A Spy Named Orphan

by Roland Philipps

  In London, Liddell of MI5 pointed out quite casually that the telegrams were “so obscure in the missing groups that it is very hard to get at the facts,” which was true, but does not take into account the reality that the telegrams were important and had reached Moscow. He too refused to countenance the possibility that any leak could come from someone high up in the Embassy. In the memorandum to the Foreign Secretary which first disclosed the leak to the British government at the start of February 1949, Sir Orme Sergent seemed anxious only about the current relations between the two security services, not about the possible source or about what else might be going on within the British services at a time when there was plentiful evidence of infiltration of the US secret world: “Provided we tell the Americans that this case has shocked us and has provided us with an excuse for overhauling our security arrangements, it seems unlikely that they will use it as an excuse for withholding top secret information from us.” In the absence of real emotion in the mandarin class, saying they were “shocked” was the next best thing because they could forget the past and assumed that as it was the past the Americans would forget it too. They meant that there was no urgent need to look further despite the cumulative evidence of Soviet penetration of the British Embassy, the State Department and the Manhattan Project, and the revelation of the early Soviet bomb.

  In May, some months after he had been told of the severity of the security lapse, and paying no attention at all to the wider implications of Moscow being able to read transmissions from Washington, Liddell was wondering rather aimlessly in his diary: “It is still not clear exactly how the leakage from the British Embassy occurred, but there is at least a possibility that the documents were obtained through Alexander Halpern’s secretary.” Halpern’s secretary Trudi Rient was Czech-born and had been married to an Indian; they had both lived in Moscow before the war, when her husband had disappeared, presumed liquidated in the purges. She had worked in the US Embassy in Moscow before coming to Washington, where Cedric Belfrage, known to have Communist sympathies and later acknowledged to be a spy, had left his wife to live with her for a time. The small matter of the disappearance of her husband at Soviet hands aside, Rient was a good candidate to be the leaker, until it was established that she could not have possibly have seen most of the telegrams.

  The confidence with which Liddell made his pronouncement is surprising when one considers that her boss, Alexander Halpern, head of the Minorities Section at the Embassy, had been born in Russia and was now a member of the London Bar who “always retained business relationships with the Soviet Union”; he was known to have been a target for Soviet recruitment but “there was no positive evidence in 1944 that he had ever been recruited.” He had since worked for SIS which put him even further from scrutiny, as Philby found, and should have meant he was a good picker of secretaries. Halpern was on a list of eight names compiled in July 1949 of those “known to have communist views at the time,” but there was no investigation of him as thorough or as early as that of his erstwhile secretary. The others on the list did not have access to the relevant material. Maclean, of course, did not come into the category of having had “communist views” in spite of his out­spokenness a mere fifteen years earlier.

  When Dick White, head of MI5’s B Division for counter-espionage, visited George Carey Foster, head of security in the Foreign Office, to tell him of the spy, Carey Foster at once said, “It’s inconceivable that any senior member could be a traitor.” As with Krivitsky’s information a decade earlier, the authorities could countenance investigating secretaries and cipher clerks, but could not imagine that anyone with the same privileged upbringing as they had had could hold any values other than their own. Anyone who did not share those values would have been weeded out during the rigorous selection process and interview. Never mind that, as Kim Philby could plainly see, “there could be no real doubt that we were dealing with a man of stature” rather than “the petty agent emptying waste-paper baskets” judging by the importance of the wartime events described in the fragments. It seems probable that, even if the story about Helouan had got back to Whitehall through official channels rather than just through the sight of Mayall limping around his new job, the same blind eye of mandarin and class prejudice would have been turned on it in order not to upset the status quo.

  But just as the rudderless, fragmented Maclean did not seem ready to accept and deal with the consequences of his drinking, nor did the Embassy or Foreign Office. His first spell in Cairo had closed with the terrible image of the brawl on the river bank at the same time that the FBI was handing over evidence of his wartime spying to their British allies. Yet even as Gardner and Lamphere did their work in Arlington Hall and Maclean’s inner furies gnawed at him, luck, toughness, tradition and loyalty rallied around him and Melinda.

