If any link had been made at this stage to the Krivitsky evidence put back into play by Philby, or to the recent behaviour of one of the four men (realistically one of two because Halifax and Campbell were genuinely above suspicion in even the most fevered imaginations), much time would have been saved. Eighteen months earlier, Arthur Martin of MI5 had suggested that Michael Wright be security-cleared by the Foreign Office in respect of the investigation before Carey Foster apprised him of the leaks, but Carey Foster prevailed when “he said he did not think this was necessary.” On the other hand, a committed and able member of MI6 who dealt daily in secrecy, Dwyer, had to be vetted before “indoctrination.” The assumption was that anyone who had served ably in the foreign service was a pillar of patriotic moral rectitude, whereas MI5 and MI6, used as they were to looking into other people’s secrets, could not be trusted. History has shown that the second assumption was not always wrong either.
It was decided that the person to ask about who might have been leaking from the Embassy was Wilfrid Thomas, a sensible choice in the circumstances given that he had been head of the cipher room (which was directly accessible by about fifty cipher officers, distributors and typists, as well as by the diplomats) “unbuttoning” the telegrams in the war. Thomas was now British Consul in New York. This would be a tricky conversation as Thomas was by dint of his former position a prime suspect himself, so Carey Foster suggested to Bobbie Mackenzie that he might take the experienced Philby to New York with him to assist. On the other hand, that might alarm Thomas, so “on the whole” maybe Mackenzie and Philby’s opposite number in MI5, Paterson, should accompany Mackenzie. We can only speculate whether Thomas might have been a more useful red herring for Philby to exploit and thereby baffle his own side, keeping Maclean in place a while longer as his orders from Moscow Centre had instructed him to do. Philby could see by now that his recruit’s days were drastically numbered, and he urgently needed to find a way to fulfil the second, “rescue” part of his orders.
*
While these moves were being made across the Atlantic, the Maclean family once again seemed harmonious. Melinda described the 1950 Christmas holiday and the weeks that followed it as “amongst the happiest in [her] married life.” Fergus and Beany were not only starting at a new school but were running through the childhood illnesses of mumps and chickenpox; the house was too big and very shabby; she was pregnant. But her furniture had arrived from Cairo, her mother had left Europe in November and family life had started again. Most of all in those first few months of their reconciliation, Donald was behaving like a model husband and father, leaving on the early train after bringing her a cup of tea and, above all, eschewing the cocktail-party round and the post-work sessions in the pub to come home most days at around 7:30. Weekends were spent clearing their large garden, sometimes with friends offering to help.
Until the Cold War got under way in earnest and his drinking increased in concert with the global situation, Maclean had been able to live with himself, both his moral and his patriotic sides praised and satisfied. But now he seemed only to find this peace, as on that Christmas holiday, when he was with his family, able to behave like a senior civil servant at leisure in tending to them and his garden. He appeared relieved to be out of the spying game, was ignorant of the advances being made in Washington regarding his own case, and yet was well aware of the exposures of Communists and the rabid witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. As the world slid more towards ideological conflict, right against left, once again he had a ringside seat, but this time without the usefulness of an outlet in Moscow Centre, feeling he had a purpose. His alcoholism was also largely untreated. As the rhetoric was ratcheted up he had to remain the polished diplomat, but he found it harder and harder to restrain his drinking in the early months of 1951 and soon descended into his final spiral.
*
In early January, the very first mention of drunken behaviour appeared on Maclean’s file in a handwritten memo from Robin Hooper, who had succeeded Middleton as head of personnel. Patience Pain, who worked in the office and was thus a “reliable source,” had heard something from a cousin, Humphrey Slater, who had been a Communist and had written a novel entitled The Conspirator. True to the trajectory of many converts, Slater was now “violently anti-communist.” He was an artist, as were many others at a party Maclean had attended, including Rodrigo Moynihan and Robert Buhler. Melinda was not present but Philip Toynbee was. Toynbee had recently returned from the Middle East, accompanied by his new fiancée Sally, and the tightly bound men took up with each other again. “A lot of drink flowed” at the party and “there was obviously a lot of rather silly alcoholic argument.” Maclean, “stung to fury” by something derogatory Slater had said about Communism or North Korea, said, “Of course, you know I’m a Party member—have been for years!” Whether or not this was intended to get a rise out of Slater, it was not only pointlessly dangerous but also a completely unnecessary lie, given that he was not and never had been a member of the CPGB. From his Foreign Office interview on, Maclean had got away with charming evasions to allay suspicion about his true beliefs, but this was a bad moment to fall back into the late-night habits of his Cairo days and unwittingly incriminate himself.
