A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  In the brief period before Kitty arrived, Maclean passed on information to a Soviet illegal via the accepted protocols of a visual-recognition plan followed by verbal keys. As Philby found after the war had started, these could involve standing near the Thomas Cook office in the Place de la Madeleine holding a copy of the Daily Mail. When approached by a man carrying the same paper, the spy would ask, “Where is the Café Henri around here?” To which the answer would come, “It’s near the Place de la République,” and the release of information could begin.

  It was, at least, an operational relief to Maclean that these encounters could be consigned to the past, and a personal relief when his preferred handler arrived in Paris in December. Kitty was escorted by Grafpen, who was himself on his way back to Russia to stand trial followed by five and a half years in a forced-labour camp as reward for his service abroad. The lovers were reunited in an outdoor café in the Luxembourg Gardens. Kitty had chosen the spot because she was nervous that they might run into some of his old Cambridge chums who frequented the Latin Quarter were they to meet there. She was also clear that if he saw “any member of our service that you knew in England, you have to avoid meeting them or talking to them . . . You have to tell them that you have nothing to do with us any more.” It was basic self-preservation in the atmosphere of purge and defection, particularly in the wake of her blunder in London.

  Kitty soon found herself reporting to Moscow that she had nothing to deliver; although Maclean had been working hard, often all night, and still produced volumes of paper, he said he had not come across anything fresh. Diplomacy was being carried out above board. Moscow Centre, collectively anxious to feed Stalin’s paranoid need for intelligence and individually anxious to save their skins, not unnaturally questioned whether their relationship might be getting in the way of good espionage. “This combination of circumstances is not good for Stuart [Maclean]. Is this relationship justified? Does Ada [Harris] report to us about Stuart? Is she detached enough to observe him and notice changes in him that might indicate his loyalty to us?” Had the psychologically astute Deutsch still been in place he might have pointed out that the relationship could be a spur to productivity, but the Centre could not comprehend the emotional involvement of agent and handler.

  Kitty’s end-of-year report for 1938 gave a dark picture of Maclean’s state of mind: “While in London he could act as he liked. He had his friends and the opportunity to read a lot. Things are different in Paris. He leads a completely different social life. He must attend dinners and receptions . . . He hates this atmo-sphere.” She commented that Stuart was spending more off-duty time on the bohemian Left Bank, drinking heavily in the company of Marxist intellectuals, which at least Moscow would have been pleased about. Stuart himself sent word to Moscow that he “was doing little” in the post-Munich gloom of late 1938 and that this upset him. He was becoming withdrawn and solitary, disengaging from the diplomatic life that served the outer, reputable man so well and provided him with the secret wherewithal to satisfy his inner desires. It would have been the NKVD’s style to blame the handler ahead of the spy or the political reality, but once again Kitty’s relationship with Maclean was enough to keep her in place with her sole charge. Pavel Sudoplatov, head of the “death squads” that carried out “special tasks” in the 1930s and known as “the most sinister man in the Communist system,” evalu­­­­­ated Kitty as “a staffer with a flexible mind, capable, disciplined, and interested in the work but she lacks concentration and has no feeling for technical matters.”

  Kitty had indeed proved her technical incompetence in London: she had been upbraided for sending blank reels of film on an occasion when she claimed her nerves and impatience had stopped her allowing the twenty-two-second exposure required. Luckily for her it was before her affair with Maclean became known. She did not have a flat in Paris at first so their official meetings took place in cafés or on walks at which Maclean would tell her Embassy goings-on. Their unofficial meetings took place in Kitty’s bed-sitting room. When she found somewhere to rent they could meet as they did in London, and most often ended up in bed. When Kitty had photographed documents which did not need to be returned, the lovers would tear the papers into tiny pieces, put them into a large enamel bowl, sprinkle washing powder on top and add hot water; Maclean would then stir the mixture and Kitty “would knead the mess into something that looked like porridge” until the paste could be flushed down the toilet without blocking the drain.

