A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  *

  Maclean was there to provide the inside information on the hardening of the European situation through the formation of NATO and technological advances. The allies pursued their policy of building up Germany as a buffer to the Communist bloc, as it was now starting to be called: the Americans printed a new currency, the Deutschmark, in their own mint for the western half of Germany, calculating that this would kick-start the economy. The Russians responded with the Ostmark as their replacement currency for the east and, on 24 June 1948, shut down the road, rail and canal links, as well as the power supplies, to the western sectors of a divided Berlin. Even as Truman announced four days later that the US was sending sixty “atomic capable” B-29 bombers to bases in England and Germany, Stalin knew from Maclean’s earlier intelligence that they had only half the bombs and three assembly teams to arm these planes. Maclean was also able to help defuse the situation further by telling Moscow Centre that an order had gone out from US General Lucius Clay that the transport aircraft carrying out the heroic Berlin Airlift, with daily supplies being flown down a narrow corridor to Tempelhof Airport until the siege was lifted (327 days laer), would not be accompanied by fighters. Although allied courage and flying skills made the Berlin Airlift an overwhelming propaganda victory for the West, Maclean’s intelligence may once again, as with the Turkish Straits crisis a couple of years earlier, have helped avert a conflict that could easily have seen shots being fired and a subsequent escalation. But he would have to watch the conclusion of the Berlin Blockade from his next posting.

  *

  Maclean had been in Washington longer than any other diplomat in recent times apart from the former Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, whose wartime service could not have been interrupted. He now had to agree to transfer and promotion. However distasteful the US might be in the early days of the House Un-American Activities Committee, presaging the McCarthy era of Communist witch-hunts, it remained at the very heart of events. He had once again proved himself conscientious in his work and just discreet enough in his behaviour and outbursts in the world beyond the office. When it was time to leave, it was proposed that he go to Baghdad as Counsellor, the next rank above First Secretary. But the personnel advice was that such a move would be “discouraging” to John Brewis, the head of Chancery there, as he was three years older than Maclean, as well as “to other members” of the delegation who thought highly of Brewis. It was decided to offer Maclean Counsellor in Cairo instead, justifying this on the grounds that it “would be a better post from the point of view of his young family.” Egypt was a politically tricky place at a highly sensitive time, and one of the five Grade A embassies, alongside Washington and Paris, where he had already served, and Moscow and Beijing, which would have been of obvious interest to him. Cairo and this “accelerated promotion,” as Foreign Office parlance had it, which skipped another First Secretary role, was a clear stepping-stone to an ambassadorship next time.

  At thirty-five Donald Maclean became the youngest Counsellor in the Foreign Service, five years younger than Sir Roger Makins was when he had attained the rank; Makins went on to become Ambassador in Washington and Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. The outgoing First Secretary must have felt profoundly mixed emotions at this point—relief that such a momentously geopolitically and personally divisive period had come to an end, alongside the sense that his work for both sides might never be as important nor as risky again; anger at the cementing of his employer’s opinions against his ideological allies; a sense of achievement knowing how well he had performed and influenced events on both sides of his fence; and, above all, exhaustion laced with apprehension about what was to come in his espionage life. His old Paris friend Valentine Lawford met him for tea and strawberries at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel, New York, where the Macleans were staying before they boarded the Queen Mary back to England at the end of August 1948. For Donald, it was his last visit to the city after four years and countless trips to see his family and his hand­lers. Lawford commented that “Donald looked a bit strange, sort of puffed-up and beaten down simultaneously . . . But both he and Melinda were very nice to me, and we laughed at some of the good old jokes.”

