A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  *

  Maclean was a lifelong smoker, with frequent bouts of bronchitis the price to pay for his addictive habit. In November 1971 he had an operation to remove tumours on his bladder, some of which were found to be malignant. But he worked unceasingly and fulfillingly through his sixties, at one point saying that he had swapped alcoholism for workaholism. That same year, young Donald, “Beany,” his wife Lucy (daughter of the prominent American Communist George Hanna) and their four-month-old son moved into a one-room flat in Moscow, but soon relocated to England the following year. In 1973, his son Fergus left with his wife Olga and son Dmitri and enrolled at University College London, to take a degree in modern history. The governing body debated whether to allow Fergus to matriculate but correctly decided that the sins of his father should not be visited upon him. Donald wrote to his brother Alan expressing his anxiety as to how “Fergie” would find life in England. That same year Mimsie and her first husband Dmitri Linnik paid a visit to the country of her birth, of which she had no memory at all. The cruellest blow of all was when she too left for good in 1979, taking with her to the US Maclean’s adored granddaughter, the fourth Melinda, Melindushka. It is an irony that it was Maclean’s high standing in the Soviet hierarchy that enabled his children to get visas in order to leave the country; he used his influence to that end because he felt “guilt that he had deflected [their lives] from their normal course.” When their spouses and close friends came to visit he made them take a vow not to speak of their experiences to the press or to those outside the tight circle, maintaining the dignity of silence he had created for himself in Russia.

  Shortly ahead of their daughter, Melinda senior moved back to the US, taking up residence in Sunnyside, Queens, New York, finally bringing to an end nearly forty years of endurance and sundering, resilience and collapse, outstanding loyalty and betrayal. She lived until 2010, giving carefully guarded interviews when necessary to the FBI but never speaking to anyone who might make anything public. By the time she left Russia, Donald was beginning his final decline, and his last few years were spent in and out of hospital following a diagnosis of cancer. He was looked after by his devoted housekeeper, Nadezhda Petrovna, still seeing students, still writing, lamenting that Khrushchev’s reforms had not been continued in the Brezhnev era, expressing strong opinions about British foreign policy and the 1982 Falklands War, wanting to find out from the Reuters bureau chief all he could about the new Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, a leader of a type he and his former fellow countrymen had not seen before. When in 1979 Anthony Blunt was exposed by Thatcher in the House of Commons as one of the Cambridge Five after earlier being granted immunity from prosecution and confidentiality in exchange for his co-operation (and no doubt to save embarrassment to the establishment), Maclean refused to make any comment to the press, British or Russian.

  His son Fergus visited him in December 1982 and his brother Alan saw him for the first time in over thirty years in early 1983, by which time Donald was being treated for pneumonia. The two men “held hands rather shyly like children” in the airport and “talked greedily” for their three days together, mostly “about [their] childhoods.” They agreed with each other not to discuss anything which “Jim [Skardon] and his successors” did not already know.

  *

  Five days before he died, Donald Maclean gave his only interview to a British newspaper. He greeted Mark Frankland of the Observer at his flat wearing a British herringbone tweed jacket and “incongruous grey pin-striped trousers which might once have been part of a Whitehall suit.” He was composed and calm, fretting that his illness was keeping him from his work at the Institute, not admitting to the pain he must have been in. He did not mention spying, but explained that he was baffled by British foreign policy under Thatcher, harking back to his days in Whitehall “when we thought it our job to act as a mediator between the Russians and Americans.” That was how this “political man of the world” saw himself until mediation proved impossible and he had to make his choice.

  In that sense, Maclean was a diplomat until his dying day, working to make the world as he saw it through the lens of his upbringing and time a fairer, more peaceful place. He was also a dissident who held, but could not always voice, his opinions strongly. At the end of his life he believed in “convergence,” confident that “the Soviet and western systems would eventually find a middle ground and the differences between them would gradually disappear.” Like all good Communists and unlike many of the countrymen he had left behind, he looked to the future, not the past. In the interview he sent his absent family messages from beyond the grave, feeling “for my poor brother who has suffered so much because of me” and for his children, “the thing I worry about most in the world.”

  *

  Donald Maclean died on 6 March 1983 at the age of sixty-nine and his funeral was held in the assembly hall of the Institute, “of which he was such a distinguished member.” There was a large turn-out for a “touching farewell to a man who was much loved, admired and respected . . . not because he was a famous spy, but because he was a good and just man,” as his fellow defector George Blake remembered. In his eulogy, Blake spoke about the biblical story of the just men whose presence would persuade God not to destroy a sinful city. Maclean was an atheist, but one of those men. The government newspaper Izvestia did not refer to his espionage activities but described him as a man “of high moral qualities” who had “devoted all his conscious life to the high ideals of social progress and humanism.”