  Although none of this was in Orlov’s, or any other spymaster’s, handbook, the Soviets stuck by their handler and their agent despite his being in the espionage doldrums. They both acknowledged his growing diplomatic potency and attempted to kick-start the flow of important intelligence by ensuring that Kitty was primed to brief him on where the Soviets stood on various issues. Not only would he understand what was most important to them, but he might also be able to bring some influence to bear in his daily round. This reverse diplomacy was important to a man increasingly regarded as influential, not least because the Russians felt, with some justification, that since Munich the British press had been dominated by anti-Soviet appeasers.

  Kitty was right to highlight Maclean’s lack of involvement in social life. The social aspect of any posting was then considered essential to diplomacy, as it is today, and more so in the Paris Embassy than most, as Hoyer Millar had emphasised in his recommendation of Maclean to Phipps. Maclean would not have been expected to entertain much himself as a bachelor Third Secretary, but he was supposed to play his part in Embassy social life. He rented “a large, rather gloomy apartment” at 11 rue de Bellechasse, near Les Invalides. He lacked the private income of most of his fellow diplomats in the Foreign Office club, and he was sensitive to financial and class differentials. His apartment was sparsely furnished; guests sat “on collapsing sofas of orange-crates.” He did not attempt to hide his political reading matter, and “a book-shelf held a few of his Marxist texts, some Tauchnitz [a German literary publisher] paperbacks and the orange [sic] jackets of editions from Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club.” “The food was primitive, the wine was French, red but definitely ordinaire,” as one sophisticated fellow diplomat commented. It was so uncomfortable that Lady Maclean went to stay elsewhere when she came to visit her son. In spite of Maclean not being as well off and not as stuffy as some of his contemporaries, when Patrick Reilly passed through Paris on his way back from a League of Nations council meeting in January 1939, he was surprised to be told by Maclean that the hard-up diplomat had never travelled on the Paris Metro.

  *

  There were only twelve on the Embassy staff altogether, and Maclean’s withdrawal was noticed, as was the increasing consumption of drink used to mask his feelings. When Mary and Robin Campbell came to dinner in the rue de Bellechasse, they were surprised to find a whole bottle of claret by the elbow of each guest. On another occasion, Robert Cecil and his wife took him to see a gloomy film, La Bête Humaine, based on a Zola tale of murder involving the “drunken degradation” of a wife, her abuser and her lover. They “tried to cheer Donald up by taking him home for a night-cap; but he slouched off into the darkness, scarcely pausing to say good-night.”

  Cecil, who had been intimidated by Maclean’s political censoriousness at Cambridge, was “struck by the change” in the “assured, authoritative young man” he had known recently who now “seemed nervous and ill at ease.” He was very “tense . . . in a chronic state of anxiety.” Cecil put this down to the strains of diplomatic life, a correct enough assessment, if not the full picture. Gone was the confidence of the previous year in London. Maclean’s old friend and his political mentor since schooldays, James Klugmann, had been working in Paris for some time as head of the Rassemblement Mondial des Etudiants, but Maclean did not seek him out. When they bumped into one another on a train, “Maclean buried himself in The Times and killed conversation with a few curt answers.” Whether or not Klugmann, himself one of those Deutsch had approached, knew tha
t the man who had looked up to him so much had become a spy, it was a bitter moment. This gaucheness derived not from the requirement to distance himself from his past associations but from the profound discomfort he felt. His double life was not easy to sustain at that stage when one country was drifting towards war and the true faith of the other demanded peace. And it was in this defining power-play at the end of Maclean’s first year in Paris that all the British believers had to make their choice between adherence to the creed which they had espoused over the previous decade and the move to simpler patriotism. To combine both was possible, but it took nerve-shredding courage.

  *

  The Nazi–Soviet Pact made the Second World War inevitable, and was arguably the lowest point of British diplomacy in the century.

