A Spy Named Orphan Read online

  ROLAND PHILIPPS

  A

  SPY

  NAMED

  ORPHAN

  THE ENIGMA OF DONALD MACLEAN

  W. W. Norton & Company

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York • London

  For Felicity

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Purity in Thought

  2 Dared to Question

  3 Orphan

  4 Lyric

  5 City of Light

  6 Left Bank

  7 Blitz and Barbarossa

  8 Homer

  9 Iron Curtain

  10 Distant Thunder

  11 Access All Areas

  12 Chaos on the Nile

  13 Collapse

  14 Reconciliation

  15 Curzon

  16 Endgame

  17 Establishment

  18 Into the Wilderness

  19 Comrade Frazer

  Afterword

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Prologue

  Donald Maclean awoke on 25 May 1951 at his house in the quiet Kent village of Tatsfield to a beautiful late-spring day, a welcome change in the weather. That Friday morning would be his last in England; it was his thirty-eighth birthday. He ate his breakfast of bacon and eggs with two cups of tea in his usual haste. The housekeeper and nanny to his sons Fergus and young Donald (known as “Beany”) entered the comfortable Victorian villa to see him rush upstairs to kiss his American wife Melinda goodbye. Remarkably, given the traumatic year they had just had, Melinda was now eight months pregnant with their third child. Donald came back downstairs, quickly watered the cyclamen that Melinda had bought him, bent his long frame into his car and set off for Oxted station and the commuter train to London’s Victoria. When he arrived in London the tall, slender, elegantly pinstriped diplomat with his trademark bow-tie, his good looks now with an air of distinction about them as his blond hair was starting to grey, walked briskly from the station through St James’s Park, which was in full flower, to the Foreign Office. The man with the trilby and unnecessary raincoat had to adopt an undignified scurry to keep pace with Maclean’s stride; it was almost as if the taller man were taunting him. Maclean was at his desk as head of the American Department by 10:00 as usual. He was young for such a prestigious job, the latest promotion in what had so far been, with one setback, a remarkably successful career. He was on track to reach the heights of his profession, the major ambassadorships certainly, perhaps even ending up as Permanent Secretary. His friends were already calling him “Sir Donald Maclean, OHMS,” in recognition of his work On His Majesty’s Service. Here was a cultivated, laconic mandarin who was also a highly experienced Soviet agent, and MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, were on to him.

  Maclean’s employers had been exceptionally loyal. They had not only brought him back into the fold the previous winter but they had promoted him to his influential new post. Less than a year before he had been in the throes of paranoid alcoholism and had come close to bringing disgrace upon British diplomacy. When one of his oldest friends had picked him up at the station on his way to stay with her in Wiltshire, she had been so alarmed by his appearance that she took him first to a friend’s garden to relax before driving him home. As he lay on piled-up cushions beneath a beech tree, he was seized by an attack of delirium tremens so violent that he kept jumping up to fight the branches above him. An acquaintance saw him soon afterwards and described him as looking “as if he had spent the night sitting up in a tunnel.” A year on, and a delicious lunch in Soho seemed a fitting celebration both of his birthday and of his recovery.

  *

  The Foreign Office had been constructed on a regal scale in keeping with the majesty of the British Empire in the mid-1860s. That Empire was now shrinking fast, although the outlook of the politicians and diplomats was not always keeping pace with the decline. The great ideological struggle of the twentieth century between Communism and capitalism was now being fought as a cold war between the superpowers of America and the Soviet Union; Britain’s most potent contribution to the struggle had ended with the Second World War, when Donald Maclean had held a prime ringside seat in Washington, DC. The grandest office in the Whitehall building was that of the Foreign Secretary, and there Herbert Morrison had the previous day signed the order for Maclean to be brought in for questioning. Although the extent of his betrayal was barely understood, the trap was about to snap shut on one of the most influential spies of the century.

