A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  In his marriage, Donald was no longer playing either the protective or the controlling roles that he had been for the previous decade of their relationship. For the first time, Melinda was free of the burden of keeping house, being attentive to her mother and sisters or being constrained by her countrymen. Donald was also not as over-worked and strained as he had been, and did not, in the early days, require her vigilance. He would go each evening after work to swim and play tennis at the Gezireh Sporting Club, founded by the British fifty years earlier and admitting only the most elite Egyptians as members. She was free to go out to Groppi’s, the coffee house where many of the smart women of Cairo would meet to discuss the party of the night before. Her time in Paris, “the spiritual home of Middle East cosmopolitans” and smart fashion sense, meant she was treated with respect outside the diplomatic community. She was able to relax away from wartime London and the serious social scrutiny of official Washington, and with her husband’s rank and the help they had could at last play the role of the diplomatic hostess.

  Even so, the hidebound British could be painful. Many of the servants of the Raj had moved to Cairo after Indian independence in 1947, bringing with them their cocktail-fuelled love of entertaining; as Melinda was younger and more attractive than most of them, their snobbery, combined with jealousy, came oozing out as they sneered behind her back at her “American housekeeping.” Donald’s sister Nancy, who was working for MI5 (she was to appreciate the bitter irony of that when her American husband Bob Oetking lost his State Department job for no reason other than his marriage) and living in Cairo, asked her servant Mohammed to buy “stop-gap glasses, cutlery and plates . . . from Woolworth’s to be used [by Donald and Melinda] until their own stuff arrived,” but when she went to dinner with them was astonished to see “heavy linen table cloth and napkins, glittering crystal glasses, silver place settings, plates with gold trim”; several of the guests were similarly surprised to see their own property in use. The Maclean servants had put word out that Nancy’s “stop-gap” place settings were not good enough and the servants of the invitees had brought the necessary goods round earlier in the day.

  Sir Ronald Campbell, a bachelor with the elegance and charm of a David Niven, took a great shine to Melinda and started to use her as a hostess for his engagements, a further boost to the “new self-confidence to replace her shyness and diffidence.” When the dashing young Prince Philip, two years married to the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth, came to stay with the Ambassador in March 1949, she gave a “young people’s evening” with dinner for fourteen and then party games, including “Murder” around the house. Geoffrey Hoare, who had been away on assignment in Beirut for a few months, commented on how Melinda had emerged from her shell. She wrote to her sister Harriet that “I have become more extroverted and enjoy gayer and simpler people.” Cairo had a flourishing social scene among its top echelons, and attractive and important diplomats would always be asked to the “endless round of Cairo parties.” On the rare occasions they were not at a party they and the Hoares would often play bridge “with a rather intense efficiency,” befitting the man of control that Maclean with his “watchmaker’s mind” could still be in his early days there.

  But he was never completely at ease. He had always preferred the company of those with what Philby described as “independent minds,” artists and writers, intellectuals rather than socialites. Even though he went to the parties, the high life just exacerbated the falseness of his situation in the quasi-imperial nature of Britain’s relations with Egypt.

  Cairo was the most populous city in Africa and it was the first time that Maclean had witnessed such poverty and slum-living at close hand, his resulting distress intensified by his comfortable billet and the high life surrounding those with whom they socialised. The “covenanting conscience” that defined his childhood and informed his beliefs was being tested. Support for the regime of King Farouk and the old policy of non-interference, letting the hostile Egyptian factions play themselves out against each other, did nothing to improve the conditions in which most of the country lived. Maclean was outspoken in private about his disagreement with British policy and said that “we should accept our responsibilities” as a previous colonial power and try to persuade the rulers of Egypt to adopt the reforms which, in his opinion, were the only way to “save the country from Communism.” In the context of the time, this was more a sensible policy view, the expert saying what he believed was right, rather than any sort of bluff on Maclean’s part: revolution in Egypt might have dire consequences in the region, and the peaceful amelioration of the lot of the people was his real aim.

  His distaste for the inequalities at times emerged more publicly, as they had done in Washington. The Ambassador’s nephew, Colin Campbell, came to stay with his uncle over the first Christmas that the Macleans were there and after a Sunday lunch at his uncle’s residence walked out with Donald, whom he found charming, “funny and friendly,” on to the balcony outside the drawing-room. They looked across at a line of “shabby Nissen huts” on the other side of the road, the married quarters of the junior members of the Soviet Embassy. Campbell made a “naïve” remark about how they must be envious of the smarter British accommodation, and was taken aback by “the look of disapproval and even contempt” given to him by his previously warm and generous fellow guest. The resentment felt towards the British by all but the elite of Cairo whose protection they seemed to be working for had aggravated Maclean’s own class views to the point where his mask was starting to slip. He “inveighed” against “the rich” to the Embassy Naval Attaché, Captain H. P. Henderson, and remarked how “he had become disgusted with the way the upper classes in Paris had rushed screaming from their capital in 1940,” which in the light of the Wehrmacht’s behaviour towards those who resisted conquest is a particularly unforgiving choice of words.

