The perilous part of the plan was now: it was Sunday and there was no flight out on the route allotted them until Tuesday. The Soviets assumed that Maclean at least would be missed on the Monday, but had not taken into account the near-paranoid British confusion and desire to keep the defections quiet, let alone Melinda’s complicit silence. The pair of runaways “collapsed in a hotel suffering from . . . the opposite of euphoria” as the adrenalin wore off. Maclean lay on his bed, calm and focused now that he had no agency in his immediate future, smoking and reading Burgess’s edition of Jane Austen. His fellow defector went to look at the cars on display in the city.
On the Tuesday, as the hunt got going from London, they took the Stockholm flight, which touched down briefly in Prague. There Maclean and Burgess were “immediately taken in hand by KGB agents” and were destined to spend the rest of their lives in Soviet territory. The trail was already stone cold by the time the Daily Express and the British and American authorities learned of Maclean’s escape. On 12 June Guy Liddell recorded in his diary that “GCHQ reported an increase in volume of traffic between London and Moscow as from 25th May . . . Two or three days later there was an increase in the traffic from Bern, and about the 4th or 5th June an increase in traffic from Prague,” which corroborates the men’s movements as well as the care taken in seeing them to their new home. But the report came too late to be of any use in the hunt for them.
Nobody in the West was to hear of them again for years.
*
Donald Maclean had left the stage and was about to begin the last act in the turbulent drama of his life, for the first time since his early boyhood no longer playing two roles simultaneously. His leading lady was, as always, waiting in the wings.
* It was good news for McCarthy and his followers in their attacks on the State Department that they were now able to equate homosexuality and treachery. They were soon to allege that there were 110 homosexual State Department officers in Taiwan alone.
18
Into the Wilderness
Throughout the febrile months of that summer of 1951 following the defection, Melinda and her children were under siege, enduring their personal agonies as a public drama. Here was a Cold War story that could sell millions of newspapers, and the editors made the most of the wife abandoned in the last days before her confinement and the two young boys left fatherless by the traitor who had had the best Britain had to offer handed to him on a plate. Sir William Strang, mindful of Melinda’s pregnancy and the psychological strain she would be suffering, ordered that she should not be questioned for some time after the birth of her child. But when Skardon, under the name of Seddon, went to interview Lady Maclean in her Kensington flat on 30 May, he found Melinda there, waiting for her mother’s delayed arrival from Paris at the air terminal in nearby Cromwell Road. “Mrs Curzon” seemed “to be very self-contained,” “worried” but “annoyed rather than disturbed.” He came away with the impression that she believed Donald was on a bender, that all would be explained on his return from his “escapade,” and that meanwhile she was grateful for the “trouble and kindness shown by the Foreign Office.”
By the time the newspaper story broke on 7 June and her husband was named in the press release, Melinda had much less reason to be calm as her house came under siege from the press. When Mrs Dunbar arrived, she first of all accused the Foreign Office of denying her daughter information and later of abandoning her. In fact, they had no information to offer her, and all they could do was instruct her not to talk to the press. Robert Cecil, now acting head of the American Department, out of concern went to Tatsfield with his wife on 9 June and found the gates locked and the blinds drawn against a throng of reporters and photographers. Fergus finally spotted the visitors from an upstairs window and Melinda let them in. She was “in a great deal of distress,” desperately worried about the birth of her child after the stillbirth and miscarriages, anxious about money now that Donald’s salary had stopped coming in and there was the mortgage to be paid, unsure how to cope with the fatherless boys. A few days after this visit she went into hospital and twenty days after her husband disappeared she gave birth to a daughter, Melinda (distinguished within the family as “Pink Rose” or “Pinkers” when she was a baby, and “Mimsie” afterwards), named just as Donald had told Mary Campbell she would be at lunch on his last day. Her mother and sister Harriet were on hand at Tatsfield for the two weeks she was in hospital.
Since the first stillbirth, having children had been risky for Melinda’s health, hence her long-planned and lengthy hospital stays. She felt more than usually fatalistic this time and wrote a remarkable letter to Donald which she kept by her until it was found among her effects two years later. He would get to read it at the same time as the rest of the world—when it was published. The letter demonstrated her great courage and the pride she took in their achievements, just as it showed the strength in their relationship at a point where she cannot have known whether he was alive or dead—features that are especially moving in the context of what she had been through in the previous few years. It stands as a powerful tribute to her commitment to Donald, to her generosity, above all to her love and faith in his own courage, and it was a testament to her belief that he would still be a father to the children after she had gone:
My Dearest Donald
If you ever receive this letter it will mean I shan’t be here to tell you how much I love you and how really proud of you I am. My only regret is that perhaps you don’t know how I feel about you.
I feel I leave behind and have had a wonderful gift in your love and the existence of Fergie and Donald. I am so looking forward to the new baby. It seems strangely like the first time and I think I shall really enjoy this baby completely. I never forget, darling, that you love me and am living for the moment when we shall be together again.
