Maclean’s position deteriorated after his friend Philip Toynbee, a repentant ex-member of CPGB, arrived in Cairo in April 1950. They went on a succession of violent binges: Maclean struck his wife, hit an effete English aristocrat called Edward Gathorne-Hardy, threw glasses against walls and raved. As Toynbee wrote from Cairo on 9 May to Julia Mount, who fifteen years earlier had gone skiing with Maclean, ‘Poor Donald has engaged in a wild crescendo of drunken, self-destructive, plain destructive episodes.’ Melinda Maclean blamed Toynbee’s influence but, as he protested, ‘actually, I’ve done my honest best to control him’. A diplomatic incident had occurred when the two English drunks ‘smashed to pieces the flat of the American ambassador’s secretary (God knows why)’.20
It does not need God to give explanations. Maclean had twice besought Moscow to be released from his spying commitment, but had received no response. As a result of smashing the American’s apartment, he was returned post-haste to England for detoxification, which accomplished his object of escaping the immediate stress of his double life in Cairo. It is further possible that, in attacking American property, he hoped that the outcry raised by US officials would be such that Moscow would decide that his cover had been impaired and would therefore release him, as he had twice requested, from the intolerable strain of his Cairo duplicity. But the US protest was unexpectedly muted, and Sir Ronald Campbell was determined not to ruin the career of a member of his staff. Campbell had a record of feeling responsible for people in difficulty. When Yugoslavia had been overrun by the Italians in 1941, the Belgrade legation staff, under his unruffled leadership, made a cross-country trek to Kotor, where Campbell’s persuasive tenacity enabled 100 vulnerable people, not only the legation staff, to leave Yugoslavia and escape Italian clutches. His protective empathy during Maclean’s disgrace may have been influenced by another matter. Campbell was a bachelor who was accompanied in his overseas postings by a devoted manservant whom Campbell had in the past defended from prurient criticisms. Like anyone of sense and experience, he disliked people’s private habits being held against them if they were good at their work.
Edwin Chapman-Andrews of the Cairo embassy reported Maclean’s breakdown to the FO’s Personnel Department on 10 May 1950 in gendered language: ‘He is a very good man, fundamentally, and well worth making a very special effort for.’ Melinda Maclean was blamed for her husband’s collapse. ‘She is a vivacious and no doubt attractive person and the whole build-up of her character is so definitely American and can never become anything else that I think there has been some maladjustment.’ Through her hard-drinking compatriots on the US embassy staff her husband had fallen in with ‘a fast set keen on sitting up late at night or all night and assing about a bit’. This had brought him to an alcoholic breakdown. ‘He has become thoroughly ashamed and disgusted with himself,’ reported Chapman-Andrews. ‘What he needs is quietness and green fields and a little good companionship.’ He recommended Maclean’s transfer to the Foreign Office, ‘where his wife would at least have a chance to become a little anglicized’.21
For Campbell and Chapman-Andrews, as for any able diplomat, tolerance was a hallmark of civilization. ‘The British upper-class code encourages variation,’ reported Crane Brinton of OSS, ‘once a few essentials are complied with.’ When in 1948 it had been reported to Sir Alexander Cadogan, head of the British delegation at the United Nations General Assembly in Paris, that Burgess had provoked outrage by attending a meeting of the Balkan sub-committee drunk with cosmetics on his face, Cadogan replied ‘that the Foreign Office traditionally tolerated innocent eccentricity’.22
In London Maclean lived first in the Mascot Hotel, off Baker Street, and later moved to 41 York Street, Marylebone. He declined to go for treatment by the Office’s Harley Street physician and insisted on becoming the patient of Dr Erna Rosenbaum in Wimpole Street. Her consulting-rooms were a few minutes’ walk from the Mascot Hotel and York Street. It is unclear how he knew of Rosenbaum after seven years abroad in Washington and Cairo; unclear, too, why the Office agreed to his insistence. Middleton and Carey-Foster became suspicious of Rosenbaum after her patient absconded, but MI5 could find no material against her. Any chance of success for her treatment was dashed when, in August 1950, Mark Culme-Seymour (who had introduced Maclean to Melinda Marling and had been best man at their wedding) arranged for him to become a member of the Gargoyle Club at 69 Dean Street, Soho. The Gargoyle was open to members only, and thus circumvented the regulations, first introduced under the Defence of the Realm Act during the First World War, which limited the hours when licensed premises could serve the public with alcohol from noon to 2.40 p.m. and 6.30 to 9.30 p.m.