  After the funeral, Maclean’s wishes were carried out. His ashes were brought back to Penn by his son Fergus, and interred in his parents’ grave, alongside those of his two elder brothers. Accidentally, but fittingly for such a notable spy, they were buried after dark by torchlight, for the mundane and practical reason that Alan Maclean was late and the short service needed to be over before the press got wind of it. The reading was from St Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians:

  Love keeps no score of wrongs, does not gloat over other men’s sins, but delights in the truth.

  There is nothing love cannot face, there is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance.

  *

  Donald Maclean’s conscience was inspired by his Victorian, church-going parents, and then was forged in the godless atmosphere of the General Strike, the Depression and the rise of fascism. He was dedicated to the pursuit of peace and justice for the largest number, the humanism referred to by Izvestia. His conscience and the fulfilment of the secret life enabled him to maintain his core beliefs through the purges and the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and when many others fell away he continued to work for what he still believed in: resistance to the capitalist hegemony and atomic might of his wife’s country. There is a purity about this consistency that makes his collapse into alcoholism in Cairo and afterwards all the more painful. His pleas to be removed to Moscow went unheard, leaving him at the time with the torment of feeling that he had betrayed his country to no higher end.

  Late in his life he wrote: “I do not at all regret having done what seemed and still seems to me my duty. I took, and take, no pride in the actual process of carrying out my task” because he disliked the “deceit and danger” inherent in “underground work.” Whatever disappointment he felt about aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, he believed to his death that the USSR and its “new society has a much better prospect than the old of overcoming the major ills and injustices of our civilisation.” His long-ago best man, Mark Culme-Seymour, had felt deeply betrayed by a man he had loved and trusted but he wrote to Alan Maclean that Donald “was a victim of our times and I will cling on to the idea that he was a noble victim, no matter how profoundly misguided.”

  Had he lived beyond the age of sixty-nine, he would have welcomed the increasing moves towards glasnost that he was already detecting, might have felt his was a life less divided than it had seemed by his idealism and his treachery. It was a life that fell into two neat halves: the high-
flying and respected British public servant, and the Moscow intellectual. In both cases he ran against the grain of conventional thinking. Had he not been uncovered through the genius and good luck of Meredith Gardner and his team, he might have been able to complete his successful Foreign Office career away from his obligations to Moscow Centre and end up as honoured in his time and as little remembered today as his father.

  As it is, the simple, timeless Celtic cross on the edge of a peaceful English country churchyard marks the remains of two men with the same name, both men of their times, of high ideals, optimism and strong consciences. Men with similar but differing beliefs and truths to which they remained firm, perhaps too doggedly firm. Donald Maclean’s hope for a better world endured even as his life came full circle and he ended up back in the country he had served and betrayed, next to the father whose edict to follow one’s conscience he had obeyed and whose patriotism he had undermined, in obedience to his secular faith.

  * Hughes is an inspiration for the character of Old Craw in John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy.

  † SW1 is the postal area of London’s smart Knightsbridge and Belgravia.

  Afterword

  When I heard in early 2015 that a large number of the MI5 and Foreign Office files concerning Donald Maclean were finally due to be released to Britain’s National Archives, I realised that he was a figure of national significance who had always been lurking somewhere in the background of my life and whom I would like to explore.

  It is a tale that involves both my grandfathers. My maternal grandfather, Roger Makins, features throughout this book. He and Maclean first worked together in Washington and were the two British diplomats on the Atomic Energy Commission there—although Makins did not have the “access all areas” pass given to his junior. Makins thought highly of Maclean, as did all the Foreign Office chiefs throughout his career, and gave him his last post as head of the American Department. Makins, who knew of Maclean’s treachery shortly after he made the appointment and knew that he was soon to be questioned, was the last man from the Foreign Office to see him as they bumped into one another in the courtyard on the evening of 25 May 1951; he sent his regards to Maclean’s sister who he thought was staying the weekend. For the rest of his long life it was a source of surprise and minor irritation to him that he had not known the watchers did not work at weekends. Occasional commentators used to imply that the Foreign Office, he in particular, and MI5 had been complicit in letting Maclean defect because the alternative, the trial of such a senior figure, would be too embarrassing for the establishment. Makins was rightly exonerated from any such accusation in Parliament when the White Paper was published in 1955.