All my deepest love and wishes for a happy life for you and the children.
Melinda
*
During that first summer, and thereafter, Alan Maclean was the reliable conduit between Skardon, the Foreign Office, his mother and Melinda. The comforting policeman became a friend and even solace to Lady Maclean over the ensuing years to the point of enabling her to take pride in her son’s notoriety.* He was also was key in providing the moment of comedy that such a tragic drama requires to lighten its impact. Skardon told Alan that now that MI5 had thoroughly investigated the belongings the fugitives had left on the Falaise he could go to pick them up from Waterloo Station, and that the office would be sending a car for him and Colonel Bassett, Burgess’s stepfather. Lady Maclean insisting on buying her youngest child a new suit for this important expedition, and dug out some of his late father’s fermented aftershave to make sure he was presentable. The Colonel was impeccably turned out in his pinstripes and bowler hat, and smelling very expensive. Jim Skardon too was in attendance.
The Waterloo stationmaster himself led them to his enormous office and invited them to sort through the “various piles of sad-looking objects and clothes” laid out beside two collapsed canvas bags on a table. After a brisk spell in which each man went “turn and turn about,” picking more or less at random, all that was left were “a pair of really dirty, torn black pyjamas” and a pair of “revolting socks,” full of holes and “stiff with dried sweat.” Both Alan and the Colonel, who particularly loathed the outing because “he had never liked Guy and was manifestly upset by his wife’s obsessive affection for her son,” insisted that the pyjamas had to belong to the “other’s chap,” until Alan “in a moment of inspiration” came up with the line that Donald thought wearing pyjamas was a “sin against nature” so they could not possibly be his. Even the redoubtable Colonel had to concede defeat in the face of this irrefutable claim, but insisted that the socks had to go to the Macleans in return. On their way out, Alan took heart when he saw a wire-mesh bin on the station concourse. The offending items were no more. As the three men parted on the steps of Colonel Bassett’s club, Alan asked Skar
don if he had enjoyed his morning. “I’ve had a lovely time,” said the jovial fellow.
Alan’s good nature was needed as it became clear that he would not be given work by the Foreign Office, to the point that he felt he had no option but to resign. This, too, reached the newspapers, hungry for any Maclean-related snippets. The Foreign Office had the grace to say publicly that he was not suspected of sharing the sins of the brother in any way. Over thirty years later Donald was able to explain to Alan that he had wished that his younger brother, who had from a young age looked up to him in the absence of a father, had not wanted to emulate him by entry into the Diplomatic Service, but he could find no way of saying so at the time. Through the establishment friendship with Lady Violet’s son, Mark Bonham Carter, Alan went to work for the publisher William Collins before moving to Macmillan and on to a distinguished career as a publisher, in which his diplomatic skills were invaluable and in the course of which he became very close to the Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister and Chairman of the firm, Harold Macmillan.
*
Although by the end of July the environs of Beaconshaw were no longer thronged by reporters, Mrs Dunbar, fully in control by now, decided that the family needed a break and should go away. They made plans to go to Beauvallon, near Saint Tropez in the South of France where Melinda’s sister Catherine had rented a house in the middle of August. Just before they set off, the postman knocked on the door with two registered letters addressed to Mrs Dunbar. Both were from St Gall, a town near Zurich, one from the Swiss Bank Corporation and the other from the Union Bank of Switzerland. Each contained a banker’s draft for £1,000 from Mr Robert Becker made out to Mrs Melinda Dunbar. The Maclean name was no doubt too explosive to be used. As Mrs Dunbar had lent her daughter and son-in-law £2,000† to buy Beaconshaw, the sum was probably not a coincidence.
Neither Melinda knew of a Robert Becker and they got in touch with MI5 who immediately sent detectives to St Gall where they got the predictable brush-off from a Swiss bank asked to divulge its client’s details, other than the confirmation of what was stated on the form accompanying the banker’s draft, that Mr Becker had been staying in the Hotel Central in Zurich and had given a New York address. The FBI established that Mr Becker’s stated address located him somewhere in the middle of Central Park. Mrs Dunbar was pragmatically advised that she might as well cash the cheques as there was no point in trying to return them.
Two days later Melinda received her own letter, this time signed by her husband. It was undated and had no address but was postmarked Reigate and Redhill, twenty-five miles from Tatsfield. The handwriting was shaky and the somewhat stilted but deeply sensitive and loving letter, establishing Melinda’s innocence to official readers, aches with yearning and absence, and a wish to soothe the pain he has caused, while giving away nothing of his whereabouts; it is acknowledging and trying to assuage grief and make things better for the family that he might reasonably expect never to see him again, including his new daughter:
Darling
A friend going to England has said that he will get this to you and I am so happy to be in touch again with your sweet self. I cannot tell you why I left or where I am. I must still lean on the strength of our love to answer for me. Darling, I think of you always and carry you close in my heart and I am sure that you do the same.