  *

  The Maclean residence on P Street would now become the home of Albert Parker, Custodian of the Alien Property Office of the Department of Justice. Parker’s daughter Charlotte found an unsigned letter that had been dropped on the doorstep as the Macleans moved out. The letter started “Dearest Melinda” and was in “handwriting that was very difficult to read” (Maclean’s hand was very clear, even allowing for the difference in British and American styles, so the letter was in all probability written while he was drunk) and “said something to the effect that ‘I am going away, take care of yourself.’ ” It sounded very “grim . . . like he was either going away on a very long trip, or was contemplating suicide.” This remnant is a puzzling and poignant counterpoint to the four years of high drama and swirling emotion, perhaps even a practice departure for the solitary man who had roamed the night-time halls of the AEC in turmoil as he felt the increasing tug between his lives: his conscience and concern for his family and world peace against his informed, nuanced understanding of global politics. It was a gnawing tension that was threatening to overwhelm him.

  * The Hyde Park Agreement itself was a victim of wartime secrecy and of Roosevelt’s habit of running his diplomacy on a very personal basis: one copy of it fell behind some books in the library of his Hyde Park home and was not discovered for nine years; another was misfiled by an American clerk (who thought “Tube Alloys” probably meant the file had something to do with torpedoes and submarines) and came to light only in 1957.

  † Groves is widely credited as the inspiration for the swivel-eyed, bomb-crazed General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove.

  ‡ On being raised to the peerage, Inverchapel added two naked male figures as supporters to his family coat of arms, one holding a pen, the other a discus, reflecting two of his interests. He chose as his motto the Latin “Concussus Surgo,” meaning “Having been shaken, I rise.” Burke’s Peerage found the figures (possibly in conjunction with the motto) too suggestive, and added underpants to the supporters in their 1950 edition.

  § When Marshall’s staunch ally and benefactor President Truman asked if he might call him George, he got the reply, “No, General Marshall will do.”

  12

  Chaos on the Nile

  Cairo was the last, and briefest, of Donald Maclean’s overseas postings. His time there was characterised by chaos and damage, his marriage seemingly in a terminal state, the accelerating collapse of a man tormented by his fears and his tangled conscience. Ever louder in the background, the Venona clock was ticking that would prove his treason. But it was also the time when those around him showed themselves in their true colours. Astonishingly, his Cairo assignment did not see the end of either his career in the Foreign Office or his role as a top spy working for Moscow Centre. As he sweated at his desk after a late-night bender, he must have felt that his life was simultaneously playing at double speed and slowing down to protect him in its most tense, dramatic period.

  *

  Sometimes Maclean’s efforts at discretion collapsed completely when he was drunk. It was remarkable that this was not taken up as an issue by his superiors. At the atomic community’s farewell party in the Hay Adams, where champagne, whiskey, bourbon and dry martinis flowed, Edmund Gullion, the suave, Kentucky-born assistant to Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson and another rising figure in the diplomatic world (he was to become “John F. Kennedy’s favourite diplomat”), congratulated his friend, contemporary and colleague on his important new posting. He was put out to hear the “unprofessional” way that a man of Maclean’s “calibre and attainment” stated that Cairo was not the right place for him: “He made disparaging remarks about the country, its people, British policy in the region, and about diplomatic life in general.”

  For all the discomf
ort he felt about Anglo-American policy in the early Cold War and his understanding that his time was up after his elongated stint, Maclean was undeniably piqued at having to leave Washington, where he could see everything and be cherished, most of the time, by Moscow Centre. Actually, Cairo was a vital and absorbing place to be sent to, the hinge via the Suez Canal of what remained of the British Empire. Britain was a major power in the region, with troops in both Palestine and the Canal Zone. Egypt was one of the few countries that had a department to itself in the Foreign Office, and the Embassy was larger than that in Paris. In the previous year Indian independence had made little difference to the Suez Canal as the essential route to the Middle East for British trade and for defending the interests of the Empire. Not surprisingly, British troops in the Canal Zone were resented for their colonial presence, although among Cairo society the British, who had cleared the Italians and the Germans out of the country in the previous few years, were still sought after. But for someone who was increasingly to go against the grain of the pol­icies he was asked to propagate, who needed secret support, whose marriage was complicated, it was always going to be challenging.

