The statement, apparently composed by the defectors themselves, had been issued as “speculation about our past actions” could be getting in the way of “Anglo-Soviet understanding.” The men had gone to the USSR “to work for the aim of better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West” as neither the British nor the American government were interested in this aim, which was essential “if peace was to be safe”: the lodestone of Maclean’s idealism from the League of Nations at Gresham’s to the message Melinda gave his sons about his Communism. The defectors admitted that they had been Communists since Cambridge days but denied, to protect others and themselves in the event of a return home, ever having been “Communist agents.” They were political refugees, not spies. For Maclean’s part, he said it had been impossible to find anyone in authority (presumably he meant among his colleagues in the Foreign Office) who did not speak of “the menace of Communism” or who understood “the folly and danger of American policy in the Far East and Europe,” with no reference to his last post as head of the American Department in London. When it became clear that “the Foreign Office and security services had plans of their own” to hamper his future career by bugging and trailing him, he “therefore decided to come to the Soviet Union to do whatever he could do to further understanding between East and West from there.” That was the work he was getting on with when asked, in a move he could not have welcomed, to break his cover and be reminded of his treachery by speaking to Hughes. Among the half-truths running through the statement, that last point fitted his own sense of his upstanding political and moral conscience at least, and represented how he intended to conduct himself for the rest of his life.
The Sunday Times commented in their brief piece that “the statement leaves many unanswered questions, even for persons who have closely followed the case”: such as how the pair had left England and the whereabouts of Melinda and the children. It thought “Russian readers may have some difficulty in comprehending the story” as very little had appeared in the Soviet press about the defection.
*
“Understanding” was set back even further during Bulganin and Khrushchev’s visit to Britain by Operation Claret. This was the attempt of the heavily decorated Lieutenant Commander Lionel “Buster” Crabb of the Royal Navy to examine the keel, rudder and propeller of the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze while it was in Portsmouth harbour waiting to take the leaders home. Crabb never resurfaced from his dive; his handless and headless body was caught in a fisherman’s net some fourteen months later. The following night, at a dinner for the Soviets hosted by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, Khrushchev made a lightly veiled reference to the Ordzhonikidze and “missing or lost property.” Pravda reported this less wittily in denouncing “a shameful operation of underwater espionage directed against those who come to the country on a friendly visit.” Burgess and Maclean’s statement did not smooth diplomatic relations much except in clumsily leading the elephant from the room. Operation Claret served only to point to the yawning depths of the Cold War.
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On their first night in Moscow in June 1951, Maclean and Burgess had dined in style on “a great hotel balcony on the first floor overlooking the Kremlin.” They got increasingly drunk on vodka until three in the morning. Such a binge was an ideal way for Moscow Centre to handle the traumatised travellers. The next day Maclean recovered from his hangover and tried to comprehend what had transpired, while Burgess went out on his ever-thirsty quest for more drink and more company. But such jovial treatment could not last and from the Soviet point of view the crucial thing was to debrief the two burnt-out agents, find out what they really knew and work out what the future might hold for them, if they had a future.
They were sent to Kuybyshev, the city on the Volga known until 1935 (and after 1991) as Samara, a city closed to foreigners, controlled by the military and Moscow Centre, and accessible to Soviet citizens only with a special pass. The government had been evacuated there in October 1941 when the rapid Nazi advance threatened Moscow, 500 miles away, so it was well provided with secure areas, radio facilities and secret apparatus. It was a depressing, heavily polluted, industrialised place that supplied most of the weaponry for the war. No journalist would run into Burgess or Maclean in its dull streets or joyless bars. “It was permanently like Glasgow on a Saturday night in the nineteenth century,” Burgess complained to the MP Tom Driberg. The two men, one louche and full of gossip and bile, the other showing more and more of his father’s high-mindedness, united for ever by their journey but never destined to be soulmates, shared an apartment.