  13

  Collapse

  Away from the increasing stresses and evasions of Cairo, Donald Maclean was once again the relaxed family man on holiday in Italy, playing tennis, drinking in moderation and enjoying the company of his wife and sons. The family returned to Egypt in July 1949, the Helouan trip and his drunken attack on Melinda seemingly forgiven, although with Melinda understandably harbouring grave concerns about the effect that the stress in his life was having on his drinking. The family spent most of the rest of the Egyptian summer in Alexandria, where the Embassy decamped to escape the unbearable heat and dust of Cairo. It was soon after they had returned to the capital in September that both the global and the personal combined into an agonising and squalid spiral downwards to the lowest point of his life, a vortex of shame and fear.

  Maclean was already feeling isolated as a result of Moscow Centre’s neglect compared to the heady espionage days of Washington, while Melinda’s increasing self-confidence and enjoyment of her own life was proving very hard for him in a marriage where he had been used to relying on his intelligence, reputation and charm to be the dominant figure in their relationship. Moreover, she was receiving “pressing attention” from a wealthy princeling of King Farouk’s house, Prince Daoud, which led to an increasingly independent and high-flying social life much encouraged by her sister Harriet as an outlet from the mounting difficulty of being married to Donald.

  The realisation in early September that the Russians had carried out their first nuclear test five days earlier, years ahead of expectation, caused consternation in the West, following closely as it did the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists by Mao Tse-tung’s Communists in China. War crept a little closer. Maclean’s time on the AEC in the early nuclear days must have been in his mind as he worked on the evacuation plans, drafting a top-secret telegram to the Foreign Office on 27 August headed “Evacuation in case of war.” But it was not until later in the autumn that he could have had an inkling of the circlings of Venona and the potential exposure of his secret life.

  *

  In early October, Peter Dwyer introduced his successor as MI6 representative in Washington to Robert Lamphere. The FBI man had previously been told by Dwyer that he would be meeting an extremely bright and senior operative, who would probably be head of the service one day. In the context of what Venona had just uncovered, spies in Los Alamos and now in the British Embassy, it was vital to have such a good mind on the case. Lamphere was accordingly surprised to be shaking hands with a “seedy” figure with “loose-fitting and shabby clothes.” It was his first introduction to Kim Philby. Philby, who was renowned for his charisma, managed to make their meetings so painfully boring that it was a relief when he suggested they became monthly and with another FBI colleague present, rather than weekly and one to one, as they had been with Dwyer. Meredith Gardner too was not that impressed, and was similarly grateful to find that he did not have to see the offhand and unlikeable new MI6 man. Dwyer had been very helpful in Gardner’s decryption work, often filling the gaps in the telegrams, but the same could not be said of his successor. When Philby was in Arlington Hall, Gardner noticed that as he and Dwyer were discussing
their progress, “Philby was looking on with rapt attention but he never said a word, never a word. And that was the last I saw of him. Philby was supposed to continue these visits, but helping me was the last thing he wanted to do.” Although shortly before Philby’s arrival the MI5 investigation was despairingly aware that “at least 150 people had access to [the telegrams]” and “this number is likely to be increased as enquiries proceed,” it certainly would not do to help winnow the list too vigorously.

