A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  In London, Carey Foster found Mackenzie’s analysis “most interesting and useful,” although he was “disturbed” that the “new evidence” had only just come to light—a possible dig at the secur­ity services. He could not resist going back to his own shortlist of diplomatic stars from 1949 of Balfour, Makins, Hadow, Wright, Gore-Booth and Maclean, which when put together with Krivitsky came down to “Balfour, possibly Makins, and Gore-Booth.” Maclean did not make the final cut because of “the more detailed information supplied by Krivitsky.” This is not specified but might well refer to schooling. Excluding Makins and Balfour on the grounds of age gave the same result that Mackenzie had reached: Gore-Booth—but only if Krivitsky’s spy of the 1930s was the same as “G” of the 1940s, for which they had no evidence. Carey Foster was still not keen to have “a senior man” as a spy of such magnitude and asked that “junior members of Chancery” should be looked at while the wartime travel records were obtained.

  Lamphere, meanwhile, was badgering the British about their progress and had asked about the Krivitsky evidence. Following the unpleasant matter of Nunn May and Fuchs there was a tense relationship between the FBI and the British over security matters. Paterson had hoped that Gore-Booth would soon be posted back to Britain (he was currently serving in Washington himself, which hobbled his masters a bit) before the FBI, having “jumped to premature conclusions,” demanded interrogation. There is con­­­­descension (mixed with alarm) in the attempt to regain a little of the security high ground as well as a justifiable desire to avoid feeding the febrile atmosphere of “Senator McCarthy and anti-administration politicians.”

  Now that he had a theory ahead of his security service colleagues and the less gentlemanly FBI, Mackenzie was determined to make it stick. He offered Philby “short odds” that Gore-Booth was the spy. After all, “as for ideals, Gore-Both was a Christian Scientist and a teetotaller,” so what more evidence could Philby want? Philby, inwardly delighted that they were at the wrong end of the spectrum if they believed Christian Science and abstention were the marks of Homer, wanted to buy all the time he could. He knew that if this was handled the wrong way and Maclean was rumbled before he could be safely smuggled behind the Iron Curtain, his own cover could be blown and the Cambridge Five would go down like dominoes. He agreeably went along with Mackenzie.

  It became important to make sure that the pieces that did not fit the puzzle were dovetailed in. Mackenzie noticed that Gore-Booth had been transferred to Vienna in April 1936, while Krivitsky had spoken of seeing documents from the source now known as Homer as late as 1937. That could be glossed over: they might have been sent from Vienna rather than London, however unlikely it might be that the Embassy in land-locked, post-Anschluss Austria would need to see the Committee of Imperial Defence minutes. Another possibility was that “the prints seen by Krivitsky [who had told them he saw photographs of the minutes] were old ones” that had only recently made their way to Gore-Booth, or perhaps ones that he had failed to send earlier and had taken with him. The 1944 Embassy travel records were missing anyway, so any omissions for Gore-Booth’s trips to New York did not need accounting for. That Gore-Booth had not initialled certain files that were known from Venona to have been passed on to Moscow was “entirely possible”: if the most sensitive, including the correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, had been read in Washington in one sitting, Gore-Booth would only have initialled the top file. It took another few weeks before Paterson gently wondered “whether we might be attaching too much significance to initials on telegrams” in cases of espionage at this level. There was no mention of Maclean putting his mark on the telegrams in question, as he could take them from the registry any time he wanted.

  Paterson joined in the hunt for Gore-Booth evidence on 11 April, while stressing that it had to be kept between him, Carey Foster, Philby and Mackenzie. “It would be alarming if H[is] E[xcellency] were to hear any unhappy rumours of our suspicions via the FBI, A[ttorney] G[eneral], State Department and [Secretary of State] Mr Acheson,” and to let on to the FBI in particular “would be asking for trouble and any hope of handling the matter quietly and discreetly would be blown sky-high.” The real reason was perhaps to do not so much with fear of early exposure as with saving face, because “it was highly undesirable that they should again be able to claim, as with the Fuchs case, that they had been responsible for uncovering a British agent of the Soviet intelligence system.”

