Mrs Dunbar put pressure on her to go abroad. Fergus would find life even tougher in the more sophisticated environment of secondary school and eventually she agreed to live in Geneva for a spell from September. With real sadness she left the only home she had ever owned, and in which she had briefly been happy, and rented it to strangers. Before going she gave a last interview to MI5 in which she once again denied any knowledge of her husband’s treachery and spoke to the Daily Express: “I have waited for over a year for news of my husband. Now I am starting a new life for my children . . . I may have to come back to this country to wind up my affairs, but I shall never come back to live.”
After leaving England, Melinda first went on a holiday with Harriet in Normandy in which the ceaseless rain did little to lift her spirits. She drove to Geneva on 3 September in her new American Chevrolet car, a gift from her mother and a symbol of her new life.
*
Melinda was therefore out of the country as the ferocious gossip intensified, more particularly among Donald’s group of friends. On 21 September 1952, one of those friends, Cyril Connolly, wrote the first of his two long articles for the Sunday Times, later published in a book called The Missing Diplomats. He was frank (and as stylish as always) about the drinking, Burgess’s homosexuality and Maclean’s behaviour in his latter days in the Foreign Office, and free with his speculation about the origins and enactment of the men’s treachery.
Melinda was out of the Home Office’s jurisdiction by this time, but Lady Maclean’s telephone was still being tapped against the unlikely event that her son would ring in from wherever he was or that a Russian accent might be contacting her with news. She was as appalled as might be expected of a mother (and a mother brought up in the reign of Queen Victoria at that) who read that “the child whose craving for love is unsatisfied . . . eventually may try to become a revolutionary.” She said on the telephone to her relation Buddy Devitt that the articles “read as though Connolly was a nasty little boy looking at the world through a dirty window,” but the listeners got the overall impression that the family “seemed to dismiss the articles fairly lightly.” Patrick Leigh Fermor described a lunch party attended by the former Minister of Information and British Ambassador to France Duff Cooper as “a regular tempest of anger and indignation . . . [Duff] grew red in the face until the veins stood out about C’s exposing his friends as drunkards, traitors, sadists, Bolsheviks etc. etc., cashing in on friends’ failings . . .” Leigh Fermor’s was the only voice at this gathering of those of the same ilk as the missing men to speak up for the articles, which although they taught those present nothing new “rehabilitated them both as human beings . . . not the shifty and guilty shadows that have emerged in the press so far.” Connolly’s articles were the first, and in many ways the most astute, of the books and articles that were to flood the marketplace over the ensuing years with varying degrees of speculation masquerading as fact, most of which found their way to Russia where they were read and loathed by their subject Maclean for their hyperbole and inaccuracies. At the time, though, he had no idea of the extent to which his and Burgess’s story was obsessing the London intelligentsia.
Once Melinda had put the boys into the International School in Geneva she finally explained to them what had happened to their father, reporting to Harriet that “their worst fear seems to be that I might vanish too . . . Fergie is horrified that [Donald] might have done something wrong at the Office and the FO will be very angry when he returns. Little Donald said perhaps he had gone to India . . . that would be a good place to hide.” She emphasised the strength and goodness of their father’s moral and political beliefs. Fergus announced to some children with whom he was playing a war game that “My daddy wants to stop all wars.”
The family moved into a small, dark apartment in the rue des Alpes, with a view of the lake, and settled down to make it home. But Melinda remained “so completely depressed” at this confirmation that she was now bringing up the children alone, an object of pity and fascination, that she could not see how to “summon up whatever it takes to start a new life.” She went to visit Harriet in Paris, who had never seen her spirits lower. Alan went to Geneva to visit her in early October. They discussed whether Donald was behind the Iron Curtain and whether she would go to join him if she was asked; she said “firmly” that she would not. She wrote to her sister on New Year’s Day 1953 that she “couldn’t have been happier to see 1952 go,” but even after a full year in which she had got used to not hearing any news of her husband she “remained in a dismally unstable state,” with the “horrid feeling that almost anything might push me over the precipice.” It was the first time since the age of twenty-one that, whatever the roller-coaster of their lives together, she had been out of touch with the man who in spite of everything stuck by his commitments, personal as much as political.
