A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  *

  The atmosphere changed in early May. On the first weekend of the month, Lady Maclean found the family “in a state of complete devotion one to the other,” with Donald playing games with his boys and generally being an “unquarrelsome sort of person.” He was more downcast and anxious the following weekend when Harriet Marling Sheers and her new husband Jay, a documentary producer, came to stay. Harriet had been with Donald and Melinda at many of their critical moments and was the confidante of both of them in most matters. The Sheers arrived in the evening, expecting to see a harmonious picture in the new home and a warm greeting for Jay, whom the Macleans had only met at the January wedding in Paris. Harriet was struck by the “great change” in her brother-in-law from his nadir in Cairo. He was no longer drinking to destructive oblivion, but instead “was tense, strained, and . . . desperately worried.” She and Jay, the stranger to whom it is often possible to show more of oneself than to someone closer, had “an extraordinary conversation” with him in which “he openly supported Communism” (Harriet had never heard him make more than a “passing reference” to his beliefs) and “although he did not say so in so many words, suggested he was a Communist.”

  Although Harriet did not take this particularly seriously at the time, as Donald was given to posturing and teasing with her, his conversation with Jay Sheers in the pub, loosened once again by alcohol, took on a very different tone: “he railed bitterly at his life and his job; he mocked himself as a sheep amongst hordes of other sheep going off to London every day . . . he was sick of it all and longed desperately to be ‘cut adrift.’ ” He may have suspected his nemesis was getting closer—maybe he was not seeing certain files he knew about, maybe there was an awkwardness from his superiors, or he heard the underwater echo of the tapped telephone, but if so, he did could not know from which direction. He could unbuckle his desire to start again to Jay, someone not connected with his job, not of his own country or gossipy social circle but of his family and personal world, in a way that he could not otherwise do. By the next day “he seemed his normal self again and his outburst of the previous night was forgotten.” He kept the mask in place in the office but could not when he was caught off guard, as he was when a fellow Foreign Office commuter and Washington acquaintance, Fred Everson, caught sight of him. Everson was “struck by Donald’s shabby dress and moroseness . . . He walked, untalkative, with his hands thrust deep into his tweed coat pockets and his shoulders hunched.” Away from his family and that connection, he seemed defeated, exhausted by the worlds which he had strived to straddle for so long.

  *

  For the first couple of days of the following week Harriet stayed down in the country with Melinda, while her husband came up to London with Donald on the train on Monday morning, just as the Queen Mary was docking at Southampton. There Anthony Blunt met Guy Burgess. The two former lovers had kept in touch since they had met at Cambridge, just as Burgess had gone against good tradecraft in staying with Philby in America. They went straight to Blunt’s exquisitely furnished flat in Portman Square near Marble Arch for an urgent exchange of news. The next day, Blunt met “Peter,” as Modin was known to him, in Ruislip, “deeply worried”: “Peter, there’s serious trouble. Guy Burgess has just arrived back in London. Homer’s about to be arrested. MI5 . . . have a lead which points straight to Maclean. It’s only a matter of days now, perhaps hours.”

  Blunt stressed, as if it needed emphasising, the implications of Maclean’s arrest. There would be panic for the rest of them if the depth of penetration and betrayal in the past fifteen years, the most internationally turbulent in modern history, were to be revealed. There was heightened concern about what had reached Blunt’s ears, slightly belatedly, regarding Maclean’s collapse: “Donald’s now in such a state that . . . he’ll break down the moment they question him.” The surveillance, which Philby had told Burgess about, meant they would have to be extremely careful. Modin needed a couple of days to get instructions from Moscow. When they came, they could not have been clearer: “We agree to your organizing Maclean’s defection. We will receive him here . . . if he wishes to go through with it.” Burgess, still officially a Foreign Office employee pending whatever action was planned for his latest misdemeanours, had a meeting with Modin and Modin’s superior, the London rezident Nikolai Korovin. He was ordered to put Maclean fully in the picture and to convince him to defect.

  *

  Things were not as clear-cut for MI5. They needed more than “days” or “hours” to work out how to handle the Homer case. They needed weeks and wanted longer. Apart from the lack of evidence to bring about an arrest, in the absence of which Maclean might well “do a Pontecorvo” (they were counting on the impending birth to prevent that), they had the potentially explosive issue of how to handle the embarrassment of breaking the news to the FBI. They were still tying themselves in knots about whether to inform the Americans about the suspected traitor’s identity. Lamphere had told Paterson that “the Bureau wants action.” Paterson prevaricated by saying that Alexander Halpern “could of course have been shown some of the signals on his frequent visits to the Embassy and he may have known Pravdin. But the rest of it does not fit in.” Finally, on 5 May it was agreed that GCHQ, the government communications centre, should tell Arlington Hall about their working out of the Tyre pregnancy message and that their suspicions were now centred on Maclean, who would be interrogated within “a fortnight at the most.” But in another embarrassed volte-face, just before the fortnight was up they were suddenly less confident about how things would play in Washington and decided that “the FBI should only be informed after Maclean has been interrogated.”

