Although it was not stated as a part of their discussion, the more diplomatically sensitive minds would also have been aware of “the strong wave of anti-British feeling,” as the US Ambassador to Britain characterised the atmosphere in Washington to Foreign Secretary Morrison after Britain’s heel-dragging in its support for the Korean War. The Fuchs revelation was too serious and too recent for the British to want to bring up further top-level spies for a while. The meeting attendees thought they had “three to four weeks” in which to dissemble to the FBI, although accepting that it was risky and that there were many questions “which could be answered only by a lie.” They decided their best hope was to spend the next two weeks seeking evidence that could be used against Maclean in the absence of a confession, given that Venona remained too secret. They would inform Arlington Hall on 28 May, and finally the FBI on 7 June that they were going to interrogate their man on the following day. This was a handy breathing space for Philby, but no wonder he was keen to set a brisker pace to get Maclean out of the country. He ended his letter to Burgess pointing out that Washington was “very hot” that summer.†
The painstaking efforts to back up what the authorities already knew continued: on the 18th Barty Bouverie, “late of SOE” and now of the London South American Bank, told Guy Liddell that Melinda had lived in New York and that he thought she had been pregnant in the summer of 1944. Bouverie reversed the normal denigration of diplomatic wives in general and Melinda in particular by saying that it would be better to ask Esther Wright for her recollections of their Washington lodger rather than her husband Michael as she “was much brighter than he was.” Wright had, of course, already confirmed the Macleans’ living arrangements in 1944. Given the lack of impetus with the Krivitsky investigation, Liddell had been verging on the disingenuous when he said to Bouverie that they had been looking for the spy “since the beginning of the war.”
*
After his drunken outing on the 15th, Maclean found it in himself to act normally for the rest of that week, having a drink in a pub before boarding his train, making arrangements with decorators to do some work at Beaconshaw starting on his birthday, the 25th, lunching with the now heavily pregnant Melinda at Scott’s fish restaurant in Mayfair. Scott’s was far beyond Schmidt’s in price, service and quality: maybe this visit was in recognition that this might be their last restaurant meal together. Culme-Seymour and BBC producer Laurence Gilliam were the following day’s companions. He had a drink with Nicko Henderson on the 16th and talked about his plans for leave around the time of the baby’s birth; his parting comment was that Nicko “must come down for a night” after the birth, as he could be helpful with the gardening. The routine of renewing his season ticket, leaving his trousers at the dry-cleaners on his last Saturday at work and lunching with his best man and not going on drinking binges and letting on about his turmoil was impressive. His future was now out of his hands and he could live calmly in the moment. Throughout that last week he was at home by 8:15, playing the attentive father to his boys.
*
Despite what she had to say in a few days’ time when Jim Skardon called on her, and despite her advanced pregnancy, it is now clear that Melinda knew what her husband needed to do and had given it her blessing, maybe even stating that she would stand by him come what may, as she had since he first told her he was an agent in Paris before the war. She must have realised that Donald could not withstand much interrogation without confessing everything, that (in Modin’s words) “he would fold very rapidly,” and the events of the evening of the 15th had reinforced that likelihood. Although she would be left pitied, even censured, and alone in a country in which she had spent barely a tenth of her life, it might be better that Donald should be free to live a new life in Moscow than spend the next decade behind bars. Maclean’s outward calm in the face of what he was now being asked to do was greatly bolstered by Melinda’s support. Just as she had given him the comparative strength to go back to work the previous autumn, now she helped him move towards something far bigger.
