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After the Petrov evidence had come to light, a White Paper about Burgess and Maclean was published in September 1955. The paper was little better than a whitewash, excusing official myopia in every area relating to the escape of the two men. The Times editorial, headlined “Too Little and Too Late,” summed up its impact. Also in reaction to the White Paper, the journalist Henry Fairlie coined the new and still highly relevant usage of the word “establishment” in The Spectator to encapsulate “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised,” in this case by “those who belonged to the same stratum as the two missing men.” Fairlie named Lady Violet Bonham Carter as a “prominent member of the Establishment,” which brought an enraged response from Asquith’s daughter alleging that such comments meant that she had used her influence as “a cloak for treachery”—an illogical position as Fairlie was making the point that the newly dubbed establishment had simply not been open to the idea of treachery. Harold Macmillan, Foreign Secretary at the time, summed up the establishment’s emotional position when he said that “the Foreign Office regards this case as a personal wound, as when something of the kind strikes at a family, or a ship, or a regiment.”
If the establishment hoped to draw a line under the affair with their defensive and disingenuous White Paper and House of Commons debate, immediately followed by overdue changes to the vetting procedure, the reappearance of the men a few months later led to further diplomatic concerns, such as how members of the British Embassy should behave if they saw their two missing colleagues. A directive was sent out that if Burgess or Maclean were encountered at receptions, staff “should avoid all contact with them, but need not leave simply” because the traitors were present. However, “if the occasion should be a purely Anglo-Soviet one it should be made plain to the hosts that the staff of the British Embassy will leave” if Maclean or Burgess were there. But, unlike the ubiquitous Burgess, Maclean went out of his way to avoid his fellow countrymen, leaving a concert given by Sir Malcolm Sargent in Moscow in the interval when he realised that he was sitting next to someone from the Embassy. Patrick Reilly, on reporting back to the Foreign Office, hoped that the edict excused leaving public performances if the defectors were spotted as in that case he had twelve seats from his Russian hosts which would have been “conspicuously empty” if they had departed. The defectors’ passports would not be renewed, but even so there was a great kerfuffle when Donald McLean applied to the Embassy for a British visa until it was established that an Australian with that name living in Moscow simply wanted to take his Latvian wife on a trip to London.
The Sargent concert aside, Maclean preferred functions that allowed him to pursue his undimmed interest in foreign policy matters and intellectual debate; he was as uncomfortable as ever with social events. In 1961 he took the job that was to last him the rest of his life, working for the Institute of World Economics and International Relations (IMEMO), the research centre that analyses the economic, foreign, domestic and military policies of overseas countries. He was a researcher and teacher, writing papers for the Institute’s magazine which always stressed that if the system which he believed in was to work, the Party had to embrace the intelligentsia, not treat them with suspicion and send them into exile. His perennial teaching course was on the first Labour government in Britain, which was in office shortly before that in which his father had served, and from the Institute he wrote a thesis which later became his book British Foreign Policy Since Suez. Throughout his life, he declared, he had got his “job-satisfaction” from dealing with the “intellectual problems” of the Foreign Office and “as an analyst in the Institute,” not from either the diplomatic show or the hidden business of espionage which so pained him.
Always on the side of the unjustly treated, Maclean took a close interest in dissidents. He fraternised with like-minded intellectuals, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “united by similar opposition views.” They met “to discuss the kind of political and literary news you did not find in newspapers.” He remained as true as ever to where his conscience led him, on the intellectual edge of Soviet society as he had wanted to be on British. He learned that a girl whose family he knew slightly had been arrested for distributing “subversive” leaflets and wrote on his ballot paper in the next Supreme Soviet elections “While girls like Olga Ioffe are kept in mental institutions, I cannot participate in the elections.”
Although he had supported the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, by 1968 his thinking about the Soviets and confidence in speaking out against them had developed to the point where he could voice his opposition to the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (an echo of his early days in the Foreign Office and the Munich Agreement that had allowed Hitler to take that territory). He stayed out of trouble in IMEMO only by getting permission to be absent on the day when its members were made to declare support for the Soviet action.
