*
Maclean’s Cambridge friend and fellow spy Guy Burgess was going about his own alcoholic journey. Since Maclean had last been based in England Burgess had done a brief stint in the News Department, handy for seeing all Foreign Office communications in good time; then he worked for the minister Hector McNeil, before a brief spell in the Information Research Department followed by the Far Eastern Department, a useful position for Moscow Centre in the build-up to the Korean War. In 1949 he had gone on leave to Gibraltar and Tangier, boozing and brawling on an epic scale, “insisting on visiting the local representatives of MI6 and on discussing their characters, habits, opinions and professional inadequacies with anyone who chose to listen to him in any bar in which he happened to be drinking.” In Tangier, Burgess was to be found at the Café de Paris at noon each day, where he would recite “Little boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday,” to the assembled company. The local gay community, a number of whom were British, were outraged when to cap this he began to make approaches to their local favourites. Burgess returned to London in February 1950. The arrest of Fuchs the week before was a reminder to him that the previous September he had forgotten to pass on to Modin a warning given to him by Philby that Venona was on to a scientist code-named Charles (that is, Fuchs), which might have given Moscow Centre time to exfiltrate him.
During Maclean’s last week in Cairo, it had been decided that Burgess (a few days before he was cleared by a disciplinary panel for his many indiscretions) should be posted to Washington as a second secretary. This would be “a last chance to make good” as Carey Foster told Sir Robert Mackenzie, head of security in the Washington Embassy. Mackenzie wondered what Carey Foster could possibly mean when he said that they had better take care of Burgess “as he was capable of worse things” than he had perpetrated before. “Surely he can’t mean goats?”
Burgess arrived in Washington in early August and, much to Aileen Philby’s horror and outrage, moved in with his old friend Kim Philby as a lodger. Goronwy Rees summed up what she might expect: “cigarette ends stuffed down the backs of sofas, the scorched eiderdowns, the iron-willed determination to have garlic in every dish, including porridge and Christmas pudding, the endless drinking, the terrible trail of havoc.” Philby found himself in a dilemma as to whether he should tell the loquacious Burgess about Venona and the possibility that Maclean would be identified. He “made two lone motor trips to points outside Washington” to meet his handler and was instructed that Burgess’s “special knowledge of the problem” might prove useful. By now “some dozen reports” referring to “Material G,”* which Philby knew to be material from Maclean sent via New York, had now come in, so a solution to “the problem” might be needed sooner rather than later. “G” himself was out of contact and in a parlous state. The fate of the three Cambridge spies, mirroring their recruitment, was now irrevocably entwined.
*
Maclean sank further through the summer. Nicholas Henderson, who had served with him in Washington, asked him down to his parents’ cottage when he was on leave for the weekend where he was “struck by his feebleness.” Henderson did not keep much alcohol in the house so “Maclean was unable to drink a great deal, but drank all that was provided.” Also staying was Robert Kee, then of Picture Post, and his wife Janetta, who together were co-founders of the left-wing publisher MacGibbon and Kee. At the time the Kees were experiencing “awful personal troubles” and going through a divorce, and when back in London Maclean would go round to Janetta’s “house in the morning and stay there all day drinking, frequently getting violently drunk.” As Philip Toynbee lived in the same Bayswater house when he was in London, the association in Maclean’s mind with his partner might well have triggered even greater bouts. Henderson reported Maclean’s self-absorption “in trying to find someone to be left-wing with” and in rejecting Kee, who was in a desperate state and had attempted suicide. When Maclean was told of this, his response was, “I wish I had known, because I am sure my Analyst could have helped him as she helped me.” As Kee had already told Henderson that “when Maclean was drunk it was very frightening” and that he “would threaten people in the street and knock them out,” something nobody else mentioned in their keenness to dissect the man, it seems this desire to help someone else in pain by referring them to Dr Rosenbaum was buried fairly deep or his remark was edged with sarcasm.