*
Stalin died in March 1953. After the coup d’état led by Nikita Khrushchev, his sinister security chief Beria was executed (among other charges for being a spy for the British) in December. The temperature of the Cold War rose a couple of degrees. It seemed the Soviet Union would become a more open place without the ruthless control of the two tyrants.
At Stalin’s death, Melinda changed. She seemed anxious not to be away from home for too long, as if it had been hoped for or even agreed that Donald would find a way of getting in touch with her when the tyrant had gone. She showed unaccustomed indecisiveness over which destination to choose for the family holiday that year. She told her mother in May that she was going to accept an invitation from some American friends to go to Majorca and bought the tickets on 10 June to leave as soon as the boys finished school on the 30th. She wrote to Harriet that she was “in a fever of preparation for going away,” sorting out clothes, attending to her business affairs and preparing the flat for subletting. On the 30th she suddenly changed her mind, deciding she wanted mountain air, and took the boys to the remote Alpine town of Saanenmöser instead. Five days later she was back, saying that trip had been “disappointing” and she was going to rebook for Majorca after all. They set off nearly a month late, on 23 July, after their unplanned mountain excursion, an ideal place for an unremarked rendezvous with an emissary from the MGB.
Also staying in Cala Ratjada, Majorca, “an odd place with a small foreign colony, largely American,” was D. A. Wilson, a straitlaced civil servant from the Board of Trade who reported that Melinda’s host, “a very obvious pansy,” was an American named Douglas MacKillop, and that it was common knowledge that the family was “going off somewhere shortly” since Melinda had given MacKillop’s maid “a quite unusually large amount of clothes and cosmetics etc.,” that seemed “exceptional” even by extravagant American standards. Fergus and Beany said to another child they had met on the beach that the photographs their new playmate had taken could not be forwarded to them: “you can’t send them on as we are going away and we don’t know where we are going.”
After a few of weeks of sunshine and beach life the family returned to Geneva on Monday 7 September to find that the new term had been postponed a week until the 15th. On Friday the 11th, Melinda came back from the weekly market “looking elated,” according to her mother. She explained that in the market she had bumped into Robin Muir, an old friend from her Cairo days, and he had invited them to stay with him and his wife that very weekend in his villa at Territet, at the other end of Lake Geneva. When her mother asked her if it might not be easiest to leave the children behind with her and their nanny, Melinda airily said that was no problem as Muir had a “children’s nurse.” As the villa was apparently hard to find, Muir had said he would meet her in the lobby of a hotel in Montreux that afternoon. Melinda had also cashed a substantial cheque, for £60, that morning, had bought toddler Melinda some new clothes and had settled an outstanding garage bill. As it was only for a weekend, they took very few clothes with them and when they left at 3:00 the boys got into the Chevrolet in their grey flannel suits and sport shirts. When th
ey had not returned on the Sunday night, Mrs Dunbar started to grow frantic. She notified the British Consul in Geneva at 3:30 on the Monday afternoon.
*
Just as a Swiss taxi driver was the last person identified in the West to see her husband two and a quarter years earlier, an Austrian station porter was the last person to see Melinda and her three children on 11 September 1953. Tickets had been bought for them by a man that afternoon, and luggage had been left in a station locker in Lausanne (it transpired that Melinda had somehow taken most of her wardrobe after all); Melinda left her Chevrolet in the station garage. The boys played with a pop gun on the train and Mimsie had a doll with red hair, or so the conductor noted as he calmed their mother, who was very anxious to know if they would make their connection in Zurich. They did make it, and changed on to a train that took them to Schwarzach in Austria, where a porter, Peter Geiser, took their luggage to a large waiting car with Salzburg number plates which drove off towards Vienna. Halfway there they switched cars and drove to a small airport in the Soviet zone of Austria.§ Then they “boarded a small military-type aircraft” which flew them to Moscow.