  *

  Despite Mackenzie’s claim that they backed his Gore-Booth theory, MI5 got properly back on track and were definitely getting warmer at the beginning of April, when Paterson forwarded to London an accurate but unsigned top-secret memorandum. Literary criticism and date-checking (late in the day, perhaps) came into play when it was pointed out that “in style and content” there were similarities between the partial decrypts of 2/3 August 1944 and of 7 September, so “G” and “Gomer” could now definitely be assumed to be one and the same. In spite of the “fragmentary information” and many “ifs and buts,” a pattern seemed to be emerging of four- or five-weekly meetings in New York, and the material being handed over on a Sunday. These weekend visits both strengthened the case for the agent being stationed in Washington, and made the travel papers a tree that at least need no longer be barked up as records were not kept for out-of-hours travelling.

  The telegrams were sent to Moscow four days after the New York meetings with the agent but no classified material was sent following the first meeting on 25 June. This might be because the spy had been “absent from his post in the period immediately preceding” or, “alternatively,” because this was the first contact between agent and handler and nothing was handed over. In Philby’s view, which was of course bolstered by knowledge of the truth which gave him other puzzles to grapple with, the security services were acting with a great deal more intelligence and psychological nous than the Foreign Office in looking for the “odd man out,” the loner who hated the diplomatic round, rather than the “depressingly conformist” names on the rest of the list, those who could make an accomplished toast in Latin to warrant the name of “Homer.”

  While these late-exploding and accurate bombshells were being sent to London, Philby’s extraordinary run of luck seemed to be holding up. The British Ambassador informed the State Department in mid-April that Guy Burgess was being recalled to London. Goats were not involved, but the final straw after so much sloppy work and drunkenly offensive behaviour was a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of February. Burgess was going to give a lecture at The Citadel, a military college, on “Britain: Partner for Peace,” defending Britain’s recognition of Communist China. He was stopped for speeding twice on the way there, but got himself off by claiming diplomatic immunity. The third time the young black homosexual he was travelling with, James Turck, was driving and the patrolman did not accept that a diplomat’s chauffeur could have immunity, nor indeed could the diplomat himself when Turck let slip it was the third violation of the day. The Governor of Virginia complained to Franks, who had had enough. Handily enough for Moscow Centre and Philby, he ordered Burgess’s return to London. Burgess dined with Philby on his last night in the US in a New York Chinese restaurant where each booth had piped music loud enough to drown out their voices. Burgess was given a “step-by-step” briefing on how he was to conduct himself when he got back to England, how to warn Maclean that he was going to be rumbled any day now, and how to set up an escape plan. Philby’s last words in the West to his friend and fellow spy, “spoken only half-jocularly were ‘Don’t you go, too.’ ”

  Burgess sailed on 1 May from New York, where he had stayed at 123 East 55th Street in the apartment of Donald Maclean’s unsuspecting younger brother, Alan. The Maclean brothers’ employment by His Majesty’s Government now had only a few weeks to run. The innocent younger man was to have his life changed irrevoc­­­­­­ably by the ideology of the older.

  *

  George Carey Foster and his colleagues started to
dig deeper, no doubt encouraged by Paterson’s work in Washington. They finally “examined” the personal files of the seven Chancery officers who had been in their sights at various times. Hooper’s handwritten memorandum of the rant at Humphrey Slater had come to light, including Maclean’s lie that he was a Communist Party member of long standing, and this time it was deemed perhaps to “have direct security significance.” If they had had a mole in the Gargoyle Club they would even have had their confession. Maclean’s name was back on the list and a more focused comparison with the life and times of Gore-Booth could be carried out. At a meeting of White, James Robertson and Martin for the Security Service and Patrick Reilly and Carey Foster for the Foreign Office on the 17th (a Saturday when the office would be quieter), it was agreed that the political sympathies of both men should be looked into, as well as their movements in 1944 and 1945.

