Not only was the clock ticking that much faster with respect to Maclean’s fate. The FBI investigation highlighted the tensions in the intelligence relationship between Britain and America. Lamphere had the healthy scepticism of the rougher FBI about dealing with the smooth, clubbable MI6 operatives, “a bunch of skilful horse traders with whom you trafficked at your peril.” In particular, he didn’t trust the “clever, witty and charming” Peter Dwyer, MI6’s man in Washington and “one of the most skilful horse traders,” who would exchange a few crumbs of British intelligence for a great deal from America, which was obviously frustrating since the two organisations were dealing with a common enemy.
But in late 1948 Assistant Director Mickey Ladd overruled Lamphere and decided to tell Dwyer and his MI5 opposite number Dick Thistlethwaite that material had been uncovered which the Brits would be interested in. Dwyer demanded that Lamphere give them access to all that the FBI had uncovered, not just the material where there was a British interest. In the ensuing row, Lamphere threatened to withhold as much information as he could within the barest niceties of co-operation, but eventually he told the two “startled” men about the spy in the British Embassy in 1944 and 1945. Further, he made it clear to Thistlethwaite (known as “Thistle” in MI5) that if he let on to the CIA what he was doing, MI5 would be “persona non grata” in Washington. However, in a “classic flanking maneuver” the highly strategic British in fact put their own man directly in touch with Arlington Hall through military rather than intelligence protocols in order to have access to more of the telegrams. The consequences of this in-house secrecy, and that between “the Cousins,” as John le Carré later called the services on either side of the Atlantic, were to reverberate for decades after the discoveries and defections of the next few years, in fiction as well as in life.
*
In Cairo Maclean did not have even the first glimmer that a spy had been unearthed in Washington, but 1949 nevertheless became the year in which his mask could no longer be kept in place. The social life, described by their friend Isis Fahmy, the first Coptic female journalist in Egypt, as “a strenuous pastime, with parties one after another in quick succession,” became monotonous: in the words of Madame de La Fayette referring to the court of Louis XIV, “Always the same pleasures, always the same hours and always the same people.” Work finished at eight o’clock and dinners often did not begin until around 11 p.m., leaving plenty of time for drinking at home or in the clubs (or possibly to meet a contact in bars) beforehand. Maclean tended to work through the siesta hours of noon until 4 p.m., both because of the amount on his official plate and often because his secret work of photographing and copying could not be done in his much busier household, now frequently full of guests, and with his growing boys and extensive staff. Lady Maclean, who visited her favourite son as she had in his other two postings, had no doubt that his Cairo troubles were due to a combination of his being “compelled to live a life of social gaiety which he would find absolutely alien to his character” and “his size and fine mentality,” which demanded “more sleep than most.”
Fahmy reported that often Melinda did not know where her charming husband was in the evenings. Sometimes he was likely to be at the house of the hedonistic Princess Faiza, one of Farouk’s four sisters, who “liked her friends to organise parties and dances for her on an almost daily basis.” On “more than one occasion” the Embassy Military Attaché was rung by the Princess and asked to take away “a friend of his,” Maclean, who might be sleeping on her doorstep or fighting with her servants. Maclean would be helped into an Embassy car or poured into a taxi to be sent home, where he would pass out on his bed.
Maclean was struggling through drink to withdraw from his unfulfilled existence, while daily witnessing the miserable poverty that a system of gross inequality could bring about. His spiritual isolation was made even harder by Melinda’s separate life; she would say to Kim Philby in a very different time and place that her marriage had in effect ended in 1948.
