In November 1949, the finger of suspicion might well have come around to point to Maclean again. Philby, who had checked up on the Walter Krivitsky file during his time in London, decided to make absolutely sure that he was not implicated by the defector’s vague mention of an agent during the Spanish Civil War, who was “amongst the friends” of the Scotsman “of good family” and had been ordered to assassinate Franco while working as a journalist in Spain. He also wanted to be certain the evidence pointed squarely at Maclean (whom he had not seen or spoken to since he asked him for help in Paris in 1940) so that he could plan his future actions. From the Scottish name to the important father, it was clear that anyone suspicious of the diplomat could use the testimonies as strong circumstantial evidence to start digging deeper. Philby’s devious mind calculated that he could serve a treble purpose here: by bringing the Krivitsky evidence to the table he would be seen to be actively on the Homer case, so could have no vested interest in suppressing the investigation; he could deflect attention away from the reference to the British agent in Spain which could conceivably draw him in; and in playing his key part in the search he would ensure his own inclusion in every conversation about it should he need to warn his recruit or Moscow Centre. The master-spy had worked out all the odds.
Philby’s top-secret memorandum to the head of security in the Washington Embassy, Sir Robert Mackenzie, omitted Krivitsky’s details about “artistic circles” and cape-wearing, just as it naturally omitted any mention of Spain, and dealt in the vaguest of terms with the facts, the person being of “good family” and “young” and “ideological.” Before he came to his conclusion which would cover him in the event of mishap he admitted: “The description would, of course, fit a very large number of persons in the Foreign Service; and it is a far cry from Krivitsky’s statements in London in 1939 to the leakage from the Embassy in Washington in 1945. But in case this disquieting possibility is overlooked, I thought it advisable to draw it to your attention.”
In Whitehall, Carey Foster offered his opinion a month later that “there is absolutely no evidence to connect the Washington case with the ‘Imperial Council’ story contained in Krivetsky’s [sic] interrogation report.” But it did prompt a look at which members of staff were in London in the late 1930s and then in Washington in 1945. Carey Foster settled on a list of six names on this basis: Balfour, Makins, Robert Hadow, Wright, Gore-Booth and Maclean. As a roll-call of the coming men in the Foreign Office, that could scarcely be bettered. In the end, the lack of “evidence” and the refusal to believe that any of these high-ups could even be considered as a traitor when there were so many junior staff to explore meant that this list did not get looked at again for some time, and the links between the six men and their subsequent Washington responsibilities not examined at all. Philby’s stratagem of bringing evidence that could expose Maclean and then soft-pedalling his presentation of that evidence was brilliant: his due diligence deflected attention away from himself just as it effectively buried the evidence for now.
The risky irony of the Krivitsky reminder is that, if it had been rigorously followed up and Maclean identified, then it could have kept the other Cambridge recruits hidden from the investigators—if Maclean’s nerve held under interrogation by Skardon. Such an outcome might even have been in the subtle sinews of Philby’s mind: if they were going to catch Maclean anyway, which surely they would do at some point, his confession might not implicate the others. Philby claimed to be amazed that, even though Krivitsky and Volkov had both said the Foreign Office had been penetrated at a high level, “the FBI were still sending us reams about the Embassy charladies, and the enquiry into our menial personnel was spinning itself out endlessly.”
*
In the autumn of 1949, Maclean becomes more silent, there are fewer sightings at parties, less comment on his work. Helouan was a signal to him that his two working lives, and alcoholism, the three now indissolubly linked, were an unbearable combination, and in December he tried to throw in the towel. The schizophrenic life he had not signed up for was out of control, he had had enough and he wanted out.
He wrote a short letter to Moscow Centre and handed it over to his handler. The letter declared that he “had always wanted to work in Russia” as “the best place for him to carry on his struggle against American and Western imperialism.” It was, in other words, a thinly veiled request for him to be exfiltrated to Moscow to follow his guiding conscience, a place where he could hold his head high, do his work and be a whole, united man rather than languish in Wormwood Scrubs with the scientist spies. He had not taken this decision alone, and may even have been guided by Melinda, who could not bear the humiliation being heaped upon her and was standing by him come what may. Perhaps there was a chance of a sober, happy marriage with a husband who was not being torn apart. Donald said that Melinda too was “perfectly prepared to go.”