In the course of that week the Security Service had got more jittery about what they could do to nail their man. They produced a paper called “Assessment of the Evidence against Donald Duart Maclean,” which broadly concluded that there was not enough of it. Ideally, they would watch him for two to three months to obtain “the necessary background for interrogation,” or hope that he would lead them to associates they could pin something upon, but even if he was still spying that would not guarantee them what they needed. Perhaps he could be removed from the Foreign Office under the “existing machinery of a Civil Service Purge” (any echo of Stalin’s purges which had removed Maly, Krivitsky and many others from the espionage game would have been completely unintentional). But on reflection it might be best to stick to the timeline agreed at the beginning of the week, as this did at least enable the service to appear to have collaborated fully with the FBI, “lessening the recriminations” and reducing “to a reasonable minimum the possibility that the FBI might independently identify Maclean.” That was their main fear. Paterson was now meeting Lamphere in Washington almost daily, and the FBI agent was growing “rather frustrated” at the lack of “action” which he thought would still be against other candidates, including Halpern. Even the name of Gore-Booth had been withheld from him as a likely “Agent G.”
*
The wires between Moscow and London had been humming since the RAC lunch, the MGB showing much more decisiveness than their British counterparts. Moscow Centre were pragmatic and ruthless in response to the fear that Maclean might crack up and tell all, or that the irrepressible Burgess would spoil things. They knew they “had not one but two burnt-out agents on our hands” and they saw that Burgess would have to go with Maclean. By now Burgess was also under watch (code-named “Berkeley”) as he had cropped up on the telephone intercepts before the men’s lunch the previous week. If he were to go too, it might solve two problems for Moscow, even if it need not be pointed out that he was on a one-way ticket. Above all, it might protect Philby, with his unquantifiable value in Washington and MI6.
Maclean and Burgess next met a week after their lunch, on Tuesday 22 May, for an evening drink at the Grosvenor Hotel, near Victoria. Burgess, true to form, arrived forty minutes late. Maclean left a quarter of an hour later for his train. A quarter of an hour was all it needed for Burgess to pass on his simple message: Maclean had to go and go soon, and Burgess would accompany him some of the way.
The next problem was how to get the two out, given that it was a safe bet that the airports and ports would be watched. Given that there was not time for false papers of sufficient quality, Moscow Centre toyed with “that classic spy-novel device, a submarine appearing at a discreet rendezvous somewhere along the coast,” but time was too short, and starting the Third World War off Beachy Head a risky possibility. Blunt, the coolest head on the case outside Washington, warned Modin that Burgess too was now on the point of cracking up, and, walking through Regent’s Park, suggested a solution. There were cruise ships that left the Channel ports on a Friday night, put in for brief stops for meals and shopping in France and the Channel Islands before returning on Sunday evening. As they were deemed not really ever to leave Britain, passport checks were “virtually non-existent,” the French authorities showing “unique restraint.” Given that the passengers were largely made up of adulterous “businessmen and civil servants” with their mistresses, not at all a shocking carry-on to a Frenchman, discretion was fairly well guaranteed. And on Fridays the watchers would start taking their own well-earned weekend rest. Modin visited an Oxford Street travel agent and saw that the Falaise, “the cliff” in translation, would be sailing that Friday. In three days.
*
The following day, Wednesday the 23rd, the pair met again, this time for lunch at the Queen’s Head pub in Sloane Square. For two confirmed lunchers, this was to be another very brief encounter, and a charged giving of orders. They arrived separately at 1:
30, and Burgess left again at 2:05. He rejoined Maclean for a few more minutes before they parted again. Maclean then went into Peter Jones department store, ostensibly to ask about chandeliers for Beaconshaw, but possibly only hoping to shake off the irritating “dicks.” A surveillance report, perhaps exceeding the watchers’ brief to stick to what they saw rather than interpreting, characterised the difference between the two men:
Guy Burgess seems to have something on his mind and is, in fact, obviously deeply worried. He will order a large gin . . . and will then pace the bar for a few seconds, pour the neat spirit down his throat and walk out, or order another and repeat the performance.
In the open he frequently shows indecision with, apparently, his mind in turmoil.
With Curzon there is an air almost of conspiracy between the two. It is quite impossible even in a bar to hear a word of what they are saying. It would seem likely that Burgess has unburdened himself to Curzon as the latter does not display any normal emotion when they are together.