Even when Maclean had to take time off work to cope with his monumental hangovers, it was kept from his Ambassador, Sir Ronnie Campbell; any unexpected absences were attributed to “a bad cold.” But the cracks were beginning to show in public now: at one dinner-party Maclean found himself seated next to the wife of the Dutch Ambassador, whom he horrified (and he must have rattled himself if he remembered the remark the next day) by saying, “If Alger Hiss felt as he did about communism, he was quite right to betray his country.” This at a time when Hiss was in the daily news and when the reach of Soviet espionage in the West was beginning to be understood thanks to the revelations pouring out of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Once again, the loyalty Maclean inspired through his charming daytime inscrutability, reinforced by the codes of the close-knit club of the Foreign Office, conspired to keep his decline within boundaries, undetected by Campbell or London. The Embassy security officer was Major “Sammy” Sansom, a moustached and squarely built man who had come up through the non-commissioned ranks of the army and revelled in being the “most hated man in the embassy.” He was unremittingly tough on any potential breaches of security such as love affairs between secretaries and what he saw as “local gigolos,” and managed to have several of the former sent home for their dalliances. He was pleased when the new head of Chancery “showed a keen interest and understanding of my little set-up” and took an especial interest in “the procedure for the safety of secret documents.” The pugnacious Sansom approved of his boss’s security-mindedness and asked Maclean whether they should do spot checks on a junior staffer who, although “fashionably dressed,” used to leave the Embassy with “an unfashionably large handbag.” The Counsellor got quite heated and insisted that there “will be no snap checks while I’m Head of Chancery.” Maclean soon came to his notice in a different context. His boss used to stoke himself up with whisky at home before going to cocktail parties with Melinda; afterwards he would wander off in search of solitude, hiding from whatever demons were chasing him, and more than once he had been found in the early hours of the morning, shoeless, in a stupor and blackout on a bench in the insalubrious Esbekieh Gardens, the last place the Egyptian police would expect to find a member of the British corps diplomatique.
After he had left one royal party, Maclean climbed over the wall of the Gezireh Sporting Club to sleep in a flowerbed; he was found next morning wandering through the rush-hour traffic, shoes in hand, his linen suit in an indescribable state. The police were obliged to report this to Sansom, who thought Maclean “a brilliant chap but highly unreliable.” Sansom found himself in a bind: the prescribed route for dealing with such matters was via the head of Chancery, but that was Maclean himself; he could have gone straight to Ambassador Campbell in these exceptional circumstances but both Macleans were so popular with His Excellency that he doubted that he would get a hearing there. Melinda even said to Sansom when he raised this behaviour with her that “everybody knew . . . that when Donald goes on a drunk he just smashes the place up.” Instead Sansom passed the matter legitimately upwards to George Carey Foster, head of Foreign Office security back in London, suggesting that a transfer might be considered for Maclean, who could represent a security risk.
Sansom’s clearly and carefully worded reports were rebutted. The head of personnel in London, George Middleton, Maclean’s Washington tennis partner, asked Campbell about Maclean’s behaviour and was sharply put in his place by the Ambassador, who disliked hearing “tittle-tattle about an able officer like Maclean.” The Foreign Office sent inspectors to look at the Embassy in general in June, and they seemed to pay particular attention to Maclean, but he was clearly on his best behaviour and lived up to every perception London had had of him since he joined the service. The inspectors reported that he gave “an impression of great confidence” and although quiet in manner “appeared to have very sound judgement in all staff matters which he handled with great tact.” They thought his administrative side was not quite up to
speed, “possibly because of pressure of other work.”
*
Lees Mayall was two years younger than Maclean and ranked just below him as First Secretary in the Cairo Embassy. Shortly before his arrival there Mayall had married Mary Ormsby-Gore, whom Maclean had courted while swotting for the Foreign Office exams at Scoones, but she had instead chosen his friend Robin Campbell (son of the Paris Sir Ronald) as her first husband. The Mayalls were well known to the Maclean family and “Lees was a dear,” according to Nancy. Melinda seems to have been less warm to them, possibly sensing an historical threat to her husband’s fading affections: Mary found her “very difficult” and felt that she pulled Donald’s senior rank unnecessarily and rudely, insisting on occasion that she herself went through a door first at formal events, for example. Even if this animosity from Melinda was the jealousy of a former close friend of her husband from his former life, Mayall’s reaction was much more strongly put: he described her to his colleagues only a year later as “a cold American bitch.” Towards the end of his life, Maclean still spoke of Mayall as having his “permanent affection.”