The back-slapping of that first night in Moscow soon disappeared. They were put in “a small house guarded night and day by KGB [sic] troops . . . to all intents and purposes under house arrest” on Frunze Street with their own minder following them wherever they went. The early debriefing about foreign policy and their contacts soon became closer to a full-on interrogation. To the Soviet mindset, at its most paranoid at that time with the doctors’ so-called “plot” against Stalin and the savage rounding up of the remaining Jewish intellectuals, it was highly likely that the rather derelict pair might even be in Russia as double agents. One of their MGB minders said they had to “recall a lot, add new information, make comments on different documents, expound on the information the Cambridge Five had given to the Soviet Union.” Maclean was questioned in detail about his career in London, Paris, Cairo and in particular Washington, about the “issues” and the people he had met. MGB operatives came in relays from Moscow to run through the narrative archive of the previous fifteen years. Between these visits, Maclean trudged around the lowering city, read the classics and started to learn Russian against the day when he might be allowed to start to live his life again.
As Stalin still had his hand ever more crazily and cruelly on the tiller of state, it was by no means obvious that that future would involve being kept alive. The MGB way of doing things made them fearful that if their whereabouts were discovered by the British an assassination squad would appear. Whether they were true Soviet agents or had been turned, death was the only conceivable outcome. A Russian intellectual friend of his later pointed out that Maclean “was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner. He might equally well have been shot.” Until the death of Stalin in 1953, state security chief Beria pressed for a “confession” of double-dealing and ruled out giving the exfiltration any sort of propaganda value. That also had the unintended consequence of enraging the British media and public as they poured their speculative fantasies into the news void.
The men had to adopt pseudonyms to prevent leaks about their whereabouts. Maclean was able to start again intellectually, free of despised espionage and the poisonous business of duplicity. He chose to be Mark Petrovich Frazer, after the anthropologist Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough was a “sacred text” for intellectuals. T. S. Eliot, the poet Maclean had despised for his politics before the war, referred to “the hanged god of Frazer” in his notes to The Waste Land. Fittingly, Frazer had been awarded an honorary degree at Cambridge in 1920, alongside his fellow Scottish Presbyterian Sir Donald Maclean; as the younger Donald was experienced in psychoanalytic thought, it might not be too much of a stretch to follow his choice of pseudonym from this point to Frazer’s most famous volume, The Dying God, in which his man-god is slain when he begins to lose his powers to make way for his “younger and more virile successor,” who may even be his own son.
In the greyness of Kuybyshev, such an associative train of thought through his choice of name might have bolstered the intellectually questing Maclean and given him a sense of high purpose, exiled and without his family, friends and standing in the world, facing a very uncertain future. Frazer’s “legend” was that he was a political émigré, a trade union leader persecuted in England for his political views. He had been born in 1934 in Edinburgh, where his father had been a professor of history until his death in 1932, his mother a housewife, and he had graduated from the university there. His la
ter colleagues, accustomed not to questioning anything strange, knew not to pry further into the erudite intellectual perfectionist’s reasons for emigrating. Melinda became Natasha Frazer when she occasionally worked translating Russian stories into English for the weekly English paper Moscow News after they had moved to the capital. Even in the mid-1960s a friend had no idea of Frazer’s real identity until he became agitated when he spotted a man pointing a camera at him. Not until 1972, when Maclean was an accepted and admired part of Moscow intellectual society and his book was about to be published in Russian under his real name did he write to his employers to say “Please regard me hereafter as Donald Donaldovich Maclean,” signing the letter “Frazer.” He looked back to those dangerous days with the stark comment that “nobody knew why we were there,” and was relieved as much for his own safety as for the possibilities for the peaceful flourishing of Communism when the dictator died.
In the less intimidating atmosphere after the deaths of Stalin and Beria and “the nightmare of [their] persecutions,” Maclean was able at last to start living an undivided Russian life. Where Burgess became drunker and roamed Kuybyshev looking for action, on one occasion having his teeth knocked out in a brawl, Maclean made attempts to get sober, eventually undergoing cold turkey in a detoxification clinic. He got himself a job teaching English in a school—exactly what he had been planning to do after he left Cambridge twenty years earlier before his change of heart and application to the Foreign Office. Once Melinda and the children had been sprung from Switzerland for their reunion the family moved to a small apartment on the other side of the hallway from the insalubrious Burgess.