  My other grandfather was the artist Wogan Philipps. He became a Communist (and was disinherited by his father as a result) after seeing the plight of those working in the East End of London and in the docks when he worked as a mounted policeman during the General Strike of 1926. I quote some of his letters from the Spanish Civil War (where he was an ambulance driver and from which he came back wounded by a shell which obliterated the ambulance parked next to his) to make points about the essential nobility of the left-wing cause to high-minded British converts. Like Maclean, Wogan was a totally committed ideologue who believed that Communism was the only pathway to world peace and a fair society. Like Maclean, he remained a fellow-traveller after the revelations of Stalin’s purges and after the Nazi–Soviet Pact had ensured that the Second World War was inevitable. In Maclean’s interview with the Observer, a few days before he died, he said he did not fear a resurgence of Stalinism and had hopes that Communism could now thrive. Wogan outlived Soviet Communism; he died in 1993. When I asked him after it had ended where he stood on the subject, he said that Stalin had been a disaster for the cause but that the system was still inherently right, would come around again and next time be successful. I think Maclean, with his ideological purity, would have said something similar had he lived another few years.

  Finally, Alan Maclean was a family friend and a fellow publisher who retired shortly before I joined the house of Macmillan. My mother worked for him before her marriage. Alan left an impressive legacy of authors there and was remembered with affection and respect.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  The Maclean family on holiday in their father’s North Cornwall constituency, 1925. Left to right: Alan, Gwendolen (“Mother”), Donald (aged 12), Andy, Ian, Nancy, Sir Donald (“Father”).

  Donald Maclean’s parents. Sir Donald was canvassing support in the 1929 General Election.

  Lady Violet Bonham Carter, close family friend and daughter of Sir Donald’s political hero and leader, Asquith.

  The model schoolboy (back row, middle). Prefects at Gresham’s School, Holt, home of the sons of the Liberal establishment and crucible for free-thinkers of the left.

  James Klugmann, schoolboy friend and undergraduate mentor to Donald Maclean, whom he would later meet again in Paris just before the war.

  The Cambridge Armistice Day March in 1933, which erupted into street-fighting. Maclean is in the second row, under the banner.

  Donald Maclean, the talented linguist heading for the Foreign Office.

  Anthony Blunt, the aesthete Apostle.

  The extrovert exhibitionist Guy Burgess.

  Kim Philby, whose occasional appearances in Maclean’s life shaped its course for the next thirty years.

  The staff of the British Embassy, Paris, the hub of the frantic diplomacy in the build-up to war. Maclean is the tall figure in the back row.

  Melinda Marling, whose long marriage to Maclean was a dramatic and mysterious tangle of love and loyalties.

  Sir Roger Makins, Maclean’s boss in Washington and during his final job in London, was the last man in the Foreign Office to see him on British soil.

  Churchill and Roosevelt had few secrets from Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Behind Churchill is his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and behind Eden the colourful figure of Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, British Ambassador in Moscow and post-war Washington.

  The British Embassy, Washington, 1947. First Secretary Maclean is sitting on Sir John Balfour’s desk. His friend Nicholas Henderson is on the left.

  General Walter Krivitsky of the NKVD defected in 1937 but could not escape his fate. He warned of two spies in the Foreign Office, but it took well over a decade for his testimony to be explored.

  FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere, lumberjack turned spy chaser who was astounded and frustrated by the dilatoriness of his British colleagues.

  Cryptologists at work at US Army Signals Intelligence HQ at Arlington Hall, Virginia, home of the Venona operation.

  Donald and Melinda in the garden of their home in Cairo, 1949.

  Philip Toynbee, Maclean’s close friend, drinking companion and chronicler of his worst excesses.

  Beaconshaw, the first and last house the Macleans owned in Britain.

  The high-flying diplomat in his trademark bow tie and pinstripes.

  The Maclean family, 1950. Left to right: Donald, Fergus, Melinda, Donald.

  The Foreign Office, symbol of British power and importance, found it impossible to believe it could harbour a high-level traitor.

  The Falaise, the ship on which passports were not needed, even when it put in to St Malo.

  Wanted posters of the “Missing Diplomats” were distributed throughout Europe. Here being scrutinised on the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia.

  Melinda Maclean, holding her daughter Melinda, arriving back in London with her sons and mother after their escape from the press in the south of France, September 1951.

  Donald’s brother Alan and their mother seeing Melinda and the children off on their way to Paris, June 1952.

  Jim Skardon, the deft and genial confessor for traitors.

  Vladimir Petrov, Melbourne 1954. The defector gave the first clues about Maclean’s mysterious exit three years after the event.

  Melinda in 1953, the photograph used to apply for
Swiss residence.

  The end of an uneasy thirty-year friendship: the funeral of Guy Burgess in 1963. Melinda and Donald stand together in the foreground.

  The final betrayal: Melinda and Kim Philby in Moscow.

  Donald Maclean’s coffin being carried out of IMEMO, Moscow, in 1983 after he was honoured for his work there.