The spy whose every word had been fallen upon in Moscow Centre a couple of years earlier, who was able to add his own gloss to the policy documents he would send on as being helpful to the Kremlin, was ignored. Unlike the Western countries in the wake of Krivitsky, Gouzenko and others, the Russians did not have a template for defectors. Perhaps they did not appreciate the danger to the other members of the network if Maclean was apprehended. Perhaps they thought he was trailing his coat to become a double agent for the British, hence the reports back from their Cairo rezident that he “was making an ass of himself . . . week after week, the tales of Maclean’s increasingly unpleasant behaviour filtered through.” They might have thought he was not worth the candle at this stage, particularly because in their neglect they seemed not to appreciate the importance of what he could send them from Cairo. But most likely they simply failed to hear and deal with the cri de coeur from their agent now that the psychologically minded handlers had all gone. Whatever the reason, true to the treatment Maclean had received thus far from Moscow during his Cairo posting, this surrender and appeal, which would have saved all sides many problems in the ensuing eighteen months and beyond, were ignored. Yuri Modin of the London rezidentura said later that he was “quite sure nobody looked at” the letter, but in the deep paranoia of the times in Moscow even if they had they might well have revisited their fears that Maclean had been turned.
Ignored at his moment of gravest crisis in Moscow’s service, Maclean followed up this desperate plea with another appeal in April 1950. At this point his first letter was read as well, but while the Centre was considering its position on the request, a prominent figure from Maclean’s pre-war life reappeared and his final, messy, tragic exit from overseas service was under way.
*
Melinda had expressed her disapproval of Philip Toynbee almost as soon as she met him in Paris before their marriage. Recently he too had been showing signs of coming unstuck: he had undergone a bitter parting from his wife and in the aftermath ramped up his own drinking; but his Communism had moved into the background and was soon to be replaced by a fervent Christian belief. Arnold Toynbee, Philip’s father and a socially committed economic historian, asked David Astor, the great liberal owner and editor of the Observer, if he would take his son on at his newspaper. Astor commissioned a series of articles from Philip about the Middle East, and the correspondent started to make arrangements to go to Cairo where he would naturally stay with his old friend Donald Maclean. They had not met much while Maclean was posted abroad, although while on leave in 1946 Maclean had spent a few days with the Toynbees on the Isle of Wight, where he had shocked his old friend by taking a Marxist view of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and described them as “decadent and effete.”
The political trouble started when Toynbee applied for his visa. As the Observer was banned in Egypt for its pro-Zionist stance it did not have an official correspondent in the region. Instead, it relied on Clare Hollingworth, the Macleans’ close Cairo friend and bridge partner, to file pieces for them. When she heard about his looming arrival Hollingworth got in touch with the Informat
ion Department in the Embassy to complain that Toynbee’s Communist past would make things difficult “among the Arabs here.” She was soothed on being told that he was staying with her friend the head of Chancery, who would explain how things were done in Egypt and keep him from writing anything that would cause trouble. Fadel Bey of the Egyptian Ministry of Information made it clear to the Embassy that any hostile pieces in the Observer would result in Hollingworth, the “real” correspondent, being expelled.
To cover his back, Maclean wrote to William “Rids” Ridsdale, head of the Foreign Office News Department, to say that he knew Toynbee had been expelled from Rugby School because of his Communism, and had then been a “leading Communist” at Oxford, but he pointed out that Toynbee had given up Communism at the beginning of the Finnish war and was absolutely not a security risk. He had been asked “some time ago” if he would put Toynbee up and had agreed “and thought no more of it.” He was happy to “put him off altogether” if that was the advice from Whitehall, which no doubt would have pleased Melinda, but it seems likely that this was merely the diplomat speaking.