Mayall in turn was “extremely fond” of Donald, whom he found “amusing, highly intelligent and an excellent talker.” He was “good in the office” (although “hopeless” on the administrative side and always fighting shy of “unpleasantness” in his dealings with staff) even if “his judgement about things outside the office and about the world in general was absolutely infantile.” The echoes of the early reports of Maclean’s immaturity resurfaced, in this context perhaps as part of his “burning hatred [for the disparity] between riches and poverty in Egypt” about which he was “woolly” and “had no practical solutions,” also complained of by Mayall. The only real global solution, Communism, he felt, was not one that could be voiced, nor indeed did Maclean see it as the specific answer to Egypt’s woes.
The Mayalls and Harriet Marling were witnesses to the first, public, crack in the Macleans’ marriage, the agonising start to the next act of what was beginning to look like a tragedy. In late June 1949 Donald and Melinda, whose sister was staying with them, decided to have a picnic party. They booked two feluccas to sail their party of eight up the Nile, “supping and wining in the moonlight,” to the grand house of a British businessman, Eric Tyrrell-Martin, fifteen miles upstream at Helouan. The boat party would join forces with Tyrrell-Martin’s dinner guests for port and coffee and after-dinner chat and games before returning to the city by road. This plan, simple enough, went badly wrong from the very start. They were meant to meet their feluccas at 7 p.m. but arrived an hour late to find that only one boat was waiting. The vessel was slowed by its double cargo, and to add to that there was barely a breeze on the Nile, so they tacked laboriously against the current without any moonlight to provide visibility. There was at least plenty of food and a huge amount to drink on board—Donald had seen to that. He himself was drinking a mixture of whisky and zebib, an Egyptian version of arak, a disastrously potent combination. After some hours of this progress they came ashore to see where they were, and Donald’s frustration with the spoiled adventure spilled over. He blamed Melinda for the whole shambles, and to the horrified embarrassment of the party grabbed her around the neck and made as if to throttle her. Lees Mayall and the others pulled him off her and told him to calm down. He skulked alone at one end of the boat for the rest of the journey; she maintained a bright façade which could not disguise her own mortification.
By the time they had arrived at what they reckoned was their destination in the very small hours of the following morning their host was falling-down drunk. The able-bodied men, Mayall, an American businessman, John Brinton, and a colonel in the military administration of Cyrenaica, went ashore. They became aware of some “white-robed fellaheen” flitting through the palm trees behind them. The colonel grabbed one of them and held him in a “commando grip” until the prisoner had guided them to the house at Helouan, where he was released and tipped handsomely. Nobody answered the bell, and a sudden spotlight coming on above their heads gave Brinton, not at his most sober either, such a start that he fell over and knocked himself bloodily unconscious on the stone step. The door was finally opened by Tyrrell-Martin, furious that they had not turned up earlier when his guests were waiting for them; he had eventually sent their cars back to Cairo. Grudgingly he allowed them to carry the concussed Brinton upstairs to a bedroom and gave them some towels to staunch his blood, but refused to help them beyond that.
The colonel and Mayall had to take charge of the outing. They decided to go to the nearest village on foot to see if they could find cars. They got back to the boat and announced the plan. The others needed no persuasion to get off the cramped, rancorous felucca and were taken ashore, where they were joined by a ghaffir, an armed guard employed to patrol the river bank. Donald was having a heated argument with the rais, the boat’s skipper, about his payment for the trip as he came onshore: the rais was claiming he had not been paid enough for such a prolonged journey, with Maclean berating him for sending only one boat and not knowing where to disembark. The ghaffir turned out to be the rais’s cousin and joined in the debate which carried on until Maclean seized the ghaffir’s rifle from him and started to beat him with it. All the Egyptians present (more fellaheen had joined them to see this fascinating night-time spectacle) started up in “an ugly excited murmur”; Mayall feared that a diplomatic incident might ensue and the ever-practical colonel urged him to knock out his superior, which would have left two broken skulls among the four men of the party.
