Jordan was intrepid, with superb connections across the world. With a beautiful Swedish wife (who had managed a beauty parlour on the Champs-Elysées) and a house overlooking the Regent’s Park, and as someone who believed with a passion in ‘fair deals for extremists’, Jordan was the sort of man whom populists and conspiracy theorists like to denigrate. The facts that he had published a book entitled Russian Glory in 1942, that he had served as press secretary at the Washington embassy when Maclean was also working there, that like Maclean he was a member of the Travellers, that Francis Meynell the Daily Herald jewels-smuggler wrote his obituary tribute in The Times, and that the government did not grant a pension to his widow were adduced, after the publication in 1979 of Andrew Boyle’s The Climate of Treason, as signs that he too was a suspected spy. Malcolm Muggeridge gained publicity in 1979 by claiming to Andrew Boyle that he had organized Jordan’s Fleet Street memorial service and that Attlee had refused to attend. The truth is that Mr and Mrs Attlee headed the list of those attending the church.7
MI5’s treatment of Melinda Maclean was gentler than Fleet Street’s. When Skardon first interviewed her on 30 May, he found her calm and self-contained. Knowing that she was due for a Caesarean birth within a fortnight, he was solicitous in not adding to her stress. By contrast, the press showed no mercy in besieging Beacon Shaw. The driveway gates had to be padlocked and the curtains drawn so as to deter the journalists shouting boorish questions and the photographers snapping intrusive shots. In retrospect, there is no doubt that Melinda Maclean knew about her husband’s secret work for Moscow before they married in 1940. She was aware of his continuing commitment in Washington, Cairo and the Office. She was complicit in his weekend dash for safety, understood what was planned with Burgess and delayed reporting that he was missing until he was far away. Her children were overheard making such remarks as ‘My Daddy works to stop all wars.’ Yet MI5 were considerate, attentive and even fatherly in protecting her. Skardon, who worked to keep the trust of all the Maclean family, determined to treat her account as credible until he had evidence that it was false. Ronnie Reed of MI5, who interviewed her with her mother on 10 August, regretted that she was still being vexed by ‘newspaper hounds’. At the Foreign Office Patrick Reilly believed that ‘the Maclean family have every motive to help us’ if they could be protected from the ‘hullabaloo’ of press stunts. ‘I wish something cd be done to stop Mrs Maclean from being molested,’ minuted the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, after a Daily Mirror story in September. ‘She is having a rough time.’8
For many people the strain after the Daily Express broke the story was intolerable. Inverchapel’s death on 5 July was hastened by his devastation at the betrayal that had occurred in his Washington embassy. June and July of 1951 passed in ‘a nightmarish blur’ for Reilly. One evening he read a minute in which Carey-Foster urged him to implement a recommendation over which he had been hesitating. ‘This entirely justified reproach touched off a violent nerve storm,’ Reilly recorded. ‘Within seconds I demolished the solid wooden chair in which I had been sitting. I stood for a long time looking aghast at its ruins. Then I collected the debris together, put my papers away in my safe, and went off to bed, deeply shaken and ashamed.’9
In Whitehall there was extreme concern about Washington reactions to these defections, which came so soon after Fuchs’s trial and Pontecorvo’s defection. On 5 June Milo Talbot de Malahide forwarded to Dick White an emphatic message from the Washington Ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, to the effect that ‘our best chance of securing cooperation and secrecy on the American side is that we keep them continually informed and never let them feel that we are holding back from them. If this latter feeling ever grew up I should fear efforts of public self-defence by Hoover of the FBI who can be, and sometimes is, very unreasonable.’ Whitehall did not dare to follow this good counsel. All the training and habits of the security services were against following a precept of Churchill’s. ‘In politics,’ said the war leader, ‘if you have something good to give, give a little at a time, but if you have something bad to get rid of, give it all together and brace the recipients to receive it.’ MI5 and SIS did not dare to tell their American counterparts that Maclean had been under observation at the time of his disappearance. Whitehall press officers were told to keep their mouths clenched shut, which made journalists suspect that the missing diplomats were being protected by ex-colleagues, whereas it was confidential sources of top-grade information – such as VENONA – that were being protected. On 9 June a watch list including the names of Goronwy Rees, James Klugmann, Philip Toynbee and Anthony Blunt was issued to passport officers at ports. By the end of June Philby, Footman and Blunt were under intense investigations. Acquaintances of the missing men were methodically interviewed. None of these developments could be briefed off the record to any Fleet Street journalist.10