  *

  Maclean’s lunch date, who had helped him through his crisis the previous year, drove her jeep into the palatial Foreign Office courtyard just before noon. She noticed he was wearing a jaunty bow-tie, always a sign that he was in good spirits. Gone was the shaky wreck of the previous summer. They chatted about his family over pre-prandial oysters and a half-bottle of champagne in Wheeler’s fish restaurant, then made their way through Soho’s bustle and sunny spirits to Schmidt’s where they were meeting the friend’s husband for an unseasonably heavy German lunch. En route they bumped into a writer they knew, who noted that Maclean seemed “calm and genial,” a welcome change from the gate-crasher who had appeared late in the evening at his Regent’s Park home a couple of weeks earlier and passed out in the hallway so that the departing dinner guests had to step over him.

  As Maclean had insisted on paying for their lunch he needed to refill his wallet so he walked back to Whitehall, his watcher trotting not far behind, via the Travellers Club in Pall Mall to cash a cheque for £10. He was back at his desk by 3:00 for the only planned meeting of the day, a dull one which he despatched with his usual efficiency. He left his office for the last time around 5:45, reminded a colleague that he would not be at work the following morning, Saturday, and ran into his boss, Sir Roger Makins, in the grand courtyard with its marble pavements and arched colonnades. Makins thought highly of Maclean and had given him his current job after being impressed by him when they worked together on top-secret atomic matters in Washington at the end of the war. Makins had been as astonished as all the other senior men in the Foreign Office when he had learned of Maclean’s crimes, but had been assured that there was no danger that he would be able to leave the country, so he acted in his normal friendly manner. The tail followed Maclean to Victoria, where he caught the 6:10 train, carrying a cardboard box and a few small parcels, but without his briefcase. Makins was the last civil servant to see him. Donald Maclean was now invisible to official eyes.

  *

  That same afternoon, Guy Burgess, an acquaintance of Maclean’s from their days in Cambridge and someone he had seen on several occasions in the past couple of weeks, was in his flat in New Bond Street preparing for a journey. He carefully packed a tweed suit, some shirts, shoes, socks, a dinner jacket, shaving kit, £300 and the novels of Jane Austen in a one-volume collected edition (“I never travel without it”) and put the case into the back of a cream Austin A40 he had hired that afternoon. Tickets had been booked for the midnight sailing of a ship, the Falaise, on the advice of Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, an establishment figure soon to be recognised with a knighthood. Blunt, Burgess and Maclean were all three members of the Cambridge spy ring, known to their Soviet controllers as the “Magnificent Five.” Now, after decades of brilliant espionage that meant no government had ever been as comprehensively penetrated as Britain’s, the ring was about to come apart.

  *

  Melinda Maclean later claimed that she had spent the day baking her husband a birthday cake and preparing a “special dinner” and
that she was therefore understandably upset when he got back to announce that not only would Roger Styles, a friend of his she had never heard of, be joining them but the pair had to go somewhere on business immediately after dinner and might even have to spend the night away. He started to go upstairs to pack and they argued—not only was it “too bad” that he had invited an “unknown guest” home for his birthday which they could have spent as a family, but now he was not even staying with her and their boys, both of whom were in bed with measles. She would now be alone as she prepared the house for his high-maintenance sister Nancy and Nancy’s new husband who were arriving on the following day. She begged him not to go, but he insisted. The argument woke up their son Fergus, aged seven, who asked “Why are you going away, Daddy? Can I stand at the window and watch you go?” His father said: “Get back into bed, you little scamp; I’m not going far; I’ll be back soon.”

  Roger Styles, dark and thickish-set, turned up half an hour after his host and was introduced to Melinda, who found him “charming and easy to talk to.” Dinner was in the end a chatty, “normal” meal, with nobody showing any sign of strain. After dinner, Maclean announced that they had to be on their way smartly, and went out to stoke the boiler for the night, leaving Styles talking to his wife. They did indeed have to hurry, and only just covered the ninety miles to Southampton in time to embark at 11:45. They left the car on the dockside as they jumped aboard. “We’ll be back for it on Monday!” they shouted to a waiting sailor.