  Philby had leapt at the proposed move from Istanbul to Washington as he was “beginning to suspect” that the American intelligence organisations were “already of greater importance” than the British ones. He didn’t even bother checking to see if his Soviet “colleagues” approved. He was briefed in London by the “formidable” Maurice Oldfield and given “a communication of the gravest importance.” The communication was that the Anglo-American investigation of Soviet activity in the US had yielded the “strong suggestion” that there was leakage from the Washington Embassy and from Los Alamos during the war. “A swift check in the relevant Foreign Office list left me in little doubt of the identity of the source from the British Embassy.” The news from Arlington Hall came in some respects as “a relief” to Philby when he saw that he was not implicated, but it also caused him some anxiety as it clarified what his Soviet contact in his last posting had been asking him for some time—what were the British doing about a case involving the British Embassy in Washington which they had heard about from William Weisband? It was another instance of Philby’s recurring good fortune that six telegrams with material from “Stanley,” as he was then code-named, sent in 1945 were not decrypted until some years later. Back in London his “Russian friend” confirmed that he had indeed “stumbled into the heart of a problem” with regard to his new job. It was one he and Moscow Centre had to solve ahead of his own country if the Cambridge Five were to remain at liberty. It would take all his considerable guile. And he would rely on Homer keeping himself together until the time was right.

  *

  In mid-September Lamphere was shown a newly deciphered message from 1944 which had clearly come from one of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos: “Rest arrived in the Country [America] in September as a member of the Island [Britain] mission on Enormoz . . . The whole operation amounts to the working out of the process for the separation of isotopes of Enormoz.” A message from the following November indicated that “Rest” had transferred to “Camp No. 2,” Los Alamos, to work on “Balloon,” the atom bomb. Fuchs was easily identified but, as had been the case with Nunn May, the evidence that caught him could never be brought to court as it was too highly classified. Nor could it be revealed to those being investigated for fear of Moscow Centre keeping abreast of the decryption efforts and triggering a spate of damaging defections. They were, of course, up to speed anyway through Philby. Although Fuchs had been back in Britain since 1946 and was working at the Atomic Research Establishment at Harwell and supplying material to the Soviets, he would either have to confess or be caught red-handed for a conviction to be achieved.

  William (always known as “Jim”) Skardon was the man. A former Metropolitan Police officer, most often wreathed in pipe smoke like Sherlock Holmes, Skardon was now MI5’s skilled interrogator. He got his results by being a “nice, unpretentious and even cosy man.” Lamphere, when he came to meet Skardon, took to the ex-copper immediately, mostly because he was not, as were all the Brits he had met so far, “from the upper crust of British society, but rather was a friendly, low-key fellow . . . complete with dishevelled appearance and an intellect that was sometimes hidden until the moment came to use it to point to incongruities in a subject’s story.” Skardon (who despite his crucial role in the espionage investigations was never given any sort of promotion to senior officer before his retirement in 1961) came up with a brilliant plan. Fuchs’s father was about to accept a post at the University of Leipzig in East Germany; Skardon started to talk to Fuchs about the possible blackmail he would lay himself open to. As he began to gain Fuchs’s confidence, he let slip that the authorities knew about possible espionage activities in the United States during the war. After a period of denial, in January 1950 Fuchs laid down his burden with relief and confessed to Skardon that he had given the Russians “all the information in his possession about British and American research in connection with the atomic bomb.” Fuchs was so soothed by Skardon’s manner and politeness that he thought he might be allowed to continue at Harwell, or work in academia (and indeed he was allowed to remain in place for a while in the hope of catching more spies around him), but in March he was sentenced to a fourteen-year sentence after pleading guilty to violation of the Official Secrets Act, the only charge that could be brought without revealing his actual security breaches and the intelligence oper­ations behind the arrest. On his release after nine years Fuchs finished his working life as a highly respected scientist and academician in East Germany. Afterwards Skardon used to refer to Fuchs as “Dear Old Klaus.”