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Melinda hated Kuybyshev and was by her own admission “very unhappy” in the “very primitive and depressing” city. Although Donald had his teaching work, he “was also very depressed and disillusioned at this point with what he observed as the reality of Soviet Russia.” He was enough of a realist never to have had the roseate vision of those who visited in the 1920s and 1930s and were blind to the misery of the place. While giving up his life of professional acclaim, his Soho restaurants, his mother, his garden at Beaconshaw (which had been sold by Mrs Dunbar after Melinda’s escape) and the commuter train from Oxted must have been tough, once he had got more used to Kuybyshev “he . . . retained balance and optimism,” happy that at least few of those he met in the post-Stalin era “believed the official ideology any more.” It was a theme that would run through the rest of his time in Russia. The children were put into the local Soviet schools and were already model citizens before the family, deemed fully rehabilitated, moved to Moscow in 1955.
Once in the capital, Maclean could settle into suitable work. He became a magazine correspondent under the pen name of Madzoevsky so that his views could pass for Russian rather than as a voice from the West for those in the know about Frazer. After starting out in a small flat, the family were upgraded to “a splendid six-room flat on Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street . . . in the purest Stalin-era style, brand new.” The building was a “massive, heavily ornamented pile” looking out over the Moscow River which the Macleans gradually made more like home with their “good furniture and western bric-à-brac.” It had “an unmistakable flavour of SW1.”† Maclean’s study was likened to that “of a Cambridge professor in the ’40s or ’50s” with copies of the airmail edition of The Times, an edition of Trollope and biographies of Gladstone among the English books, prints of the university and “the upper end of the available furniture.” They had their own pictures and household goods shipped from the Army and Navy Stores Depository outside London where they had been stored after the sale of Beaconshaw. He was able to order new books from Bowes and Bowes in Cambridge, who checked with MI5 who in turn checked with the Bank of England whether they should be supplying him before cashing his cheques. When Kim Philby arrived in Moscow, he too ordered his books from Bowes and Bowes, both men keeping up with new novels by Graham Greene and John le Carré. The exiled spies thus returned to the bookseller in the city where their bookish, youthful idealism had been shaped. Maclean kept in touch with the best of contemporary British fiction as the new generation finally took over from the Edwardians and developed a modern style that he appreciated. He “Wained, Amised, Brained, Murdoched, Sillitoed.” However, in spite of these reminders and accoutrements of Britishness, his life in the Soviet Union was always characterised by an exceptional absence of nostalgia.
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In February 1956 the 20th Communist Party Congress continued to blow the breezes of change through the system as Khrushchev made his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin, and the horrors of his regime, including the Siberian camps, were now openly acknowledged. For the first time in a lifetime of support for the cause, with no need to keep himself hidden, Maclean joined the Communist Party. A telegram arrived at his brother Alan’s publishing office in Mayfair asking for Mrs Dunbar’s current address (Alan was initially concerned that it was fake because of the sign-off “Best love to you Old Boy,” where his brother was more likely to call him “Old Fellow”) and after five years of silence communications were established with family and friends again. Melinda put the bravest of faces on her situation (while aware of those who might read her letters on both sides of the Iron Curtain) when she wrote to her still grief-stricken mother that she understood the suffering she had caused “but believe me I did the right thing and don’t regret it . . . Donald is well and happy to be with his family again. This is absolutely the best place for us to be. Life is good here in every way, and for the children their opportunities for education and training in whatever career they choose are unlimited.” She professed herself happy in the flat with its television and part-time maid. Young Melinda’s favourite reading was, poignantly, the Beatrix Potter books about Peter Rabbit, that quintessentially English herbivore. Young Donald, aged eight, attached a short note in Russian with the hope that he would soon learn to write in English.