Mayall decided that he could not actually knock out cold an “unsuspecting” man he “had grown to like very much” and instead thought a more humane plan of action might be to tackle him around the neck and floor him, then sit on his head until British Foreign Office reason could reign again. But he had not had much practice with tackling blind-drunk men: Maclean’s sixteen stone collapsed on top of him as he went in for the heave, there was a crack like a rifle shot and the First Secretary was lying on the bank in agony with a double fracture in his ankle and a spiral fracture in the tibia of his left leg. The rest of the appalled party repaired to Tyrrell-Martin’s house and bedded down as best they could on sofas and armchairs while Maclean bullied the Egyptian servant into opening the locked drinks cabinet so that he could take a bottle of gin to Mayall as anaesthetic. He sat by him, “maudlin and contrite” and rambling his remorse until first light, when “a ramshackle taxi” arrived. Maclean, still plastered, at first refused to get into it, claiming that the driver was “an abortionist,” but Mayall was heaved in to be given “a rough ride” back to the city in silence. The expedition finally ended just before lunch the day after it had set off, the shocked and silent eightsome looking like the exhausted survivors of a short war. Nobody knew what to say to Melinda.
There was no report of the Helouan incident made to London, nor did Major Sansom comment on it. Inevitably Campbell got to hear of his First Secretary’s hospital stay, but not of its direct cause. It was put down to an accident. Even if he had been told the full story, Campbell knew that there were rumours about his relationship with his manservant, a very camp man called Charlie, which “predisposed him to ignore all stories about the private lives of his staff.” Campbell “hated any form of gossip, and would only have dealt with proven fact,” so if the injured First Secretary chose not to tell him the full circumstances of his accident there was nothing to report. Mayall himself, on his return to work for the last weeks of his tour of duty before he was posted back to Whitehall in his callipers, played the whole incident down. His next job was in the Far Eastern Department alongside Guy Burgess, whom he disliked intensely.
Once again, the diligent and credible Maclean had escaped notice and censure. Campbell never sent “an adequate report” about any aspect of his behaviour in Cairo, partly to prevent Melinda, who was so useful to him as his diplomatic hostess, being taken away. Even years later, when Lees Mayall was happy to tell MI5 that at Cambridge his erst
while colleague had been a Marxist, drank too much and “consistently gave vent to very left-wing opinions,” he did not mention the tussle and its sorry consequences. The Macleans went on a month’s planned leave to Italy two days later, and must have had some very tense, remorseful conversations once they were alone.
*
Almost as a companion piece to the official blind eye being turned to the debacle on the Nile, the FBI were astonished at the lack of excitement shown by “the British bulldogs” about the Homer bone they had been thrown in the form of the leaked telegrams from 1945. In March 1950 the Washington Embassy admitted to the Foreign Office in London that the total number of staff it employed was “of the order of 6000 and the majority was Canadian”; that the circulation of telegrams was “depressingly wide”; even “the typing of the names alone would fully occupy a secretary for some time,” to say nothing of the vetting which also ran the danger of reinforcing “the American attitude towards the Dominions in security matters” if they were to get to know the “real story.” It seemed as if the British were keener not to admit their shortcomings than to unearth someone whom they knew had had access to the correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt. It was a myopia born out of disbelief, or too much belief in their own people. One bright idea for narrowing the field a bit came from Sir Robert Mackenzie, the more psychologically astute head of security in the Embassy. He suggested an investigation into those junior members of staff who had had “nervous breakdowns,” but only those in the cipher room during the war, and no senior employee showing troubling signs later. This turned up Mrs Mary Brown, a “permanent nervous wreck,” and Miss Hewitt, who claimed to be related to Harry Hopkins of the White House, obviously a sign of delusion for someone so lowly, but no real suspects.
Lamphere knew that if the US authorities had been told about an American spy “in an office of comparative size and importance” they would at the very least have obtained within a couple of days a list of all personnel who might have had access to the information, “matching names and dates against transfer and vacation lists and entry-and-exit lists.”
A Spy Named Orphan Page 25