  There were now two clocks ticking behind Maclean, his own country’s and Moscow Centre’s, to both of whom he had given such extraordinary service. But in Britain’s case diplomatic shame was overcoming justice and Moscow Centre were moving to a more urgent beat.

  *

  The “watchers,” as MI5’s surveillance unit A4 was known, consisted of twenty men and three women, mostly former Special Branch officers, even though the “ideal watcher” should look “as unlike a policeman as possible.” They were selected for their good eyesight and sharp hearing. They had to be of average height so as not to stand out by being either conspicuously tall or conspicuously short, and the men were dressed in raincoats and trilby hats; a clever double-bluff, perhaps, to disguise the spy-spotters as spies themselves. They communicated with each other by hand signals from street corners, but they plainly stood out to one of Maclean’s lifelong wariness even as they ramped up his anxiety.

  Confronted by this turn of events, the Soviet London rezidentura remained calm. A4 had been watching their Embassy on the edge of Kensington Gardens for years, and they in turn had watched rather more analytically back. The Soviet counter-surveillance had noted that the watchers did not follow Maclean in the evenings or at weekends, which helped immeasurably with escape planning: anyone in a raincoat and trilby standing on a street corner in the village of Tatsfield, with its population of a thousand souls, would be far too noticeable. “At Victoria, MI5’s men saw the train out of the station, then headed home like good little functionaries,” as Modin tartly observed. Rebecca West, with her usual glorious acerbity, remarked that saying a house could not be watched was “a remark which could never be worth making, except by a house agent attempting to sell a castle in the Yorkshire moors to an exceptionally trusting foreign criminal.”

  Another A4 error was not to tailor their men’s average height to their above-average prey. One Under-Secretary, who was in the know, was surprised one spring afternoon to see Maclean “following a diagonal course at great speed” across St James’s Park while “another man, with much shorter legs,” was practically running to move “at the same speed and a fixed distance.” Patrick Reilly, Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office and not in on the identity or even existence of Homer, saw Maclean at the Duke of York Steps on his way back from lunch one day. Maclean wa
s “walking very fast and looked badly in disarray. The man following him could be fairly easily identified.” The Steps were on the route between Whitehall and Pall Mall, home of the gentlemen’s clubs habitually visited by Maclean—the Travellers, the Royal Automobile Club and the Reform. On 15 May, the clumsy watchers spotted Maclean and Burgess emerging from the last two of these.

  *

  By comparison with MI5’s uncertainty and in contrast to their dilatoriness of the year before, Moscow Centre was now working efficiently towards its goal. Filip Kislitsyn had been a Soviet cipher clerk in London from 1945 to 1948, and among his duties was hand­ling material coming from Guy Burgess. After Maclean sent up his cries for help from Cairo and even more urgently when Philby reported that the net was closing in on Homer, Kislitsyn attended a meeting in Moscow Centre alongside Colonel Raina, Chief of the First Directorate (dealing with Anglo-American affairs) and his successor in that post, head of the Second Department Pavel Gromushkin,* and Gorsky, who felt a special interest in rounding off his work with his “topline agent.” It was Maclean’s faithful and gifted handler’s last act in their partnership before he was “dismissed from his post because it had been discovered that he had hidden some discreditable facts about his relatives.” Kislitsyn reported that “the perils of the proposed plan [for exfiltration] caused much misgiving and many plans were put forward and rejected.” To create forged British passports would take too long as they would have to make paper with the “right fibre content,” but they calculated that if the pair could somehow reach continental Europe without showing their passports, the rest could be managed.

  *

  Maclean knew that his Cambridge contemporary had been living with Philby in Washington, that his career was in the balance in Whitehall; he must have been aware of the possible significance for his own future when Burgess made contact. Burgess had paid one visit to the Foreign Office already, on 9 May, where it was suggested to him that he should consider resigning after the “last chance” fiasco of Washington, and he did not dare show his face again in any official capacity during the acutely sensitive mission he had been entrusted with by Philby. Since then he had been to an Apostles dinner at Cambridge and had had further meetings “with his Russian contact about Donald’s escape.” Burgess was often to be found at the Reform Club from the morning onwards, “without having shaved and dressed like a tramp” (although always with his talismanic Old Etonian tie, as if to ward off any suspicions that he might be a traitor), voicing his “hatred for the Americans with great vigour,” as Virginia Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, was unfortunate enough to hear. When Burgess got his instructions from Moscow Centre, transmitted through Modin and Blunt, he rang Maclean on the 14th to say they should meet for lunch at the Reform Club the next day.

  The call unsettled Maclean, and brought the worst of his old behaviour back. After a blameless couple of weeks of catching his commuter train each evening he rang Melinda from the office, something he had not done all month, just before he set off for the Reform, to say that he would be late back as he was planning to have a drink with Isabel Lambert on the way home. Melinda sent Lambert her love. Maclean found Burgess waiting for him in the club’s majestic and gloomy lobby, and they sat over a couple of drinks for twenty-five minutes before moving along the street to the RAC where the dining-room was less full, possibly less full in particular of people who might want to come up to the two men to chat. On the way over, Maclean said, “I’m in frightful trouble, I’m being followed by the dicks,” pointing out “two men jingling their coins in a policeman-like manner.” Over the next hour and a half Burgess delivered the news he had come to give—MI5 were on to him.

