Sir Roger Makins, his colleague at the AEC whose proceedings had been so comprehensively leaked to Moscow and the man who had made him head of the American Department, was the last person from the Foreign Office to see Maclean in London. They met by chance in the courtyard. Maclean was carrying a parcel under his arm and said that he was on his way home, reminding Makins that he would not be in in the morning as he had his sister staying with him. Makins, thinking he meant Harriet, Melinda’s sister, whom he had met frequently in Washington, sent his regards to the sister-in-law and, as his “main concern at that point was not to give the slightest hint that anything was amiss,” left it at that. He did realise the potential importance of Maclean’s absence the next day, however, and went back into the office to see if Carey Foster was still there, but the office was empty. After a “pause for reflection,” Makins, who was running late for his social engagements, “concluded that as Maclean was under surveillance by the Security Service, his movements were being monitored and that therefore there was no need to start a hare by raising an alarm.” Nobody in the Foreign Office had been told about the watchers knocking off when Maclean boarded his train home. The watchers’ last sighting of him was recorded as “after a drink, he boarded the 6:10 p.m. train.”
That also means that once he was on that train to Oxted, the only witnesses to what happened over the next twenty-four hours were the highly unreliable Burgess and Melinda, who still had her husband’s best interests at heart after all they had been through, and was now about to be tested as never before.
*
Guy Burgess had spent much of the day packing and telephoning. He bought the tickets for the Falaise on that evening’s sailing from the Continental Booking Office in Victoria for himself and Bernard Miller (a medical student he had met on the Queen Mary coming back from New York at the beginning of the month), hired a cream Austin A40 saloon from a garage in Crawford Street, Marylebone, had lunch at the Reform as usual, where he ostentatiously looked at road maps of the north of England and discussed routes with a club servant, and purchased some dapper new clothes at Gieves in Old Bond Street. Returning to his flat, he packed his tweed suit, dinner jacket, shoes, socks and his one-volume collected edition of Jane Austen and, like Maclean, left London for the last time around 6:00. He also had with him “a couple of old green Penguins,” the Agatha Christie novels The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Mysterious Affair at Styles, handy because light reading might be useful in the days to come, as well as for when he needed a temporary pseudonym.
*
Melinda’s is the only account of the rest of the evening, as she related it to Jim Skardon in the weeks that followed. She told him Donald had called her from his office that morning (later she said she thought he had rung the day before his birthday) to tell her that he would be bringing a friend of his, Roger Styles, home to dinner. But this call, we now know, was not registered by the Beaconshaw tap nor by Donald’s office telephone intercept, so in fact he must have told her in person earlier in the week. She had never met Styles before but described him as about thirty-five, black-haired, medium build. Donald got home at 7:00, Styles arrived half an hour later and the two men “wandered about in the garden for a bit” before sitting down at around 8:00. Dinner was “perfectly normal . . . three civilised people talking casually and amicably.” The meal itself was “a special ham” she had spent the day preparing. She wasn’t quite sure what Styles’s “means of livelihood” was but decided that he was “in the publishing line” as “his talk was mainly about books.” The men abruptly announced after dinner that “they would be going off to see somebody, and might be away the night” which left her “pretty incensed” as the boys both had measles, her sister-in-law was due to arrive with her husband the following day (in their own car, contrary to what Donald had told the Foreign Office about going to pick them up at Dover as his reason for taking the morning off) and she was uncomfortably pregnant. But Donald said it “couldn’t be put off” and went upstairs to pack the double-handled rawhide Gladstone bag he had bought in a market in Cairo with his pyjamas and “night accessories.” She apparently “thought his conduct pretty outrageous” given her condition but could not prevent him and Styles getting into Styles’s “new-looking, tan-coloured saloon car” and driving off at 10:00. She stayed up reading for a while in case Donald returned home but when it became apparent he had indeed gone for the night she went to bed. It will never be known whether they had a more passionate farewell than she claimed or what the tenor of their conversations had been in the previous days.
