Maclean had turned a corner that winter, the desperate alcoholic tremors of the summer had subsided, his career was back on track with his file unblemished, his wife and sons were back with him and Melinda was in the early stages of pregnancy. He wrote to his brother Alan about his relief at being back in the Foreign Office, the work he loved, that it was “cosy to be part of a grinding, familiar old machine.” For a man who had remained hidden for so much of his life, he particularly cherished “how much more anonymous” and less emotionally demanding it was to be in London than serving in an Embassy. He might have felt his spying days were now behind him as he had had no contact with Moscow Centre for so long.
Above all, as he contemplated his fresh start in Whitehall, he still had no knowledge of the suddenly more urgent progress of Venona and the search for “G.”
* There is no letter “H” in the Russian alphabet, so “Homer” transcribes as “Gomer,” hence “Material G.” This led to later confusion within the Foreign Office.
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“From my discussions with my friends at meetings outside Washington, two main points emerged. First, it was essential to rescue Maclean before the net closed in on him . . . Second, it was desirable that Maclean should stay in his post as long as possible.” Kim Philby’s near-paradoxical instructions from Moscow Centre, his “friends” at their meetings in out-of-town diners, were clear: Maclean needed to be exfiltrated before he blew the entire ring, but also kept in place for the time being to exploit the intelligence potential of his new post. With Maclean as head of the American Department, Philby as station chief in Washington, and Burgess in the Washington Embassy, the Russians had the British–American establishment in their pockets—yet they also had a puzzle. They knew from Philby that Homer had not been identified, but during Maclean’s descent in the past year there must be a very high chance that he had been turned. If so, their man in Washington surely would know—unless he too was involved in a fiendish double-cross. Against that, Maclean had been committed enough to ask to live in Moscow, and was in a prime job to help them. Unknowingly, he was trapped in the wilderness of mirrors in which a spy must live, possible victim of both ruse and counter-ruse. At the start of 1951, the Russians had reached a positively British compromise: they would “leave him alone” but find a way to exfiltrate him should they need to. The reports from Cairo, on top of whatever emotional volatility they disapproved of in the relationship with Kitty Harris, might well have kept them at arm’s length for now as regards any fresh espionage.
*
Maclean himself knew nothing of the developments in Arlington Hall and Whitehall, but there had been little that would have alarmed him during most of his convalescent leave. As Lamphere had noted, MI5 and MI6 did not in 1949 seem very perturbed by the wartime spy. With a large cipher section in the Washington Embassy and “from half-a-dozen to a dozen ‘unofficial’ spares” of the vital telegrams “run off and kept on shelves in the Distribution Room” in a cupboard which did not even have a lock until “some time” in 1945, they were looking in the proverbial haystack. Apart from glancing at the two unfortunates thought to have had “nervous breakdowns” and those with Russian relatives referred to by Philby, their renewed assumption that the mole could not be a “senior man” left them no closer to their goal.
In March 1950 a despairing situation report was written in the Foreign Office which admitted that “the standard of security and control of classified papers was very bad” and that so far “at least 150 people had access” to the telegrams known to have been sent to Moscow, a number “likely to be increased as enquiries proceed.” As Maclean went back to work in the Foreign Office the investigators had a long shortlist of names with very little to go on: one suspect since 1949 was Samuel Barron, known to have had pre-war “Communist connections” and to have been approached as an agent in 1934, result unknown to the Security Services. Barron had been in the cipher room in Washington and was still on the list in 1951 but with no “reasonable” evidence that could be found to interrogate him. Another name was Gavin Ranken, a decade older than Maclean, on the list because he had been stationed in Rome in the 1920s where there had been a leak, and where he had coincidentally bought “an expensive car.” Ranken’s spendthrift habits continued in Washington, where he had bought “an expensive house” in 1946. Again, there was nothing to pin on him from the material or even any circumstantial evidence that he had direct access to or had ever seen the stolen telegrams.
At this stage, the name of Donald Maclean was not included on the list of suspects, so improbable was it that such a diligent servant should be a traitor.
*
In 1949, five telegrams had been partially decoded dating back to March 1945 laying out Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s ideas for post-war Eastern Europe. Four of them were about the make-up of Poland, the fifth concentrating on Romania. In August 1950, as Maclean was spending his desperately confused summer in England, a telegram from 1944 was cracked open by Gardner and his team which contained information on “at least three subjects” of much greater interest: “the source of the information on the last of these subjects is referred to in the Russian telegram by the letter G”—“G,” as it turned out, for “Gomer.” “Agent G” was a development from “Material G” because “G” was now definitely a spy with a code-name that began with that letter, as opposed to the more amorphous “Material G.” This latest decrypt included correspondence between the Prime Minister and the President about the invasion of Europe by either Operation Overlord (which became the D-Day landings) or Operation Anvil (the proposed landings in southern France), as well as about the German occupation zones they hoped to persuade the Soviets to adopt. The importance of the material that had at some point passed through the Washington Embassy to Moscow (and critically not been circulated to any American departments) meant the hunt took on a different hue. This was top-secret intelligence of the most highly classified order, prompting a momentous change in the tone and pace of the investigation.
