That same afternoon Acheson appeared before the Senate inquiry into the dismissal of General MacArthur from the command of the UN forces in Korea. On being asked what reports he had had “on the recent episode involving apparently Britons high in the foreign service” he could only answer that he had “heard that on the radio this morning,” after which he had “had inquiry made at the British Embassy about it but they knew no more than the radio report.” Public political humiliation was heaped on top of the rage.
Philby had been shocked when he heard at the end of May that Burgess had gone as well as Maclean: exactly what he had told his friend not to do in the Chinese restaurant on their last night in New York. His “consternation was no pretence,” as it had been seconds before when Paterson told him that Maclean had successfully got away. Later that day Philby put his camera, copying equipment and other espionage accoutrements into the boot of his car and drove to the woods at Great Falls, where he had often been to fish the Potomac with James Jesus Angleton, one of the founders of the CIA and soon to become its head of counter-intelligence. There Philby, aware that he would soon have to lie as never before, buried the tools of his secret craft.
The FBI’s Robert Lamphere was told of the men’s absence on 31 May in such a manner that he assumed they were “taking French leave” and continued pursuing the other angles about Homer’s identity which his British friends had not dissuaded him from doing. It was now two and a half years since he had come across Homer, and Maclean’s name was not ringing any bells. Mackenzie, security chief at the Embassy, admitted to his masters that “We can probably only maintain this casual interest for a few days,” but they attempted to do so until the Express and US newspapers broke the story on the 7th. Only then did Philby and Geoff Paterson shamefacedly go to see Lamphere in his office in the FBI building, where, as the laconic agent recounted, “to say the least, it was a rather uncomfortable meeting.” Lamphere was not alone when his thoughts went straight to where Philby’s loyalties lay: “I’m not saying much. They’re not saying much. I know one thing for sure: I’ve been lied to for a long time by MI5 . . . I’m thinking, ‘Maclean has fled. Burgess, who had been in Philby’s house, has fled with him. Surely Philby tipped off Maclean.’ ”
Elsewhere in FBI headquarters an urgent teletype went from J. Edgar Hoover’s office that spelt Maclean’s name every way except the correct one asking that his New York address, non-existent as he had never lived in the city, from 1943 to 1945 be supplied. Such was the total lack of knowledge in the US law enforcement and espionage hierarchy of the spy they had been co-operatively and painstakingly helping to identify over the past three years. Sir Percy Sillitoe’s office were already looking into flights and discussing where the MI5 Director General might stay on his second trip to Washington in a month to talk to Hoover about spies within the British ranks.
In keeping their own mortification under control by putting a brave face on things, the British seemed unaware of the possible humiliation they piled on their allies. On the day of the defection, Sir Roger Makins had submitted a paper on Anglo-American accord to Sir William Strang with an encouraging view from his recent visit to the USA that relations “did not seem to be as bad as they looked from London.” That comment was presumably based on the timeline for telling the Cousins what was really going on and for Maclean’s interrogation by the jovial Skardon and his permanent pipe, but Moscow Centre had moved at a different pace.
On top of Nunn May, on top of Fuchs, on top of Pontecorvo, this latest episode was made far more damaging by the opacity brought on by a combustible combination of fear and hubris in the weeks leading up to it. The State Department went on the moral offensive on the day the news broke. In a telegram forwarded from the Washington Embassy to the Foreign Office they “pointed out” that for them “repeated drunkenness, recurrent nervous breakdowns, sexual deviations and other human frailties are considered security hazards.” * Carey Foster, a year after the disappearance, wrote a secret and spirited cultural attack on this attitude in a memorandum to members of the Foreign Office, saying that while homosexuality was still illegal and therefore open to blackmail, it “could be said to have almost respectable antecedents in the country of Wilde and Byron.”