Melinda was certainly not worried enough to make any calls on the Saturday morning and maintained radio silence. “Mrs Grist and her young women,” minding the telephone intercepts in MI5’s headquarters at Leconfield House, picked up nothing until 8:00 in the evening when Nancy Oetking, née Maclean, rang to say they were at Ashford on their journey from Dover and would arrive at about 9:30. Had Donald been telling the truth about their arrival time, he could have gone to work that morning and still have had plenty of time to meet them. In Nancy’s mistaken recollection (as the telephone intercepts prove) they arrived at 6:00. Melinda told them as soon as they were in the house that Donald had rung to say he would be back late and they were not to delay dinner for him. As only three places had been laid the Oetkings accepted this, but do not appear to have enquired where their host was. At nine minutes past ten o’clock Lady Maclean telephoned to discuss arrangements for the next day with her daughter: Donald had suggested that Nancy and Bob should rest in the morning after their journey, lunch at Beaconshaw and then go on to her afterwards. Nancy might want to check that with Donald while she was on the line. After a brief chat with Bob, Nancy came back and told her mother that she had confirmed with Melinda rather than her brother that they would lunch at Tatsfield.
There was no mention of Donald, who by this time had missed the train from Saint Malo to Paris, changed some money in a hotel and had his hair-raising taxi ride to Rennes to pick up the train at 1:18. He and Burgess were just having a largely liquid supper in a café in Paris before they got into their berths to Bern. They were well on their way, thanks to Melinda’s care on the telephone as she had probably deduced that the taps were in place. Mrs Grist and her team reported “there was nothing . . . on the 26th to indicate Maclean was not at Tatsfield.”
*
Nancy realised that Donald was not simply on a bender the next morning when she found Melinda in the bathroom helping the boys to wash. Before Nancy could say a word of greeting, Melinda looked up at her: “Your brother has disappeared.” Nancy had not seen much of Donald over the past few years and was “taken aback” by Melinda’s phrasing: “What do you mean, my brother has disappeared? He’s your HUSBAND, isn’t he?” In the weight of the moment, Melinda could offer no answer and “suggested we make ourselves some breakfast then get on our way to London as soon as possible.”
Bob and Nancy went alone to London and broke the news to her mother that Donald had disappeared and they had no news. Lady Maclean “wasn’t all that surprised that something was wrong” and said she could “kick herself” for not accepting her son’s urgent lunch invitation. Later that evening Nancy spoke to someone called “Di” on the telephone and mentioned “Donald and Linda” still being at Tatsfield. Either family loyalty and the need to protect her mother from Donald’s drinking sprees were trumping her wartime MI6 training or Melinda had spun a story that would make Nancy believe Donald would be back by then: a bender would be plausible, one that would end before he had to go to the office the next day.
By Monday morning Melinda could afford to sound “very upset” when her mother-in-law rang at 8:17 to say she was sorry to hear that Donald had not returned and had he come back the previous evening? Lady Maclean asked if “everything was all right.” She feared another breakdown or marital rift, but was reassured by Melinda. This news was immediately reported to the Foreign Office, where Carey Foster confirmed to MI5 that Curzon had not come in,
but “thought there was no cause for alarm, since he had in fact asked for a day off.” When Carey Foster checked with Sir Roger Makins, the senior man, still believing that the watchers had Maclean permanently in their sights, said he thought he might have given him the Monday off as well. This was British sang at its most froid, given what they knew about Curzon. Although Melinda was to tell Geoffrey Hoare that she had rung the office on the Monday morning, Mrs Grist’s record shows that in fact she did not do so until Tuesday 29 May at 10:58, over eighty hours since the Falaise had weighed anchor at Southampton and her husband, Britain’s hard-working and brilliant servant, had had his last sight of his sleeping country as he moved on to his new life. The watchers had waited in vain at Victoria for the previous two mornings. Their last report dramatically signed off, “Thereafter the great search started.”
* Gromushkin was poorly educated and “spoke in the vernacular.” A favourite KGB joke about him was that when he gave an award to “some girl” on International Women’s Day, instead of saying “Give her a big hand” as he meant to do, he said, “It’s not enough just saying it—congratulate her with your hands!”
† This letter was found (and pocketed) in Burgess’s flat by Anthony Blunt when he was sent by MI5 to have a look around a few weeks later to save them the rigmarole and possible publicity involved in obtaining a search warrant.
