Toynbee had made the case to Maclean for being psychoanalysed, and his mother-in-law, the New Yorker, was also keen on the discipline. Lady Maclean, indomitably British, was not countenancing any such treatment and sent her son to see the family GP, Dr Herbert Moore, in Wandsworth. Maclean told Moore that “he preferred treatment by a psychoanalyst of his own choice” rather than following Wilson’s advice. Moore felt such treatment was “unorthodox” and too long drawn out for it to be of any use to the Foreign Office in getting their man back on the rails and ended his letter bleakly: “Personally I think a solution is going to be difficult to find as the whole family (4 sons & 1 daughter) are definitely unbalanced & there is a marked alcoholic tendency which is surprising with such a family background.” It is ambiguous, and a breach of patient confidentiality for a family doctor to write to the Foreign Office in these terms, whether by “family background” Moore was focusing on Sir Donald’s temperance or his knighthood or Lady Maclean’s very conventional nature, or none of those things. The “alcoholic tendency” had been plainly stated for the first time, but was not discussed any further by the medical team.
The “unorthodox” route meant that Maclean put himself in the hands of Dr Erna Rosenbaum as he had planned to do from the start. The German-born Rosenbaum was an analyst of some standing, “of considerable charm and intelligence,” and was married to a British psychoanalyst. She was one of the founders of the Society of Analytical Psychology and, before she arrived in London as a refugee from the Nazis, had been interned during the war as an enemy alien. She was a trusted colleague and pupil of Jung, and the dream material from her own analysis became the basis for his Psychology and Religion. But even these qualifications and Rosenbaum’s Upper Wimpole Street address failed to convince Chiesman who did not believe “analysis is really desirable.” He thought pursuing the physical options (and rest) were the only real possibilities. Furthermore, Dr Rosenbaum was “not qualified in England,” a cause for concern not so much for security reasons as because Chiesman “feared she might be a quack.” Middleton and Carey Foster later said that, because of Dr Rosenbaum’s Eastern European background, they sent her details to MI5 but the message came back “Nothing Recorded Against.” MI5, with little more understanding than the Foreign Office, wrote in 1951 that their investigations had shown Rosenbaum to be “highly regarded by fellow psychotherapists,” although they understood that the profession “consists of sheep and goats and as we do not know to which class Dr Rosenbaum belongs this does not help very much.” Even before this background check could be carried out Middleton had agreed to Maclean’s chosen treatment, although he found it “unfortunate.”
In Maclean’s first week in England a small, anonymous and accurate piece found its way into the Daily Express: “Men Wreck Girl’s Flat,” where the wreckers of the Cairo apartment were identified only as “a member of a European embassy and a journalist friend.” This was the first the Foreign Office knew about the episode, and Maclean “admitted” to Middleton that the story was true. But since his apologies had been accepted and the police were not involved, it had merely served to “bring home the seriousness of his condition.” In the light of this discovery, he would agree to ask Dr Rosenbaum to allow him to have a physical check-up as well and the results were to be forwarded to the office, on the grounds that Drs Chiesman, Wilson and Moore had all mentioned alcoholism as a part of his “trouble.” The physical tests on his brain came back negative from the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases, and he dropped from the medical scrutiny of the Foreign Office other than in the context of when he might be able to report for work.
*
When Harriet Marling “roundly ticked off” Toynbee for leaking the incident to the papers, his response in his diary was that Maclean would have “profoundly and brilliantly” understood why he had blabbed. “It was no use concealing it. After all, we broke up that room in order that it shouldn’t be concealed.” This is either the braggadocio of a man in crisis and caught in the wrong, or an acknowledgement that at some point during their late-night conversations Maclean, violently ambivalent about his marriage and wanting to set up a new Communist Party just for himself, had said he had to leave Cairo to deal with his nightmares. Given that in his sober moments he would have been able to request leave without risking nearly everything, it is likely to be the former.