In August Maclean stayed in a friend’s house in Oxford and wrote that he was living “on a diet of sedatives and pints of bitter,” which presumably provided a little more nourishment than gin or whisky. His handwriting was by now sliding down the page and getting harder to read. “There are two men in a car waiting outside. They’ve been there for four hours. Are they after me?” He then checked his paranoia to wonder if he was not imagining the men anyway. Certainly MI5 were months away from taking any interest in him, and the Russians appeared not to care. Connolly was horrified when he saw the formerly suave diplomat at this time: “His appearance was frightening: he had lost his serenity, his hands would tremble, his face was usually a vivid yellow and he looked as if he had spent the night sitting up in a tunnel.” Maclean still tried to keep up his social front, “as detached and amiable as ever” although “it was clear that he was miserable . . . In conversation a kind of shutter would fall as if he had returned to some basic and incommunicable anxiety.”
By now, through his own isolating choice, Maclean had moved out of his mother’s flat and was living in the Mascot Hotel, off Baker Street. Sometimes he did not make it back to spend the night there. Lees Mayall “would often return to find [Maclean] in his drawing-room, having climbed over the back wall because he did not like coming in through front doors.” Mayall would no more let his codes of honour and friendship tell Middleton this than he had told him about the broken-leg incident in Helouan the previous year. Connolly recorded that “One evening a man leaving a night-club got into an empty taxi and found [Maclean] asleep on the rug. When awakened he became very angry and said he had hired it for the evening as his bedroom.” He became known as “the Lurcher” as his tall frame swayed pathetically from Soho bar to Soho bar. Yet none of the reports of his depraved behaviour appears to have made it back to his Foreign Office superiors. His close-knit circle of colleagues in the Foreign Office remained solicitous for his recovery from his “nervous condition.”
*
By the end of September he appeared to have reached the end. He wrote a letter to Melinda in which “he seemed desperately discouraged about himself and said he did not see why she should ever return to him.” He didn’t feel that he could be a good husband or father, and the family would be better off without him. He had conspicuously not joined them in Spain, nor offered to do so, nor had he suggested that he and Melinda should be alone together, leaving the children with his mother-in-law. Melinda had just as conspicuously not suggested that he join her, nor had she come back to England to see him. But his despairing message, though it was unclear whether it presaged defection, desertion or even suicide, changed her mind. She ended her Spanish sojourn, parked her mother and boys in Paris and went to London.
Over the next two weeks Melinda had “the most momentous” conversations of her life—with Lady Maclean, with Middleton, with Erna Rosenbaum and above all with Donald himself as she struggled to find a resolution. She was in no doubt that she loved her husband, but found that after the experience of a decade of married life with a “split personality like Donald’s, love was an insufficient foundation for happiness.” That “split” might refer both to the sides of him divided between country and conscience and to the duality of the loving, sober Dr Jekyll who wrote on his first night in England and the drunken, destructive, near-murderous Mr Hyde. Or maybe by now those divisions were too intricately bound up with each other to be separately investigated. If so, that must have made these momentous conversations with all but her husband feel very false to her. She wrote to her sister Harriet in New York, acknowledging that “we have both, ala
s, developed in different directions. I have become more extroverted and enjoy gayer and simpler people, but Donald will have none of that at all.”
While Melinda was obviously considering leaving Donald, Middleton put the Foreign Office position to her in very plain terms. She was necessary to him, and to his continuing employment. The office had “a strictly pragmatic attitude towards matrimony . . . The happiness of couples is a secondary consideration; but keeping them out of the divorce courts and so avoiding publicity is primary.” Also, as Melinda had found in Cairo, a diplomatic wife could serve as an unpaid hostess and housekeeper, oiling the wheels of diplomacy for nothing. Middleton had heard from Dr Rosenbaum that, if Donald and Melinda could be brought back together, he would stand a chance of full recovery and would be able to resume his career. The “lay analyst” had pinpointed his dependence on his wife, the need for the secret sharer with whom he could begin his recovery. Melinda might even have become an extension of him in Donald’s psyche, the one who was always there and whom he could hate when he could not live with himself and felt he was not being helped by her. The Foreign Office view was that they very much wanted an employee with a “penetrating mind, sound judgement and quiet industry” to come back, particularly at a time when hostilities in Korea involved British personnel and had the potential to escalate into a global war with Communism. Lady Maclean also showed her daughter-in-law unheralded warmth in her efforts to persuade her to resume her married life, playing on the love both she and Donald felt towards their boys.