17
Establishment
On the evening of 6 June 1951, eleven days after Maclean’s last day in England, the front page of the London Daily Express was about to be put to bed with a lead story that was already gripping the nation: Alan Poole, a nineteen-year-old Royal Corps of Signals soldier had shot a policeman dead with a Sten gun and was now defying a siege of 200 armed officers at his home in the naval town of Chatham, Kent.
That same evening the paper’s French bureau chief, a stocky, powerfully built, well-connected journalist of the old school, Larry Solon, was dining alone in the Restaurant du Forêt, on the outskirts of Paris, when he was summoned to the telephone. Puzzled that anyone should know where he was, Solon was told by a man with a German accent “Don’t go round asking questions about missing persons,” and instructed to stop his “Interpol nonsense.” Solon had visited the international police organisation’s HQ the day before, desultorily following up a tip-off from the crime reporter of France-Soir that the French police had been asked to keep an eye open for two unnamed diplomats “on a spree.” Solon’s Interpol contact had told him that the whole affair was a matter for the British government as it was a “political escape” and Interpol could not get involved unless it was a civil crime such as a kidnapping.
The realisation that “this was no routine story of some Foreign Office employees lost on a binge” meant that Solon left his dinner half-eaten and hailed a taxi to take him to another favourite watering hole, a bistro near Montmartre. He was sure to find there his mole who specialised in smuggling stories, a former police officer who “had lost his job because of his taste for cognac.” Solon hoped that he would not be too far gone and could be helpful enough to earn his next bottle. Once Solon had established that there were any number of ways that two men without papers could be spirited out of the country undetected, he moved on to meet a police contact he called “Vincent” in the bar of the Scribe Hotel. Vincent said that in this instance what he knew was “too hot” to pass on: “there’s going to be a hell of a blow-up.” He blamed the British for “stupidly waiting a week before telling us about it,” but let slip that there was “not a chance” the diplomats were still in the country; “the Stalinos had that one organised like the Monte Carlo rally.” This was enough for Solon to make a final call to a contact in the British Embassy who simply said, “So it’s out.”
Solon was ready to file the biggest story of his career, about “two British Government employees” who had left “with the intention of getting to Moscow . . . to serve their idealistic purposes,” possibly taking vital papers with them—a story that would bump the Chatham siege from the front page of his newspaper.
*
That night, Philip Jordan, the friendly Embassy Press Attaché from Washington days and now Prime Minister Attlee’s press officer in Downing Street, was dining with the Muggeridges when he was called to the telephone. He came back, “his face ashen,” and excused himself as there were “things he had to attend to.” He had been told for the first time about the next day’s newspaper, and the disappearance of his friend. Kitty Muggeridge said that he looked “so tragically ill it seemed that the bottom had dropped right out of his world.” The following morning she heard that Jordan had died of a heart attack in the night. When Kitty’s husband Malcolm and others wrote a letter to the Prime Minister suggesting that his widow might be granted a pension they were met with a flat refusal. His association with the traitor, however ignorant he was of Maclean’s wrongdoings, had made any special pleading bound to fail.
*
The Foreign Office realised that there was no point in keeping quiet any longer, their men had gone and they might was well get it over with. They put out a press release naming Maclean and Burgess, reporting them as missing and reassuring the taxpayer that “Owing to their being absent without leave, both have been suspended with effect from June 1.”
*
Maclean’s deputy, Robert Cecil, was coming back from a week’s leave in France on Tuesday 29 May, and was surprised to have his passport checked on the road to Orly airport. The next day the staff greeted him with relief, “Thank God you’ve turned up anyway.” He, too, was excluded from the real reason his friend and boss from Paris, Washington and now London might not have come in. When he heard Burgess had disappeared as well he only semi-facetiously assumed that “the pair had gone off on a drunken spree, had perhaps accosted a burly French sailor and been dumped unceremoniously in the Seine.”