  In late 1938 the German Ambassador in Moscow intimated to Berlin that the Soviet Union had been more upset by France and Britain acting without it at the Munich talks than by Germany’s own conduct, and tentative moves were made towards setting up trade negotiations to enable the Nazis to meet their four-year economic and rearmament plan. Towards the end of January 1939 these negotiations became public. Vernon Bartlett, a journalist on the London News Chronicle known to be close to the Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky, wrote on the 27th of that month that “At present, the Soviet government obviously has no intention of giving any help to Great Britain and France if the latter come into conflict with Germany and Italy.” On 30 January, for the first time in six years, Hitler offered no criticism of the Soviet Union in the speech marking his accession to power. The British were slow to realise that they had to act: in February Chamberlain became the first Prime Minister since the eve of the Revolution in 1917 to dine at the Soviet Embassy in London, but there was no hint of forming an alliance in any matters to do with international security or defence. After Germany had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, Chamberlain wrote that he had “the most profound distrust of Russia. I have no belief whatever in her ability to maintain an effective offensive, even if she wanted to. And I distrust her motives, which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of liberty . . .” This distrust shaped the events of the next few months.

  In April and May, the British asked for a pledge that the Soviet Union would come to their aid and the aid of their Empire if needed, but when Moscow responded by suggesting British and French support in protecting the Soviet Union’s own neighbouring states the proposal was rejected. The British, certain of their diplomatic standing, were guilty of a “complete failure to grasp the psychology of such men as Hitler and Mussolini. These Englishmen perceive them as they would a business man from the City or an English country gentleman . . . Aggressors have an entirely different mentality!,” as the more subtly minded Maisky observed, while carefully omitting Stalin from his list of dictators. Stalin now dismissed his pro-Western Foreign Minister, Litvinov, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, the beady-eyed chief Soviet negotiator and the man who was to see his ministry through world war and into cold war. No wonder Maclean was withdrawn as he watched his country being torn away from Russia.

  He was at least useful again. All the traffic about the negoti­ations from the British side went through Paris en route to the Moscow Embassy. He was able to send it via his trysts with Kitty to keep Molotov one step ahead. In the last week of May Halifax told Daladier that if necessary (and it went very much against the grain for him and Chamberlain) the British would be in favour of reciprocity with Russia without French support, and on the 24th sent their terms to Paris for approval. When this document was forwarded to the Russian Foreign Ministry on the 27th, Molotov “read it giving every sign that he was familiar in advance with its contents.” Thanks to Stuart and Ada’s work he had indeed had a day’s start on the news. By the end of June, there was agreement between the French, British and Soviets on a treaty under which each would help the others, and countries on the borders of the Soviet Union, specifically Poland, in the event of attack. At the same time MI6 decided not to circulate to the Foreign Office a report that they had had from an agent in Prussia code-named “the Baron” revealing that German–Soviet talks were advancing because they could not understand how one of their own agents could have such good sources.

  The Anglo-French delegation then took the radically odd step of going to Moscow by boat and train rather than by aeroplane: Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax,* head of the military mission, told Ambassador Maisky at lunch on 4 August that they were travelling this way because a plane would be too uncomfortable for twenty of them and their luggage; they were using a freighter rather than a faster warship so as not to have to make twenty naval officers give up their cabins. Maisky couldn’t believe that he was hearing “Such tender feelings and such tactful manners!” The City of Exeter arrived in Leningrad on 9 August. The talks went badly from the start: the British team had not been given the authority to negotiate the necessary detail and were unprepared for Soviet demands for safe passage of their troops through the countries around their borders, which the Poles bitterly resisted as being tantamount to a partition of their country. When they did receive credentials to negotiate, “they turned out to be so general and vague that it became clear to us that London and Paris had no serious intention of reaching an agreement” with Moscow.

