A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  I am very anxious to wed at the earliest possible moment, as one can’t tell what will happen in the next few months or days . . .

  Eventually Melinda committed herself to marriage. Another urgent reason for her decision was that she had realised that she was pregnant. Maclean’s mind was understandably not on his job at this vital moment. That was noticed by the new Ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell who commented to a senior colleague “unfavourably on Maclean’s dilatoriness and neglect of his duties during the last critical days. He thought of him, perhaps a bit harshly, as something of a weakling.”

  Melinda did not need to ask permission of anyone to marry when she wrote to her mother the following day, 9 June (with additions up to 11 June):

  Darling Mother

  Please don’t feel hurt that I haven’t let you know before about my decision to marry Donald. But I honestly didn’t know whether to or not. We decided very suddenly because it seemed to be the only chance as the Embassy is liable to have to leave Paris for some Godforsaken little place in the country and one is no longer allowed to travel without an impossible reason . . .

  I am sorry I haven’t given you more details about Donald and I know you must be very worried and also probably disappointed at my marrying an Englishman. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I will have to settle down in England for the rest of my life. We will probably be sent all over the world.

  … I am terribly in love with Donald and am sure there will never be anyone else. He is the only man I have ever seen I would have liked to marry . . .

  She added that Donald was “the soul of honour, responsible, cultured, broad-minded (and sweet) etc. Of course he has faults but somehow they don’t clash with mine—except that he is stubborn and strong-willed. I needed that as I was drifting along getting nowhere.” He was indeed the “soul of honour,” a neat evasion of what she knew.

  In the same letter she said that she would go straight to Bordeaux after they were married to get a boat home with little luggage. “The rest I am leaving in Donald’s flat as they will be sent to him if he has to leave France.” Not for the last time, Melinda showed little interest in or grasp of the affairs she found herself in the midst of. But again time ran out on them; she may also have decided that she wanted to be with her new husband rather than using him as a ticket home, and certainly the baby focused her mind. She broke the news obliquely (and slightly coercively) to her mother in a sudden outpouring of emotion: “My greatest desire is to have a baby while I am at home as I am dying to have one and I couldn’t bear to have it without you. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Mummy!?”

  The Macleans necessarily got married ahead of Donald’s planned timetable in a mairie in the Palais Bourbon district on 10 June, the day the Embassy left Paris (with the Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce leading the convoy). Mark Culme-Seymour was the best man. Donald was neglecting his orders to help evacuate the Embassy to attend his own wedding and they joined the nightmarish “surrealist goulash” of the columns of refugees leaving the city; Culme-Seymour made his own escape south in a large Packard with five English ladies from a refugee committee. Donald and Melinda spent their first married night in a field near Chartres, their second in their car outside Tours (which was being pounded by air raids), managing to spend a few days of their honeymoon in a village near Biarritz before being evacuated from Bordeaux on a destroyer, HMS Berkeley, on 23 June. Three hours later they were transferred to a British tramp steamer, the SS Narvia, returning from delivering coal to South America. They then had a ten-day voyage to Britain, zig-zagging to avoid U-boats and the Luftwaffe. Melinda shared the cook’s cabin with three other women, Donald slept in the passageway. In the daytime they sat on deck and remembered their best Parisian meals. Finally they arrived in Milford Haven, near Sir Donald’s home town of Haverfordwest in Wales, and caught a train to London. Melinda sent her mother a telegram announcing their union; Mrs Dunbar took an advertisement in the New York Times to share the news. The tumultuous married life of Donald and Melinda Maclean had started as it would continue, beset by difficulties and dangers, united but often not together, an enigma at times to the outside world that, like matryoshka dolls, kept hidden their deeper selves.

  7

  Blitz and Barbarossa

  The newly-weds arrived back in Britain at the start of the German battle to knock out the Royal Air Force and pave the way for the invasion of Britain. The country was blockaded at sea and the RAF was daily fighting the Luftwaffe over the south coast and the English Channel to prevent the invasion and consequent near-certain defeat. Chamberlain’s replacement as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, made his stirring speech to the House of Commons on the evening of 18 June 1940, coining the name for the confrontation: “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation . . . Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war . . . Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”*

  The refugees from the Battle of France had little else to stir them when they arrived, nowhere to live, no furniture, and nearly all their clothes were in occupied Paris; their car was abandoned in Bordeaux, not that it would have been of much use to them as petrol was rationed in Britain. Valentine Lawford rode on horseback over the ten miles from his parents’ home to see them. Melinda’s introduction to her formidable mother-in-law took place when they went to stay with her at Elm Cottage, Penn, for the first weeks of July 1940, at the height of the battle.