The newspaper report (which had also run in the leading Arabic newspapers) should have brought a degree of public shame and consternation to the Cairo Embassy. Sir Ronald Campbell wrote to his successor-elect, Sir Ralph Stevenson, ten days after Maclean had left:
You may have heard that Donald Maclean has had something of a breakdown. He may not have spoken to you himself, but he has, I am sure, spoken to Middleton and perhaps others. This is to say that when I expressed my opinion of his capacity etc., I had no idea of there being any possibility of this kind, but I still adhere to my high opinion of him, and feel sure that if he can get out of his present difficulty (and it would be worth while encouraging him in every way) you would find him a very useful member of your staff.
It might be seen as diplomatically unwise to consider sending someone back to a post which they had left so spectacularly and now more or less publicly.
Maclean’s Cairo calamities were in fact the subject of a great deal of gossip in his own circle, which did not overlap with his work much. It was garbled and exaggerated like all gossip but in essence true: Janetta Kee told Frances Partridge in June 1950, when Nicholas Henderson had just brought Maclean to tea at Ham Spray, the Partridges’ house and one of the last Bloomsbury bastions, “that [Maclean] had been a member of the Embassy at Cairo, but had just been sent home because he tried to murder his wife . . . and another friend got his leg broken going to her rescue. It happened because he got fearfully drunk with Philip Toynbee.” Partridge had been struck by Maclean’s good looks, friendliness and smiling charm so was very surprised to hear this. In a personal letter to Middleton, Chapman-Andrews wrote that the incident “was the subject of a certain amount of gossip and speculation here,” but blithely and learnedly concluded that it would pass, “for Cairo is a snakepit of gossip and Cairo society, like the Ephesians of old, is always seeking after some new thing.” However, Middleton acknowledged that it might be “best for the Service as well as best for Donald” if he did not “appear again in Cairo” despite Sir Ronald’s strange commendation. The events in Jacqueline Brannerman’s flat were already becoming the stuff of exaggerated story-telling: Sansom, in charge of security at the Embassy, was soon mendaciously recounting how he had been sent to the flat by Melinda, who had apparently not seen her husband for days, and found him “horribly drunk and completely naked. He stared at me for a moment and then mouthed an obscenity and aimed an unsteady fist between my eyes.”
For Toynbee to receive a mere “ticking off” from Harriet seems mild in the context of the anxiety and shame her sister was feeling. Practically and immediately, Melinda was left to run the house and family in Cairo without knowing whether Donald would be returning, or whether she should pack up and go to England to be with him. But in spite of the Embassy’s tact and generosity over the allowances, the uncertainty was understandably too much for Melinda. Mrs Dunbar arrived on 1 June and helped solve one pressing dilemma, whether the family should go at the beginning of July to the house they had rented in Alexandria, where everyone not on leave elsewhere decamped in summer, in the hope that Donald would be back by then to join them. But as his letters gave no indication of how long his treatment was likely to last, they decided not to run the risk, cancelled the house, went to the US Embassy to secure visas, put their car on a boat and sailed for Spain on the 18th. Mrs Dunbar settled all the outstanding bills. She also noted that in their master’s absence, the “usually excellent” servants in the Sharia Ibn Zanki house were “slack, dirty and slightly insolent,” as if they knew that Donald was “never coming back.” It was now the end of Melinda’s life as a diplomatic wife abroad,
the end of two years in which she had grown in confidence and self-possession to become a polished hostess and able to cope with the increasing and embarrassing nightmare that her husband had become.
*
The double-bind of Maclean’s situation, which he had been in for all his professional life, was that if he could admit to every betrayal of a moral code that he had had hammered into him in his childhood, then Dr Rosenbaum could set him on the path to a cure for his alcoholism and the pain it was covering up, as well as enable him to cease the devastating evasions to all those who had placed their trust in him. But if he could do that he would be saving Jim Skardon a lot of time in due course and would be spending the next decade behind bars, his reputation in tatters. As Dr Rosenbaum’s teacher Carl Jung had written: “Clinical diagnoses are important, since they give the doctor a certain orientation; but they do not help the patient. The crucial thing is the story. For it alone shows the human background and the human suffering, and only at that point can the doctor’s therapy begin to operate.” Jung’s emphasis on balance and harmony, integrating opposites, would be an impossible treatment for one who needed to keep his opposites separate, and not allow the honesty in telling the story which would begin the healing he so badly needed.