When the dissident historian Roy Medvedev wrote his book On Stalin and Stalinism in the 1970s and was looking for “individual historians, old Bolsheviks and other writers” to read it and add any extra comments, one of those he showed it to suggested that he might like to ask Mark Petrovich Frazer for his opinion. Frazer went on to help Medvedev, who had no English, by translating English texts for him. Raleigh Trevelyan of the London publishers Hutchinson approached him with an idea (which came to nothing) that he should write a book “on the Russian people” as part of a series to include Doris Lessing on Africa, Kenneth Tynan on America and Lady Diana Cooper on France. Alan Maclean suggested that he might curate a list of the most interesting Russian writing for translation by Macmillan, but, again, with no result.
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Maclean’s own book was published first in Britain and America in 1970, then translated into Russian. It was an extension of his doctoral thesis, very different to the one planned at Cambridge on Calvinism and the bourgeoisie, albeit picking up on many of the same themes that had recurred throughout his intellectual life. He stressed this straight line as an explanation for his current course of study early in the book: “When, after having spent the first sixteen years of my working life in the Diplomatic Service, I found myself with the necessity of finding a new profession, I decided . . . that what I was best qualified to do was to contribute . . . by making a continuous study, as objectively as possible, of contemporary British foreign policy.” The first word of the title of his doctorate, “Problems of British Foreign Policy 1956–1968,” gives away his thrust. The book is in three parts: policy towards the other Western powers, towards the Third World and towards the Communist powers. He takes the line that the Anglo-American alliance was now anti-Communist and that Britain was threatening its own destruction by pursuing this course, either by ramping up talk of war when Britain was within range of Russian nuclear weapons or, more likely, in destroying itself economically by overspending recklessly on defence. The country was failing to come to terms with its loss of Empire and the “rate of error is a function of the particularly rapid change in the post-war balance of forces to the disadvantage of all the imperialist systems, particularly the British.” On the whole, those he had served failed to see Britain’s world decline in the same way.
The argument is compelling and the mandarin prose would have been familiar to Maclean’s former colleagues as he displayed his mastery of foreign policy from his exile. In his view, consistent with his memoranda as head of the Foreign Office American Department, American economic aggression was more dangerous than Communism and “the question of policy towards the Communist powers enters into all the main problems of British foreign policy.” The British government could find no reason to ban the book, well researched and tightly argued as it was with its socialist bias much in evidence but not overwhelming (and therefore backing up his publisher’s claim that it had not been “edited” by the Soviet Foreign Ministry). With the respect shown to him within IMEMO, he felt free to criticise the Soviets too for being drawn into the arms r
ace. He called for the conflict between the “creative” and the “dark” tendencies within the system to be resolved. With hindsight, it reads like an early plea for the glasnost he would not live to see. A decade after the book had been published he wrote to a friend that he felt “the current leadership” of the USSR were more interested in “preserving power” for themselves than in “releasing the energy of the Soviet people,” in whom he still placed such faith.
The book was taken seriously in Britain. Maclean even gave a brief, nervy interview to BBC radio to promote his work. Apart from saying he believed Britain’s power and influence would increase over at least the next twenty years, most of the four minutes was spent reminding his interviewer that he had an agreement not to answer any questions outside the content of his book. Apart from the sniping prejudice of the Daily Mail which blindly dismissed his long-held political views merely as “Soviet thinking and style,” it got respectful reviews applauding his work in a way that would have reminded him of his annual appraisals in the Foreign Office. Donald Cameron Watt in the Sunday Times called the work of the “quondam traitor . . . a remarkably clear and objective account of those parts of British foreign policy he has chosen to cover . . . impeccably documented.” The completion of his thesis and publication of it as a respectfully received book at the age of fifty-seven seems like a part of the simpler life that he was meant to lead. He expressed his political beliefs with expertise, demonstrated his intellectual curiosity and shared a worldview that for him was consistent and focused.