  *

  In his confession Fuchs summarised the way he had managed to combine his professional and conscience-driven lives: “I used my Marxist philosophy to establish in my mind two separate compartments: one in which I allowed myself to make friendships, to help people and to be in all personal ways the kind of man I wanted to be, and the kind of man . . . I had been before with my friends in or near the Communist Party . . . I knew the other compartment would step in if I approached the danger point” of “disclosing myself.” After the war, after the Russians had tested the bomb Fuchs had helped them to build, he came to realise that he “would also have to stand up and say to them that there are things which they are doing wrongly” and felt unable to hand over all he knew. Since the Nazi–Soviet Pact, spies of sensitivity and conscience had been aware of living with what Fuchs called “controlled schizophrenia” but with the Russians as wartime allies control could be maintained. For Maclean, the non-scientist with his true feelings buried deep, this “schizophrenia” was less easy to control; his “compartments” were overflowing into each other and were plainly visible when his defences were down, such as when he was drinking. As the hunt for traitors was intensifying, so, for Maclean, was the tension of serving one system and yearning for and abetting another.

  Fuchs’s conviction would not have given succour to anyone living a double life as attacks on Soviet Communism were stepped up in the West at the beginning of the new decade. President Truman announced that now the Russians had the atom bomb the Americans would raise the stakes by building a hydrogen bomb. The Communist agent Judith Coplon, snared by Venona, was tried for the second time in the US and found guilty of passing government documents to Moscow; Alger Hiss’s second trial ended in his conviction for perjury (as we have seen) after he had denied that he had ever been involved in espionage. Most publicly of all, Senator Joseph McCarthy made his explosive statement in West Wheeling, Virginia, on 9 February 1950, that he had in his possession a list of 205 Communists in the US State Department. The McCarthy era, with its attendant bigotry and witch-hunts, had begun.

  Maclean must have wondered if the exposure of Nunn May and then Fuchs would lead to an investigation of those who might have been at the 1947 declassification conference, or whether the spooks would go further and deeper, to those who had been on the left at Cambridge in the mid-1930s and now had access to secrets. After the Atomic Energy Commission had reacted to the uncovering of Fuchs in stark terms, by saying he “alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States but in the history of nations,” there might have been questions raised about other “aliens” who had had passes to the AEC in the new atmosphere of mistrust. The rhetorical stakes were being upped alongside the political.

  *

  The FBI investigation into the wartime British Embassy leaks, in a move which Philby did nothing to discourage, began looking at the technical an
d support staff rather than the senior diplomats, for the reason that “since almost every American has relatives abroad . . . the loyalties of those people are divided between America and their historic homeland.” Accordingly they did not bother scrutinising Anglo-Saxons, senior or not, or even those with German antecedents (as wartime enemies of the Soviet Union) but concentrated on those with more dubious origins, even generations back. They would question the friends and neighbours of anyone with Eastern European or now Soviet bloc origins, and Mickey Ladd of the FBI would answer Philby’s twice- or thrice-weekly calls to ask “if they had found anyone with a Russian uncle or a Ukrainian aunt” with the succinct “A big zero.” Although it was barking up the wrong trees, the FBI was at last showing energy and a sense of direction lacking in the British investigation.

  *

  The cracks in Maclean’s bearing were now beginning to show in the office as drink took an even stronger hold. With his two lives pulling more and more in opposing directions, his levels of fear and discomfort ramped up his alcohol intake. There were more absences for “bad colds” in the sweltering climate than there had been before, although when at work he remained, as the Press Secretary, James Murray, commented, “tirelessly conscientious. He demanded first class work, you could never let a shoddy telegram go by him.” But Murray added, “Why he would go off and drink too much, I never knew.” Another perspicacious colleague noted with admiration his ability to stand up to the immense workload “while having the obvious appearance of one who was completely loaded.” In the gossipy aftermath of the Helouan debacle, the unwisdom of failing to control his daytime drinking or of still being drunk from the night before showed that he was beyond being able to prevent it. At one dinner-party given by the Assistant Military Attaché, Maclean “steadily insulted a Mr Duncan of the British Com­­munity . . . for no good reason,” refused to leave the table and shouted for more brandy. When his host protested Maclean “knocked him to the ground.” The Military Attaché took the desperate Melinda home but did not report the incident “for reasons I would prefer not to put in writing”—reticence possibly inspired by Ambassador Campbell’s dislike of “tittle-tattle,” or by gallantry in the face of Melinda’s pleas.