  When the pair were compared objectively by MI5 to Krivitsky’s evidence, Maclean had three more ticks in his column than Gore-Booth: he could have seen the Imperial Defence Committee minutes in 1937, by which time Gore-Booth was in Vienna; he had access to material in London about defence measures in the same year; under “Was young aristocrat?” he got “His father was an MP and Knight,” where the socially superior Gore-Booth (his grand­father was a baronet who owned estates in Ireland covering thirty-nine square miles) got “No obvious reason for such a description.” Three days later Carey Foster had spoken to Roderick Barclay, Maclean’s predecessor as head of Chancery, and established that Melinda did live in New York when they arrived, and that Maclean had started work in June, not July as planned, because Barclay had been struck down with mumps and had to leave early. So Maclean, after all, had been in place for the first telegram at the end of that month. The scales had tipped to his side. Gore-Booth, who went on to become head of the Foreign Office and a member of the House of Lords, knew none of this. He was in the clear and free to pursue the career that could have been his co-suspect’s.

  As the case was starting to look bad for their trusted friend and colleague, Carey Foster “stressed that, without exception, everyone who now knew of our suspicions was incredulous that Maclean could be the guilty party and had made numerous counter suggestions.” Carey Foster was therefore “anxious” that those who had come under suspicion “in the past,” including Ranken and Barron, be investigated again, as well as Miss Randall, in her role as head of the Green Registry through which the telegrams had passed.

  In spite of this last plea, the evidence against the head of the American Department was sufficient for a tap to be put on his home telephone and a tail to be put on him that day. Taps were also put on Lady Maclean’s telephone and, perhaps in the belief that Maclean would be telling all his secrets to his psychoanalyst (who would be bound by her oath not to reveal them), on Erna Rosenbaum’s. A censoriously accurate description of their target was circulated to the watchers: “big build; broad-shouldered; good looking; clean shaven; very slightly florid face . . . I am told he drinks quite a bit and the general effect is to make his appearance a little more slovenly than it would be otherwise.” For a man who had had code-names assigned to him by Moscow for fifteen years, it now became necessary to give him one from his own side—and “Curzon” was chosen. Although almost certainly chosen because the headquarters of MI5, Leconfield House, was in Curzon Street, the irony of the name of that zealously devoted public servant the Marquess Curzon, late Foreign Secretary and Viceroy of India, who had died when his new namesake was eleven, might not have been lost on the mandarins, who would have taken comfort from such a familiar and patriotic figure being chosen to stand for a man they were loath to believe a traitor.

  On 23 April, the day the taps came into action, it was decided by the Foreign Office and MI5 to inform MI6 of their “strong suspicions,” “owing to the fact that Philby himself is already in the picture.” Michael Wright was visited in Oslo and confirmed that Melinda had lived in New York in 1944 while Mrs Gore-Booth had been at her husband’s side in Washington. Wright could not resist getting in a couple of digs about Melinda’s “lower-middle-class family” and her lack of intellect.

  As the Queen Mary transported a sodden Guy Burgess and his secret instructions to Southampton, another high-level meeting was held in the Foreign Office on 4 May. The heads of MI5 and the Foreign Office agreed that the FBI should be told about the suspicions but would be asked to keep them quiet until they had had a chance to interrogate their suspect, within a fortnight “at most.” Maclean was now alone in the spotlight of suspicion. A failure to follow through on their decision within the fortnight would do lasting damage to their reputation and have further reverberating inter­national repercussions. But they were confident all would be well.

  *

  The final evidence against Donald Maclean was contained in the very first telegram clumsily sent by Pravdin on 28 June 1944 after the two men had first made contact. The fact that this contained no espionage material meant that it might have been simply commenting on the first meeting between Homer and Pravdin, as MI5 had already wondered might be the case. The decoded fragment read:

  Your No. 2712. SERGEI’s [Pravdin] meeting with HOMER took place on 25 June. HOMER did not hand anything over. The next meeting will take place on 30 July in TYRE [New York]. It has been made possible for HOMER to summon SERGEI in case of need. SIDON’s [London] original instructions have been altered [thirty-four groups unrecoverable] travel to TYRE where his wife is living with her mother while awaiting confinement . . .

  The devastating lack of tradecraft in the personal detail about Melinda’s pregnancy and living arrangements was the smoking gun that led to the appalled Foreign Office’s ultimate acceptance that Donald Maclean, the man many of them expected to run the show in due course, the star they had hitched themselves to and protected, had to be Homer. The quiet genius of Meredith Gardner and his team and their years of work had uncovered the very detail that meant Homer could be only one person. When he realised a few weeks later what had happened to his decrypts, Gardner “thought, ‘Just think of that! I made them do it!’ I didn’t really feel self-important but I was impinging on the real world more than when I was just a scholar and studying philology.” Sir William Strang, Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, went “quite white” on being told the news—“I just can’t believe it.”

