by Vikas Khatri
In fact, he was busy contacting the remnants of Russia’s spy ring in the United States, and putting them to work again. He also re-contacted various American embassy officials who had been blackmailed into aiding Russian Intelligence when they were stationed in Moscow. By 1953, the revitalised Russian spy ring was stronger than ever. The secrets that flowed to Moscow via Abel’s transmitter included details of the American hydrogen bomb and atomic submarines.
His downfall was a new assistant, Reino Hayhanen, a Russian Finn. Like many Finns, he was a heavy drinker. He was also unhappy about spying in a foreign country. Abel had Hayhanen’s wife sent out to join him, but this proved to be a mistake. The couple quarrelled all the time, and Hayhanen became less efficient than ever. He resented his lack of contact with Abel; their meetings were often in public parks, or in the New York subway.
In 1955, Abel went to Russia; when he returned, he discovered that Hayhanen had been drunk for weeks. He told his demoralised assistant that it was time he journeyed to Russia for a holiday. Hayhanen was terrified; with his reputation as a drunk, it was a 50/50 chance that he would be eliminated. He travelled as far as Paris—then went to the American embassy, and explained that he wanted to defect. So, one more Russian spy network collapsed. Abel was sentenced to 30 years in jail; but he spent only five there. In 1962, he was exchanged for the American pilot, Gary Powers. And Russia’s greatest spy since Sorge returned after all to end his days in Moscow.
More and more the spy lives in a limbo between his employers and those whom he seeks to betray. In some cases, when the agent plays a double, or even treble, role—his life span can be calculated in terms of days rather than weeks, weeks rather than months. Ultimately, the spy finds himself with only one person left whom he can trust – himself. And when his own self-trust evaporates—as it eventually does —then he is as good as dead.
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Burgess and Maclean:
The Old School Spies
On the morning of May 25, 1951, diplomat Guy Burgess sat in his New Bond Street flat reading the London Times. He was in no hurry. A friend of his, a male dancer in a West End musical comedy, had just left, and an apparently uneventful day stretched before Burgess.
He did not have to report to the Foreign Office because he was under suspension after being sent home from his job at the British embassy in Washington. The complaints against him ranged from homosexual affairs to driving offences, from repeated drunkenness to “inattention to duty”.
At 40, his career as a diplomat was clearly near its end. The Old Etonian, very much in favour of taking life as it came, was not particularly worried. Apart from The Times, his only immediate concern was the holiday he planned to take with a young American friend he had met on the Queen Mary, a month earlier during his voyage home in disgrace. They were due to sail from Southampton at midnight aboard the steamer Falaise, bound for Brittany.
On that same morning, another diplomat, Donald Maclean, was working away busily at his “American desk” at the Foreign Office. It was his 38th birthday and he was in good spirits. His wife, Melinda, was expecting a baby; he had recovered from his homosexual infatuation with a Negro porter at a Soho nightspot, who had repaid his devotion by beating him up; he was looking forward to a birthday lunch with a few friends.
Then came the tip-off that changed everything. The source was a third “diplomat”, Kim Philby. Philby worked ostensibly as a first secretary at the Washington embassy. In fact, he was the liaison officer between the British S.I.S. (Secret Intelligence Service) and its American counterpart, the C.I.A. (Central Intelligence Agency). He was also, like Burgess and Maclean, a Soviet agent.
Security men, trying to track down a whole series of atomic secret leakages, had suspected Maclean for some time. Now they were about to pounce, and because of his job at the very heart of Anglo-American Intelligence, Philby had been informed.
His message to Burgess was short and crisp: “Warn Donald he is about to be interrogated.” Burgess, although not directly under suspicion himself, panicked. He decided not merely to warn Maclean and help him to flee the country. He would flee himself as well.
One of his first steps was to arrange an assignation with the young American due to join him on a holiday that night, and explain that the trip would have to be called off. “A friend of mine at the Foreign Office is in serious trouble,” he said at their meeting in Green Park. It must have sounded a reasonable excuse. But, for once, Burgess was speaking the truth.
What had promised to be an uneventful day proved to be a busy one. Burgess hired a car “for about ten days”, invested in a new suitcase and some clothes, packed, and in the early evening, climbed into the car and set out to drive to Maclean’s country home at Tatsfield in Kent.
Maclean, shadowed by security men who had had him under surveillance for some weeks, caught his usual train home, the 5.19 from Charing Cross Station. It was to be for the last time. As soon as Burgess arrived with news of his impending interrogation, Maclean also packed his bags. Then, after a hasty dinner, the two spies drove down to Southampton.
They arrived only minutes before the Falaise was due to sail, abandoned the hired car on the quayside, and rushed for the gangway. “Hey,” shouted a sailor, “what about the car?” “Back on Monday,” called out Burgess as he boarded the cross-channel steamer—but neither he nor Maclean would ever see England again.
By a secret route they made their way to Moscow while behind them the storm broke—not only over their escape, but over the fact that two men of such unstable character had been able to betray their country over such a long period without detection.
