A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  *

  In spite of his outstanding degree, Maclean still had to cram for the Diplomatic Service exams. As young men had done for sixty years, he went to Scoones, a school in a gloomy townhouse near the British Museum. Scoones was run by André Turquet, “stout, with a florid complexion . . . [who] simulated outbursts of rage, provoked usually by an error of French syntax.” Turquet, the son-in-law of the school’s founder, “once said that no man could be a diplomat unless he knew the history of the last three centuries” and at least two languages. As well as French and German, in both of which Maclean was proficient, modern history and economics were also taught. Maclean admired the economics tutor who “expounded the frailties of the capitalist system in a way that tended to convince his hearers that it was doomed.”

  In the evenings, in the world beyond Scoones, “the Season”—the dinners and dances that introduced that year’s crop of well-born adults to each other and to society—was in full swing. Maclean conformed to his instructions from Deutsch in suppressing his political views from now on. Wearing the regulation white tie and tails, with his silk-lined opera cloak draped around his tall figure, he escorted Asquith’s granddaughters Laura and Cressida to dances (the daughters of his father’s old friend Lady Violet Bonham Carter). He made friends with the Oxford-educated sons of two ambassadors, Tony (later Sir Anthony) Rumbold, whose best man he was to be in 1937, and Robin Campbell, under whose father he was to serve abroad. He was confident in intellectual matters, but at this stage “had yet to lose his public-school gaucherie.” He had little success with women: despite his height, his understated charm and his “nice, quiet sense of humour,” he could still appear uncertain and was often described as “flabby” (as Burgess put it) and other words suggesting chubbiness. He was most often to be seen hovering on the edge of the dance floor rather than taking part in the entertainment, sometimes talking to his mother. The literary critic Cyril Connolly saw “both amiability and weakness” in Maclean. He was “an outsize Cherubino intent on amorous experience but too shy and clumsy to succeed . . . charming, clever and affectionate, he was just too unformed.” Connolly said that he thought Maclean could be “set right” by an older woman. Presumably word had not reached Connolly, even with his enthusiastic knowledge of other people’s sex lives, of the previous summer’s Brittany affair with Marie; nor had he taken Burgess’s boasting into account.

  While Guy Burgess continued to cut his homosexual swathe through London, Maclean rather ineffectually courted the independently minded and sweet-faced Mary Ormsby-Gore, daughter of Lord Harlech, for a brief period accompanying her to dinners and dances. Even if he never got quite as far as proposing to her, she had already decided that she could not marry him as the highly political Ormsby-Gores were “strong Conservatives” and he was of “Liberal stock”; she married Robin Campbell instead, his assiduous courtship causing him to fail his Foreign Office exams. In her second marriage to another diplomat who was a close friend of Maclean’s, Mary became an appalled witness to the exposure of her erstwhile admirer’s tragic fall from grace. She could not have regretted her decision.

  Maclean was also attracted to one of the Bonham Carter sisters he escorted, the clever and funny Laura. Laura, whom he had known all his life, had the pale skin of her family and a sweet smile that belied her reputation as “a great mocker” who “rotted people and had nicknames for them all,” as a more serious suitor, Jeremy Hutchinson, described her. She was, like Maclean, “a difficult person to get to know . . . very independent.” There was no sign that she returned his crush, not responding in any way to his tentative moves towards a kiss in a taxi. Even if she had been interested, her powerful mother was “very keen that her daughters should make proper marriages,” and the grandson of a Highland cordwainer, however much in the true Liberal tradition of her father, might not have constituted a proper marriage in the eyes of the “extraordinarily formidable” Lady Violet. Hutchinson, who became a fêted barrister, felt he had been rejected because he was not rich enough. Laura was to marry the rising star Jo Grimond, who fulfilled Lady Violet’s criteria of being “brainy, rich, good-looking and Liberal.”