  *

  There would have to be a confession, as with Fuchs and Nunn May, or evidence was needed that would not compromise Venona, too classified to be revealed in court, if Maclean was to be brought to book. Meanwhile, the head of the American Department went about his duties immaculately, took part in the tea parties in the old India Office and most nights caught the 6:19 from Victoria to Oxted and drove from the station in his “large American pale green car,” still with its Egyptian licence plates, to his new home and newly cleared garden, his heavily pregnant wife and their two sons, who were now losing their American accents. The most senior spy ever detected inside the British government was still allowed to go about his business, his colleagues and the security services paralysed with indecision about how to bring in him and deeply embarrassed about how to deal with their closest allies, who had uncovered him in the first place.

  For Maclean himself, the solution to the dilemma he did not know he was in was steaming across the Atlantic in the unlikely guise of Guy Burgess.

  * The upright and patrician Gore-Booth also had some ability in French. He saw Maclean only once after their simultaneous service in Washington, in late 1950, when he was struck, as he recorded in his memoirs With Great Truth and Respect, by his “aspect of dégringolade,” meaning “falling to pieces.”

  16

  Endgame

  For a man who had been in crisis, at his nadir eighteen months earlier begging to be taken to Russia, it was a profound irony that life seemed to have settled into an agreeable normality before the first, secret meeting that started what had been a desired union of his lives. Some mornings Melinda would come up on t
he train to London with him, and they would part at Victoria, she taking a bus with Fergus to see Lady Maclean in Kensington (“Give my love to Mother!” he would shout as they parted at Sloane Square), he making his way to his desk at around 10:00. The couple lunched at Schmidt’s with a third person, unknown to those watching him, in Charlotte Street on 26 April. Schmidt’s, with its cheap meals of Hungarian goulash, Würst, braised pork knuckle and red cabbage, served by elderly and famously surly German and Austrian waiters, was so much a favourite haunt of his that Maclean was to choose it for his last meal in London. With Melinda the talk was of the impending birth, friends in Egypt and their companion’s matrimonial prospects. Donald was “drinking quite heavily,” but as usual was back at work by 3:15.

  On the last Saturday of the month, when the office shut at lunchtime, Donald was joined at Victoria Station by his brother Andy, visiting from New Zealand. They returned to London on Monday morning after Andy had seen the new house and his nephews, and been put to work in the garden. The following week was for old friends, lunch with Toynbee at the Travellers Club, drinks with Nicholas Henderson, Mark Culme-Seymour coming down to Kent for the night. If he was going home alone, Maclean would always stop for a quick whisky and soda at the Red Lion in Whitehall, or drink at the Fountain in Wilton Road, on his way to Victoria.

  There had been no recent outbursts about being a Communist or being betrayed by his friends. From the start of the year his lunches (and the occasional dinner) had been in the respectable establishment surroundings of the Garrick Club, Army and Navy Club or the Travellers. As well as “Nicko” Henderson and Culme-Seymour, Lees Mayall and Toynbee lunched with him. He saw some of his intellectual circle, including Cyril Connolly, the composer Kit Lambert and the philosopher Freddie Ayer. George Carey Foster, still head of security at the Foreign Office, lunched with Maclean on 1 May, but did not record whether this was an uncomfortable occasion for either man: the watchers simply noted that nothing was said by Maclean “which would be of value” to MI5. Once again, the accomplished “Sir Donald” seemed to be carrying the day against dissolute “Gordon.” His last appointment with Erna Rosenbaum had been in the middle of February; given his patchy attendance record when he needed the therapist’s professional help most, this failure to see her again might reveal nothing more than that a few months into this “happiest period” Melinda and he felt he could maintain his stability. They were looking forward to the birth of the baby—with the attendant anxiety about the birth itself, given their past experiences—­the boys were happy at school, work was interesting. Donald Maclean had no idea of the catastrophic discoveries and calculations closing in on him from Venona, MI5 and Moscow Centre as he went around this innocent daily round.