Burgess was a talkative, once handsome but now bloated, figure who breakfasted off benzedrine tablets washed down with brandy and port, and who never tired of boasting about his sexual excesses. “I could never travel by train,” he once announced at a party. “I would feel obliged to seduce the engine driver.”
His Communist sympathies, like those of Maclean and Philby, went back to Cambridge—where all three had been contemporaries in the early 1930s. As an undergraduate, Burgess far outshone his two friends and “fellow-travellers”. He has been described as “the most brilliant young talent of his day”.
That promise was never fulfilled. He drifted from job to job, served for a brief period in the war in a minor Intelligence job, worked for the B.B.C., then finally found a niche in the Foreign Office. That he survived there from the end of the war until 1951—despite his drinking, homosexual exploits, and lack of enthusiasm for work—is a tribute to the strength of the “old school tie network”.
As a spy, as in everything else, Burgess was something of a dilettante—more interested in being able to boast to his intimates that he was “working for the Reds” than actually providing his Moscow masters with information of genuine value. It is doubtful if he told them anything that changed the course of history. Maclean, however, was an entirely different prospect.
He was the son of Sir Donald Maclean, a staunch Presbyterian who had been Minister of Education under Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. By the time Maclean arrived at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to read modern languages, he was as staunch an atheist and Communist as his father was a Christian.
Outside of his studies, Maclean’s main —in fact, almost sole—interest was undergraduate journalism, which he used to popularise Marxism. He had quite clearly accepted the whole Communist philosophy. It was therefore a surprise to his friends when he announced that he proposed to seek a career in the British Foreign Office—the very anthesis of Red belief.
“I have decided to join the oppressors instead of the oppressed,” Maclean uttered. It was an uncharacteristically flip explanation which, along with his uncompromisingly Left-wing written views, should have aroused suspicion.
As it was, the Foreign Office accepted Maclean as a more than passable recruit. If the pro-Communist sympathies he had shown in the past were considered at all, they were dismissed as the not-uncommon excesses of an
intellectual undergraduate. It did not occur to anyone in authority that he was already a committed Soviet agent.
Luck was to prove unusually kind to Maclean in his role as a spy. He was posted in the spring of 1944 to Washington as a First Secretary. With him went his wife, Melinda. The fact that he was only 31—unusually young for such a job—is an indication of the esteem in which he was held at the Foreign Office—who regarded him as one of the brightest of their bright young men.
It was only natural, when the post became vacant a couple of years later, that Maclean should be appointed British Secretary to the Combined Policy Committee on atomic affairs. The function of the Committee was to control the exchange of information on atomic matters between the United States, Canada and Britain.
This post not only enabled him to pass on to the Soviet Union details of vital atomic secrets being pooled between the countries—he was able to lay his hands on even more important information held back by the United States for security reasons.
This came about because he managed, as part of his duties, to obtain a non-escort pass to the U.S. Atomic H.Q. in Washington. He made frequent use of the privilege—usually at night when the building was more or less deserted.
Nobody knows, or is ever likely to know, exactly how much information he managed to filch on these nocturnal visits. One secret—at a time when uranium was believed to be in critically short supply—was almost certainly a cheap American process for converting waste from South African goldmines into high-grade uranium.
Eventually, a security officer, Brian La Plante, became suspicious of the frequency with which Maclean made use of his non-escort facility and the unusual hours he kept. “I reported him and the pass was withdrawn,” said La Plante. But by then the damage had been done and, with no follow-up investigation, Maclean was able to move on to his next coup.
From his privileged position he was able to monitor for his Russian task masters the top secret negotiations which led up to the signing of the Western defensive alliance—the North Atlantic Pact—in April 1949. During the negotiations, Maclean was switched to a new post, Head of Chancery at the Cairo embassy. It did not affect his efficiency as a spy because, as a Grade A embassy, Cairo was kept informed as a matter of routine about all details of British Middle East policy.
There were signs, however, that he was beginning to feel the strain of his dual role. In Washington, he had already started to drink heavily. In Cairo he drank even more, and his conduct became increasingly bizarre.
After one alcoholic binge, he broke into the apartment belonging to the United States ambassador’s secretary, smashed up the furniture, stuffed some of her clothing down the lavatory, and shattered the bath with a marble shelf.
Finally, on May 11, 1950, he was sent home. Melinda had complained to the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell, that it was no longer possible to control him. The official reason for his return—not far from the truth—was “a nervous breakdown”.
Back in London, Maclean was given six months’ leave on condition that he underwent psychiatric treatment. It was at this time, urged on by his woman psychiatrist to face up to his latent homosexuality, that Maclean embarked on his affair with the Negro porter of a Soho nightclub.
Intermittently, he still drank heavily, and friends would sometimes find him reeling about in the bar of a West club declaiming: “I am the English Alger Hiss”—a reference to the respected American State Department employee who had turned out to be a Soviet spy.
His friends did not for a moment believe that he was
speaking the literal truth. They simply dismissed his mumblings as the ravings of a drunk. Maclean then returned to the Foreign Office in November, 1950. Fortune—or official naivete—continued to smile upon his spying activities. He was next appointed head of the American Department.