  While her husband was away in Whitehall, Melinda did not find life with Lady Maclean easy. Whatever adjustments needed to be made in wartime, Gwendolen would have preferred to meet her favourite son’s intended before the wedding became a fait accompli. She might even have liked the chance to meet the girl’s parents. She came from a radically different, Victorian era and from a family that put great stress on things being done properly (and preferably in church). She had also had an exhausting start to the war herself after undergoing a mastectomy as well as having to care for her elderly mother in Surrey. Mrs Devitt’s mind was starting to wander, and she had become convinced that her eighty-year-old maid was going to be called up into the navy and made to run up and down the ship’s rigging to check it. Overall, and even allowing for Lady Maclean’s essential sweetness of nature, particularly where her middle son was concerned (which might have been a problem of its own for Melinda), it soon became apparent that for the sake of Donald’s work and their marriage the couple should live in London, which certainly held more excitements of the sort they had got used to in Paris. In mid-July, despite the US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy warning three weeks earlier that it was “utterly inevitable that England will be almost completely destroyed by air raids,” they moved into a room in the modern Mount Royal Hotel in Oxford Street.

  *

  The Foreign Office was a reserved occupation and its staff were not liable for conscription. It was in chaos with so many diplomats returning from Western Europe: promotions, leave, assignments were up in the air, and the legendarily smooth running of the service had fallen apart. The office routine was very different in wartime to how it had been when Maclean was last based in London two brief years earlier. Then there had been no reason to be in much before eleven o’clock, there was no work on Saturdays and one had two months holiday a year; lunch could be an extended affair and a tea trolley brought scones, biscuits and fruit cake in the afternoon. Now, short-staffed and in more urgent times, everything started much earlier and finished much later; Saturday mornings were working hours. There were soon to be twenty-seven departments; before the war there had been twelve.

  Nearly all of Maclean’s colleagues from Paris were set up in the new French Department of the Foreign Office created to cope with the arrival of General de Gaulle and the Free French. In spite of his Paris experience, Maclean was excluded, partly because
of the poor report from Campbell on his untimely marriage and his failure to provide support in the evacuation to Bordeaux; it was his one career black mark. Instead he was assigned to the new General Department, mainly responsible for liaison with the Ministries of Shipping, Supply and Economic Warfare, the last broadly concerned with getting what was needed for the war and keeping it away from the Germans. Robert Cecil remembered overhearing two diplomats talking about a three-hour meeting focused on denying wolfram to the Germans without any knowledge of what wolfram (also known as tungsten, an essential ingredient of the steel used to build tanks) was, such was the level of expertise within the Foreign Office in relation to modern warfare. Apart from Maclean and a few others, the General Department was made up of visiting experts in the various specialised fields it dealt with, and Maclean’s job was not particularly taxing for someone of his calibre. He was promoted to Second Secretary in October, routine for the time he had served.

  Maclean’s annual report that month recorded his work as being “consistently excellent but the word ‘immature’ recurs.” “Immature” harks back to his start in the service, overriding the interim “confidence.” The comment might have a number of explanations as the report did not go into detail: it might be that the word is a euphemism for being hung over in the office; his marriage and the move from France would certainly have been a distraction if it referred to lack of concentration; he might have found life in London a bit frivolous after the drama of Paris and the novelty of married life as he and Melinda escaped from the approaching German forces. He might simply have been finding the job a bit of a backwater after the excitement of the political work that had dominated his career so far, and it perhaps made him petulant beneath the dutiful surface.

  Above all, he might have found it hard to engage fully with his job while he was out of contact with Moscow, a theme which was to recur, sometimes with damaging consequences. A vital part of him was not being nourished and fulfilled. For over two years now he had not only had the thrill of knowing that much of what he was seeing was clearly valuable to Moscow; there was the added drama of having been romantically involved with his controller. Now Russia was allied with the enemy which had driven him out of France, and London was grim and tense. He was cut off from his ideological centre, for all he knew for ever. Moscow Centre might well have decided that he was expendable, given the Nazi–Soviet Pact and Kitty’s withdrawal, or even that the British had been subtle enough to turn him as a double agent. If they did believe he had been turned, they did not have the measure of their man. Maclean never dealt well with discomfort or with a lack of feedback to nourish his secret side, particularly after being in such close contact with Moscow Centre via Kitty. The supposition that he was of little value now, especially with British war prospects looking so bleak, induced a fundamental unease in someone so sensitive.

  *

  The suspicious Soviets left their London spies without a handler for six months after Maclean’s return. Moscow had come to the conclusion, thanks to their perennial belief that no one who had worked abroad could be wholeheartedly committed ideologically, that their work in Britain “was based on doubtful sources, on an agent network acquired at the time when it was controlled by enemies of the people and was therefore extremely dangerous.” It was “recommended that all contact with the British agents should be broken.” Although this did not apply to Maclean in Paris, where Kitty Harris knew very well that he was not an enemy of her people and where his material was not in question, there was certainly a post-purge cooling at the very point when information should have been at a premium.

  After Maly and Grafpen had been recalled to Moscow and respectively executed and imprisoned, the rezidentura in London was in chaos. Maly’s quasi-religious loyalty was not taken into account and it was assumed he had compromised the Five; all but Maclean, out of the country and consistently useful, had been cut adrift. In December 1938 the short, balding, brilliant, depraved and utterly ruthless Lavrenti Beria, described by Stalin’s daughter Svetlana as “a magnificent modern specimen of the artful courtier, the embodiment of oriental perfidy, flattery and hypocrisy,” had become head of the NKVD. The only remaining NKVD officer in London in 1939 was Anatoli Gorsky, official cover name Anatoli Gromov, code-name “Henry.” Gorsky had a “distinctly Slavic profile . . . a round, moonlike bespectacled face” with “angry eyebrows,” always wore a hat and was ignorantly unbriefed on his charges’ individual personalities. He treated them instead in a grimly efficient, humourless and “business-like manner.” Moscow Centre had so lost touch with their London network that Gorsky had to write in the summer of 1939, when Philby was about to return from the Spanish Civil War, that “we would appreciate some orientation on him, for he is only known to us in the most general terms.”