*
When they landed, they were reunited with Donald at the Sovetskaya Hotel, near the Dynamo football stadium on the road to the airport. Safely away from sharp journalistic eyes, they were greeted by “Soviet officials,” including Yuri Modin who had come from London and was there to see the reunion in which he had played a leading role. Modin had not met Maclean before and had been introduced to him while they were waiting for the plane to land. He commented on how “cold” and “distant” the defector was as they “chatted about nothing in particular.” After their years apart, after all that Melinda had gone through, the pity and sympathy which she had had to accept and the dissembling she had had to practise, the semi-public meeting was a desperately strained affair. Maclean too was in an unfathomable emotional situation, guilt, love, not knowing where he stood with the sons he hardly recognised and the unknown daughter he had abandoned and not been able to contact. He “barely embraced his wife.” He had an inkling of the movements of the family in the two years since he had left them, could perhaps imagine some of their path through that time, while they knew absolutely nothing of what had happened to him. The polished diplomat of the American Department, the Travellers Club and Schmidt’s and of the evening train to Oxted had gone, to be replaced by a Russian-speaking unknown who had betrayed his own children.
The Macleans travelled on to the city where their father lived and where they were to spend the next two years. “So it has come off at last!” Filip Kislitsyn exulted in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra when he heard of their arrival, the final part of the 1951 plan—“to bring out Mrs Maclean” at an unspecified date and in an unspecified manner after her husband’s exfiltration—now in place.
*
The news broke at once. Catherine Marling had an American journalist staying with her in Paris when she got the call. In a pre-planned replay of June 1951, a telegram arrived, misspelt, garbled, but with a critical family nickname to authenticate it. It had been handed in at Territet, where Melinda had supposedly been spending the weekend:
TERRIBLY SORRY DELAY IN CONTACTING YOU UNFORESEEN CIRCIONSTANCES HAVE ARISEN AM STAYING HERE LONGER PLEASE ADVISE SCHOOLBOYS RETURNING ABOUT A WEEKS TIME ALL EXTREMELY WELL PINK ROSE IN MARVELLOUS FORM LOVE FROM ALL MELINDA
The press, naturally caring little about their part in her misery of the past two years, turned on Melinda. They no longer pitied the “pathetic and lonely figure,” but conjured a scheming deceiver, and a foreign deceiver at that. “In her cunning campaign, which fooled many people, Mrs Maclean must have had two objectives: to rejoin her husband and discredit this country as much as possible.”
On 22 October Melinda’s traumatised mother received a handwritten letter on cheap, greyish-blue paper of no discernible origin, postmarked Cairo. That was either a poor joke or a hopeless attempt to imply that Melinda might actually have gone back to that city. As with Donald’s first letter it gave nothing away, but unlike that it hinted at the possibility of reunion amid the genuine sorrow of departure:
Darling Mummy
I know you will be worrying terribly but please believe me that we are all quite alright and well. I hope with all my heart you will understand how deeply I feel the sorrow and worry my leaving will cause you. How much we shall miss you. How much a part of us you are. We shall always think of you.
Please believe Darling in my heart I could not have done otherwise than I have done.
All our love to you, Cathy and Harriet.
Goodbye but-not-forever—
Melinda
When Mrs Dunbar went miserably to her daughter’s flat, feeling that she had profoundly failed her, she found that Melinda had had passport photographs of the three children taken in May under the name of Mrs Smith. One of each of the photographs was now missing. Melinda had also packed her treasured Rolleiflex camera. “She may have taken it with her into the wilderness,” Jim Skardon noted in a style so much more poetic than his normal police training allowed that it is probably a direct quotation that echoes the bleakness in a mother and grandmother’s heart.