Slater, who disliked Maclean, told his cousin Patience Pain about this exchange. Even as the Foreign Office and security services were struggling to come up with any plausible identities for Homer, the official line that ended the head of personnel’s minute was “Obviously, this is not to be taken seriously, but it is evidence that D is still hitting it up and that he is apt to be irresponsible in his cups.” There is at least acknowledgement of the dangers of Maclean behaving badly “in his cups,” but even with the wreckage of the Cairo flat known through the press clipping from the Daily Express, there was no indication that the head of the American Department was considered in any sense a liability to the office. It was “not to be taken seriously.” Small as his declaration might seem in the scale of Maclean’s drunken indiscretions, and as indirectly as it had come to innocent official attention, Patience Pain’s almost accidental evidence was soon to assume importance as the hazy situation gained focus.
*
As in Cairo, Maclean could “put on his armour” and was very much his urbane self in the office. It was when he was away from there, and away from his warm new home environment, and drank, that he was increasingly getting into trouble. In spite of his attempts at recovery over the previous year, Melinda seems to have resigned herself to his absences and hangovers; at least this time he was neither strangling her nor causing criminal damage and official embarrassment. He was more often a good husband, father and homeowner. Maybe she even appreciated his need to have the release of binge-drinking to manage his stress levels, which she could understand.
Goronwy Rees had disavowed Communism at the time of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, had worked in MI6 and had made his post-war career as a journalist and an academic while maintaining his close friendship with Guy Burgess. It was nonetheless an intense relief when his friend went to Washington as “one was no longer liable to be rung up late at night and asked whether he might come round for a drink, or to have him for lunch and find him still with you at breakfast.” Early in 1951 Rees was in the Gargoyle Club, that “favourite resort of intellectuals,” when Maclean, whom he had not seen for fifteen years and had had no “reason even to think of,” “lurched over” to his table and “said in an extremely aggressive and menacing voice, ‘I know all about you. You used to be one of us, but you ratted.’ ” Then, clutching the edge of the table, he collapsed to his knees, “his large white face suspended like a moon at about the level of my chest, and from this absurd position he proceeded to direct an incoherent stream of abuse at me” until “he rose unsteadily to his feet and stumbled away.” Rees’s mind spun for a few days before he concluded that Maclean had retained his “communist beliefs, and with time had gradually become more outspoken about them, for the very reason that it was no longer so necessary
to conceal them” to a former fellow-traveller. But Maclean was giving voice to those beliefs because they had no other outlet, now that it was safe to reveal them to Rees. When he was unleashed by drink, he posed a danger to himself and proved a spectacle to others. He was once again coming off the rails at speed.
Both Fuchs and Nunn May had experienced relief on confessing to Jim Skardon. Maclean hated the murky business of espionage, put concisely when he likened it to cleaning lavatories as a necessary job, and was on that level pleased not to be in the game. His idealism was intact even as it failed to be supported. His resort to drink meant that he was capable of blurting out the truth without understanding the importance and impact of what he was saying. Perhaps he was still craving removal from his world of capitalist imperialism where all but a handful had “ratted.” Perhaps he just did not know where to turn.
He had told Janetta Kee that Dr Rosenbaum “had said that his occasional violence was caused by the fact that he did not ever give vent to his feelings or passions on the surface, and something had to be released . . . by means of alcohol, and took a violent form.” When he did try to let go of his secrets he often could not be heard because of his daytime, lifelong and totally convincing mask. At a party in Chelsea, he shouted at his old friend and best man Mark Culme-Seymour, “What would you do if I told you I was a Communist agent?” Culme-Seymour, understandably, had no answer to this and, as he stammered, Maclean carried on.