*
Meanwhile, Maclean, oblivious, took up his new position to open a fresh chapter in his life. The American Department was based in the magnificence of the old India Office, no longer needed for its original purpose since India had achieved independence three years earlier. Even the Third Room, where the lowly Third Secretaries sat, “was a cavernous barn . . . with windows so high that they could have occupied another storey.” Around this vast space ran a minstrels’ gallery, from which one of the members of the department used to play his violin. At four o’clock each day the nine-strong department would down tools to take tea, their boss standing in front of the coal fire at one end. Maclean’s two deputies (one of them Robert Cecil, his colleague from Paris and Washington) had another subdivision of this large outer office, while he himself had a private room. The tea ritual apart, Maclean was withdrawn from his staff, and notably never asked any of them out for a meal or a drink. John Cairncross, who was then working in the foreign currency control section of the Treasury after a useful (in espionage terms) spell at the Ministry of Supply, without any knowledge of his common bond with Maclean, set up a dinner meeting with an American contact which “was not a success” as the diplomat appeared “sleepy, almost drugged.” Part of the danger of a dinner invitation was that Maclean might be too drunk to hide his boredom.
After the wartime bustle the Foreign Office had reverted to many of its old ways and never abandoned others such as the elderly frock-coated messengers who carried files done up with red ribbon, a bureaucratic detail “inherited from the Mogul Empire.” A handbook of diplomatic etiquette written with his quill pen by Marcus Cheke, the Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, was just being produced and was full of helpful instructions for what to say at funerals and what not to say at dinner-parties—mentioning birth control at the latter was a grave faux pas. The incoming Foreign Secretary and former trade union leader Ernest Bevin had it withdrawn soon enough, after pointing at it “with his
stubby finger” and saying, “Either ’ee or I must go.” Women of diplomatic rank, of which there were only four or five in the whole service, two of them in Maclean’s department, had to leave their jobs if they married; and they were not allowed to serve in South America as it was feared “they would swiftly suffer ‘a fate worse than death’ at the hands of some passionate Latino, and become unreliable.”
Margaret Anstee was one of these two female Third Secretaries, at the start of a career that took her from an Essex village school to Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. She remembered Maclean on his arrival as “serene, unfussed and calmly in control of everything.” She and the rest of the department were told that he “had had a nervous breakdown . . . and his marriage had collapsed. We would all have to be sensitive to his state of mind.” When the news emerged about Melinda’s pregnancy, they assumed everything had been “patched up.” Margaret Anstee was a Labour Party supporter, outspoken about social justice, but assumed from what her boss said at the daily tea parties that he was a “pale pink liberal” of whom she was well to the left. Maclean was back in the swing of being a model diplomat and was once again the darling of the typing pool, where he had been christened “Fancy-Pants” Maclean before the war. His charm and good manners contrasted strongly with the recently departed Burgess. He always stood up when Daphne Carroll came into the room to take dictation and “spoke at a proper speed.” He was “very popular” all round. “Sir Donald” seemed calmly back on track.
*
Once Burgess had gone to America, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross were the only two active members of the Cambridge Five in London. Both had been temporarily dropped for fear they had been compromised when Gouzenko defected, which also coincided with Blunt’s departure from MI5 at the end of the war to resume his career as an art historian. He became Director of the Courtauld Institute as well as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, in which role he both charmed (by his personality) and puzzled (by his intellect) the royal family. With Maclean a risky proposition, Burgess out of the country and Cairncross seeing nothing of interest to Moscow Centre from the Treasury, Blunt was the only one in touch with Modin in the London rezidentura, passing on titbits gleaned through his friendship with Guy Liddell, Deputy Director General of MI5. To the distaste of the aesthetically aloof Blunt, their meetings took place in Modin’s chosen venue in the west London suburb of Ruislip, with its dull ranks of semi-detached houses.
That left Maclean the lone spy in a prime position of influence and access in London at a politically crucial time for the war in Korea. President Truman stated in a press conference on 30 November that the US would take “whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation” there. On being asked if those steps might include using the atomic bomb, he replied, “That includes every weapon we have,” adding “There has always been active consideration of [the atom bomb’s] use.” Britain was already anxious about America escalating any confrontation with Communist China in a world where McCarthyism and a lessening of focus on divided Europe were already sending out loud signals. The rhetoric being ramped up to nuclear levels was terrifying. Prime Minister Attlee concluded a debate in the House of Commons that evening with the announcement that he intended to fly to Washington to hold a meeting with Truman four days later. Maclean had a copy of the hurriedly written forty-page briefing document for the Prime Minister’s visit to Washington, New York and Ottawa which included Attlee’s plan to persuade the President to avoid violating China’s Manchurian frontier and risking Soviet intervention. He kept it in his safe for the rest of his time in the job.