  The following morning, they stayed on the boat for too long, drinking beer, before disembarking in Saint Malo, leaving their luggage and some “disorder” in their shared cabin. Although a few days earlier a general instruction had been put out for UK police and passport control to watch for Maclean, the British had chosen not to share this warning with continental police or ports for fear of leaks, so the pair were free to have a leisurely cooked breakfast. They were so leisurely that they missed the 11:20 boat-train to Paris and ended up hiring a taxi to drive them the forty-three miles to Rennes where they caught up with the train.

  *

  The Foreign Office was shut from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning, in common with the rest of the country, so, as she later explained, Melinda could not do anything to contact her husband until Monday at 10:00 when she rang his office to say that she had lost track of him. Makins thought he might have given Maclean that day off as well, so it was not until she called again and mentioned his hurried departure with Roger Styles that anyone became worried, and then, in a very controlled and mandarin way, panic-stricken. Word went out to all the diplomatic and consular posts on the continent to look out for the two men and to report back on a “clear the line” basis direct to the Prime Minister.

  *

  The charming, well-connected and brilliant enigma that was Donald Maclean had made his choice. The events of that day provoked a sea-change within the British establishment, destroyed much of the carefully built trust between Britain and America and damaged the great nation’s standing in the eyes of the world. The Cold War was about to get very much colder. This is the story of a scandal still reverberating today, although the man at its centre has, until now, largely remained a mystery.

  1

  Purity in Thought

  By any standards Donald Maclean was a very successful schoolboy. He had risen to the highest rank in his school’s Officer Training Corps, was a prefect, the editor of the school magazine, secretary of its League of Nations Union and a successful all-round sportsman with colours in cricket, rugby and hockey. His contemporaries regarded him as “way ahead of others” at a time when the “others” included those who were to become some of the leading figures in British political, public and intellectual life. He left his centuries-old school as the holder of an exhibition to Cambridge, at the summit of the first generation of Macleans to go to university, the hopes of his ambitious parents and teachers intact, a glittering future lying before him. The reference later provided by his school for the Foreign Office seems to bask in shared triumph as it enumerates his achievements and acclaims his “moral character” as “exceptionally good.” He was the ultimate insider at the school, liberal and not too showy, high-achieving without being seen to try too hard.

  Yet although a combination of his devout family upbringing and his school’s unique disciplinary code enabled him to appear as a “reliable person of integrity . . . who would not let you down,” this young paragon was already morally primed to be “the cat that walked alone,” the outsider with “an open invitation to betray one’s friends.” And to betray his country even as he was its most diligent servant. He needed to find a cause and an opportunity.

  *

  Donald Maclean was born in 1913, when the British Empire was at its zenith, before the Great War and the Russian Revolution undermined the assumptions that upheld it. His father, also Donald, was a successful Member of Parliament and a leading member of that exalted establishment that sustained the Empire. He was of strong non-conformist stock, a stern and austere patriot who was able to love and serve his country while applying his highly developed conscience to every decision he took in its service. Of his five children, his namesake was the one who turned out simultaneously most to resemble him and yet most to go against the grain. The roots of their beliefs were planted firmly in the soil of the barren, windswept Hebridean island of Tiree.

  Sir Fitzroy Maclean, 26th Chief of the Clan Maclean, summoned his clansmen from all over the world to Duart Castle on the far northern Isle of Mull, Tiree’s neighbour, for 24 August 1912. All were loyal members of one of the oldest and fiercest families of Argyll and the Hebrides, families that had for the most part been scattered in the Highland Clearances of the previous century as the landowners ejected the crofters to make way for their vast flocks of sheep. The devout and hard-working Liberal Member of Parliament, now being celebrated as a prominent member of the clan, was just a generation away from his father’s subsistence on the soil, on part-time work as a fisherman and on meagre earnings as a shoemaker in their tiny home. His obedience to the summons was a demonstration of the pride he felt in his small branch of the vast clan tree, in their rise from their centuries-old, back-breaking and diligent Hebridean life to middle-class Edwardian comfort and national respectability. He kept the invitation to the gathering at Duart Castle among his papers for the rest of his life. His third son and middle child, born nine months later on 25 May, was named Donald Duart, binding the infant to his own success and the newly attained family standing. From then on, Duart became the middle name of all his male descendants.