Maclean was by now the calmer, the man who had asked to go to Russia over a year earlier, accepting and even looking forward to his new, unified life. Burgess was more in shock at their orders.
*
Thursday 24 May was a warm and sunny day, the first in an otherwise chilly month. Maclean arrived at Victoria and worked as normal in the morning. Meanwhile, in Sir William Strang’s grand office in another part of the building a meeting took place between him (the Permanent Under-Secretary of State), Deputy Under-Secretary Sir Roger Makins, Assistant Under-Secretary Patrick Reilly, the head of security George Carey Foster, MI5 Director General Sir Percy Sillitoe and Sillitoe’s deputy and successor Dick White. They were still very cautious about condemning such a trusted colleague. Sillitoe acknowledged that MI5 had gathered no further evidence against Maclean beyond the fact that secret information had been passed to the Russians in 1944 and 1945 and that the “agent concerned appeared to have a wife resident in New York in 1944.” He was clear that “the danger of attaching too much importance to coincidences was very real,” although Maclean was “the most likely suspect” and on those grounds an interview could take place.
Makins pointed out that from the political point of view “this was the worst possible moment for anything to occur which would aggravate anti-British feeling in America” and if this leaked it “would cause a sensation in the USA.” Sillitoe reminded the meeting that they would be going against intelligence-sharing protocols as well as perpetrating “a breach of faith” if this was kept back, and claimed that he had sufficient influence with Hoover to get him to keep it quiet.
A new timetable of events was drawn up which included telling Arlington Hall and the FBI of the British work on the fragment which had led to their suspicion in the first week of June; a telegram swiftly followed by a visit from Sillitoe to Hoover on 12/13 June, and interrogation started between 18 and 25 June, a month hence. The last was an acknowledgement that Melinda was expected to have her baby on or about the 17th and this would enable them to search the house if necessary in her absence in the nursing home. Sir Roger Makins, who had shared the high-level atomic work with Maclean, confirmed that some papers had been kept from Maclean but by no means all of interest to him as “nothing further could be done about this without arousing suspicion.” Robert Cecil, the deputy chief of the American Department, later said that boxes containing the more classified documents “requiring special keys” were being withheld. (In the end, Maclean knew perfectly well from all sides that he was being watched.) Finally, it was agreed that Prime Minister Attlee and Foreign Secretary Morrison should be informed of the case the following morning, Friday the 25th, and the ball could start rolling on this extended programme.
As this meeting which was meant to decide his future was coming to its close, Maclean made the five-minute walk to the Reform Club for his lunch date with Anthony Blake. Tony Blake had been the third person on the holiday at Saint Jacut in 1934, alongside Cumming-Bruce, by now a senior lawyer. Blake was the only one of the three not to have had a holiday fling with an older French woman. He had seen little of Maclean recently as his old Cambridge friend had been in America and Egypt, but they had made this date when Blake heard that Maclean was back in the country. At lunch, Maclean talked of his “personal plans in the immediate future in such a way as to give no suggestion that he was thinking of running away.” He was planning on going to France for his summer holiday and invited Blake to visit them in Tatsfield some time. Once again, Maclean’s calmness, maybe numbness now that a decision had been made and it was out of his hands after the chaotic stress of recent times, is remarkable. Burgess was also in the Reform Club that day and the pair were confident enough to be seen to leave together at 3:00 at which point Burgess passed on the next day’s schedule. After putting in an afternoon in his office, Maclean had a swift drink in the Windsor Castle pub by Victoria Station before catching the 6:48 home for his last night in England.
*
Friday the 25th was Donald Maclean’s thirty-eighth birthday and it had a low-key start. The boys had both come down with measles, Melinda was exhausted and full of dread. Donald himself was cast down but feeling the adrenalin surge of the day ahead. He arrived at work at 10:00 and straight away rang his mother to see if she would lunch with him that day: she was having lunch with a friend and declined. If she had been able to see her favourite son on that day, she was sure he would have “made her privy to his troubles” and an appeal from her would have prevented him from “going off.” She was never to see him again.