  *

  At this point Maclean met a man who was to be the closest he had to a male confidant. Philip Toynbee was to be at his side at some of the most emotionally fraught moments of his life. Toynbee was “tall and muscular with a sallow, long-jawed face and a sardonic twist to his mouth,” simultaneously both “wild and warm.” He had been the first Communist president of the Oxford Union and a close friend of the radical Romilly brothers who had demonstrated against Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts in London. He slept with both men and women, most recently Julia Strachey, niece of Lytton Strachey, and he too had been infatuated with Laura Bonham Carter, writing woundedly of “making tiny attempts to hold Laura’s arm—always repulsed to my fury.”

  Toynbee was captivated by his first encounter at a debutante ball in 1936 with “Donald Maclane [sic]. He was beautifully clothed and seemed a perfect bourgeois. I was quite drunk and thought at first he was being rude to me so I went off.” Later on, attracted by what he knew of Toynbee’s Communist past and by what he had heard from the Bonham Carters, Maclean “buttonholed me and we sat out together. He’s in love with Laura! He’d heard all about me from Lady V (a bad woman we agreed) and thought highly of me . . . It was very good to meet someone who thought highly of Laura . . . he really was a very nice man.” Even though he was addressing a committed Communist (according to Toynbee, Communism gave “humanity the possibility of happiness”), Maclean spread the word that he had moved away from his past beliefs: “He accepted the Marxist analysis but had definitely decided he was on the losing side. A hopeless position and I didn’t argue.” Maclean told him that “his interests now lay with the ruling classes.”

  The two men got progressively drunker, as they sat on the edge of the dance floor while the band played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Body and Soul.” Maclean confided to Toynbee that “he may also fall in love with [Jasper Ridley] and I encouraged him.” As Ridley, more familiarly known as “Bubbles” and later to be killed in the war, was shortly to marry Cressida Bonham Carter, that kept the circle very tight. To a like-minded man Maclean was still content to display his sexual ambivalence; in this instance it is mixed with a yearning to be cherished within a small group. As the debauched night wore on the pair went “very drunk in a taxi to a night-club called the Nest. DM ordered a bottle of gin most of which he drank; niggers danced and I wanted D cuddle [sic] but didn’t . . .” After that, “More taxis . . . I woke E [Esmond Romilly] up and tried to persuade him to come to bathe in the Serpentine. He wouldn’t but we did. It was extraordinary bathing blind tight.” Not only were they “blind tight,” they were both fully clothed in their white tie and tailcoats, the dress for society balls. They went to Maclean’s house, where Toynbee finally passed out and Maclean, “poor bugger,” went to work, not for the last time after an all-night bender with his new friend. Toynbee was smitten, “shocked and fascinated by this ingeni­ous monster, but charmed, above all, by his lazy wit and sophisti­­­­cated good humour”—and unaware that the “ingenious monster” was covering up political ­passions that ran deeper underground than this.

  Acting on Deutsch’s instructions, Maclean never mentioned Burgess or Philby or spoke to them on the rare occasions when their paths crossed at parties. Peter Pollock, a very close friend of Burgess’s in the late 1930s and 1940s, did not remember Maclean’s name coming up at all; it was against Soviet tradecraft to allow social contact between agents, a policy that was proved disastrously right when Burgess and Philby went against the rules by living together in 1950. Even in November 1955, when Philby gave the press conference in his mother’s flat that rehabilitated him for a while and is now used as a training tool by MI6, Britain’s overseas intelligence agency, as “a master-class in mendacity,” he got away with saying, “The last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist, was s
ome time in 1934.”