  Maclean often grew withdrawn in the midst of Melinda’s newfound gaiety; he could be “a little remote” in the home and “slightly condescending, slightly mocking” about Melinda’s lack of know­ledge of “social and political problems.” He took refuge from his own unease in putting her down. She was starting to take the rap for his moral and political disquiet.

  *

  The discomfort Maclean felt about Cairo developed not only because he felt he would be out of the intricate centre of Cold War diplomacy, but also because he saw that Moscow was behind in recognising the importance of the Arab world. His urge to pursue the greatest good in foreign policy terms for the greatest number was always present, whichever side he was working for. In spite of what he might be able to tell them thanks to his position in Cairo, he would be of much less use to the Soviets, which could be disastrous for his equilibrium and self-esteem. Yuri Modin, a Leningrad Naval Academy graduate and member of the London rezidentura, warned his counterparts in Egypt that “a vitally important agent was on the way, that he should be treated with the greatest care and that everything should be done to maintain excellent relations with him.” But the Cairo rezidentura “reacted somewhat oddly to this message” and perhaps the unnamed rezident “never even read it.” After fifteen years of tact and closeness, even intimacy, that had made the relationships with Deutsch, Maly, Harris and Gorsky vital sources of stability through unsettling as well as powerfully motivating times, the ineptitude with which he was handled in Cairo was degrading, anxiety-inducing and dangerously neglectful for all concerned. If Moscow Centre had been aware of the dangerous balancing act Maclean had been performing recently, they would not have been so heedless of him. They were on the verge of jeopardising their brilliant agent, and possibly their entire high-level British network.

  *

  This seeming indifference took place against an intense military and political backdrop as the Arab–Israeli War continued with undiminished ferocity—a time therefore when Moscow might have received valuable information from Homer. Israel attacked Egyptian forces on 22 December 1948, and Egyptian aircraft and ships bombed and
shelled Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. On 7 January 1949 four British reconnaissance Spitfires flying over Israel were shot down by Israeli ground fire which had mistaken them for Egyptian attackers; the Israelis then attempted to conceal their part in this, and the US Special Representative to Israel sent a message to Washington that “all political officers and service attachés of Mission are of opinion that British actions are destroying the chances of peace.” In the ensuing negotiations it seemed as if the Egyptian demands for a corridor linking Transjordan or Gaza with Egypt might well bring about a war with the British on the Egyptian side and the Americans on the Israeli.

  Attention in late 1948 and early 1949 became focused on the possibility that the region would play a part in any confrontation with Russia as a new front in the Cold War. The Pentagon’s planning for a projected nuclear war included a scenario for 133 atom bombs to hit seventy Soviet cities, with a loss of 2.7 million lives. All parties knew that Armageddon would not be on this scale, as the Americans had only about fifty bombs, but even so the bases in Egypt’s Canal Zone were vital for military access to the Middle East. Maclean entered negotiations with the Egyptian government to renew the alliance and extend the leases for the bases to include America.

  At the same time he was asked to set up the evacuation plans for British personnel in the region. As both the British and American ambassadors had been targeted for assassination and anti-British feeling was running high, this was not simply playing war games. All this was testing to work on even for a man of British sangfroid, and was much more so for Maclean. Without an outlet enabling him to inform and impress others regularly and receive due appreciation in return, it was troubling and isolating for him. Washington’s aim to become the dominant power in the region and to lessen British influence fuelled his anti-Americanism. He wrote to Michael Wright, now back in London, that, “Judging from the brashness and take-charge attitude of the US mission, America is ready to assume the dominant economic and military position in the Middle East.” This dent to his patriotism could not play well at a time when he felt isolated from his ideological allies.

  The “insensitive handling” of Maclean over this high-level information meant that rendezvous were proposed in the Arab quarter of Cairo where the tall, blond diplomat, elegantly dressed in his immaculate tropical suit, would be “as about as inconspicuous in the souk as a swan among geese,” as the London rezident was able to discern. When Maclean managed against some opposition to get the venues changed to restaurants and bars where he would not look like a “skulking informer,” the documents he handed over “were accepted without comment” and he was given no feedback about the usefulness of his material or about “what the Centre expected of him.” The name of his Cairo contact was not recorded by Modin: a sign of the different times and and lower regard in which the posting was held compared to the days of Deutsch, Maly and Gorsky. Deutsch’s identification of the “infantile need for praise and reassurance” and “a yearning to belong” held true, if not truer, in the changed world fifteen years later where fascism was no longer a threat. In Maclean’s case, such praise and reassurance were essential prerequisites, the plainest recognition of the human factor underlying successful agent-running. These needs were, indeed, increased by another of the characteristics noted by the master-recruiter, the “inherent class resentfulness” which Maclean was so aware of in starkly class-ridden Cairo. Added to the loneliness he was feeling in his marriage as Melinda blossomed in her new life, the result was a significant blow to his self-esteem. At one stage he was even suggesting that Melinda should hand over the documents herself to save him from the danger and humiliation. She could meet the rezident’s wife in the hairdresser, for example. This belittling notion appears to have been ignored in spirit as much as in fact by Moscow Centre.