Donald himself, in his haze of self-doubt, realised that whatever the ambivalence of his feelings towards his wife, she was a safety line to his sanity and career, possibly even to his liberty. He must have yearned for normality, for an end to the fears that led to yet more binges. After her two weeks in London, Melinda returned to Paris to fetch her boys, from where she wrote to Harriet again: “Donald had very grave doubts at first about our ability to be happy together but we decided to try it again. To me it was the only decision to take on account of the children, and I think Donald has already benefited tremendously. He realises many things which he has never allowed himself to think before . . . If we are frank and above all don’t repress our feelings perhaps we will work something out.” The bond between them, born out of an inner loneliness and dislocation, what Deutsch had spotted in Donald when he code-named him “Orphan,” remained fragile but true.
Under pressure from her husband, loving him, fearful that he would destroy himself, nudged by the upright Foreign Office who were uneasy about ending Maclean’s sick leave if he lacked a strong family base, not wanting to undermine the happiness of her boys, Melinda could rationalise her decision to live with Donald in England again. She ended her letter to Harriet, “He is going back to the F.O. on November 1st—poor lamb!” And that gave his delicate ego the strength he needed to move past his despair, pull on his armour and resume his old working life again. Against her doctor’s orders after the stillbirth and miscarriages, and to the surprise of those who had known them offstage in their darkest time, she was soon pregnant again.
Their unusual marriage was about to enter its next extraordinary phase.
*
For the second time in the two years of his spiralling decline Melinda raised the issue of whether Maclean’s homosexual proclivities were a further destabilising factor for him. She felt that Dr Rosenbaum had made Donald “definitely better,” but she was still “baffled about the homosexual side which comes out when he is drunk and I think slight hostility in general to women.”
In his youth, Maclean had expressed an attraction to Jasper Ridley at his first meeting with Toynbee (at which Toynbee himself had wanted to kiss his new friend), but since then, unlike Burgess or Blunt, he had not shown any sign or left any trace of homosexuality since Burgess’s boast of a one-night stand at Cambridge. When a few months earlier Maclean was in his drunken frenzy with Toynbee, wanting to tear down his life and to murder Melinda, he does not mention any leanings to his private chronicler. Geoffrey Hoare, to whom Melinda spoke from the heart, makes no independent mention of it. Melinda said to Kathleen Cecil that she assumed Donald had been off on a “homosexual spree” immediately after his defection, at a moment when she had to cover any of her own complicity in his absence. Nor did any of the others who knew him as well as anyone could—Henderson, Connolly, the Bonham Carters, Robert Cecil, his siblings, his handlers—comment on it. Perhaps Melinda, the only person using the word homosexual, was doing so again to set up a smokescreen for Donald’s treacherous work at the same time as rationalising his sporadic and mortifying rejection of her.
Lees Mayall, who had no cause to associate himself with Maclean later, said that he “knew [Maclean] was a homosexual largely because when drunk he was more apt to throw his arms around men than women.” Yet it was widely acknowledged that “no other member of the Service . . . mentioned homosexual tendencies.” Nor did MI5 in their thoroughgoing investigation of Maclean’s life. The sensationalising stories that came out when he could no longer defend himself, and at a time when he was always going to be associated with his widely acknowledged homosexual partner-in-flight, built up a rich sex-life with Arab boys in Cairo and the coloured night-club doorman at the Moonglow Club in Soho “who repulsed his advances.” It is as if the betrayed establishment needed to build a further case of gross immorality and illegality to help lessen the shock of discovering that one so trusted could have been a spy all along. Maclean’s old friend from Cambridge Tony Blake said that he had “no knowledge or belief” that he was “inclined to . . . perversion,” and that was at a point when Blake had nothing to lose and plenty to gain by distancing himself. When the Macleans were once again the gossip of artistic society, Eddy Sackville-West, a lover of trouble as well as many men, claimed to Frances Partridge that he had been to bed with Maclean, but if that is true it is a far cry from stories of constant rent boys and doormen. Maclean’s devoted but always truthful brother Alan said “positively no” when asked the question. Anthony Blunt in his unpublished memoirs never mentioned Maclean’s sexuality while being frank about his own. And Burgess, who got great satisfaction from “blazoning” his conquests, never raised the subject after Cambridge.