After the arrival of this letter (which found its way into the newspapers nine months later) years were to pass before Melinda Dunbar had any further news of her daughter. The Soviet Union kept its secrets secure until once again Donald Maclean could be useful to the Kremlin.
* Nancy Maclean went to the bank with her mother, and a “new girl” asked to see her identification. Her mother said “in a voice loud enough for the whole bank to hear, ‘Do you mean to say you don’t know who I am? I’m Lady Maclean, mother of the Missing Diplomat.’ ”
† About £75,000 (approximately $104,000) in today’s money.
‡ The Aga was a stove that needed stoking each day.
§ The post-war occupation of Austria did not end until 1955.
19
Comrade Frazer
Maclean spent very nearly twice as long living and working in Moscow as he did as a spy in the Foreign Office. The great rifts that had fuelled the dramatic outbursts and rampages of recent years were no more; the schisms in which his parents, his marriage, his job, his espionage, his schooling, the events of his times were all swirling in the combustible space between his patriotism and his conscience, his divided duty, were gone. Or they were finally acknowledged, and for being so were no longer a threat to his stability. The dramas of his life were far from over, but the way ahead was now clear. He had some control of his destiny and a greater hold on himself now that he was no longer liable to be buffeted by events that affected his split allegiances to both Britain and the Soviet Union. Unlike some of his fellow defectors, he had now found a version of himself that he could live with.
*
At the end of 1955 Ian Fleming had just published the third of his glamorously implausible James Bond adventures, Moonraker. As Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times he decided to “mount a hit-and-run sally into Russia.” “The new Soviet variety show” of General Secretary Khrushchev and Prime Minister Bulganin had finished a tour of India and Burma and was about to come to Britain. Fleming thought his newspaper should have the first press interview and sent Richard Hughes, star Far East correspondent,* complete with six bottles of whisky in his luggage, to “net” Khrushchev. After a month without getting any closer to the General Secretary than any other member of the swarming press pack, Fleming cabled Hughes to return in two weeks “since primary object your assignment appears unattainable.” Five days later the rival News of the World scooped them with the Khrushchev interview, in which the premier went as far to deny that Burgess and Maclean were in the Soviet Union. Hughes, fobbed off with an interview with the long-surviving Molotov, sent the leaders a letter via their Foreign Minister which made plain that this “protracted, futile and absurd policy of silence” about the two defectors would affect the success of their British visit. There had been no sightings of t
he men since their taxi journey from Saint Malo to Rennes over four years earlier. The news from Petrov in 1954 had filled in some of the gaps in the defection narrative after the astounding and shocking flight of “pathetic and honest” Melinda and the three children. But the rest of it remained an enigma that spasmodically excited the press and still pained and puzzled their family and friends.
Hughes, comfortably full of vodka, was packing up after his fortnight’s grace to catch the flight out on 12 February 1956 when the telephone rang in his room at the Hotel National and he was urgently summoned to come to Room 101. We can only speculate if the choice of room was a subtle piece of Soviet irony a mere seven years after George Orwell’s Ministry of Justice in Nineteen Eighty-Four had used that number for the place where one’s worst fears would be realised. Five men were sitting at “a white-clothed table, surrounded by Victorian bric-à-brac, a marble clock above the fireplace, and antimacassars.” One of them, “a tall man in a blue suit and red bow tie” stood up with his hand out. “ ‘I am Donald Maclean,’ he said with a wooden smile.” Hughes sobered up at once. The interview lasted barely five minutes. Maclean was more or less silent, smoking “a long Russian cigarette,” the much friendlier Burgess said little of interest. This remarkably uninformative newspaper interview was the last one Maclean was to give for nearly three decades. The following day a statement released by the two men announced at British and American breakfast tables that they were alive and revealed their whereabouts after four and a half years of news blackout. Hughes was given a £1,000 bonus by the Sunday Times’s owner for his scoop.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 39
