A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  The Crimean meeting place ensured that both delegations were comprehensively bugged in their respective grand residences. At one point Sarah Churchill, accompanying her father, mentioned that lemon juice went well with caviar; “the next day a lemon tree loaded with fruit” had been flown from a great distance and was “growing in the hall” of the house where the Churchills were staying. The impresario of this largesse, General Kruglov, was awarded an honorary KBE and thus became the only member of the Russian secret service to receive a knighthood. At the same time as this honour was being bestowed, a reciprocal thank-you was given secretly by the Soviet Deputy Premier Andrei Vyshinsky to one of the organisers and attendees on the US side, Alger Hiss, a star of the State Department who was to become Director of Special Political Affairs dealing with the new United Nations.

  Stalin may have had the upper hand at the negotiating table through his military success, but Moscow Centre’s intelligence operations gave him everything he needed to negotiate with before the conference began. On 23 and 28 January he had had full debriefings on the British and American strategies. The second briefing came a day after the NKGB had left him with a full translation of the British delegates’ strategy paper, which addressed the partition of Germany (with Anthony Eden’s memo of the previous December included), the formation of the United Nations and which of the USSR’s republics would have a role in that, what questions the British and the Americans each thought important and which party would raise them: it included the discussion points about Poland, indeed it included everything. The briefings were a tribute to the hard work and influence of Maclean, Hiss and the rest of Fitin’s intelligence network. Fitin’s code-name was currently, and undeniably, “Viktor.”

  So successful were the pre-conference briefings that Stalin even had the confidence to bring to the grand opening dinner his own “Himmler,” as he put it, the “little and fat” head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, his eyes glinting behind their thick lenses. Once he had his feet under the table, the secret policeman discussed the sex lives of fishes with the “boozy, womanising” British Ambassador to Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. Clark Kerr was so taken with Beria that he proposed a toast to him as “the man who looks after our bodies” and had to be told to calm down by Churchill. Some people there had a pretty good idea of how many millions of bodies would never be heard of again thanks in part to Beria, but such was the charm and the cordiality of the whole event that the well-­pampered Churchill was encouraged enough to write afterwards that “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Uncle Joe, as Churchill nicknamed him, was put in such good humour by the conference that he clowned about in the photoshoot to mark its close, jovially repeating his only four phrases of English, “You said it!”; “So what?”; “What the hell goes on round here?” and “The toilet is over there.”

  Poland and its governance was the subject of seven out of eight plenary sessions at the conference as the British and Americans pushed for free and open government. Stalin insisted that there must be more control to prevent the country being used as a military corridor through to Russia as it had been by Hitler and Napoleon. One of the high points of the Grand Alliance was Stalin’s agreement to hold “free and unfettered elections” in Poland, pos­sibly within the next month, and it was left to the diplomats to see this woolly resolution through. What actually happened the following month was that the Russians, encountering more resistance in Poland than they had expected, invited the sixteen emaciated leaders of the Polish underground to come to London to discuss how relations might be improved. The sixteen duly presented themselves at Marshal Zhukov’s Warsaw HQ, expecting to be flown to London, but were diverted to Moscow and never heard from again. A diplomatic storm predictably erupted. Churchill had “never been more anxious” than he was then “about the state of Europe,” as he cabled Truman who, after only eighty-three days as Vice-President, had become President following Roosevelt’s death on 12 April. Truman sent his personal emissary, Harry Hopkins (who was so close to the presidency that he was still living in the bedroom in the White House that he had slept in after a late-night session in May 1940), to negotiate in Moscow.