Maclean’s next call was to his oldest and closest friends, Mary and Robin Campbell, who had taken him in the previous summer and whose friendship went back to his time in London just after Cambridge, studying at Scoones and standing on the edge of debutante dances. Mary said she would come and pick him up at lunchtime and they would celebrate the occasion. The only appointment in his diary was a reception in Belgrave Square that evening for the Argentinian National Day, but he was never going to make that as he had his birthday supper that evening. He also had to prepare to meet his new brother-in-law Bob Oetking, who worked for the State Department, and see his sister Nancy, who were en route from Beirut to London via Marseilles and Dover. Earlier in the week he had arranged to take the Saturday morning off so that he could be in Dover to collect them.
Just after his arrival in the office, his next-door neighbour, the Assistant Labour Adviser Frederick Mason, came in with a telegram from the Dominican Republic with the news that a trade unionist in that country had disappeared, presumed kidnapped. Maclean “spared it a languid glance.” Even on a normal day, this would not be something to excite the most passionate diplomatist. At midday he greeted Mary Campbell in the courtyard with the brim of his black hat turned up, a sure sign that he was in good spirits according to the code they had drawn up the previous year: if the brim was down, her friend “was feeling shaky and had to be treated with kid gloves.” His habitual bow-tie was unusually jaunty as well. Over their half-bottle of champagne and dozen oysters at Wheeler’s oyster bar in Soho, Donald was “completely himself.” They discussed the imminent baby, to be named Melinda if it was a girl. Donald was planning to stay with the Campbells at Stokke Manor while his wife Melinda was in hospital.
As they left Wheeler’s to make their way to Schmidt’s where Robin was joining them for their grumpily served lunch, they bumped into Cyril Connolly, who had last seen Maclean ten days before to give him an Alka Seltzer breakfast. Connolly introduced himself to “Sir Donald Maclean” to “efface” that last meeting and to make the point that the “calm and genial” Maclean was the man he was seeing now. Humphrey Slater was lunching with Connolly and saw him chatting with Maclean and the Campbells, but “kept out of it as he did not wish to get involved with Maclean again” after the unpleasantness at the party earlier in the year the disclosure of which had been such an unwitting factor in Maclean’s exposure. For his part, Connolly was pleased to hear from the Campbells later
that afternoon that his friend was “mellow and confidential” and that he did not need to visit his psychoanalyst so often. Maclean was at ease—it would not be possible to fool a critic as acute as Connolly—and seemed determined to put his closest friends at their ease too on this, their last meeting.
Maclean insisted on paying for lunch, birthday or not. Even though Schmidt’s was very inexpensive and he would have little need of more British currency himself, he went to the Travellers on his way back to the office to cash a cheque for £10. While he was in the club, rather than waiting to get back he telephoned Geoffrey Jackson in the department and asked, rather incoherently as Jackson thought, if he would “hold the fort” the next day, followed by some “garbled explanation” about meeting his sister at the docks. His nerves were starting to get to him after he had said farewell, for all he knew for ever, to his dearest friends, his eccentrically favoured restaurant and his club, all of them part of the establishment which would shortly know of his betrayal. The man following him noted that he was “steady on his feet” and back through the Foreign Office doors for the last time by 3:00.
His last official visitor was Señor Leguizamon, the Argentine Minister-Counsellor. Maclean took careful notes about Anglo-Argentinian trade negotiations to leave in his out-tray and wrote a letter to Sir Nevile Butler, Ambassador in Rio de Janeiro. Making sure that his absence would not come as a surprise to any of his colleagues, he put his head around John Curle’s door to say he wouldn’t be in in the morning. When Third Secretary Margaret Anstee brought him the last papers of the day he said, “Can you manage on your own tomorrow? I can’t come in. Something has cropped up.” The new recruit was “flattered” by this trust and made a quip about there being no revolutions looming in the Americas to cope with.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 35