“Well, wouldn’t you report me?”
“I don’t know. Who to?”
“Well, I am. Go on, report me.”
This was followed by “a diatribe” against the State Department and its handling of the Korean War.
The next day the shaken Culme-Seymour went to see Cyril Connolly to discuss the incident, as he of all people surely knew Maclean well enough to be confident that what had been said could not be true. He and Connolly decided that it was “a loyalty test with a high alcoholic content,” rather than a plea to stop living the lie. Philip Toynbee, no doubt remembering the nights before the final Cairo debauch, later claimed that “when intoxicated Donald would be most anxious to make extremely dramatic statements. His only intention would be to surprise and shock the person to whom he was talking.” In fact, these episodes all offered glimpses into the inner man and were just as true as those that Toynbee had experienced when Maclean was rambling to him from his armchair as dawn broke over Cairo.
The Gargoyle Club was also the scene for the agonising test of Maclean’s friendship with Toynbee, his closest with any man, with any person with the exception of Melinda. In mid-March, Toynbee had written an article in the Observer under the headline “Alger Hiss and his Friends” in response to the US Supreme Court’s rejection of Hiss’s appeal. Toynbee reminded his readers that Alistair Cooke had taken the line in his book on the Hiss–Chambers case the previous year that “the tragedy of Alger Hiss lay in the fact that the conduct of the thirties was being unfairly judged in the radically changed climate of the late forties. Hiss was condemned for having been a Communist when a whole generation of good and reasonable people believed that this was a proper thing to be.” The puzzle was why Chambers had ruined his own career (he had been editor of Time magazine) and was now a “recluse” because of his actions in denouncing Hiss, whom he believed to be a Communist still giving away secrets when the charges were levelled against him. To Toynbee, who in his own words had “bitterly rejected Communism” and was now turning to the religious spirituality that became his new morality, this denunciation at the cost of Chambers’s own career was a “strange confusion of the liberal spirit, which so much prefers the appearance of Alger Hiss’s integrity and respectability to the reality of Whittaker Chambers’s change of heart.” One can hear the echo of biblical repentance in that last phrase.
A few days after the article had been published, Maclean was once again in the Gargoyle Club having missed his usual commuter train to Oxted (the station nearest to Westerham) and no doubt having made some excuse to Melinda, when he spotted Toynbee there. “According to Donald, [Chambers] was a double-faced exhibitionist too revolting to be defended by anyone,” let alone by one of his greatest friends. Nearly incapacitated by booze as well as holding his pint glass, he took a swing at Toynbee and sent him reeling into the band. “I am the English Hiss,” Maclean muttered as he turned away from his loyal friend. It was the last time the two men, the youthfully idealistic and boisterous Serpentine swimmers of 1936, the crazed flat-wreckers of 1950, would ever meet.
*
To Nicholas Henderson Maclean was “extremely likeable . . . kind and considerate,” and was one of the few fellow Foreign Office employees he saw outside the office. Just after Maclean had started work again, and before the move to Beaconshaw, the two of them went to a pub together and Maclean said to Henderson that he felt “racked” knowing that “his weakness for drink was having a bad effect on him”; he added that when drunk he “reacted against all authority . . . and liked people who were rebels.” He blamed his father, “for whom he did not seem to have much admiration,” and Sir Donald’s teetotalism for his drinking. Young Donald knew all about his father’s tireless and effective work to further social good, about his great and undivided public service, and his admiration for him now openly crossed the thin line into shame at some of his own actions. Through his own religion of Communism, as expressed to the Campbells a few months earlier, which guided his conscience and which had helped bring him to this desperate point, Donald Maclean was, in fact, probably closer to Sir Donald in spirit and integrity than he could admit.