  Maclean showed no surprise, even found it welcome to share the psychological pressure that his constant London tail was putting him under: “They’ve been watching me for some time . . . I’m expecting a summons any day now.” When Burgess went further and said that Moscow Centre and Philby agreed with him that the only course of action was for Maclean to “run,” he “sagged visibly.” After a long pause, he said he hadn’t the strength for the “coming confrontation,” he would “confess everything”; he knew himself well enough that he could not “soldier on for months, denying everything.” But he couldn’t bear to abandon Melinda and the new baby, the commitment that MI5 were counting upon. He would stay. The decency of the husband, repaying his wife’s loyalty that had got him more or less back on track in the last couple of years, perhaps some echo of the Honour System of his old school that claimed it was better to turn oneself in than be caught in a lie, and perhaps above all the possible relief of laying down his secrets now that they were no longer as urgent—the relief that led to Nunn May and Fuchs deciding to confess rather than have the pressure of watchers and suspicion—all militated against his going. The two men parted at 3:00, Maclean to go back to work, Burgess to report back to the London rezident. That evening, within an hour of the report reaching them, Moscow Centre telegraphed back to say, “Homer must agree to defect.”

  The day then took on a familiar turn. Maclean stopped at his own club, the Travellers, for one more drink on his way back to his office, where he diligently got through his in-tray, the routine possibly the best distraction for a whirling head. At 6:00 he telephoned Melinda again. Having not rung her from the office in the weeks that his telephone had been tapped, the fact that he had now done so twice in one day is an indication of his unsettled state. He reminded her that he would be late home as he was now meeting Isabel Lambert for a drink at the philosopher Freddie Ayer’s house in White Horse Street, Mayfair before they went on alone. Ayer, who had been an MI6 agent in the war and was currently teaching philosophy at London University, was very much the highly intelligent, open-minded and free-thinking bohemian (he was married four times to three women) that Maclean, trapped by his job in the conventions of diplomatic circles, had been seeking out from his first days in the Foreign Office. Lambert’s husband was the composer Kit Lambert, a brilliant alcoholic (he was to die later that year from complications brought on by his drinking), who was currently rehearsing pieces to be performed at Covent Garden and the Royal Festival Hall. Isabel was “fascinating . . . a tall, dark, elegant woman . . . who combined working as a painter with assiduous bohemianism” and who had briefly been in the same Parisian Left Bank set as Melinda and Donald just before the war. She and Maclean left Ayer’s house and went to the nearest pub at 8:00, leaving again at 9:00, plainly having trouble walking, the watchers noted, and went on to Isabel’s local, the York and Albany pub on the edge of Regent’s Park, until just before closing.

  Lambert then went home while Maclean continued on his last bender on British soil. Another taxi took him to the Gargoyle, from where he incoherently rang the anxious Melinda after 11:00, and then he took another taxi to Cyril Connolly’s Regent’s Park house after midnight. He hammered on the door, probably hoping for Philip Toynbee to answer as he and Robert Kee had a flat in the same building, and Connolly, “sober-drunk” himself after a dinner-party, saw him for the first time “in this legendary condition.” “He began to wander round the room, blinking at the guests as he divided the humble sheep from the well-adjusted goats, and then went out to lie down to sleep in the hall, stretched out on the stone floor under his overcoat like some figure from a shelter sketch-book.” Connolly “put him to bed and gave him an Alka-Seltzer breakfast. Hardly a word was spoken.” Maclean’s lack of aggression, so often a feature of his inebriation at time of stress, is noteworthy on this binge: maybe he really had come to accept what was going to happen next. Maybe he had lurched in with the confused intention of some sort of farewell to Toynbee, or to confess what was about to happen to his oldest companion, finally sharing the last and greatest secret with him. The exfiltration itself, already practic­ally and psychologically fraught, would be more complicated and stressful yet.

  *

  On that same Tuesday the 15th, a top-secret meeting was convened in Whitehall. Bobbie Mackenzie had come from Wa
shington, Dick White, Robertson and Martin were there from the Security Service, Carey Foster from the Foreign Office. The main item on the agenda was to discuss the American side of things after a Washington gathering six days earlier attended by Makins, Paterson, Mackenzie and, of course, Kim Philby. Philby had followed up by sending a letter to Burgess metaphorically urging him to get a move on: Burgess’s car was still languishing in the Embassy car park and Philby told him that “if he did not act at once, it would be too late,” his car would be sent “to the scrap-heap.” The Whitehall panjandrums vacillated some more but eventually backed the Washington station’s conclusion that it would be “unwise” to tell the FBI about their well-founded conjectures regarding Homer’s identity until they had interrogated Maclean, ostensibly for fear of “leakage.” This was a decision that would come back to haunt them.