After years in which he had been almost exposed, had been driven close to suicide and had suffered a massive breakdown, Maclean still saw everything of classified value, despite the government’s claim that the American Department dealt “principally with Latin American affairs.” Everything passing through the Foreign Office to do with the Korean War came across his desk, and he made doubly sure of that when he approached the Distribution Selectors, as they were known, in the Communications Department on 25 January 1951 to check that he was “getting all the telegrams he should on the Korean question.” He saw documents commenting on NATO dispositions, mobilisation plans and bases. He saw classified material detailing how overextended Britain was, with its garrison in the Middle East “cut to the bone.” He saw a cable sent from Ambassador Franks in Washington with the highest confidentiality of all. Once the Washington meetings had established that the Truman administration were not in fact considering using the atom bomb, their strategic thrust was, in essence, led by the British desire to keep the war in Korea local, not involving China, which despite the attacks it had launched the US persisted in seeing as the pawn of Russia. In fact, Stalin had initially offered support and weapons to China but on the very same day, 8 October 1950, he had sent a message to Beijing via Molotov stating that “We do not agree with the decision to send in your troops, and we will not supply you with military equipment.” Feelings ran so high between the Western allies that at one point the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, “inquired sarcastically whether a Chinese attack on [the British colony of] Hong Kong would mean war, when it was not considered war for the Chinese to attack American troops in Korea.”
Stalin was of the view, shared by much of the rest of the world, that “a Third World War was imminent” and did not need high-level British espionage back-up for this opinion. Maclean, out of contact with Moscow Centre since his desperate and solitary departure from Cairo, seemed calmer, able to voice his own political certainties now that he was relieved of the need to over-correct in order to compensate for his espionage, more confident with his peers in the diplomatic corps. But he was nonetheless anxious about the war, the first major conflict between his ideological and his patriotic homes, and dissatisfied with the British status quo and American drift further to the right. When Maclean had lunch with Nicholas Henderson in December, Henderson was “struck by the fact that he seemed to take the side of the [Communist] North Koreans in a way that made argument impossible.” In the same month Maclean explained to Cyril Connolly over lunch at the Travellers Club that both sides had forgotten that the North Koreans were “people” and were exploiting the war for the sake of their own “prestige.” The relief he derived from airing his true beliefs began to unmoor him from his professional diplomatic impartiality; if Moscow Centre had been in touch with him, they might have been able to steer him through careful handling back to his old state, but they might also have regarded his lapses in the office as justification for cutting him off. Henderson had been “very upset when he saw [Maclean’s] Minute . . . on the Korean War and American policy.” He wrote a “counter Minute” and Maclean was only “half-friendly” when he said that Henderson “had no right to say what he had about his Minute.” Maclean also put his own “alarmist” views on the minutes of a meeting about Korea, saying that American aggression “was pushing the world into a pointless war,” an opinion that was open to any newspaper reader.
*
The net began to close in on Maclean during his first week back at work. Geoffrey Paterson, sent to Washington on behalf of MI5, passed on to London Lamphere’s suggestion that the 1944 leaks from New York (the Russian handler had said in June 1944 that they were meeting in “Tyre”) and the extraordinarily damaging 1945 ones about Yalta and post-war Europe from Washington could have come from the same source. They now knew that Gorsky (working under his cover-name of Gromov) “took over certain commitments in Washington DC” as “Chief MGB Resident at the Soviet Embassy,” so “it is not unreasonable to suppose that G worked at first to New York and later to [Gorsky].” In other words, that the supplier of “Material G” from New York was probably the same person as “Agent G” in Washington. This supposition led to some sharper detective work, which was once again handicapped by prejudice.
By 8 December there was a list of “Certain” criteria: that “G” had been a member of the Embass
y staff in 1944; that his work had “included personal telegraphic correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt”; that the spy had had access to papers about the allocation of occupation zones in Germany; that he had personally deciphered a telegram from Churchill to Roosevelt; and that he had had access to a highly classified War Cabinet Memorandum about uranium after its internal circulation. The list of those supposed to see the last were Michael Wright, Sir Ronald Campbell, Lord Halifax and Maclean, but “G” had to have had it afterwards as none of those men could be suspect. Two other “Probable” and “Possible” criteria raised in this top-secret note, that the mole still had access in March 1945 and had a wife who lived with him in Washington at the time, do not seem actually to have been applied to the candidates. The sifting would continue into 1951, just as Maclean began to feel more settled in his new role.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 31