The veteran statesman Lord Simon interrupted work on his memoirs on 11 June to prepare a memorandum ‘The Mystery of Maclean and Burgess’. As Foreign Secretary, and as a friend of his parents, he had welcomed Maclean into the Diplomatic Service in 1934. He suspected that the two diplomats had been kidnapped at Saint Malo by Soviet agents in order to arouse tensions and intensify mistrust between the United States and the United Kingdom. ‘What better means’, Simon asked, of bringing Whitehall, and especially the Office, ‘under sharp reproach from the other side of the Atlantic’ than by engineering ‘another instance of apparent slackness plus treachery à la Fuchs’? He supposed that Burgess and Maclean had already been killed. ‘The men would be of no value to the Government in Moscow, for I do not suppose they have any material secrets to disclose. They are not like a man of science who possesses the secret of our atom-bomb experiments. The value of their capture is merely that it creates a mystery which will prompt many people on both sides of the Atlantic to think that this is another case of inadequate screening and of cold-blooded treachery.’11
Alan Maclean, then personal secretary to Gladwyn Jebb at the United Nations, was summoned back from New York. When his aircraft landed at Prestwick, the passport inspectors at border control isolated him in a small room, where they questioned him with insolent contempt before permitting him to continue to London. There he was whisked by Daimler to the Foreign Office’s Personnel Department in Carlton House Terrace. On the drive he was treated with such ominous civility that he thought, ‘they’re not arresting me: they’re going to kill me’. In the event, he received blandishments rather than threats when he began his series of interviews with Skardon, whom he likened to a convivial stoat. ‘We became friends of a working sort. He was a nice, unpretentious and even cosy man, who got on famously with my mother. They made each other laugh, and he never said a nasty thing about Donald to her – or to me for that matter. He was considerate in many small ways, and made her path through the woods less thorny.’ The defections meant, so Harold Nicolson predicted on 11 June, that ‘the old easy-going confidence of the FO … will be destroyed and henceforth everybody with begin to distrust everybody else. I do hate that. It is the loss of one more element of civilization. We used to trust our colleagues absolutely. Now we cannot any more.’ The truth of this prophecy was soon shown. Herbert Morrison, as Foreign Secretary, judged Alan Maclean guilty by fraternity, and insisted that he must leave his United Nations post and resign from the Diplomatic Service. This was not the only such travesty: in the same month, after Morrison removed the semi-retired ‘Old China hand’ Sir John Pratt from an official committee because of his sympathies with North Korea, the Daily Mail, supporting Pratt’s dismissal, traduced him as villainous on the basis that his younger brother was Boris Karloff, the Hollywood actor who played evil monsters.12
‘We are all agog about the two Missing Diplomats,’ the novelist Rose Macaulay told an American friend. Literary London was intrigued by their escapade, she said, as ‘most of us knew them’. Her fellow novelist Nancy Mitford was Parisian by adoption. ‘We eat & drink & breathe Burgess & nobody thinks of anything el
se,’ she wrote from the French capital on 11 June. ‘The frog papers are quite sure it is sex,’ although she supposed that ‘if they were just bouncing about on some double bed they would have been found by now. Oh the fascination.’ She had discussed the missing diplomats with her brother-in-law Sir Oswald Mosley, who suspected that ‘Burgess was probably always communisant & Maclean horrified by the trend towards war, & both together thought out some Hess-like mission.’ Another novelist, Rosamond Lehmann, Rees’s ex-lover who knew of Burgess’s recruitment approach to him, telephoned Stewart Menzies of SIS, who showed no interest in her information. She was then put in touch with MI5 by Harold Nicolson, with whom Burgess had almost certainly had vanilla sex during 1936. It was, however, not until October that she was interviewed by Skardon in a safe-house in Mayfair.13
Goronwy Rees’s reaction to the disappearance was tragic for himself and destructive for others. He was in a funk: afraid of being unmasked as a Soviet informer on All Souls opinion before the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939; fearful, too, of jeopardizing his relations with the college and SIS (for which he did part-time work at headquarters). Apart from the possibility of criminal prosecution, he was married with small children and short of money. He was drinking heavily, excitable and fuddled, and harmed himself by his agitated and unconvincing behaviour. He gave an absurd interview about Burgess to the Daily Mail. ‘He was in some ways one of the most patriotic Englishmen I have ever known and was entirely free from the kind of denigration of British social life and political policy which is typical of most Communists. He was absurdly sentimental about England.’14