I do not know what you must have thought of me leaving you without any money. At my request a friend is now sending you two thousand pounds. It is simpler to send it to your mother’s credit, but of course it is meant for you.
Oh what good news about little Melinda! Well done, darling. I was so happy, especially for you. I wonder if she is dark . . . like all true Melindas; quiet or tempestuous? Perhaps you do not know yourself yet. I can well imagine you two together.
Tell the boys I think of them always. I expect Fergie is helping with the Aga‡ and such things while I am away. I wonder what Donald has in his doctor’s bag and whether he practised on himself when they had measles. Please hug him specially from me.
Please give my special love to Mama and tell her that I am close to you all and am sure that, with her great courage, she will not worry or be cast down. I think often, too, of Andy, Nancy and Alan and send them all my affection.
But this letter is for you, darling, and it tries to say that you are so much part of me that I feel that you are always with me and to ask that you will, despite everything, believe in my love. Have faith in me and be of good heart. Be sure that I will write again and that I am well and quite alright.
With all my love, dearest snoop,
Donald
He must have guessed in this personal agony that a drama was being played out in public in England and wanted to bolster Melinda, not least to give her an alibi in case she was to make any confession.
Melinda kept this love letter in her handbag for many years, and her mother noticed that she drew strength from it, panicking when on one occasion more than two years later she thought she had lost it. At a time when doubts about her own future path might have been starting to set in, her husband’s words must have gone some way to affirming that she had been right to stand by him, that their lives together had some sort of nobility and purpose that could not have been achieved had she remained an East Coast debutante.
But this final confirmation that her husband was in the pay of a foreign power, as nobody thought for a moment that he could have squirrelled away more than a year’s salary in a Swiss bank, caused a turn in MI5’s treatment of her: they were enraged that they were not able to locate him. Instead of Skardon, who apparently had a knee injury, a different officer came to talk to her, accusing her of knowing of Maclean’s Communism and of having plans to join him. Melinda said that she “flared up” and said to the policeman that until he proved it to be the case “I’ll never believe he was a traitor to his country.” Nothing of this interview appears in Skardon’s friendlier, meticulous and detailed record. Melinda was relieved to leave England for the South of France a few days later against Foreign Office advice. The press pack initally followed the family, but soon the lack of story and spiralling expense accounts meant that their attentions dwindled. They were left to lament that the telephone had been disconnected in the villa, but otherwise stayed away. After a month, the family returned to Tatsfield.
*
A week after his letter to Melinda, an unrepentant Donald wrote to his mother in a hand more like his own. He hoped to see her again soon and “though I still cannot explain it myself, leaving was the best course and that I have done nothing of which I am ashamed and of which you need be ashamed for me.” Lady Maclean held firm until her death to her conviction that her favourite son was working as a double agent in Moscow (even as Stalin and Beria were exploring that possibility themselves) and was able to derive from this letter the comforting idea that he was still pursuing the path of patriotic righteousness followed by her late husband. Perhaps the solicitous Skardon, once he had realised that she knew nothing of value to his investigation, did little to dissuade her from this view.
*
The next few months were especially tough for the family. After what they now knew of the runaways’ political past, the Foreign Office explored ways of preventing other undesirables from joining their ranks through the Cadogan Committee of Enquiry into the affair. But all the office could really do was set up positive vetting in early 1952 for all and that particular attention be paid to peccadilloes which laid anyone open to blackmail. They had little interest in or sympathy for Melinda, nor had the media. She was living off her own small income and what her mother gave her. Fergus and Donald were subjected to some predictable bullying in school, taunted by claims that their treacherous father was dead. Most of all, and seen only by a few, Melinda missed Donald and tried to assess her feelings about him as well as her future as the family marker of Christmas and the start of 1952 went past. She went into hospital in London for a minor operation in the spring and was visited by Clare Hollingworth from her
Cairo days. Melinda told Hollingworth that she had decided to move on in life, that she was no longer in love with Donald but in the absence of any news from him did not know how to go about things: to return to America was a big move and for now she felt exhausted by what she had lived through in the past three years and wanted to keep life more or less steady for the children, including her new-born namesake. As Hollingworth’s husband Geoffrey Hoare put it, “She was like a patient after a long and wasting illness who simply could not gather strength again.” Whatever she and Donald had discussed on those last, dreamlike days together the previous May, this exhaustion and uncertainty in her rings true. On the anniversary of the defection the press descended again, and she wrote despairingly to Harriet, “I don’t know whether to be sad or glad: people are asking me out and strangely enough I am in such a state of hyper-sensitivity that almost all social contacts exhaust me to a frightful degree. I really feel nearer to going off my rocker than I ever have.” Melinda seemed to Hoare to be in a “black depression . . . convinced her marital life was definitely over never to be recommenced.”
A Spy Named Orphan Page 38