In his new position, Maclean was able to keep Moscow abreast of all the vital details of such matters as the U.S.-Japan Peace Treaty negotiations, and the Korean war strategy. For instance, it was through the services of Maclean that the Chinese learned—via Moscow—that President Truman had ordered General MacArthur not to retaliate even if China invaded Korea from the north.
But, although Melinda had by now returned to him, and they had bought a country house in Kent, his inner life was far from well. He still found his burden of guilt difficult to bear. By the beginning of 1951, he was again on the bottle. At times, it seemed as if he was almost seeking discovery so that he might have some peace of mind and conscience.
In one of his drinking bouts, he asked Mark Culme-Seymour, a friend from prewar days: “What would you do if I said
I was working for Uncle Joe?” Culme-Seymour debated with himself whether to report the conversation, but eventually decided—as had the friends whom Maclean had told he was “an Alger Hiss”—that it was merely the eccentric remark of a man who was overimbibing.
However, the net was beginning to be drawn in on Maclean. The earlier leakages of atomic secrets were known, and for two years British security men had been trying to track down the informer. The finger pointed to Maclean even at the time when he was in London on his six months’ leave for psychiatric treatment.
Then, at a three-cornered meeting of MI5, S.I.S., and Foreign Office executives, it was decided that the time was ripe to spring the trap. The next day, a Friday, the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, gave the authority for Maclean to be interrogated. The investigation would begin on the Monday. MI5 ordered their top man, William Skardon, the ex-Murder Squad detective who had unmasked atom bomb spy Klaus Fuchs, to stand by.
Then onto the scene stepped Kim Philby, “The Third Man” in Washington. It was to prove a personal tragedy for him that Burgess—the go-between in warning Maclean—should have chosen this moment to make his unnecessary flight. Had he stayed put, Philby might have continued undetected for many more years as a Soviet agent.
In the quest for the man who had tipped off Maclean, he would have figured as just one of several possible names.
But in lists drawn up of Maclean suspects and Burgess suspects, he was the only person to figure on both of them. Philby was recalled from Washington, where the Americans had made it clear that they would no longer work with him and asked to resign.
In his time as a spy, Philby had probably done even more than Maclean to damage the interests of the United States and her Western allies. He had occupied two offices of supreme trust which had put him in an ideal position from which to serve the Communist cause.
One was when—at a time that the war had not yet ended, and Russia was still officially an Anglo-American ally—he was given the task of setting up a new Soviet counterespionage section of S.I.S. The other was his key position as liaison officer between S.I.S. and the C.I.A.
No one was certain how many Western agents as well as Western secrets he betrayed. Certainly the blood of 150 Albanians was on his hands. They were men who took part, in 1950, in an American and British inspired attempt—at the height of the Cold War—to overthrow Russian influence in Albania through guerilla-fomented uprisings. But when the guerillas crossed the frontier the Russians were primed and waiting for them.
Yet Philby’s treacherous career was a long time in dying. He managed to bluff his way through his interrogation on his return from Washington. As late as 1955, he was publicly cleared of being “The Third Man” by Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons. Afterwards, smiling and confident, he held a press conference. Some of the questions and answers at it were:
“If there was a third man, were you, in fact, the third man?”
“No, I was not.”
“The Foreign Secretary said in the past that you had Communist associations. Is that why you were asked to resign?”
“I was asked to resign because of an imprudent association.”
“That it is your association with Burgess?”
“Correct.”
“What about the alleged Communist associations?”
&nbs
p; “The last time I spoke to a Communist, knowing him to be a Communist, was sometime in 1934.”
“That rather implies that you have also spoken to Communists unknowingly and now know about it?”
“Well, I spoke to Burgess last in April or May, 1951.”
“He gave you no idea that he was a Communist at all?”
“Never.”
Philby then went on to work as a S.I.S. secret agent in the field—his final posting being to Beirut, Lebanon, where his cover was foreign correspondent for the Sunday Observer. Meanwhile, back in London, irrefutable evidence was gradually being assembled of his long connection with Communism. And the fact that he had been “The Third Man” in the Burgess-Maclean affair.
At the end of 1962, S.I.S. confronted him in Beirut. He was given the choice: come home to Britain and face trial, or disappear for good behind the Iron Curtain. The British government hoped he would choose the second alternative—thus saving the “dirt” a trial would bring to light, and the inevitable demands for an inquiry into the Security Services.
Philby plumped for the Iron Curtain and fled “in secret” to Moscow. From there —speaking for himself and Burgess and Maclean—he wrote to a friend in England: “My tongue is looser now!”
Burgess and Maclean settled in Moscow after their flight and continued to serve the Russians in minor advisory roles connected with propaganda. Maclean was joined by his wife, Melinda, and their two sons.
Although the Macleans lived discreetly. Burgess still drank heavily and went on with his homosexual affairs. Western correspondents would often encounter him, usually the worse for alcohol, in Moscow hotels. He died in 1963, a few months after Philby’s defection, of advanced hardening of the arteries. Before his death, he added a codicil to his will, leaving a third of his estate to Philby.