Rees was interviewed by both Liddell and White, and gave a garbled account of Burgess’s recruitment overtures which he claimed to have resisted. He implicated Blunt, towards whom he evinced a strong and burgeoning antipathy. Sensing the dislike of him by White and Liddell, he became panicky and widened his denunciations of Burgess and Blunt into accusations against innocent men, notably Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire. Zaehner had run SIS counter-intelligence operations in Iran in 1943–5, had served as Press Attaché and SIS representative in the Tehran embassy until 1947, had trained anti-communist Albanians who were later betrayed by Philby in 1949, and was to be elected alongside Rees as a Fellow of All Souls in 1952. ‘The idea of Zaehner as a Soviet agent was grotesque,’ Isaiah Berlin judged. Rees’s accusations against Zaehner were all the sadder because the ex-SIS man’s ‘loyalty to him was beyond words’: when Rees became ostracized in Oxford, and suffered crushing misfortunes in his career, Zaehner ‘stood by him through thick and thin’.15
Rees’s other wrong-headed Oxford target was the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who had been a wartime intelligence officer and later conducted a security review at GCHQ. MI5 investigations discredited both accusations. ‘Goronwy is an utterly changed character,’ Hampshire wrote of him early in 1952, ‘he seems invalid, uncertain, almost apologetic and somehow broken … the physical basis of his vitality has collapsed, and he simply asks for kindness.’ In time Rees began to besmirch Liddell, who had tried to persuade him to keep quiet and minimize disturbance. He aroused doubts that harmed Liddell’s standing in his lifetime and posthumously. White was incensed that it had taken Rees thirteen years to tell MI5 that he knew Burgess to be working for Moscow. ‘I thought he was a four-letter man. If he knew these things, why hadn’t he come forward? Then he went into this spiel that he assumed we knew it all. So I said, “You assumed we knew! Burgess was working for the Russians, and we did nothing about it! What can you mean?”’16
Other denunciations were made: Rebecca West told Sir Toby Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions, that Footman was a Soviet spy, and later spoke of Inverchapel as a communist. She suspected that the missing diplomats had been spirited to Moscow ‘simply to weaken public confidence and make mischief between America and England’. She also badgered her publisher Harold Macmillan, who was a Conservative frontbencher in the Commons, with her suspicions. Lists of names, which might become suspect names, were accumulated day by day. Tomás Harris’s telephone was tapped as the result of a stray remark by Aileen Philby to Nicholas Elliott of SIS. Doubts about Footman were pervasive: talking with Dick White, Robert Cecil asked, ‘What about David Footman? He is not necessarily in the clear.’ White replied: ‘You can say that again.’ Hector McNeil, who regarded the missing diplomats as ‘two sad unbalanced creatures who took a hysterical jump’, named Burgess’s ‘chief friends’ as Blunt, Footman and Philby. His political career was ruined by his association with Burgess. He lost favour with his party’s leader Attlee, put his energies into promoting the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Britain and died at the age of forty-eight after suffering a stroke on an Atlantic liner taking him to New York.17
Under instructions from Moscow, Yuri Modin of the MGB urged Blunt to follow Burgess and Maclean in defecting. Modin was dumbfounded when Blunt refused. For Blunt the intellectual fulfilment of directing the Courtauld Institute would not be matched by the dour ideological confinement of Soviet cultural bureaucracy. He was confident that there was no evidence that could be brought against him in court, and perhaps little evidence altogether. He may have been buoyed by his tacit standing with Liddell and White. They and Roger Hollis used him as an informal consultant. He explained the milieux of the missing men, provided guidance on personal histories and connections between Cambridge and London, and helped MI5 to manage Burgess’s bewildered mother. To distance himself from past associates and previous convictions, Blunt resigned from the Reform Club, which he had joined together with Burgess in 1937. Miranda Carter reported a tentative notion of Stuart Hampshire’s that Blunt made limited, informal admissions to Liddell and White in June 1951, and thereafter was accepted by them, without explicit discussion, as someone who had made a limited transfer of allegiance to their side. It is curious that although White was soon convinced of Philby’s guilt, and obtained his recall to London in July, he made no move against Blunt. When MI5 turned to question Blunt, it was done gently, first by Courtenay Young and then by Skardon.