*
Sir Percy Sillitoe had anyway been travelling to Washington in mid-June to tell the FBI that Maclean was shortly going to be brought in for questioning. He stuck to his plans even though he was now entering a bitter and less collaborative atmosphere. He had made his name as a senior policeman in Glasgow, scourge of the razor gangs that terrorised the city in the 1930s. That experience could not prepare him for the tough time he had in Washington, DC. His telegram to his deputy, Dick White, on 14 June highlighted how tricky it was working for a secret service that chose to keep its secrets from its allies, in this case Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Welsh Dulles, Director and future Director of the CIA. “Dulles asked me point blank if we had knowledge [of the] activities of Maclean . . . from cryptographic sources. I evaded the issue by implying that such sources were not my business . . . He immediately changed the subject.” Dulles presented himself as a gentleman, but he harboured a deep mistrust of the British and their clubbiness and inbreeding (as he saw it), which he had already observed at length from the viewpoint of both ruler and ruled when he was teaching in India in the 1920s. Whatever his inner reaction to their evasions, he was anyway not surprisingly most interested in Philby, a more present danger who had been summoned back to London at Bedell Smith’s insistence to be questioned by Jim Skardon about his association with Burgess.
Sillitoe was franker about his travails with Lamphere and Hoover in a letter to his colleague James Robertson, in which he admitted to being “economical with the truth” (as a later civil servant said about a later espionage matter) with them on his first day in the capital: “I stuck to May 25th as the date on which we had received the new [material about Homer], but threw in that I had heard about the possibility of such a recovery being made a week or two earlier . . . I admitted that we had Curzon under surveillance before he skipped, but only in London and that only as part of our investigation of all seven hot suspects.” That “hot” is giving the impression of an exciting scenario with six more suspects than they had had for some time before the defection.
Sillitoe described his second day with an overwrought British metaphor about the weather: “the wind blew cold” as he was “hotly interrogated.” He was asked, quite reasonably, why he had not handed over the names of all of his seven imagined candidates and why he was still not doing so. Lamphere and his FBI colleagues, outraged by the realisation of how much had been withheld from them, “bombarded” Sillitoe with a “series of questions which had obviously been prepared and which were calculated to trip me.” He felt he “had probably made a mess of it” as he emerged from his interrogation “wringing wet,” not an accustomed situation for a man of his standing in the world. Sillitoe was astonished, as well he might be given his service’s lackadaisical performance, about the speed and “thoroughness with which [the Americans] have gone about this task” of investigating Maclean in the previous week since they got the news: they had even found out the name of his French maid in Washington from 1944 with a view to questioning her if she was still in the country. While he might have been embarrassed as his country’s emissary and as a security chief, he seemed blithely unaware—or unconcerned—about the intelligence and national security consequences both for his country and for the US: “I cannot honestly say that I have been working tremendously hard, but it has all been somewhat worrying. However, I am enjoying myself immensely . . .” He might have hoped he was running the sweetshop in Eastbourne that had been his retirement plan after his police service.
*
Both “Lady Curzon” and “Mrs Curzon” had been interviewed by Skardon, six days after the defection, in Lady Maclean’s flat. Melinda happened to be there, awaiting her own mother’s arrival in London from Paris. Alan Maclean was also there, hav
ing been summoned back from New York, where he was private secretary to Gladwyn Jebb, British Ambassador to the United Nations. He was grilled by customs at London Airport when they saw his middle and last names on his passport as if the fugitive might be sneaking back into the country under a thin disguise. None of these witnesses was able to shed any light on where Donald might have gone. Sir William Strang had been keen not to involve Melinda until after she had had her baby, but when Skardon encountered her by chance in Lady Maclean’s flat she was at least able to confirm the identity of “Roger Styles” from a photograph of Burgess.