At the beginning of April the Hendersons gave a dinner-party, attended by the Labour minister Lord Pakenham (later Lord Longford). Melinda, her dislike of these formal occasions as strong as ever, over seven months pregnant and with her hands full with the two boys, did not come. Pakenham was a staunch Catholic and humanitarian, “violently anti-communist” on account of his religion and liberal beliefs. Maclean got himself into a futile row with Pakenham over “some Foreign Office business about sending a Catholic to America” which ended with the diplomat behaving as undiplomatically as he possibly could, saying, “this government is just as bad as any other British Government—suppressing coloured people,” before storming off to the Gargoyle. One of his fellow guests put her finger on a profounder observation than she knew when she said, “he looks like a Tory and talks like a Communist.” Maclean rang Henderson the next day to apologise, simply saying “it happens.” Henderson, who lunched or dined with Maclean on at least five occasions in the first four months of 1951, later translated the incident as Maclean showing “marked sympathy for North Korea.” He rightly regarded the evening as a “disaster.”
That apology to Henderson, shrugging off his aberrant behaviour, would not have lasted through many more incidents, inside or outside the tolerant Gargoyle. But that same month Meredith Gardner had his breakthrough, the Brits on the case in Washington finally started to put the pieces of the puzzle together and the pronouncements about Maclean being a Communist and a spy became all too believable.
*
At the same time as Maclean was lurching about the Gargoyle Club, Sir Robert Mackenzie, head of security at the British Embassy, wrote from Washington on 3 April to say that he, Paterson of MI5 and Philby of MI6 were now all firmly of the view that “Material G” and “Agent G” definitely referred to the same person, and related to “Gomer.” The earlier meetings had taken place in New York and Embassy travel records had been requested to see who had regularly travelled there. Most importantly, they had realised that as Homer “gave his views on matters of policy” and was clearly “an ardent Communist” he was likely not to be working for monetary reward so much as for ideological ends. The fact that the handler had so respectfully passed on Homer’s views on some of the situations led Mackenzie to deduce that “the Russians attached considerable value to the agent’s views and . . . he was therefore a man in a responsible position.” The security services, h
ampered by Philby and the prejudices and fears of the Foreign Office about Homer’s unlikely seniority, had failed to see this.
Mackenzie took the lead. Now that he had had this breakthrough, he realised the importance of the Krivitsky information put into his path by Philby and he began to go over the evidence of more than a decade earlier. He looked at who was in Washington from the beginning of 1944, when he mistakenly believed the first telegrams had been sent, until March 1945, who had been in London from 1935 until 1937, and who was a regular member of the service, not one of the hundreds of staff taken on during the war. This gave him two candidates on all counts, Paul Gore-Booth and Michael Wright. A third possibility was Donald Maclean, but according to the records he had not arrived in Washington until the summer of 1944. The next step was to look at who had been a recent recruit in 1935–7 and who had been at Eton and Oxford. Wright was out. Gore-Booth scored on both counts. Maclean, of course, did not go to Eton and Oxford, a further strike against him. So Gore-Booth was the man.
From here, Mackenzie was quickly able to bolster his case. “G” is the first letter of the code-name and of the suspect’s real name, and “Gomer” close enough to being an anagram of “Gore.” As Carey Foster, to whom this top-secret sleuthing was addressed, knew, “Secret Services often use some form of alliteration or make some punning allusion to an agent’s habits or country when christening him.” Gore-Booth had been a classical scholar at Eton and Oxford, as “was brought home” to Mackenzie (himself an hereditary baronet and Old Etonian) at an old boys’ dinner in Washington on the Fourth of June (Eton’s day of celebration) “when he drafted a telegram of greetings to the head of the governing body, the Provost, in Latin without a moment’s hesitation.” * If Mackenzie had known it, he would probably have added that Paul Gore-Booth’s aunt was the Irish republican and socialist revolutionary Constance Markievicz, muse of W. B. Yeats (which would have satisfied the bohemianism alluded to by Krivitsky) and Minister for Labour in the Sinn Féin government of 1919, as more conclusive evidence of espionage potential than his classical proficiency. For now, a simple mistake over the date of his arrival and a healthy dose of upper-class insider knowledge had earned the real Homer a brief reprieve.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 32