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Maclean never became part of the “twilight brigade community of defectors, down-at-heel, disillusioned and wondering how he had got there.” He did not seek out British company for its own sake unless it could feed his desire for news that would further inform his intellectual interests. He shunned giving interviews where Burgess revelled in them. He had closed the door on that world. When Edward Crankshaw of the Observer, a close friend of Alan’s, went to Moscow, Burgess was in touch with him within a day and they spent a lot of time together. When Burgess then rang Maclean on Crankshaw’s behalf; Melinda was keen to meet him “but Donald would not hear of it.” The conversation ended with Burgess calling his fellow Communist “a stuffed shirt” and hanging up on him.
Melinda’s mother and sisters came to visit, but Lady Maclean stayed away. She was instead the frequent recipient of letters addressed to “Dear Queen” or “Dear Queenie” and signed by his childhood nickname of “Teento” that detailed her grandchildren’s success as model Russian offspring: Fergus spent his summer holiday working on a collective farm, while Beany and Mimsie were going to their respective boy and girl Young Pioneer camps, working the land, playing wholesome games, learning agricultural and horticultural skills, politics in “black and white . . . socialist or capitalist terms,” preparing to be good Soviet adults. He portrayed his life as one of contentment intellectually, socially and within the family.
There was a major fluttering in the official hencoops in London in 1962 when it was rumoured that both Burgess and Maclean would soon be returning to Britain, the former because he was suffering from angina and was thought to be wanting to make a farewell visit; the latter because Lady Maclean’s health was declining. Although there was no clear evidence for either man’s desire to return, a warrant for their arrest was obtained just in case. When the Queen Bee of the family did enter her last days in July of that year, her middle son’s telegram of love gave her comfort and Alan reported that “she was really very happy for you and your new life and had no regrets or worries on your behalf.” Six plain-clothes police officers attended the funeral at Penn just in case Maclean chose to return on a false passport. His modest inheritance was sent to him in Moscow.
Burgess’s death followed the next summer as a result of his angina, abused liver and the hardening of his arteries. Although Maclean “seldom saw Guy, and it gave him a very odd feeling that the names Burgess and Maclean had become as indissolubly linked as Swan’s with Edgar’s and Debenham’s with Freebody’s,” he gave an address at his funeral. Kim Philby, who had finally made his confession of treachery in Beirut, where he was the Observer’s correspondent, and had defected earlier that same year, was not allowed by his minders to attend, in spite of his newly won Soviet citizenship and his inheritance of Burgess’s 4,000 books. Maclean was relieved to write at the time of the defection that “the hounds are baying away again, but I am not the fox, or even half the fox, this time.” Philby would soon give the young Cambridge graduate he had recruited at his Kilburn kitchen table nearly thirty years earlier every reason to regret his arrival in Moscow.
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Philby was the man who had influenced the course of Donald Maclean’s life more than any other. He had recruited him to the Soviet cause, saved him from identification by Volkov, enabled him to reach Russia just ahead of his arrest and interrogation, and now, as he betrayed everyone close to him, did the ultimate double-cross of his fellow agent. Espionage and betrayal, which felt “like being a lavatory attendant” to Maclean, was a source of thrilling power to Philby, who was now well paid by the KGB as “an upper-middle-class apparatchik.” When Philby’s American third wife, Eleanor, joined him in Moscow, the two couples spent two or three nights a week together, at the ballet or just having dinner and playing bridge. Eleanor and Melinda were exiles for whom a discussion about seeing a grapefruit in the market could last five minutes, the men more cerebral and at home with the system. Eleanor Philby found Donald conceited, and Melinda amusing but “extremely nervous and highly strung, with an annoying habit of repeating herself” and yearning “for the luxuries of Western capitalism,” a yearning only partially fulfilled by the parcels of food and clothes sent by her mother. All the same, Eleanor was pleased to have “someone new to talk to” in her exile. She sensed that the Macleans’ marriage was by now a difficult one again, with Donald on occasion still getting hopelessly drunk; he could be “unaccountably rude and offensive” to anyone around him, as if he had “sipped a phial of Dr Jekyll’s medicine.” Mrs Dunbar had concurred with this when she reported back after her visit to Moscow in 1959 that “life in the Maclean ménage is not altogether harmonious,” the phraseology more Foreign Office than Dunbar. The Macleans were now openly tied together by ideology and geography, and, rather pathetically given Donald’s masterful grasp of global foreign affairs, used to talk of the “good times they would have in Italy and Paris when the Revolution comes.”