*
The day after the Express broke the story, telegrams arrived for Lady Maclean and Melinda, despatched from the Post Office in the Place de la Bourse in Paris at ten o’clock the previous night, though obviously they had been kept in hand by Moscow Centre’s people in Paris for several days. Lady Maclean’s read “Am quite all right. Don’t worry. Love to all. Teento.” The childhood nickname, a condensation of “Teeny Don,” was a clear indication that he was behind it; the handwriting and the continental crossing of the numeral “7” in her address was an equally clear indication that he did not write it. Melinda’s telegram was equally anodyne. It had the wrong county given for Tatsfield and was full of clumsiness as well mistakes in English:
MRS MAC LEAN MELINDA. BEACON SHAW. TATSFIELD NEAR WESTERHAM. SURREY. ENGLAND.
HAD TO LEAV UNEXPECTEDLY. TERRIBLY SORRY. AM QUITE WELL NOW. DON’T WORRY DARLING. I LOVE YOU. PLEASE DON’T STOP. LOVING ME.
DONALD
In spite of attempts by MI5 and the FBI to decode this telegram, dividing the letters up into different groups, trying to find meaning in the shorter telegram being exactly half the length of the longer, more verbally padded one; to find the real meanings behind the idiosyncratic spelling and its pointless assertion that Donald had not been well before and now was, the only conclusions to be drawn were that Donald had almost certainly been involved in the telegrams, hence “Teento,” but in the end they had not been written by him.
The telegrams were the final piece of intrigue the newspapers needed to follow up on the Fleet Street bombshell from the day before. The next day’s Daily Telegraph had three headlines in block capitals:
ALL EUROPE HUNT FOR TWO BRITONS
FOREIGN OFFICE MEN MISSING WITHOUT LEAVE
RIDDLE OF TELEGRAMS FROM PARIS
Around the world, the story made headlines. In New York it was categorically said that the two men had taken “Hush-Hush Data” with them. That Maclean had worked on the atom bomb itself, the subject of the century, was fertile ground for media fearmongering. This was a story that would keep journalists excited, creative and busy for years to come.
*
Sightings of the fugitives poured in. The Daily Mail offered a £10,000 reward for any information that led to a confirmed sighting. Rumours were followed up that the pair were hiding in a chateau outside Paris; or they were in Monte Carlo, Berlin, Naples, Rome, Vienna and Barcelona. They were spotted in a bar in Cannes, identified by “Gaston, a café caricaturist and an expert in faces,” and in a restaurant in Prague. Letters from clairvoyants took up valuable security time if only in the reading and filing. Maclean was recognised in a Greyhound bus station in New York by a woman who managed to identify him by his “very black hair and protruding front teeth.” Dušan Miljković, a Yugoslav railway guard, was a credible enough witness to be interviewed by the head of Chancery in the Belgrade Embassy to confirm his evidence that two men matching the fugitives’ description had travelled from Belgrade to Istanbul, third class, on the early-morning train on 3 June. “They had little luggage.”
The photographer Humphrey Spender, brother of the poet Stephen and by chance a fellow Greshamian, and the writer Geoffrey Grigson were touring the West Country for Picture Post and were arrested in a chemist’s shop in Warminster where they had gone to develop some film. Delighted that he had caught the spies pursuing their nefarious tradecraft in Wiltshire, the diligent chemist marched them to the local police station “wondering which of us was Burgess and which was Maclean” before a call to their editor got them released.
German police arrested two men on a train in Beggendorf who turned out to be SIS “personalities” on the same hunt. A letter “From an old pal of Maclean” was hand-delivered to the US Embassy in London which contained a so-called “deposition” dictated by Maclean to the author on 24 May in which Maclean stated that as he was “haunted and burdened” by what he knew of official secrets and in particular “by the content of high-level Anglo-American conversations” by which the British government had “betrayed the realm” to the US, he was planning to “cross the Iron Curtain into the Free World” to deliver up his knowledge to Stalin so that the British people might be alerted in time “to wrest control of their destiny from the wretches who have stolen it.”