Skardon found grim amusement in his dealings with the Burgess and Maclean families. Eve Bassett, Burgess’s doting mother, was, he reported, ‘a very stupid woman, and made a great many suggestions to account for his disappearance, most of them being slightly comic. These suggestions were greeted by her spouse with derogatory snorts.’ Later Skardon showed his sardonic humour by arranging a charade at Waterloo station. ‘One morning Jim rang up very jolly, to say that I could now collect Donald’s belongings which he had left on the cross-Channel ferry,’ as Alan Maclean recalled. ‘He mentioned, a shade too casually, that as all their belongings were mixed up, it would be sensible if Colonel Bassett, Guy’s step-father, and I went together to Waterloo Station and picked out our respective family treasures.’ An official car collected both men. ‘The Colonel was dressed for war – impeccably pin-striped, complete with bowler and rolled umbrella and just a whiff of expensive aftershave.’ Skardon joined them, ‘silent and smiling … bent on enjoying the outing’. They were met at Waterloo by an imposing station master in top hat and tails who, seeming both excited and embarrassed, led the trio to his gloomy office where sad-looking objects and clothes were piled. ‘You go first, Colonel,’ young Maclean said respectfully. ‘No,’ the Colonel replied. ‘We’ll do it fair. Turn and turn about.’ Both men decided to get the business over at top speed. They chose items entirely at random, without a moment’s thought, one after another, until only two items remained: a pair of filthy, torn black pyjamas and a revolting pair of socks which were stiff with dried sweat and had holes in heels and toes. Alan Maclean felt sure that they were both Burgess’s, and said so. The Colonel disagreed, and snorted, ‘Your chap’s.’ Maclean had an inspired reply. ‘Donald never wore pyjamas’, he said. ‘A sin against Nature, he once told me.’ The Colonel paused for a moment, shut his eyes, tried to find an excuse, opened them and accepted defeat. ‘Right,’ he said, hooking the pyjamas into his bag with the handle of his umbre
lla, ‘but you’re having those bloody socks.’ As they crossed the station concourse, Maclean saw a big, wire-meshed rubbish bin. ‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘look!’ ‘Good man,’ he said, and both pyjamas and socks were binned. MI5’s car dropped Bassett at the United Services Club (‘the Senior’) in Pall Mall. He shook hands with Alan Maclean, nearly smiled, but thought better of it. ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed your morning, Jim,’ Maclean told his remaining companion. Skardon sighed: ‘I’ve had a lovely time.’18
In the weeks immediately after the two men had vanished, White kept insisting to MI5 officers: ‘We must trust everyone unless there is proof to the contrary.’ He knew how mistrust can damage organizations. Everybody of sense and responsibility understood the destructiveness of paranoid accusations. When the defections came to be debated in the House of Commons in 1955, it is noticeable that two Tory MPs with intelligence backgrounds, Dick Brooman-White and Rupert Speir, both supported positive vetting, but decried any outbreak of McCarthy-style witch-hunts in England. There had once been too much reliance on ‘the old-boy network’ in vetting intelligence officers, White told an SIS conference in 1961, ‘but we can’t tolerate Gestapo-style coverage’.19
Sir David Kelly, Ambassador in Moscow, struggled to save Fred Warner, his First Secretary in the embassy, from having his career wrecked by the associative guilt of his friendship with Burgess. Warner was ‘sincerely horrified’ by the turn of events, Kelly reported; but he strove in vain to protect Warner, who was soon posted from the fast lane of Moscow to the dead-end of Rangoon. At Kelly’s suggestion, Warner submitted a long handwritten report on his knowledge of Burgess, which was passed by Carey-Foster to MI5. He listed Burgess’s respectable circle as comprising himself, Hector McNeil and his wife, Kenneth Younger, ‘Isaiah Berlin of All Souls’, Charles Fletcher-Cooke, ‘Mr David Footman of Broadway’, Arthur Marshall, a camp and comic housemaster at Oundle School, the Cambridge don Noël Annan, Goronwy Rees, Ellis Waterhouse, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, Harold Nicolson and his son Benedict, and Hester Marsden-Smedley, who eleven years earlier had first recommended Philby to her colleagues in SIS as a possible recruit. ‘His best friend’, Warner judged, ‘was Professor Blunt, the Keeper of the King’s Pictures. On all these people he would rely for support, and he was such a loyal friend in intention that they generally felt ashamed of withholding it, although his friendship might have become only burdensome.’ This list of friends, commented Kelly to Carey-Foster, ‘is as impressive as it is to me astonishing’.20
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