  The embassies were lit at all hours of the day and night, encrypting, decoding, passing messages between London, Moscow, Washington and San Francisco, where the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was overseeing the founding of the United Nations. Maclean was at the centre of the traffic with his precision “watchmaker’s mind” and his ability to analyse complex material. He passed on Churchill’s urgently worded telegrams to Truman imploring the President to be firm—“we must not cease our effort on behalf of the Poles.” He passed on the White House’s summaries of Hopkins’s reports from Moscow, the emissary gloomy about getting Stalin to shift his position on the Polish leaders or the country itself. He passed on the instructions given to Sir Archie Clark Kerr from the Foreign Office via Halifax in Washington discussing “some major differences of tactics.” The Russians had the incalcul­able advantage of being able to read that Sir Archie did not “think that Molotov, despite his stubbornness, has said his last word,” or that Halifax believed British intransigence over Romania would “invite a head-on collision with the Russians.” They could drive home this advantage without any qualms that they might lose their debate. No negotiation could be easier once “H” (for “Homer”) had transmitted the report that “Smyrna” (the British Embassy in Moscow) had told the “Pool” (the Washington Embassy) that the State Department had concluded that the Americans would “pursue no course on which we should not be willing to rest our case should Molotov remain adamant.” The adamant side knew that they just needed to stand their ground to win.

  The speed with which these telegrams passed through his hands meant that Maclean sometimes had whole items sent on undigested, using Gorsky as the intermediary. The urgency of the material meant that it could not go by diplomatic pouch, but had to be telegraphed in encoded cable form. As the whole Embassy was working around the clock, his hectic activity, dashing in and out of his office to take notes and photographs, would not be remarked upon. Such was his importance to Moscow that his offerings were flagged up “Materials from H” in order to ensure priority reading on arrival. Homer himself was fulfilled and excited, working all hours in this crisis to send vital information that would shape, as he believed, a post-war Europe more in keeping with his own ideological sympathies.

  *

  Maclean was unlikely to be aware that under US censorship laws during wartime copies of all foreign commercial radiogram traffic sent via Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Com­munications, the three commercial carriers, had to be stored for reference. Had he been so, he would have thought little of it as he would have been reassured that the one-time pads rendered the Russian codes unbreakable. The Russians had chosen this form of transmission for security reasons: short-wave radio could too easily be tapped. In August 1945, a law was passed by which these carriers had to hand over to the government their copies of “enciphered telegrams of certain foreign targets” and the following month what was assumed to be innocent messages between diplomats at the Soviet Consulate in New York and the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in Moscow were lodged with the US Signal Intelligence Service in Arlington Hall. By the end of the year over 200,000 seemingly uncrackable cables, some of them pages long, had been transcribed and stored in undecoded form.

  *

  Guy Liddell was a cultivated man who had been studying in Germany to become a cellist when the First World War put an end to that career and took him into the army and then to Scotland Yard after the Armistice. He had moved to MI5 in 1931 and become a Soviet expert, head of counter-espionage in B Division in 1940, where he appointed Anthony Blunt, possibly at the suggestion of his friend Guy Burgess, as his assistant. Liddell was also Philby’s main contact within MI5, and was held in high regard by the MI6 man: “He would murmur his thoughts as if groping his
way towards the facts of a case, his face creased in a comfortable, innocent smile. But behind the façade of laziness, his subtle and reflective mind played over a storehouse of photographic memories.” Liddell noted in his diary, in the run-up to Yalta, that Philby came to check the Krivitsky file, ostensibly to “satisfy himself that he was on sound ground” with regard to someone he had just taken on in the Russian section. Philby’s real motives, as always, were much more self-serving: he wanted to see if Krivitsky had incriminated him and was also checking on how safe Maclean, whom he had not seen for years, might be should another look be given in the context of the emerging world order at those with previous left-wing links. What he learned from Krivitsky’s debriefing he would use for altogether different ends.