By the time Rids replied some days later, the Egyptian paper Akhbar Al-Yom had reported on the arrival of “Mr Philip Toniby [sic]” to stay with “Mr Ronald Maclean [sic]” of the Embassy. Rids said that he had had a word with the diplomatic correspondent of the paper, who had confirmed that Toynbee had indeed been a Communist in his youth but under “the inoculation theory” was “quite convinced that Toynbee is now very definitely anti-Communist.” In confidence, and with no irony intended, Rids was happy to tell Maclean that Toynbee’s visit was “therapeutic” as the journalist had recently separated and was “inclined to go round the bend, and was sporadically drinking much too heavily—a state of affairs particularly bad in the case of one who is of a brilliant but slightly erratic, if not unbalanced, temperament.” This careful character analysis led Rids to the conclusion that it might be better if Toynbee stayed in a hotel. Maclean replied that the visit would not only keep Toynbee on the journalistic straight and narrow but might “help” him with his “drinking difficulty,” so it would be fine to have him to stay after all. Inevitably, with two such seasoned dipsomaniacs brought together with their separate woes, the drinking difficulties stood a greater chance of multiplication than of division. Maclean may even have been looking forward to having a partner in the bottle.
Toynbee had arrived “in a state of extreme depression” after the “violent and painful changes” in his life, but “my spirits rose at once when I saw the delightfully reassuring figure of Donald advancing to meet me at the airport, dressed in the golden-white of an antique tropical suit.” “Philippo,” as Maclean affectionately called his old friend, was launched into the diplomatic whirl, which he hated as much as Maclean and which undoubtedly contributed to their bonding isolation as the month wore on: “I went to a party at the Embassy . . . for the press. DM was there at first to offer some protection, but when he left I found myself sweating, untidy, confused and somehow small, in the middle of these brisk, high-powered men and women.” He went on to dinner with some of them, but found them “ODIOUS, racist and xenophobic, a terrible end-of-Empire gathering.” The British Military Attaché was less enraptured at meeting Toynbee, who was “always dirty, always drunk, very argumentative and always at least an hour late for everything.”
Two weeks later, Maclean was spinning out of control, in misery as his second plea to be taken to Russia went unheard. He spiralled down from “extreme gentleness and politeness . . . [with] the occasional berserk and murderous outbursts when, so to speak, the pot of suppressed anger has been filled” to going into a “two-day trough together” of drinking with his friend while Melinda was off for a week’s tourism with her sister Harriet. His alcoholism was now unfettered and unhidden as his demons had emerged, an age away from the June evening of fourteen years earlier when the two young men had got cheerfully drunk together at a white-tie ball in London before taking their dawn swim.
They went to another party. Toynbee “was back in bed by midnight but Donald rushed out again to disaster after disaster, ending by hitting Eddy [Gathorne-Hardy, a very old friend of them both and a colleague of Maclean’s] and throwing glass after glass against the wall. In the morning I came down at half-past eight . . . to find him snoring and a pool of water all around him.” Young Donald, Beany, called out gleefully to his nanny that “Daddy’s wet the bed.” Toynbee “sobered him with talk and took him all the way to his room at the Embassy. Somehow, once there, he managed to heave on his armour . . . I admired it.” It was that morning that Toynbee gave names to the two sides of Maclean: “Sir Donald,” when he was in On His Majesty’s Service mode, the brilliant, unflappable diplomat; and “Gordon,” after his favourite brand of gin, whose label had on it a scarlet boar’s head, long-tusked and mouth gaping.
Toynbee did not see Maclean that evening but was awoken by him at 2:00 a.m. and made to talk over whisky until 5:30 a.m. Maclean’s “pot of anger” turned into rage at Melinda, an easy target to bring into view rather than investigate the true causes of his anguish. “Donald told me he wished . . . for the death of his wife. He was in a queer and terrifying condition—still very funny, very lackadaisical (tho’ voluble), yet the genuine depths were there behind his words and his face.” The two “clung together” and decided to form a new Communist Party just for themselves, but Maclean “tried to expel me so he should be alone.” Toynbee had “been inoculated against the disease of Communism” and “understood that [its] doctrine was no good thing for people with any true intellectual or democratic ideas.” He believed that Maclean had come to the same realisation since the war and through his work, so he read this isolating loneliness and psychic pain as being all about Melinda. He tried to comfort Maclean in “his glorious and passionate ambivalence” about his wife, whom he “really does love and hate . . . almost equally.” Or perhaps his dissatisfaction with both Communism and Melinda, the two fixed points in his life, was merely the reflection of a man filled with self-loathing, one who could not stand the strain of his torn allegiances.