Whatever he was getting from his sessions with Dr Rosenbaum (and he cryptically said to Lees Mayall that he was “fighting her hard”), Maclean did not seem to recover much over the course of that summer, in spite of his reassurance to Middleton on 14 June that he was much better and would return to work in August: that meeting itself was prompted by Chiesman telling Middleton that Maclean had failed to keep his last two appointments. When he did turn up the following week, Chiesman reported that “he bears no evidence of suffering from any physical disease. His blood pressure is rather low which confirms the impression that he is suffering from nervous exhaustion.” On hearing the news that a return to work was planned, the Treasury doctor said that “Maclean is playing fast and loose with us . . . I would not advise you to allow [him] to return to duty on the opinion of a lay analyst.” By mid-August, he was certain that Maclean was “by no means normal.” Maclean’s brother Alan was alarmed to see “his most unbalanced condition” and noted that “he seemed to have taken a dislike to people generally.” But in July Alan left to assume his appointment working for Sir Gladwyn Jebb as part of the British mission to the United Nations. It was the last time for thirty years that he would see the elder brother who had played soldiers with him when they were boys as they convalesced from flu. Maclean’s anticipated sick leave of three months was extended, although without any sign that the alcoholism was being acknowledged and addressed.
From early June onwards, there had been only intermittent contact with Melinda, with little mention of his health. He picked up his old London behaviour quickly and seemed to give her less thought, and almost none to the Foreign Office. Cyril Connolly saw that Maclean would often be unable to go through with his psychoanalytic sessions, hovering on the Rosenbaum doorstep for a while, hopping from foot to foot, before slipping away around the corner. The damage he was continuing to inflict in his personal life and the consequent pain which that caused him, even at a distance from his family, led to heavy drinking. He took up many of the old haunts and friends of his pre-war bachelor days in London. The Gargoyle Club was then in its last years, but still maintained its louche “theatre of social, sexual and intellectual challenge,” its mix of writers, artists, intellectuals and scions of Bloomsbury with the more classless post-war social scene, and it admitted both sexes. It was very different from the Pall Mall clubs where Foreign Office mandarins spent their lunchtimes and evenings, the Reform, the Travellers and Brooks’s. Among the Gargoyle’s members were Lawrence Durrell, A. J. Ayer, Philip Toynbee, Victor Rothschild, Rosamond Lehmann, Frederick Ashton, Arthur Koestler and, inevitably, Guy Burgess. Maclean joined in July, presumably something that Dr Chiesman did not know about or Middleton would have had another stern note to leave on the file. He was proposed for membership by his best man Mark Culme-Seymour.
Although the Gargoyle was to become one of the more notable places where Maclean could let his inhibitions fall away later in his year in London, in the summer of his return his guard was up when in the company of the close friends of his youth. His erstwhile flame Laura Grimond, daughter of his father’s (and his) old ally Lady Violet Bonham Carter, had lunch with him but got nowhere: “There was nothing wrong with his memory, nor with his grasp of the international situation. He made light of his own troubles too, even suggesting that he might soon be going back to rejoin the Embassy staff in Cairo.” With other friends, less associated with the upright side of his upbringing (and at less formal times of day), his alcoholic demons were irrepressible. He went to stay at Stokke Manor in Wiltshire with Lady Mary Campbell, whom he had also known before the war and who was now married to Robin Campbell, his fellow swotter for the Foreign Office exams in 1935. She could see what a desperate, sodden state he was in when she picked him up from Hungerford station and took him to a friend’s garden to relax, piling up cushions under a beech tree. Maclean, in a fit of delirium tremens, kept jumping up and “fighting the overhanging branches, shouting, ‘They’re after me!’ ‘Who are?’ ‘The Russians!’ ” The paranoia, even terror, about what retribution he might face, as Maly and others had encountered on their arrival in the USSR, now that he was no longer useful in passing on secrets, could not be suppressed; or perhaps it was on some level a wish to be discovered, to be released from his hell. After a while, Lady Mary thought that “the thistle-bashing on the farm was doing him a tremendous amount of good,” even if she had never seen a “worse case of the DTs.”