When Eleanor went back to America to see her daughter and enjoy a bit of Western luxury for herself in the summer of 1964, she got a stream of letters from her husband in which he described going on holiday with the Macleans to the Baltic countries of the Soviet bloc, staying with them at their dacha, dining with them in Moscow and increasingly mentioning Melinda alone. Eleanor’s passport was confiscated on her arrival in the US and she was not able to return to Moscow until late in the year; Melinda paid for her enforced stay from the dollar account she still had in her home country. On her return Eleanor found her husband “restless and uneasy,” drinking more than she had ever seen him drink before (although she had generally found him to be most often “lost in a haze of alcohol” before she left) and no longer on speaking terms with Donald after a “filthy row” in which Maclean apparently accused Philby of being a double agent working for the British. Christmas and New Year were miserable, spent cross-country skiing with Melinda at the Maclean dacha and taken up with Melinda’s own complaints about how “Donald has become quite impossible and I can’t live with him any more.”
Eleanor confronted her husband with her suspicions. Philby claimed that he was just “trying to make [Melinda’s] life happier” by spending time with her as she had been miserable for the last fifteen years. And that Donald was impotent. Whether or not this last claim was true, and alcoholism would be a strong factor if it were, the encounter marked the end of the Philbys’ marriage. Eleanor was presented with a bunch of tulips by the KGB at the airport before she retur
ned to America. Reflecting on her husband’s pathological betrayal of his great “ideological comrade” as well as herself, she wrote shortly before her death that “no one can ever truly know another human being.” Melinda moved in with Kim Philby. They lived together for three years, the children remaining with Donald, until Rufina, a half-Polish, half-Russian woman twenty years younger, caught Philby’s eye and became his fourth wife. Melinda returned to her husband, who had once again forsworn alcohol in 1968, this time for good, but two years later moved to her own apartment near by. Their extraordinary marriage was finally over.
Maclean made no comment in his letters home about his double desertion, aware as he was of how everything to do with him, Melinda and Philby found its way into the press. In 1968 the Sunday Times published a series of articles which became the basis for Phillip Knightley’s biography of Philby; no word came from Moscow. In spite of the fulfilment of his work and his attention to the future, as his marriage finally seemed to end, Maclean might have thought back with some regret to Melinda’s support after the horror of the Helouan trip and his exit from Cairo the following year, their last days in England and their lives together. Or he might have felt that in his undivided self he no longer had the need for a secret sharer.
Philby’s place in the Macleans’ expatriate life was taken by George Blake, the spy turned while a prisoner of war in Korea and whose dramatic escape from Wormwood Scrubs (rather than serve the longest prison sentence, forty-two years, ever handed down in a British court) brought him to Moscow in 1969. Maclean saw in Blake a fellow ideologue and found him work at IMEMO, studying the Middle East and the Arab–Israeli conflict. Blake admired the older man’s capacity for work and identified with the “strong Calvinistic streak” that drove that, as well as seeing him as a “prophet of perestroika.” When Blake remarried and had children the families spent Christmas together. Maclean left the younger man his library and his old, stained tweed cap. Among the books in that library were the spy novels of Graham Greene, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré, whose fictional depictions of ambiguous, divided loyalties in the world of espionage got “close to the truth imaginatively” for the real-life and deeply ambivalent spy.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 41