The morning after such outpourings, Maclean had not “the least idea of what it was or where it came from.” In the manner of alcoholics trying to rationalise their hopeless condition the pair would “ruminate together . . . about what it could be that drove us both to drink and him to violence as well.” Toynbee’s own rationale, that he thought his own drinking was triggered by his shyness, he saw later as an “absurd and unconvincing excuse,” but at least it was an attempt to grasp what was going on, unlike his friend’s “charming” and elegantly evasive “Oh, do you? I’m shy because I get drunk.” From his appearance in Granta as an “Undergraduate in the Witness Box” through his interview for the Foreign Office to now, Maclean was always the master of the deft deflection. The longing to escape his demons was leading him to the destruction of every anchor in his life. The “armour” Toynbee had seen only a few days earlier as Maclean went to work could not conceal the surging self-destruction.
The final scenes of this terrible drama were played out immediately following the Marling sisters’ return. Melinda’s agony is written between the lines of Toynbee’s diary for 4 May: “an evening of Rabelaisian exhibitionism . . . wilder and wilder attempts to shock [Melinda and Harriet]. Failure. They retired in good order long before we did. Donald began to get aggressive.” This time Donald went on alone; even his drunken friend was frightened or unable to stay by his side, and Maclean “disappeared” into the night with another guest, not reappearing until the following Saturday lunchtime. Melinda was waiting to see him and plead with him in her bedroom. On Monday morning, recorded Toynbee, “Donald came down with those terrible, tell-tale bleary eyes and told me that he had gone wild again last night, publicly insulted Harriet, hit Melinda . . . ‘I am really getting near to the point where I shall have to be shut up.’ ” A hospital or mental institution might be preferable to this life. He was desperate but could neither conquer nor s
urrender to the hold alcohol had over him quite yet.
The next day was the end of that last Egyptian binge. The Macleans, Harriet and Toynbee went to a cocktail party and were due to go on to an evening party. Melinda, who was pregnant again,* making her husband’s behaviour towards her all the more shocking, felt tired and went home after the first party. Toynbee had somewhere else to go, so Donald and Harriet went to the evening party. By midnight, Donald had gone far beyond the point where any companion could have a good time, so Harriet went home too. Donald lurched back at about two o’clock in the morning and an hour later woke Toynbee and “urged” him to come out again. “Not much persuasion was needed, and soon we had tiptoed out of the house, past Melinda’s door and embarked on a destructive orgy which had surpassed everything that had gone before.”
*
Following their all-night debauch the two men spent most of that day in the sun on the balcony at John Wardle-Smith’s house, Wardle-Smith being Lees Mayall’s replacement in the Embassy. They steadily worked their way through a coma-inducing six bottles of gin (Gordon’s, naturally) according to Toynbee’s diary. Wardle-Smith, who seems to have shared the Embassy view that there was no point in drawing Ambassador Campbell’s attention to these bouts, claimed that he had thought the best thing was to give them “so much alcohol that they would pass out” before wisely taking himself off to the office. The next stage of the day is understandably a little vague, but Toynbee claimed that he and Maclean decided to move on, “girl-hounding.” More likely that they were simply looking for more to drink, booze-hounding. They went downstairs to a flat in the same block shared by Sheila Engert of the State Department, who was spending a year teaching at Cairo University, and Jacqueline Brannerman, a secretary in the US Embassy. Engert knew Maclean slightly (and had heard plenty of gossip about the “much more liberal” Toynbee), and had taken the room in the flat previously occupied by Geraldine Williams, Film Officer at the British Embassy and one of the “closest associates of Maclean and his wife.” When Maclean and Toynbee did not find Williams, or anything to drink, they apparently left quietly and decided to go next door, to the flat lived in by Eunice Taylor, secretary to US Ambassador Caffrey, and Ellen Speers, wife of an executive with the Arabian-American Oil Company. They pushed past the “astonished suffragi” into the empty flat and began their “long miasma of destruction.”
A Spy Named Orphan Page 27