  Donald instilled in his children, young Donald especially, a powerful moral impulse. When he died, Stanley Baldwin paid tribute to him in the House of Commons: “In Donald Maclean I see a soul as clean as the West wind that blows over Tiree, where he was born.” In fact, Donald senior had been born in Lancashire in 1868 as his father John had come south with his wife, Agnes Macmellin, to look for work. No more successful in the north of England, John continued moving down the country until he reached Haverfordwest, in the south-west corner of Wales, and later nearby Carmarthen, where his cordwaining skills could flourish. But the former Prime Minister correctly identified the defining characteristic of Sir Donald—the purity of his soul, the clarity of conscience which throughout his life drove him to act as that conscience dictated, not for personal gain but for the greater good as he and his religion saw it.

  Both Donald and his younger brother Ewen received a grammar school education in South Wales. Donald moved to Cardiff at the age of nineteen to train as a solicitor, soon forming his own firm with a partner. The Welsh non-conformist, Methodist trad­ition, known locally as “Chapel” and resistant to the established Anglican Church, suited a man with his upbringing and reinforced his certainty that the writ of God could not be transgressed for fear of damnation, his conviction that others must be helped on to the right paths. Non-conformity ran deep within the family in both action and reaction. The relig
ion emphasised temperance: Sir Donald was a lifelong teetotaller who banned alcohol and tobacco in his houses, although his friend, neighbour and fellow Scot J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, noted that “at times he lit a cigarette to please me, and I have almost as nobly looked the other way while he got rid of it. On a special occasion I have also seen a ginger-beer bottle in his hand.” Among his other early appointments, Maclean was a director of a life assurance company, the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution, a founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, secretary of the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce and vice-president of the Cardiff Free Church Council, advocating tolerance for all beliefs in conscience as well as in the debate over free trade. C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian wrote in his diary that Maclean had “Liberalism in his bones,” and all this activity in the Welsh Liberal heartland brought him to the attention of the leader of the Party, Herbert Asquith. Maclean entered Parliament at his second attempt as MP for Bath in 1906, glad to support the new Prime Minister, a man “he loved as few men are loved by another.”

  Donald Maclean worked hard, “and quickly made his mark in Parliament by modesty, sincerity and industry,” concentrating on domestic issues that would improve the lot of the working or unemployed man—labour exchanges, old-age pensions and National Insurance. In 1907 he opened an office in London, and in that year married Gwendolen Devitt, the daughter of a Surrey magistrate and colonial rubber broker.

  In her only daughter’s eyes, Gwendolen was “an exceptionally good-looking woman but very difficult to live with” as she reinforced, in a less biblically stern way, the pattern of parental dominance over her children. Although her parenting style was sweeping, unethical and, to modern thinking, wrong, the family doctor described her as “that type of strong personality you often do get as the parent of episodic drinkers”—a judgement made at a time when young Donald was finding it impossible to stick to his father’s temperate path. Gwendolen was a forthright product of her age and her own upbringing. Like almost all girls of her generation, she was not well educated, yet she was never afraid to speak her mind, the more so as she got older. She was imperious to the point where her family gave her the affectionate nickname the “Queen Bee,” abbreviated in speech and correspondence to “Queenie.” The Macleans “made a handsome couple: he had a florid complexion and since his late twenties his hair had been white. She was a fine-looking woman with a lively manner. When Asquith invited them to dinner to meet the Prince of Wales, [Asquith] described her as ‘young and quite good-looking . . . with glowing cheeks and glittering eyes.’ ” Donald remained strongly attached to his mother all his life, but she was no more privy to the most important parts of his mind than anyone else. She in turn remained devoted to her son and to the memory of her husband and his principles. When young Donald was being splashed across the front pages of every newspaper, it was Lloyd George who was “that traitor” for splitting the Liberal Party half a century earlier. In her eyes, constancy was the key to both Donalds.