to see that to give America entrée into the finances of the Soviet Union or its allies would be the death of Communism, but he nevertheless allowed Molotov to go to the Paris conference of foreign ministers to discuss the plan. On 30 June Molotov received a cable passed on by Maclean detailing a meeting between US under-secretary Will Clayton and British ministers which made it clear that the Anglophone allies were intent on building up Germany to be the industrial powerhouse of Europe again. Molotov, forewarned by Maclean, accused the British and Americans of dividing Europe, gathered up his papers and swept out of the conference.

  In January 1948 Bevin cabled Marshall with the proposal that because “the Soviet Government has formed a solid political and economic block,” Western Europe must do the same. The ageing and eccentric Inverchapel’s reply that Bevin’s plan “has filled the hearts of the senior officials at the State Department with joy” was curiously inappropriate to the tension of the times. In February the Harvard-educated, half-American Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, a non-Communist who had
been asking Marshall to help his country, was found dead on the ground outside his office having fallen from a high window; the official verdict was suicide, although the size of the window, which was marked with his excrement, his mismatched pyjamas and the bruising on the soles of his feet told a different story. The Communists now held undisputed sway in the country. In March, Truman gave Marshall permission to discuss a Northern European and US military alliance; the talks would be kept secret from the rest of the administration. Maclean drafted a note of congratulations that must have stuck in his craw, expressing British delight that “we and you mean business and are prepared to see [the alliance] through, and not stop at exhortation.”

  Maclean was in charge of the British side of these talks with the State Department about the alliance. The Foreign Office considered them possibly “the most secret ever held in Washington.” They included discussions about how troops would be commanded and what the nuclear options were in a partnership. A meeting between the British, Canadians and Americans in March was so sensitive that it was held in a steel-lined room at the Pentagon rather than anywhere the press, or Congress, might get wind of it. No notes were allowed to be taken, and the delegates were not even allowed to break to leave the building for lunch. Robert Cecil, the junior member of the British delegation, hoped that Maclean would write up the minutes with his celebrated Foreign Office mind but “no doubt he was preoccupied in making his own summary for a recipient to whom it would be a good deal less welcome than it was in Whitehall” and he refused. Maclean drafted a cable for Inverchapel urging London to limit severely the distribution of the minutes, while in his own handwritten notes was the comment that “if the Soviets know where the holdline is drawn, they will move on what is protected like any predatory animal.” The savagery of that image is so out of keeping with his normal restrained style that it gives a clue to the fractured anger beneath, even as he passed the holdline on to the Soviets. From this meeting and six more over the next eleven days Moscow Centre would have a day-by-day account of the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, the military alliance that cemented the European battle-lines through “negotiating mutual security arrangements to meet the danger of Soviet expansion” for the decades to come and which continues to be debated to this day.