  Hitler was in close contact with Stalin at all times. He assumed that with the French and British so unwilling to go to war—as they had demonstrated the previous year at Munich—he could occupy the Free City of Danzig, gaining access to a valuable port without any trouble. Even as the Anglo-French negotiations were being prolonged, those of Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop were accelerating: in contrast to the Anglo-French ocean voyage, he flew into Moscow on 23 August with thirty-two “attendants,” ready to sign a pact: the Germans found the airport bedecked with swastikas in welcome. Stalin had come to the real­isation that Hitler was intending to invade Poland come what may, and that although the Western allies would come to its defence, Russia would be open to attack from the German military machine and needed to buy time to rearm. Hitler understood, reportedly after watching the Soviet May Day military parade on film, that it was more critical to have Russia neutralised. It did not emerge until after the war that the two countries had secretly agreed to divide up Poland and the Baltic states from the start. Hitler ordered the attack on Poland to begin even before the signatures had been added to the pact because it was important to launch it before the mid-­September rains. The Wehrmacht duly invaded on 1 September, and two days later—honouring their earlier guarantee of Polish independence—Britain and France declared war on Germany. Peace in Europe had barely lasted two decades, and the League of Nations Union that Maclean had supported so assiduously at Gresham’s seemed a long time ago.

  *

  The effect of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, moving from a trade agreement to a high-stakes handshake that condemned France and Britain to fight alone in a matter of months, was a shattering blow to Paris and London. It was a “bombshell” to the NKVD’s agents, according to Moscow Centre, even if Maclean was able to keep a close eye on the talks and was well aware of the consequences of their failure from the British perspective. As usual, Maclean was careful to leave no record of his reaction to the devastating alliance at the time. Looking back on his life he saw it as the result of “catastrophically irrational policies” as the leadership on both sides “sought to exercise hegemony.” He justified the Soviet leadership’s part in it as “subjectively aimed at building socialism” but admitted that it had “objectively stunted and twisted its development” and “nearly destroyed” it as a result.

  John Cairncross saw the pact in less abstract terms as he bitterly concluded that “the ignorance and stupidity of the Chamberlain-dominated Allies had resulted in the most inept diplomatic negotiations since those between England and the American rebels 200 years earlier”; Cairncross “would have broken with the KGB [sic], whatever the consequences” for his personal
safety if the pact had remained in place any longer than it did. Easy to say with hindsight.

  Kim Philby, for the only time in his career, wobbled: “What’s going to happen to the single-front struggle against fascism now?” he asked his new controller. Guy Burgess broke off his holiday and drove back from Antibes when he heard the news, even leaving his precious car on the dockside at Calais (not the last time he would leave a car on the dockside at a pivotal moment in his life), and called on his friend the fellow-traveller Goronwy Rees who “denounced the treachery of the Soviet Union and said that the Russians had made war inevitable.” Burgess replied that the Soviet Union had every right to protect itself. Rees, who had just joined up, told him that he never wanted “to have anything to do with the Comintern for the rest of my life . . . Or with you, if you really are one of their agents.” Burgess self-protectively claimed that he was going to give up his secret work, which seemed to reassure his friend, yet Rees was to prove a “ticking bomb.” The ever-melodramatic Burgess was so panicked that he would be exposed that he went so far as to propose assassinating his great friend. Moscow Centre wisely refused to countenance what at the time would have been a hot-headed move which could jeopardise their valuable British assets at the very moment when they were shut out of official diplomatic channels by the pact. Maclean could never forgive someone who had vigorously expounded the cause and then deserted it, and years later publicly denounced Rees as “a traitor” at a moment when he himself could ill afford such talk.

  Arthur Koestler, who only a few years before had described his coming to Communism as “mental rapture” as “the whole universe falls into pattern,” had survived being imprisoned by Franco. His faith had wavered when he saw Russian interests put ahead of Spanish Republican needs and when trumped-up charges were brought against Central European comrades, but the signing of the treaty destroyed his loyalty to the cause he had been espousing so vociferously, in spite of the left being the “better, optimistic part of humanity because it believed in social evolution.” He later commented that “No death is so sad and final as the death of an illusion.” If Maclean was mourning his own illusion, he nonetheless had to keep the visible part of himself, the daily life of working to his government’s tune, visible. He almost certainly saw the left-wing Paris paper L’Humanité but was too wily a diplomat to show that he agreed with its view that the pact was “the supreme effort of Stalin to prevent the threatening imperialist war.” The finality of the pact came home to those of the left, including Arthur Koestler, as war became inevitable: “it is hard for men to fight if they only know what they are fighting against and not what they are fighting for.”