Maclean had for sixteen years kept a cordon sanitaire between him and the other two Cambridge spies recruited in 1934, but this was breached by joining the Gargoyle. Philby had been a pre-war regular, and Burgess a habitué since 1943. Maclean, who kept control of himself at the Office, could discard all inhibitions at the Gargoyle, which was blasé about rowdy scenes. He got hugely drunk night after night, accosting other Gargoyle habitués with admissions such as ‘I work for Uncle Joe’ or ‘I’m the Hiss of England, you know that!’ One night, seeing Goronwy Rees in the Gargoyle, he snarled, ‘I know all about you, you bastard: you used to be one of us, but you ratted!’ Culme-Seymour considered whether to report Maclean’s startling avowals to the Foreign Office, but decided that as they were being broadcast to all and sundry at the Gargoyle, the authorities would already have heard. It was not only in the Gargoyle that Maclean had furious outbursts. Over lunch in the Travellers with his colleague Sir Anthony Rumbold he became so vehement in denouncing American policy in Korea that Rumbold had to work hard to avoid a dining-room scene.23
Maclean resumed work in November 1950 as head of the FO’s American Department. He commuted from the family home, a modern house called Beacon Shaw, on the edge of the village of Tatsfield, near Sevenoaks in Kent. During the intensified freeze in the Cold War, which followed China’s intervention in the Korean war in October, he continued to purvey valuable material for Moscow. In December that year Attlee hastened to Washington to discourage President Truman from deploying atomic bombs in Korea. A copy of the Prime Minister’s report to the Cabinet on his visit to Washington lay among the secret papers found in Maclean’s steel filing cabinet at the Office after his disappearance. Another copy will have gone to Moscow. Neither Burgess nor Maclean had access to operational decisions, however: the claim of General Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of US forces in the Far East and of UN forces in Korea, that his strategy had been foiled by their forewarning of the enemy is a self-serving absurdity. Cyril Connolly, who encountered Maclean at the Gargoyle in this period, thought his appearance was frightening. ‘His hands would tremble, his face was usually a vivid yellow, and he looked as if he had spent the night sitting up in a tunnel.’ One evening a man got into a taxi outside a nightclub only to find Maclean asleep in the back with a rug and furious at being woken: he had hired the cab for the night as his bedroom. ‘Though he remained detached and amiable as ever, it was clear to us that he was miserable,’ wrote Connolly. ‘In conversation a kind of shutter would fall as if he had returned to some basic and incommunicable anxiety.’24
On 18 March 1951 the Observer published Toynbee’s article ‘Alger Hiss and his Friends’ in which he criticized liberals who wanted to whitewash Hiss by blackguarding Whittaker Chambers (he did not deign to mention Elizabeth Bentley). Correctly but unfashionably Toynbee called Chambers’s conduct ‘reasonable and decent’, before declaring: ‘It is now established beyond reasonable doubt that Alger Hiss had at one time divulged State Department secrets to the Communists. And this must surely have given them an unbreakable hold on him.’ Talk of unbreakable holds upset Maclean, who had failed in Cairo to break free from Moscow’s grip. He may have convinced himself that world peace depended upon preserving an even balance between the United States and the Soviet Union, which required him to supply Moscow with material on, for
example, Anglo-American policy towards Korea; but most of all he felt semi-captive to the MGB, which held the means to compel him. A few nights later, blind-drunk in the Gargoyle, he chanced upon Toynbee. ‘You are a Judas, and I am the English Alger Hiss,’ he proclaimed before shoving Toynbee backwards into the band.25
The VENONA crisis
In March 1951 a new VENONA decrypt of a message to Moscow in 1944 stated that HOMER had visited New York to see his pregnant American wife. It was easily established that Maclean had done just this. He was put under close investigation by MI5, which gave him the codename CURZON. The Security Service advised the Foreign Office that in order to obtain a confession from Maclean, it was better to muster and collate evidence before interrogating him. The cryptographic evidence against him was conclusive, but could not be used in an open criminal trial or even in the questioning of him. MI5’s aims were twofold: to extract the evidence for a prosecution from the sort of confessional debriefing that had cornered Nunn May and Fuchs; and also to collect information and understand the background far beyond Maclean’s individual case. This could not be achieved hurriedly. Sillitoe was anxious to conciliate Hoover, who had been enraged by the Nunn May and Fuchs cases. He informed and consulted the FBI at every stage after HOMER had been identified as Maclean; but every message to Hoover crossed Philby’s desk.
The Foreign Office did not expect the MI5 investigation, which was run by Arthur Martin, to last nearly three months. Special Branch and the MI5 watchers decided that it would be impossible to keep the isolated Tatsfield house under surveillance without being spotted. Maclean seems to have chosen the house with care: it stood on its own, back from the road; he could leave it in four different directions; any car waiting near the house for more than a few hours would be conspicuous. Watchers followed him in London only as far as the ticket barrier at Charing Cross station, but said that they lacked the resources to cover him beyond there. Carey-Foster once glimpsed him in Pall Mall, near the Travellers, with the watchers following too closely behind. Patrick Reilly, too, saw him returning to the Office after lunch, crossing from St James’s Park to the Clive Steps, walking fast with his head down and looking disarrayed. The man following him was obvious. Maclean’s face was ravaged by drink, Reilly recalled, yet his office work remained impeccable. In mid-April he lunched at the Travellers with Wayland Young, a young diplomat who was chafing at Office life and asked the older man in all innocence how to cope with frustration. Maclean may have thought that he was being tested, or enticed towards admissions, for his responses were stolid and cagey. His meetings with his Soviet control, Yuri Modin, will have been halted as soon as Philby’s reports on HOMER reached Moscow or whenever Maclean spotted his watchers – whichever was sooner.