  Alongside ditching his friends, Otto also ordered Maclean, as he had Philby, to cut loose from and deny his Communist past. To carry on as he had been in his last year at Cambridge would certainly cause a problem with his Foreign Office application, particularly with the rise of fascism in Europe. Maclean would utter enigmatic conversation-stoppers such as “my future lies with the oppressors rather than the oppressed.” Toynbee, who “would have considered it the highest honour to perform any service at all for Soviet Russia” and on paper would have seemed ideal for the job, was not approached to be a spy, maybe because with his supportive father and self-esteem intact he did not fit Deutsch’s psychological profile. Maclean said to Laura Bonham Carter, “I’m on your side of the barricades now,” at which she felt a great relief because the “distemper” of the Marxist politics of his student years “had made him such a boring companion,” to the further detriment of their prospects together. Jocelyn Simon, who had minded that Maclean’s Communism had led to his giving up his post as secretary of the Trinity Hall Cricket Club, lunched with him in Mayfair soon after he had joined the Foreign Office and discussed his political views: “Maclean said that he had ceased to be a Communist as he found that he could not accept the Communist doctrine intellectually, and gave the impression that he was now in the centre politically, i.e. back to the traditions of his parents.” When Mary Ormsby-Gore and her younger sisters met him at their parents’ house, they thought he was “simply on the left wing of the Liberal Party.”

  Alan Maclean, the youngest of the five children and eleven years Donald’s junior, remembered the softer brother who emerged at this time now that he had been given fulfilment and purpose by Deutsch: Donald was “gentle, tolerant, funny and understanding,” and “the fact that he’d given up being a Communist didn’t seem to surprise anyone.” Their mother said “that she hadn’t minded him being a Communist at the time but that it hadn’t seemed to her to be very ‘useful’ . . . She was delighted by his change of heart and at the prospect of his being a diplomat instead of a Communist. It just hadn’t occurred to her that he could be both at the same time.” Donald had fully and swiftly covered his traces to family and friends with the remarkable efficiency in both action and deceit that was to stand him in such good stead in later life.

  *

  Donald Maclean was now in the game as a Soviet agent. He was still ignorant of tradecraft and of what the role might fully involve, and he was without regular contact with a controller, still waiting to be activated. Burgess, because of his wildly extrovert nature, was a far riskier proposition to Moscow. But such was his love of gossip that he could not fail to notice how Maclean had distanced himself and become quiet where he used to be strident. At the very end of 1934, a few months after the newly graduated Maclean had been enlisted, Philby passed on to Deutsch his concern that the promising new secret ring might be broken before it had begun to be useful:

  [Burgess] had convinced himself that Maclean and I had not undergone a sudden change of views, and that he was being excluded from something esoteric and exciting. So he started to badger us, and nobody could badger more effectively than Burgess. He went for Maclean and he went for me . . . Otto became increasingly worried that, if he got nowhere, he might try some trick—perhaps talk about us to people outside our circle. He might well be more dangerous outside than inside. So the decision was taken to recruit him. He must have been one of the very few people to have forced themselves into the Soviet special service.

  Burgess, having got his own trouble-making way as usual, was given the code-name “Mädchen” (“Little Girl”). His first act as an agent was to produce a list of potential contacts: the list was “mad and enthusiastic . . . four pages long and included just about everyone he’d ever met, from G. M. Trevelyan [Regius Professor of History at Cambridge] and Maynard Keynes to London prostitutes.” It also included the name of his former lover Anthony Blunt, most likely recruited in 1937 as a useful talent-spotter at Cambridge (puzzlingly and disappointingly given the code-name “Tony”). Like Philby, Burgess reinvented his politics and resigned from the Communist Party, much to the disgust of his former Cambridge comrades, who saw him as “a traitor, because he took care to advertise his alleged conversion to right-wing views as soon as he had gone down.” The man whose name was to be linked for posterity with Maclean’s, the loosest wheel in the Magnificent Five, was now attached.

