Double troubles of a master spy
THE author of A Spy Named Orphan is a grandson of Sir Roger Makins, the senior diplomat who was the last man from the Foreign Office to see Donald Maclean, one of the now notorious Cambridge Five, before he fled to the Soviet Union in May 1951.
So it is perhaps appropriate that Roland Philipps has written the definitive account of the life of a “gifted” traitor who spent 15 years assiduously spying for the Russians.
Born in 1913, Maclean was a brilliant student who went on to get a first from Cambridge and he grew into manhood in the early 1930s, a time when capitalism was in crisis. The Wall Street Crash had ushered in the Great Depression and Maclean so identified with the unemployed that he “sold all his clothes, wore second-hand ones instead and went about in a generally scruffy way, especially as regards his fingernails”.
Knowing what we know today about Stalin’s terror and the freedom-robbing nature of communism, it is hard to sympathise with Maclean’s views. But Philipps does an impressive job of explaining how he became so enamoured of the idea of international proletarian revolution that he converted to Bolshevism, was dubbed Donald Maclenin by a student magazine and resolved to teach English in the Soviet Union after graduating. It was fellow student Kim Philby who persuaded him he could put his talents to better use by getting a job at the heart of the establishment and becoming a Soviet agent.
He introduced Maclean to his handler Arnold Deutsch, a cousin of the founder of the Odeon cinema chain which, Philipps tells us, stands for Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation. Deutsch’s codename was Otto and he dubbed Maclean Orphan.
His charge proved a diligent informer, plying Deutsch with bulging briefcases of “secret” files from the Foreign Office which his handler would pass on to his photographer. When Deutsch was recalled to Moscow, Maclean was paired with a handler codenamed “Norma” and the couple were soon mixing business with pleasure. Indeed when Maclean was posted to Paris, Norma went with him. Their affair lasted for two years but ended when Maclean met an American student called Melinda Marling (pictured with Maclean and two of their three children) and by the time France capitulated in 1940 they were married.
If the pace of A Spy Named Orphan flags a little at times, this is perhaps due to Philipps’ prodigious research with more than 150 titles cited in the bibliography and 32 pages of footnotes.
However it generates plenty of intrigue, particularly when, in 1944, Maclean was posted to Washington as Second Secretary, giving him access to top-secret communications between Churchill and Roosevelt.
The Russians could hardly believe their luck. But there were signs that Maclean was beginning to feel the pressures of living his double life.
He began drinking heavily and survived one particularly close brush with exposure when a would-be defector called Konstantin Volkov walked into the British Consulate in Istanbul and said he was prepared to hand over the names of 250 spies in Britain including “two agents inside the Foreign Office”.
Fortunately for Maclean, Philby was head of Soviet counter-intelligence at the time. He told his handlers and Volkov and his wife were sedated and carried to a waiting aircraft on stretchers “en route to their inevitable fate”.
BY THE time Maclean was posted to Cairo he had acquired the nickname Gordon after the brand of gin he drank and he behaved so badly at parties he was sent back to London on the grounds of being “overwrought”.
He saw a psychoanalyst, moved his family into a rambling house on the Kent-Surrey border and for a time had no contact with his handlers.
By 1951 the net was closing in. He and fellow spy Guy Burgess escaped to Moscow where he was joined by his wife and children two years later.
There have been other biographies of Maclean, notably Robert Cecil’s A Divided Life, but by drawing on a wealth of previously classified material, Philipps weaves a gripping tale of misplaced loyalty, intrigue and betrayal that is unlikely to be bettered.