Closer to home, well-wishers spotted the two cleverly disguised men throughout “the realm.” A chemist in Westerham called in MI5 to tell them about the tall man who came in at weekends to hire his dark room and do his own photographic developing, one time leaving behind a charred piece of paper with the Foreign Office crest on it; he made sure his name got into the newspapers. Goronwy Rees was rung in the middle of the night to be told that Burgess had been seen leaving Reading Station on his way to visit his old friend at his home in Sonning.
What had become of Burgess and Maclean was not known for sure, although it did not take much guesswork among the well-informed and highly educated minds of MI5, the Foreign Office, the State Department, the FBI and the CIA to work out where they had ended up. It was not until a defection on the other side of the world three years later that the truth began to emerge.
*
Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov was a corpulent, bespectacled man. He had been working in the Maritime Section of the MGB, which became the KGB in 1954, in Moscow. A previous posting in Sweden where he had kept an eye on Soviet merchant seamen on the fringes of the Soviet empire on the lower Danube had given him a taste for Western living. He was pleased to be appointed Third Secretary to the Soviet Embassy in Australia’s capital, Canberra, at the start of 1951. He soon came to the notice of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), who saw through his diplomatic cover role, “because of his indulgence in good living and heavy drinking,” an indulgence to which his rubicund appearance attested. ASIO began “studying ways and means of organising his defection.” The three-year courtship of Petrov was consummated on 3 April 1954, when he took asylum and £5,000 to hand over all the documents he had.
Although the papers Petrov brought with him were not of great value and he failed to get any of the current cipher books from his Embassy, he did, at last, bring news of Burgess and Maclean now that the trail was three years cold. Also serving in Canberra as Second Secretary was Filip Kislitsyn, who had been working with documents sent out by Maclean and Burgess in Moscow in 1949 after his time in London as a cipher clerk; his section was so full of material that much of it had never been translated. In 1953, when Melinda was once again sensationally in the press, Kislitsyn had told Petrov what he knew about the Maclean case and his knowledge of the meetings that took place in Moscow. He related a simple plan, which saw the two men safely inside Soviet territory by the time the Foreign Office and security services even realised they were missing.
*
The SS Falaise had 200 passengers aboard that Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend, most of whom were safely in their cabins when the last arrivals showed up minutes before the gangplank was raised, their car abandoned on the dockside with the keys still in the ignition. The former diplomats stayed sleepless below decks after the ship had docked in the rain at 9:00 the following morning to ensure that most of their shipmates were disembarked and in the cafés and shops of Saint Malo. They remained on board for their last English breakfast of bacon and eggs, lingering over them so long that they had to take a taxi for the forty-three-mile journey to Rennes to catch up with the Paris train
. Or perhaps they assumed Saint Malo station was being watched and so deliberately timed their exit. The taxi driver noted that “they hardly exchanged a word with me or between themselves” during the drive. He dropped them off in the main square rather than at the railway station in Rennes: maybe the two tall Englishmen would be less noticeable walking in than being driven to its entrance.
They reached Maclean’s beloved Paris in the early afternoon; the men had crossed the city to the Gare d’Austerlitz and from there caught the night train to Bern, the Swiss capital, pulling in at about 6:00 a.m. on Sunday the 27th. Nicholas Elliott, who regarded Kim Philby as one of his greatest friends, even as he was being betrayed time after time, was head of station in Bern, but was made aware of the escape only when it was too late. If only they had got there two days later when the alert had gone out, they might have been slipped the “decanter of poisoned Scotch” that one of Elliott’s fellow spooks had prepared on the grounds that they had been ordered to apprehend the suspects “at all costs and by all means.” False passports that did not need to be made to the exact British paper specifications as no British customs and immigration officer was going to see them were waiting for them in the Soviet Embassy, and Maclean, possibly the calmer and more psychologically prepared of the pair, picked them up. There was a motor show on in the city: Bern was full of strangers, so two more were not particularly noticed. The watch on the Soviet Embassy was still days away.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 37