What surprised me most writing this ... was the depth of the establishment blindness.
Author Roland Philipps on his new biography, A Spy Named Orphan, about Cold War traitor Donald Maclean
A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean Roland Philipps W.W. Norton
LONDON The two-day drunk was not yet over. It was almost as though Donald Maclean, a respected figure in the world of British diplomacy, was being pursued by demons as he and a visiting chum continued their boozy rampage through the streets of Cairo nearly 70 years ago.
There was good reason for those demons. Maclean, who occupied a No. 3 position at the British embassy and, when sober, seemed the epitome of pinstriped Whitehall decorum, led a double life. And he was cracking under the pressure.
He was a traitor to his country — a Soviet agent who had been passing secrets to the enemy for more than a decade. And when his inner conflicts became unbearable — fuelled further by an infantile need to be loved by both his Foreign Office colleagues and his Soviet handlers — he would drink and drink and drink some more.
“I think it’s very significant that the booze consumption went even higher as the Cold War got tougher,” says Roland Philipps, author of A Spy Named Orphan, an engrossing new biography of the most enigmatic of the Soviet agents whose treacheries convulsed postwar Britain more than half a century ago.
By the time Maclean and fellow traitor Guy Burgess quietly slipped out of the country in May 1951, this Foreign Office mainstay had betrayed a pile of secrets to the Soviet Union, including invaluable intelligence on U.S. development of nuclear weapons. And he remained an unrepentant communist until his death in Moscow in 1983.
Those earlier events in Cairo had constituted something of a watershed moment not only for Maclean, by then desperate to find sanctuary in Russia, but also for Foreign Office colleagues resolute in their blinkered refusal to subject him to closer scrutiny.
There had already been earlier Cairo incidents — for example the night Maclean fell drunkenly asleep in a flower bed. But his marathon bender was something else again, reaching its climax when Maclean and his equally polluted buddy — who happened to be Philip Toynbee, the son of historian Arnold Toynbee — consumed “a coma-inducing six bottles of gin” and then shoved their way into an apartment occupied by the secretary to the U.S. ambassador. Furious over a lack of booze, they proceeded to trash the place, even trying to shove their unknowing host’s clothing down the toilet.
Eventually, they retreated to another apartment, where they slumped on the balcony weeping tears of remorse before passing out.
Normally, one drunken binge should have been sufficient to set off alarm bells in the Foreign Office — but not here.
Indeed, Philipps says, Maclean’s colleagues turned a blind eye to reports of drunkenness and wifebeating, and later — as suspicion that he was a spy began surfacing — refused to believe that an English gentleman of his background could be betraying his country.
“He was the model civil servant and diplomat,” Philipps says. “So even after he was sent home from Cairo after that epic binge, people looked the other way. His ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell, simply said he didn’t think ‘tittle-tattle’ was helpful. What surprised me most writing this book was the depth of the establishment blindness.”
Maclean has long been the most mysterious of the men whose treacheries would cause lasting shame to Britain’s foreign service. Philipps has been interested in him since boyhood because the author’s grandfather was the last Foreign Office official to speak to Maclean before his handlers spirited him out of the country.
Philipps has spent most of his working life in publishing, but the opportunity to do a biography of Maclean lured him away from a job he loved. The clincher was the British government’s decision to declassify once secret files.
“One of the marvellous things I found in those files was that after he came back from Cairo and was made head of the (U.S.) department, he got atrociously drunk and was overheard by a secretary in the Foreign Office shouting: ‘What would you say if I told you I’d been a communist all my life? Always have been. Always will be.’”
The secretary conscientiously reported this incident to her superiors. The head of personnel in the Foreign Office blandly reported back that this was just “Donald up to his old tricks again.”
His Soviet handlers knew Maclean under various code names — Stuart, Lyric, Homer, Orphan. He kept himself hidden for more than a decade while remaining a model of probity at the Foreign Office, yet he was actually one of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring whose other members included the flamboyantly gay Burgess and the coldly cynical Kim Philby. All were protected in one way or another by an “Old Boys network” of disbelief that no one who had attended an elite private school and enjoyed establishment status could conceivably be a traitor.
A key figure in their conversion was Soviet recruiter Arnold Deutsch.
“He came up with the idea of going after young left-wingers from the top universities, judging firstly that their communism would be forgiven as sins of youth and secondly that they were likely to rise to the top of the establishments that ran Britain,” Philipps says.
Philipps concedes he was dealing with a life shrouded in mystery. Some riddles remain — for example Maclean’s relationship with his wife, Melinda. “She knew about his treachery and submitted to physical abuse. She joined him in Russia — and then abandoned him for Kim Philby!”
A Spy Called Orphan is an exciting book, but also a humane one.
Maclean was appalled by the “grubbiness” of what he had to do. Safe in Moscow, Maclean gave vent to his true feelings about the business of spying.
“It’s like being a lavatory attendant,” he told a visitor. “It stinks, but somebody has to do it.”