  With the end of the war in sight and notwithstanding Modrzhinskaya’s machinations, Moscow Centre decided to reward the agents who had made the most significant contribution to victory. Fitin suggested that Philby be awarded an annual pension of £1,500; Maclean, Cairncross, Burgess and Blunt £1,200 each.* But before submitting his recommendations, Fitin asked the local rezidentura to contact the Five. Gorsky duly raised the subject at his next meeting with Homer. All refused the pension, on the grounds that “it would be difficult for them to explain the existence of large sums of money,” and, in Maclean’s case, it would have felt like accepting money for doing a job he had no taste for but every moral obligation to perform. Burgess did apparently accept “expenses,” and after the war bought a gold, soft-topped, second-hand Rolls-Royce on the grounds that he was such a terrible driver that a “sturdily built” car was a life-saving necessity. That was sufficiently within the former enfant terrible’s character (and potential means) for it not to attract undue suspicion.

  *

  Maclean had always disliked the grubbiness inherent in the phys­ical business of spying, as he had made plain in his letter to Moscow Centre at the time of his stillborn son and the doom-laden isolation of the Blitz. The sober, fastidious diplomat felt the shame of the ideologue who had to break the law when his job and his conscience fell on different sides. It was “like being a lavatory attendant; it stinks but someone has to do it.” For Maclean, this distaste, mixed with his appreciation of the importance and scale of his leaks during these last exhausting, euphoric months, brought his double life into sharp focus. The possibility that he might have to make a choice between patriotism and ideology must have occurred to him even as he joined the all-night celebrations on the streets of Washington after the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought the Pacific War to a close in August 1945.

  In many ways he was on the winning side: the Russians had triumphed at Yalta and later at Potsdam, with his intelligence playing a crucial role in the negotiations. The Soviets now controlled Central and Eastern Europe. A Labour government had swept to power in Britain in July 1945 (Churchill and Eden had had to yield their places to Attlee and Bevin in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, so brutal is the handover of power in the British system); Communist governments looked likely to win in France and Italy; insurgencies controlled by Moscow were threatening the Greek and Iranian regimes. But at the level of his service to his country on which the outer man thrived, there was the gradual, inescapable and painful realisation that as the US entrenched its positions on most issues, the Grand Alliance was becoming a Cold War stand-off. Maclean feared that the United States, aided and abetted by Britain, was on the point of launching “a political and military crusade against socialist states.”

  In his unsettled state, Maclean now started to indulge in near-constant off-duty drinking, acting belligerently and lashing out at those around him and most of all at his wife’s unacceptably capitalist countrymen—all the while maintaining the poise and cool expected of the First Secretary of His Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to the United States of America. His diligence and effectiveness were still much commented upon, but, as with the earlier sideswipes at his immaturity, less flattering notes crept in, in this case from his friend and ally Middleton, who commented that he was “patient” and “even-tempered,” liked by his junior staff, yet “sometimes rather sleepy and lackadaisical in manner.” Possibly this is diplomatic code for hung over, or for his withdrawal from engagement and the consequent squeamishness he would have felt from time to time about the path he was treading.

  The young British diplomat came to the attention of Joseph Alsop, the influential conservative columnist on the Herald Tribune, a cousin of Franklin Roosevelt and one of the great hosts of Washington. A friend had told Alsop that he ought to get to know Maclean as it would only be a matter of time before “he returned as Ambassador to Washington.” Maclean was invited to one of Alsop’s celebrated dinner-parties alone, since Melinda, the tempering influence, was still away for the summer. The conversation turned to the crisis in Iranian Azerbaijan. Stalin was keeping 75,000 troops there in violation of the 1943 Teheran Agreement, ostensibly to protect Russia from Iran, but actually to command the oil fields in the region—and slide his border a couple of hundred miles east to make sure he kept them. Maclean started by attacking the young Shah, installed by the allies, before turning on American policy. He called it “amateurish and ineffectual,” strong language for a diplomat when it was also his country’s policy. Alsop’s good manners kept him back until Maclean launched in on James Byrnes, who had recently been appointed Secretary of State, at which point his host could restrain himself no longer: “Jimmy Byrnes happens to be a very close friend of mine, and I find your comments grossly offensive.” But Maclean ploughed soddenly on until he was told to leave the house.