  Maclean had written from Washington to ask for travel arrangements to Cairo to be made for the family for September 1948. He imagined that “it would be fairly tough going at times, and we are girding ourselves accordingly” (although he was looking forward to “counting the number of night-gowned servants we may be able to acquire!”). The importance of the posting was fully brought home to him in London during his fortnight’s briefing by George Clutton, head of the Egyptian Department, and Bernard Burrows of the Eastern Department, which dealt with Palestine. Guy Liddell, Deputy Director General of MI5, had started the annual round-up of world trouble-spots in his diary that year with the comment that “Palestine is in a shocking state.” Palestine had been administered under British mandate since the First World War, but critically the state of Israel had been created in May 1948, prompting immediate attacks by the Arab states. Israel survived thanks to Arab disunity, contraband arms and aeroplanes from Eastern Europe and elsewhere, and an all-volunteer air force. This, and the way the USSR appointed an ambassador to Tel Aviv just ahead of the Americans, revealed the Soviets’ desire to use the new state, Egypt’s neighbour and now enemy, as their centre of influence in the Near East, just as much as it demonstrated their anti-Arab approach. Britain meanwhile was more concerned to bolster its interests in Egypt and the Arab world as a whole. In the Macleans’ first week back from the US the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, who had negotiated the release of 31,000 prisoners from German concentration camps during the war, was assassinated by the Zionist Stern Gang in Jerusalem. A month after the family had arrived in Cairo the police stopped four men in a jeep loaded with a sub-machine gun, eight revolvers, 2,700 rounds of ammunition, forty-eight hand grenades, two bombs and maps of the American and British embassies. There was absorbing work to be had for the new arrival, albeit of less interest to the Kremlin than he was used to.

  As well as being brought up to date on the situation that they would find in Cairo, the Macleans spent their leave catching up on his family and their friends after their long absence in the US. For Melinda, it was the first introduction to some of Donald’s British colleagues and acquaintances. A dinner-party given by Burrows led to their first meeting with Geoffrey Hoare of the News Chronicle, who became a very close Cairo friend, and Hoare’s fearless journalist wife-to-be Clare Hollingworth, notable as the first reporter to spot German tanks massing on the Polish border in 1939. Melinda, “this delicate-complexioned, soft-voiced little American girl,” made a deep impression on Hoare, not least in downplaying her reasonably well-travelled sophistication to come across as “rather out of her depth” in the gathering of Near Eastern hands. “She was thrilled at the thought of going to Cairo” as she listened to Hoare’s description of the city; she was almost certainly thankful as well to leave America, to have the chance of a fresh start in a country where neither she nor Donald would have any prior claims of nationality or friendships and where she might reasonably hope his work would make him less tense. Hoare “found her utterly charming . . . possessing the fragility, and defencelessness, that made nearly all men feel they wanted to protect her.” It is hard not to detect the ingénue in Melinda in this account, a role she had cultivated throughout the first half of her marriage, as well as Hoare’s attachment to her which made him such a faithful chronicler of her life in the next few years. At the same party, Donald showed no “marked enthusiasm” for his new appointment, surprisingly undiplomatic in front of Burrows, but they “seemed a harmonious couple” to Hoare and Hollingworth.

  Cyril Connolly went to a dinner the Macleans themselves gave and recognised how much his friend had matured during his time in America. Nothing now could stop him emerging as “Sir Donald,” the top diplomat “On His Majesty’s Service”: “He had become a good host; his charm was based not on vanity but on sincerity, and he would discuss foreign affairs as a student, not an expert.” Connolly felt particularly warm towards his host because, “incidentally,” Maclean enjoyed Horizon, the CIA-funded new magazine Connolly edited, which was “a blue rag” to the more transparently left-wing Burgess. Although Burgess was working at the time for Hector McNeil, a Foreign Office minister who shared his love of smoking, drinking and the seedier sides of London life (in the minister’s case topless night-clubs in particular), and was passing on material about Palestine to Moscow Centre, the two agents did not meet.