  In February 1940, while Maclean was still in Paris, contact with Philby and Burgess from Moscow Centre was suspended and Gorsky temporarily withdrawn to Moscow. By the time Maclean joined them in London after the Fall of France, his fellow Cambridge agents had been adrift for months. On top of this isolation, it was not a particularly good time to be a Communist in Britain anyway: Churchill blamed “Soviet-inspired Communism” for the collapse of the French army and argued strongly in Cabinet that Communists, as well as fascists and aliens, “should be put into protective or preventive internment, including the leaders.”

  Gorsky returned to London as rezident in December 1940 and certainly made a change from Kitty. By his very lack of emotion he was to prove adept at handling the often emotional Maclean over the next few years. It was in his absences that things started to fall apart. And for all his joyless, efficient manner, it was ultimately another handler’s inefficiency in a chance, brief gap in their relationship that condemned Maclean to exposure.

  *

  Aubrey Wolton was one of the experts in the General Department. He thought highly of Maclean’s work and tried to befriend “the rather lonely and withdrawn individual.” He went to the pub a few times with both the Macleans, but the friendship amounted to little; Wolton felt that he had “failed to make any close contact. They both seemed so young and so lost.” They were indeed dislocated, not certain of their paths in the war-torn capital; Melinda was in a totally unexpected environment, pregnant and out of touch with her mother and sisters. But they had the excitement of each other in the heightened atmosphere of living in bombed London. Melinda declared that “ever afterwards ‘love’ to me was always inextricably mixed up with ‘bombs,’ it was an experience I would not have missed.” The first bombs of what became known as the Blitz fell on London on 24 August, and soon afterwards the damage to the Mount Royal Hotel meant that it had to be evacuated before more shocks weakened it to the point of collapse. Donald and Melinda moved into a furnished flat in the handsome, run-down Georgian Mecklenburgh Square, near King’s Cross Station and the literary haunts of Fitzrovia.

  The Blitz proper got terrifyingly under way on 7 September, as hundreds of “bombers hemmed in by fighters, like bees around their queen, like destroyers around a battleship” arrived in the middle of an autumn afternoon. By dawn on the 8th the docks were ablaze. That night the Luftwaffe returned again and John Lehmann, who was a neighbour in Mecklenburgh Square where he ran Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, recorded in his diary the “whistling, ripping noise” of the descending bombs. As he made his way to the shelter in the middle of the square, Lehmann “thought part of Byron Court looked rather odd: it was only a few seconds later I realised that I was looking at a tree beyond—Byron Court had simply been blown to bits.” Only ten weeks after their escape from France, the Macleans were homeless again, very much “so young and so lost.”

  As the bombing continued, Maclean spent most nights fire-watching on the roof of the Foreign Office, brushing away and quenching the incendiary bombs before they could start to burn in earnest. Melinda decided that with her baby imminent she could not stay in London any longer. She sailed in September as part of a convoy for the safety a
nd glamour of peacetime America. It was the first time in an eventful two years she had been home. On 22 December she had a stillborn son in New York. Melinda was “very disturbed,” not surprisingly, by this terrible event on top of all her other experiences of the previous year and, her stepfather claimed, “fell in love” with the surgeon who delivered the baby. Whatever the truth of this (and at the time Dunbar had little good to say of any of the Marling family), the Macleans did not meet again until Melinda returned to London early the following summer. Donald was seen to “weep like an inconsolable child” over his double loss.

  In his emotional vulnerability, at a time when he might be killed any night, Maclean dropped his stoic British mask and sent an eloquent and assertive letter to Moscow that was a plea to be made useful again, to be allowed to ground himself, to be given a sense of purpose. His espionage, he insisted, “has the same importance for me as for you—if not of even greater importance because it is my life, I live for it.” He then made it clear that he had not been turned, nailing his colours to the mast in an attempt to dispel any doubts the Centre might have, or to push away doubts he himself might have, about his post-pact single-mindedness: “I will try as hard as I can not to do anything to endanger it [his role as a spy]. I can’t say that I like my work. But I admit that it is one of the uses in our great struggle to which I am most suited and I intend to stand by it until I am relieved of it.” The strength of purpose and ideology could not hide his perpetual distaste for the actual business of spying, the subterfuge and lying at a time when his country was “pulling together.” He never let go his Presbyterian squeamishness about wrongdoing just as he was always certain that following one’s conscience was the right thing to do. The death of his unseen baby and the absence of Melinda rendered him more vulnerable to the sheer torment of spying, so that in a child-like way he wanted to feel needed and appreciated. Perhaps this is what the Foreign Office meant by his “immaturity.”