Every update from MI5 to the FBI crossed Philby’s Washington desk. Hitherto he had used Burgess as his courier to the illegal rezident in New York, Valerii Makayev, but the threat to Maclean was so grave that Philby took the risk of meeting Makayev to give a face-to-face report. Of all the Cambridge spies, Maclean was held in the highest esteem by the Soviets: his reports were reliable and his loyalty seemed unimpeachable, despite his requests to be released from his onerous Cairo duties. They also understood that his nerves were too frail to withstand interrogation, and feared that he would reveal Philby’s part in his recruitment.
There were many ways to forewarn Maclean in London, where he had an effective handler in the person of Modin. There was no need to involve Burgess in alerting Maclean to his looming danger of interrogation. But Burgess’s situation in the United States rapidly became untenable. On 28 February he drove at headlong pace from Washington to Charleston and picked up a young black hitchhiker and gas-station loafer, James Turck, whose appearance may have suggested his exciting history. Turck had been arrested by police in Richmond, Virginia, under puritanical morality laws, for living with a married woman, was later sentenced to a year’s probation for aggravated sexual assault and was suspected of petty theft. The FBI later interviewed him in an intimidating way, and got the responses that they wanted: Turck said that Burgess had made sexual overtures to him during the journey to Charleston and renewed his advances during the night that they spent in a motel. Probably Turck was not as averse to such advances on the right terms as he claimed to the FBI.
Burgess’s car was stopped for excessive speeding three times within a few hours. He was obstreperous with policemen, claimed diplomatic immunity and was disgracefully provocative. In Charleston, where he was due to speak at a military academy, he was drunk and contentious. On 16 March, at a cocktail party given by Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA, he rowed with his host about the Korean war, and other guests had to intervene to stop a brawl. In early April, at the time when the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death by electrocution, Burgess went on holiday with his mother Eve Bassett to Charleston. On 18 April, after returning to Washington, Burgess was rebuked by the Ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, for his motoring offences, for his rudeness at the military academy and for the Roosevelt scrimmage. He was ordered to return in disgrace to England.
Burgess reached London on 7 May, and returned to his flat in Old Bond Street which he continued to share with Jack Hewit, the working-class former boyfriend of Christopher Isherwood. In the three weeks that followed he combined colossal alcohol intake with Nembutal (barbiturates) at night to sleep and Benzedrine (amphetamines) to revive his daytime mind. The Benzedrine will have rendered him prone to making ingenious, quasi-paranoid connections between incidents and people that were in truth unconnected. References to an Old Bond Street flat suggest Mayfair luxury, which was belied by the dirty brickwork, tired pointing and chipped and faded paint on the window-frames of the building. Burgess’s roof-top rooms, with their poky, grimy dormer windows, were far from a penthouse. The downstairs premises were occupied by a textiles and garments merchant.
Burgess conferred with Blunt, and then visited Rees. He repented trusting the latter as a source on All Souls appeasers in 1938–9, and wanted to assess if Rees was likely to inform MI5 of what he knew of the activities of Burgess and Blunt for the NKVD. Next he lunched at the Royal Automobile Club with Maclean, whom he had not seen for years. Maclean had already spotted that he was being watched, had noticed that since 17 April files with high-security classification had been withheld from him, assumed that his mail and telephone communications were being intercepted and expected that there were bugging devices inside Beacon Shaw. Maclean was reluctant to defect, however, as his wife was scheduled for a Caesarean birth in mid-June. Perhaps as a fumbled misdirection to MI5, which did not hear of the incident until later, Burgess visited Victor Rothschild’s sister Miriam and said that he wished to lease her expensive Mayfair flat. He consulted the Eton headmaster, Robert Birley, about a project to write a biography of the Victorian statesman Lord Salisbury, and discussed the same idea with Quentin Bell, whom he met at the Reform, and James Pope-Hennessy. He telephoned the poet Stephen Spender in the hope of reaching W. H. Auden, who was visiting London from New York. Tomás Harris’s wife had barred Burgess from their house; but two or so days before his disappearance he was allowed a visit. When Harris asked after Philby, Burgess put his head in his hands, said, ‘Don’t speak to me of Kim – nobody could have been more wonderful to me,’ and burst into tears.26
On 19 May he attended the Apostles’ annual dinner in Cambridge, where the youngest guest was Peter Marris, who had read philosophy and psychology at Cambridge, served as a soldier in the British occupying forces in Japan shortly after the dropping of the nuclear bombs and then spent two years as a colonial district officer in Kenya: he resigned because he decided that sound administration was no substitute for self-government, and had been ashamed at his inaction when a policeman shot dead an unarmed schoolboy standing a yard from him. Marris represented a new generation, both hardened and compassionate, which felt moral disgust about colonial injustice and cruelty, but was averse to political theories that proclaimed their historical inevitabi
lity and excused the mass murders of Stalinism. Burgess pressed Marris to accept a lift back to London, and then treated the ex-colonial district officer as if he was indistinguishable from the American drifter James Turck: he was so ‘aggressive and insinuating’ in the car that Marris asked to be let out when it reached Whitestone Pond atop Hampstead Heath.27
Enemies Within Page 51