Once in the Party and settled in Moscow, there was no need for Maclean to hide his politics. He maintained a principled, politically open, globally oriented perspective, world peace his consistent leitmotif. He was happily in correspondence within days of his reappearance (via the main post office in Moscow) with his brother Alan about Alan’s new job at Macmillan Publishers, and was “sorry that I missed working under Harold MacM when he was Foreign Secretary,” as if he had left the job to go to work for a rival British concern to the Foreign Office. A decade after he had been uncomfortably present and watchful at the AEC meetings, he was able to say, “it’s taken almost ten years for our political leaders to admit that the Russians are not going to attack anybody. Will it be another ten before they say, ‘Oh, well, why not let’s forbid the bomb and disarm.’ ”
In 1956 Philip Toynbee “wrote a cautious little note asking if [Donald] would like to correspond or not” and added a postscript wondering, “did Donald see anything of Gordon [his name for the bibulous Donald] in Moscow, by any chance?” He was initially pained to get “a hectoring, didactic letter” with such propaganda as “the mighty river of Soviet development is beginning to unfreeze” but was relieved when Maclean’s own postscript said that he “must admit that [Gordon] does come tusking into my room from time to time.” The two of them had a spirited political exchange. Maclean defended the Soviets’ brutal crushing of the Hungarian Uprising and, harking back to his early Foreign Office days, regretted that the French and Soviet governments had not intervened in the Spanish Civil War. It was clear to him that “the better life . . . will come to Hungary now.” Toynbee found that letter and its claims (absurd to Western eyes) “impossible to answer” and their long and eventful friendship withered to nothing. Maclean could once again be freely Communist, and seemed at that early stage of his release to have lost any subtlety of independent thought, echoing the period at Cambridge after his father’s death. He had no need to make confessions to the nearest thing he had had to a fellow-traveller, and was now able to blossom in the society he
had half chosen, half had forced upon him. If he and Toynbee reflected back over their intense friendship, they would have felt a lot more than twenty years away from the pre-war white-tie debutante ball at which they had met.
Other letters speak of his enjoyment in “rooting about” in the country around his dacha when he had time, a place that is “wonderful for the children, since there is swimming, fishing, bicycling, mushrooming and cinema all at hand.” The dacha was a two-storey country cottage lent to those in favour with the Party in the pine woods twenty miles north-east of Moscow on the River Klyazma at Chkalovskaya. It had limited facilities, with electricity but heated by wood-burning stoves, and water was carried from a communal well in the village. Two generations on from the croft on Tiree, it suited the Macleans after the upheavals, subterfuges and house moves of their lives together. In Moscow they had access to the special shops reserved for the Soviet elite, and were able to import canned goods and drinks from Denmark. For the time and place, they lived well.
Donald fitted his new life so neatly at first that he failed to understand why some friends did not rush to get back in touch now that he was in this idyll, and he assumed that it was for political reasons rather than a result of the depths of the betrayal he had perpetrated on those who had cared for him at his lowest moments. He wondered if the person who had taken him in after his return from Cairo, Mary Campbell, was silent because she was “disgusted about Hungary” rather than anything else, another sad end to a friendship now that his political beliefs could be given full rein. It is as if once the inner anguish had subsided and the need to dissemble was past, his character had changed; the charm and vulnerability appeared less often. Maybe there was an element of being unable to accept the personal element of his treachery, so certain was he that it was the right thing, so deep was the element of shame. Maclean disliked looking back on his past life: he would say “we” and “our” when speaking of the Soviet Union. Unlike Philby, he was not interested in writing his memoirs, and used to say to a friend who was correspondent for the Morning Star that he had an “emotional block” when looking back. “It was . . . a different life, a long time ago, and a painful time when everything was viewed ‘through frosted glass’: he had no wish to recall it.” His drinking was now under control as the strain of his double life receded. The time of his destructive alcoholism was in another country, and from another state of mind.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 40