The Campbells had known Maclean long enough not to be surprised by his left leanings, of course, and Lady Mary certainly thought that this psychotic episode was merely “a symptom of his clinical condition” and did not make any connection with the fears of “the Russians” expressed during it. But when in more sober and contemplative mood Maclean talked to his old friends about “Communism in the same way that a potential Catholic aware that he lacked the gift of faith might discuss religion,” and spoke of his longing “for a leap of faith that would convince him that Communism was right.” The man raised by a strictly religious father who had kept a tight hold on his own faith after his dark night of the soul was now openly questioning his beliefs in the same way, if more lucidly now, as he had in his drunken rantings to Toynbee in Cairo. There was no contact with any handler during his sick leave, so once again he was not rooted by “praise and reassurance,” to use Deutsch’s now long-ago words, from Moscow. He no longer had the daily support of Melinda or the approbation of his Embassy colleagues.
He had gone from being a spectacle of dissolution in Cairo to a solitary and aimless convalescent in London. The doubts about his usefulness, the very basis of his self-esteem, were overwhelming him again.
*
World events took a decisive turn on 25 June when the North Korean People’s Army, armed with Russian weapons and T-34 tanks, invaded its southern neighbour, long seen by America as a crucial bulwark against the spread of Communism in Asia. The Soviet delegate to the UN Security Council walked out and a resolution was passed by the other members, with the exception of India and Egypt, which abstained, demanding that Kim Il Sung’s forces should withdraw. The Korean War, the first armed conflict against Communism, the first major armed test of the United Nations, had begun. Britain, all but bankrupted by the war and dependent on American loans to keep afloat, despatched its Far East fleet to support the United States, and extended National Service to keep troop numbers up. When Maclean later wrote his book about British foreign policy, by then undivided in his ideological loyalties, he was scathing about the American interventions in Asia. With Fuchs’s confession and Hiss’s conviction earlier in 1950, and McCarthyism rampant in Washington, he had good reason to question his faith and fear for his liberty.
In July a brilliant physicist, Bruno Pontecorvo,
Italian-born but now a British national and senior principal scientific officer at Harwell since the start of 1949 (before that he had been in Canada, working alongside Nunn May), went on holiday in Finland with his Swedish-born wife and their three children. He was due to return to attend a conference in September but had continued on to the USSR. The previous March the Security Service had received information from Sweden indicating that both he and his wife were Communists. On being questioned, Pontecorvo had denied the report but said that some of his family back in Italy were “Communist sympathisers.” This was not followed up. If it had been to any degree, it would quickly have become known that Bruno’s brother Gilberto Pontecorvo was playing “a conspicuous part in the party’s service as a politician and a journalist”; that his brother-in-law was “an open Communist who worked . . . on the Party’s staff”; and that his cousin Emilio Sereni was “one of the best-known Communists in Italy,” a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. When Pontecorvo had been screened for naturalisation, Sereni held two ministerial posts and was in the public eye. The physicist himself had left Italy in 1936 to escape the Fascist regime. His MI5 vetting file had read “No Trace Against.”
At the very point Pontecorvo’s defection was uncovered, Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director General of MI5 since 1946, was in Washington trying to re-establish relations and rebuild confidence with Hoover and the FBI regarding nuclear security in Britain following the Fuchs case; keeping the “Cousins” in the dark had already led to an “explosion.” Sillitoe was briefed for his meetings by Kim Philby.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 29