Maclean’s other departmental colleagues found out what had happened from the Daily Express and the subsequent press release, in the same way as the rest of the world. Third Secretary Margaret Anstee assumed that Melinda was having her baby early when he did not appear the week after he had told her to keep an eye on things on Saturday 26 May. His office was orderly, his in- and out-trays containing “exactly the kind of papers you would expect when someone had left on a Friday evening with the confident expectation of returning: not too much . . . but not too little either.” Even on Wednesday the 30th when “every cupboard and drawer” was being “ransacked” under the “watchful eye of the head of security” and his colleagues were joking that “Donald has done a Pontecorvo” the penny did not drop. It was “totally unthinkable that a member of His Majesty’s Foreign Service would ever betray his country,” a concept that changed for ever with the double defection. Anstee and her colleagues in the Third Room were never spoken to or questioned about what Maclean had done or said in his brief time as their chief. There was no point.
*
Chaos and consternation had reigned in the top echelons of Whitehall for the previous ten days, and, in as much as the tightly buttoned denizens of those heights showed emotion, panic. They had been playing a desperate and unconvincing game of catch-up, trying to keep what had happened quiet. They knew it could not succeed. They alerted British ports to be on the look-out on the 29th, the Tuesday after the flight, and the day that Melinda reported her husband’s absence. By that evening they knew about the Falaise and contacted “Mr Reilly’s friends’ representative” in Paris, also known as the MI6 head of station, to enlist their help. On the 30th, while Maclean’s office in the American Department was being turned over, Dick White flew to Paris (after an embarrassing delay when he arrived at Heathrow to find that his passport had expired) and French and French North African ports were put on the qui vive.
That same day, five days after the disappearance, all the Western European embassies except Madrid were notified and advised to invite the local security outfits to help them; however, the British Embassy in Switzerland was cautioned not to alert “inte
rnal police authorities” in that country “in the interests of secrecy,” as if anything could be kept from Moscow Centre’s informers. If MI6 had moved faster and involved the Swiss police, the most famous defectors of the decade might have spent the next years of their lives in a British prison.
On 2 June a telegram went out saying that if the diplomats, missing for a week by now, were seen, their passports were to be impounded, and over the next few days mugshots were sent to the embassies. On the 6th, the day before the news broke, “Mr Reilly’s friends” in the South American embassies and in those of Mexico, Turkey, Greece, the Lebanon and Egypt were all informed of the disappearance. “All posts except those behind the Iron Curtain, which had not so far been asked to obtain the help of the local security authorities to identify the men should they show up, were asked to do so” on 14 June, exactly a week after they had read all about the story in the newspapers and three weeks since the flight. The defection was discussed in Cabinet on the 8th, and on the 11th a short statement was made to the House of Commons confirming what had been splashed across the nation’s breakfast tables for four days. Colonel George Wigg (who was later to lead the anti-establishment charge in Parliament that led to John Profumo’s downfall) asked the Foreign Secretary if he would “institute inquiries into the suggestion made in a Sunday newspaper that there is widespread sexual perversion in the Foreign Office.” Herbert Morrison deftly replied that “I can only say that perhaps I have not been long enough at the Foreign Office to express an opinion.”
*
Once the decision had been taken not to tell the Americans about the earlier identification of Maclean, it would have been most politic to let them in on the defection right away, as soon as MI5 realised what had happened, days before the Express broke the story. With that opportunity gone, it might have been prudent and polite to have included them in these round robins to British embassies and high commissions from the start. But establishment embarrassment, shame tinged with arrogance, prevailed. The wire-service machines in the State Department were so full of the news on 7 June that they ran out of paper. Secretary of State Acheson was so furious at being given piecemeal the bulletins that his country’s closest ally, with the two countries’ troops fighting alongside each other for the second time in a decade, had kept from him for weeks that he ordered the press office not to waste time running up to his office with the tear sheets as they came in. Instead, a secretary in the press office read the material over the internal telephone to Acheson’s secretary who took them in to her seething boss once she had typed them up. Some of the items, such as that “15,000 Secret Service men, master detectives, diplomatic personnel and policemen are combing Western Europe, peering in to cafés, hotels, airports and bordellos” in “the largest manhunt in history” made for sensational, if even more enraging, reading that morning. When the mortally embarrassed British government later downplayed Maclean’s knowledge in turn, Acheson was right on the mark when, recalling Maclean’s time in Washington, he exclaimed, “My God, he knew everything!”
A Spy Named Orphan Page 36