  Philip Jordan, the Press Attaché from Washington and now Prime Minister Attlee’s Press Secretary also entertained the couple in this hectic two weeks. He had asked Malcom Muggeridge and his wife Kitty, the niece of the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, to dinner in his Covent Garden flat. Muggeridge, who had been very left-wing in his youth and had written from Moscow for the Manchester Guardian, had become increasingly anti-Communist and worked for MI6 during the war. His diary records a discussion about war with Russia, which Jordan with his high-level access feared might well happen: “there was no question of appeasement. [Jordan] expected that the Americans would act, but not for some months, since they won’t be sufficiently armed . . . It really does begin to seem as though the inconceivable must happen, and that an atomic war with Russia is almost a certainty.” The person in whose honour the dinner was being given, who knew the true state of American nuclear preparedness, and who would have been pleased to have quietly listened to a conversation to pass on to Moscow, is noticeably absent from the recorded discussion. He was certainly aware of Muggeridge’s MI6 connections. The only mention Muggeridge makes of the withdrawn Macleans apart from noting their presence is the somewhat dismissive remark that Melinda, no doubt exhibiting her usual shyness and unwillingness to draw attention to herself, was “rather pretty, well off.”

  *

  Maclean ranked third in the massive Cairo Embassy, ahead of the knighted chief of the British Middle East Office. As head of Chancery, running an embassy’s offices and in effect the Ambassador’s chief of staff, he saw everything and decided what was sent on to London, to the extent that when the Ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell (a different Sir Ronald to the Ambassador to Paris under whom Maclean had served), reported on a meeting with King Farouk it went over Maclean’s signature. Campbell was “gentle and prone to regard American diplomats as amateurs,” and was very well disposed towards Maclean, with whom he had worked in Paris. Jefferson Caffrey, his US counterpart, was anything but amateur, a tough career diplomat who served mediocre white wine at dinner with a pitcher of very dry martini at his own elbow. Maclean, with his time in Washington under his belt as well as his tendency to look askance at the pulling of American weight in the Cold War in general and its financial and military support for Israel in particular, was under no illusions about the shift in the region. He was serving on a potential fault-line of the Cold War in a place where British imperial interests were at their most unattractive to him, keeping a corrupt regime in pla
ce to suit commercial and defence requirements.

  One of Maclean’s favourite books was the diary of the “poet, lover, orientalist, adventurer, champion of the underdog” and anti-imperial polemicist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Like Maclean, Blunt was “obliged” by his rank, as he wrote on 6 December 1888, “to be very careful how [he] meddled with politics, even in conversation” as he was “under a certain obligation to avoid any kind of publicity in sympathy with the Nationalist cause.” Blunt was, however, free to publish his Atrocities of Justice under British Rule in Egypt in 1906, the year before his cousin Anthony was born. Maclean’s posting in the middle of the century required much greater circumspection and would always be a tough test of his character.

  *

  Thanks to Maclean’s seniority and to the history of British indirect rule which dated back to the end of the previous century, the family was allotted a handsome three-storey house built for British servants of the Egyptian government on the Sharia Ibn Zanki in the European suburb of Gezireh, a retreat from the noise and squalor of Cairo. The house, with its shutters closed against the heat and its garden a colourful blaze of jacaranda, flame trees, mimosa and bougainvillea, was maintained by the Ministry of Works and furnished with beautiful oriental rugs and curtains. One of the features of the drawing-room was a mother-of-pearl chess table with ivory pieces. Maclean’s increased salary and the low cost of labour meant that he and Melinda employed four Egyptian and Sudanese servants and an English nanny for Fergus and Beany, now aged four and two, “all-American boys who delighted in being cheeky to their parents.”