  *

  The examinations for the Foreign Office took place in April 1935 in Burlington Gardens, behind the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, in a “shadowy hangar (smelling of varnish and rubber and freshly poured ink) with unsightly pipes as its sole decoration.” The exams were meant to test a candidate’s ability to synthesise and repackage information, to think on his (all the candidates were male) feet, and to look at any given situation tangentially, as well as to assess languages and literacy. Maclean’s Foreign Office contemporary Valentine Lawford described some of the questions for which they had been cramming for months: “assess the influence of Descartes or the importance of Jansenism . . . Even the Everyday Science paper included the old chestnut about sewage disposal, for which one was naturally well prepared—an acquaintance with sewage being as everyone knew a prerequisite for success for employment under the Crown.” The English paper involved précising a “Letter to a Young Friend Thinking of a Mercantile Career” to test the candidates’ powers of condensing information, and for the rest a “meagre choice between interpreting statistics about Welsh tin-plates and writing a Congratulatory Ode to the Gas Light and Coke Company on the completion of a new 250-ft. gas-holder.” The competition was intense, with only six or seven of the most brilliant and suitable Oxbridge graduates out of a field of seventy-five to a hundred being offered a place each year.

  The interview was crucial, and Maclean found a panel that was well disposed towards him and prepared to take him on trust. It included Tony Rumbold’s father, Sir Horace, the anti-Nazi Ambassador in Berlin when Hitler came to power, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Clement Attlee, the future Labour Prime Minister, Sir John Cadman and Edgar Granville MP; three Foreign Office representatives made up the rest. In the clubby atmosphere of the Foreign Office in the 1930s questions of security did not enter anyone’s mind and it was not an issue that two of the interviewers were personally known to Maclean, that others had worked with his father or that possibly all of them thought well of the late minister. It would have been hard to put together a panel where any candidate was not known to some of them. Inevitably Maclean’s political views would be raised; even if his reference from Wansbrough-Jones did not overplay them, his vociferousness at Cambridge would have stood a good chance of reaching the panel. He told his friends afterwards:

  All went well, and I got on famously with the examiners at the viva. I thought they’d finished when one of them suddenly said: “By the way, Mr Maclean. We understand that you, like other young men, held strong Communist views when you were at Cambridge. Do you still hold those views?” I’m afraid I did an instant double-take. Shall I deny the truth, or shall I brazen it out? I decided to brazen it out. “Yes,” I said. “I did have such views—and I haven’t entirely shaken them off.” I think they must have liked my honesty because they nodded, looked at each other and smiled. Then the chairman said: “Thank you, that will be all, Mr Maclean.”

  In that more socially blinkered age when who you were rather than what you were counted, before any deeper enquiries were made, let alone the “positive vetting” that his career eventually brought about, Donald Maclean, with the emerging display of confidence that disarms the innocent questioner, crossed the last line at which he could have redeemed himself and was admitted into the Foreign Office. John Cairncross, without the social and polit­ical advantages that the Maclean family held, was in no doubt that if his left-wing past had come out in his own application to the Foreign Office two years later, he would not have been given the same “exoneration” for his frankness; his “student activ
ities would then be viewed in a much more sinister light.” The difference between them, he believed, was that Maclean passed effortlessly as “a member of the élite, whereas I was the son of a modest Scottish shopkeeper.” Five applicants were successful that year and Maclean scored highest in English and elementary economics, surprisingly lowest in French and German, earning him fourth place. He got an outstanding 285 out of 300 marks in his viva voce interview—the rest scored 220—despite splitting the panel to the extent that the two surviving pencilled notes made at the time are “Pleasant and quiet. Attractive” and “B+. Rather weak face.” A candidate who scored highly in exams but came across as “weak” might seem useful in the Foreign Office, where conformity and malleability allied to brains and connections made for a sound civil servant.

  It was just over a year since Donald Maclean had left Cambridge. He was about to start his conventional British career and at the same time his unconventional, hidden one. The life of the insider was opening before him at last, yet the perpetual outsider could be simultaneously nourished. Orphan was ready for the “special work” Philby had mentioned to him at his kitchen table. The brilliant student who had been uncertain of where his true self lay was now setting out in the world to fulfil the destiny expected of him, yet with his ideals intact. He could have no inkling of where his choices of the past year would lead him, nor how quickly his secret life was to be activated, and fulfilled.