  The divide between the intoxicated, angry, arrogant Maclean and the suave diplomat was becoming so marked that there was near-disbelief when this sort of behaviour was spoken of. Such a strong display of animosity towards the Secretary of State by a prominent member of a foreign legation could not go officially unremarked. But when it was reported to John D. Hickerson, Deputy Director of the Office of European Affairs in the State Department, his reaction, recalled later, was: “I knew Maclean and I liked him. He was intelligent and dependable . . . If I had called Central Casting and said, ‘Send me someone to play the quintessential British diplomat,’ they would have sent me Maclean.” The complaint did not get back to the British Embassy, where the general attitude was expressed by Paul Gore-Booth, a close colleague who himself later came under suspicion for espionage. Maclean “was a tall, quiet attractive man with an apparently tranquil, settled family life and a professional ability that was quite outstanding. When hard pressed, you could leave it with perfect confidence to Donald.” The recently promoted First Secretary, still only thirty-two, continued to receive the plaudits that did indeed keep him on track for the highest echelons of the service.

  But the expenditure of effort against the turbulent geopolitical background was taking its toll on Maclean’s mental equilibrium. He was inwardly bitter towards Whitehall and the new Labour government for kowtowing to the Americans in their anti-Soviet policy, although more circumspect about going out on that particular limb, drunk or not. He later wrote that “British diplomacy, official and unofficial, bent itself to the task of persuading American opinion that a Communist take-over in Europe was imminent, of pushing the US government into the leadership of an anti-Soviet alliance, and of consolidating London’s position as Washington’s chief partner within it.” He said that “this was the aim” of Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, the following March, in which the former Prime Minister declared, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Stalin’s reaction to the speech came in an interview in Pravda in which he compared Churchill with Hitler in his belief that “the English-speaking nations are the only nations of full value and must rule over the remaining nations of the world.”

  Maclean was worn out by the mounting tension between his twin roles, and fatigued by the falsity and pretentiousness of his colleagues. He wrote to Melinda, just befor
e her return to Washington in early September, to report that “I get utterly sick of the game of personalities within our own circle; everything has been said and laughed at fifty times over” by those who indulge in “continuous tracing of people’s exact social history and behaviour.” His preference, he said, was for “the craggier characters here” (possibly meaning those who liked to drink as much as him, but certainly not any of the smooth diplomats) before admitting that he was “rather fed up with the logic of personalities altogether.”

  His efforts to keep up his front and maintain his reputation during the day while clearly longing to isolate himself at home made for an anxious time for Melinda, exacerbated by the stiff whiskies her husband would down as soon as he left the office. Melinda had been toughened over the past few years, not least by her personal trials, but she still felt intimidated by Donald’s superior intelligence and had the burden of being the only person who knew of his secret life and bitterness. She said she “could criticise America; there’s lots to criticise. But I do so with love and affection; Donald did so with hatred.” Keen to establish a stable base for herself and the children, she spent a lot of time with her sisters and her mother. Lady Maclean came to visit the family shortly after the end of the war, escaping the gloom and rationing in Britain that persisted well into the next decade (Melinda would never live in a Britain without rationing), and her visit coincided with one of Mrs Dunbar’s. According to fellow diplomat Robert Cecil, “There was not much cordiality to the encounter between Mrs Dunbar in her silk dress and high heels and Lady Maclean in tweed coat and skirt and sensible walking-shoes.” A further division between the formidable grandmothers was perhaps created by one favouring a dry Martini and the other a Scotch and soda, symbolising a core difference for the English grandmother, widow of a pillar of rectitude, who admitted she “does not find herself in sympathy with Mrs Dunbar, who has been twice divorced.” Donald felt that “part of [his mother-in-law’s] charm” was “her readiness with the drink,” but when she was “high, which she becomes very quickly, she becomes very tiresome indeed,” turning into “a remorseless and conscienceless talker.” George Middleton described the joint visit as “at times both painful and comic.”