*
On 29 September, Maclean saw Middleton “and reported that he was feeling very much better” and that “his own doctor thought he could count on being fit for duty by November 1.” Middleton agreed with Maclean’s request that he be given a home posting, which he was due anyway after six years of diligent work in Washington and Cairo. He was delighted that his friend, whom he had thought was by now although “not exactly malingering . . . probably just running away from realities,” was deemed able to return by Rosenbaum and therefore Chiesman. All sides were well aware that after six months’ sick leave, Maclean would have gone on to half-pay if he stayed out of the office, which would have made his life impossible, so it was, once again, a kindness to a valued servant to re-employ him without digging deeper. The head of the American Department had had to go on leave himself to undergo an operation, so Middleton decided, in consultation with Michael Wright, Maclean’s colleague in Paris and Washington, that this would be an appropriate place for him, “on a more or less temporary basis,” whatever that meant. Wright was the Assistant Under-Secretary with responsibility for the Department and thought highly of Maclean, “rather shy and nervous, but with a vast capacity for work, a willingness to take responsibility and possessing one of the clearest brains of any officer.”
Middleton was under the impression from Sir Ronald Campbell that the “breakdown” in Cairo was the result of “prolonged over-work coupled with his rather nervous, highly strung disposition,” and that the drinking dated only “from the arrival of Philip Toynbee in Cairo.” The destruction of the flat, although now known in London, seems to have been the subject of as little gossip, just as the reports from doctors were not widely discussed before the new appointment was made. Middleton and Wright cleared the
new job with Sir Roger Makins, then acting head of the office and another colleague with a very good opinion of Maclean from Washington and their secret work together on the AEC. They decided not to put it before the Promotions Board since that body had already discussed Maclean “informally” and there was not likely to be “argument” about it.
What the post actually entailed was very different from how it was presented after its most notorious occupant had vacated it. The Foreign Office claimed that it dealt principally with Latin American affairs. “Korean questions” were handled by the Far East Department and atomic matters by the Permanent Under-Secretary. Technically, that may have been the ideal, but when the questions involved the Korean War rather than trade or other matters, the British or American atom bomb, the head of the American Department was very much in the loop. As Sir William Strang, who had been Permanent Under-Secretary since 1949, was to write in his authoritative book The Foreign Office, published in 1955, “the duties of the American department [are to] advise the Secretary of State as to the policy to be followed in regard to the political, economic and other relations between this country and . . . all countries in North, Central and South America.” With the Korean War boiling up, there could be no better place in London for a keen foreign policy specialist to be placed. When Yuri Modin of the London rezidentura heard about Maclean’s new job, he could only explain it to himself “in terms of a somewhat warped British sense of humour,” just as he did in respect of Burgess’s move to Washington at the same time.
*
The Macleans, together again as a family, threw themselves into house-hunting. It was thought best to be outside London and away from its myriad bars tempting Donald to stop for refreshment between work and home. Lees Mayall was certainly relieved that after the “trouble” Maclean had caused him “during his period of convalescence” this move meant that “he began rather to fade out of his life,” although Maclean’s appointments diary shows that the two men lunched regularly in the early months of 1951. As a home posting meant Maclean was no longer eligible for a foreign allowance, living outside London was also the most economical choice. They settled on a handsome but faintly run-down and rambling (certainly by Melinda’s American standards of modern comfort) three-storey Victorian house, Beaconshaw. Down a gravel drive, with useful outbuildings and standing in over an acre of garden, it was located on the North Downs at the Kent–Surrey border in the ancient village of Tatsfield, near Westerham, about an hour from London. They paid £7,000 for it, raising part of the mortgage through Mrs Dunbar, and hired Sylvia Shrubb to come in from the village every day to help out. It was the first house they had owned in their peripatetic marriage, and was destined to be the last. They moved into Beaconshaw on 18 December 1950, in time for the newly reunited and expanding family to celebrate the only Christmas they would spend there.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 30