  *

  The news coming from America only ratcheted up Maclean’s anxiety. The anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Com­­­­­­mittee had been hearing from Elizabeth Bentley and the journalist Whittaker Chambers, a sallow-faced man who had decided his own life was in danger and renounced Communism in 1938 after hearing about the purges in the USSR. Chambers had produced five rolls of microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his family farm as evidence of his good faith in turning in his fellow former agents. One of these was blank, two others contained not very essential information from the Navy Department about fire extinguishers and life rafts, but two contained memos from US embassies to Washington still encoded, so the supplier had presumably passed on the diplomatic codes as well. Typewriter experts proved that the State Department secrets had come from Maclean’s high-flying contact and acquaintance Alger Hiss. Hiss, with whom Maclean had had meetings in 1946 to discuss Soviet troop numbers, was accused of being a spy by Whittaker Chambers in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in early August 1948. He followed the terrible precedent of Oscar Wilde fifty years earlier and took the step of issuing a writ against Chambers for libel. Hiss was indicted in December on two counts of perjury. After the first trial had produced a deadlocked jury, another was held and, in spite of the impressive character witnesses Hiss’s lawyers called on his behalf, he was convicted in January 1950 and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He spent the next thirty years protesting his innocence, increasingly peevishly towards the end of his life. Although it is unlikely that Maclean knew about Hiss’s activities, or even how much of their combined intelligence had been useful at Yalta, it was a stark reminder of the heightened danger to him in the febrile and suspicious post-war period.

  If Maclean had had knowledge of Venona working in the background, he would have found it impossible to continue. One of the few Soviet agents still active in the US after Bentley’s evidence and Gorsky’s recall was William Weisband, who was working on cipher analysis in the Army Security Agency (formerly the Signal Intelligence Service). The “very gregarious and very nosy” “Zhora,” the son of Russian immigrants to the US, had sent, in the blunt words of Moscow Centre, material “concerning the work of Americans on deciphering Soviet ciphers, intercepting and analysing open radio-correspondence of Soviet institutions.” Weisband’s Russian heritage was not brought to anyone’s attention when he peered over Meredith Gardner’s shoulder in 1946 at a decrypted telegram from the New York residency to Moscow. He had other clumsy tendencies: as remarked by leading cryptanalyst Cecil Phillips, “he cultivated people who had access to sensitive information. He used to sit near the boss’s secretary, who typed anything of any importance.” Little wonder the Russians refused his request for a camera to carry out his own photography for fear he would be caught in the act.

  Venona was so secret and so infiltrated that Moscow Centre knew about it some years before it was divulged to the President and the CIA. A mass of evidence about Soviet wartime espionage was emerging. Thirty-year-old FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere, broad-shouldered and open-faced, as suited his former profession as a lumberjack in his native Idaho, arrived at Arlington Hall with a brief to use the decoded documents to unravel Soviet activities in America. Lamphere had been transferred to the Soviet Espionage Squad from the criminal beat in New York in 1945, unwillingly as his new assignment was called “Siberia time” because for each agent or controller identified, another would come in to take his place. But the more Lamphere read of the cases and more particularly of what life under Communism was like, including Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, whose protagonist Rubashov is imprisoned in the purges by “Number One” in the system he had helped to create, the more passionate he became in his desire to pull its roots out of American soil. One converted ideologue was chasing the others. He went to Arlington Hall “every two to three weeks” and began to get behind Meredith Gardner’s reserve and modesty to the point where theirs became the critical Arlington working relationship between the code-breakers and law enforcement. And just as Maclean arrived in Cairo, Gardner and his team started work on the New York–Moscow cable traffic of 1944, and soon turned up classified
information of which they could decrypt very little. But what they did get was a telegram from New York sent on 2 August 1944 about the planning meetings for Operation Anvil, the proposed allied invasion of the Mediterranean coast, at which “Homer is present at all the sessions.”

  They had the code-name of a traitor.

  *

  The first real clue to Homer’s identity came to light in January 1949 as the rest of the series—about “Captain” and “Boar” meeting in Quebec, about post-war planning for Germany and entire despatches from the frantic period of March 1945 about the future of Poland—began to emerge. The breakthrough came when it was realised that in a sloppy piece of tradecraft and a near-miraculous piece of luck an over-literal Russian cipher clerk in New York had passed on a telegram in March 1945 complete with its internal Foreign Office serial number. There could be little doubt that it originated in the British Embassy. This tiny detail, an “appalling blunder” as Moscow Centre said when they learned of it, changed everything as the spotlight swung on to America’s closest ally.