Why Maclean’s wife dumped him and their 3 children for fellow traitor Philby
Shrewd and devious, Melinda Maclean knew Donald was a spy from the start. But, as this gripping series reveals, she convinced MI5 otherwise while plotting their reunion in Moscow – only to betray him . . .
FOR 15 years, British diplomat Donald Maclean was passing state secrets to his KGB masters. Yesterday, in our serialisation of an electrifying biography based on newly released papers, we heard how he fled to Moscow just as he was about to be arrested — leaving behind his supposedly ‘innocent’ wife. In our final extract, she secretly joins him behind the Iron Curtain …
AFTER Donald Maclean fled to Moscow to escape arrest in Britain as the spy who, for 15 years, had passed state secrets to the Soviet Union, friends of his wife, Melinda, found it easy to believe that she knew nothing of her husband’s treachery. Theirs had always been a stormy marriage, punctuated by bad behaviour on both sides and terrible rows.
He drank to excess, hit her, and often disappeared. She flirted with other men and had affairs. That he could carry on a secret life without her being aware, while at the same time working his way up the ranks of the British Foreign Office, seemed perfectly possible.
And this was the line Melinda presented to MI5 after his defection with fellow mole Guy Burgess: she had been every bit as duped as they’d been.
But it wasn’t true. Chicago-born Melinda, whom he married in France in 1940, knew all along that Donald was a spy. How? Because he’d told her from the very start.
He fell for her the moment he met her among the bohemian set he socialised with in Paris, where he was a British diplomat.
Opposites attracted. He was tall and fair; she was slight with curly, dark hair. With his brilliant mind and First from Cambridge, Maclean could bask in being the superior intellect to an under-educated, attractive woman who was both affectionate and popular, where he was withdrawn, giving nothing of himself away.
He needed a secret sharer in his life as well as someone to admire him. Melinda fitted the bill.
He claimed he made the admission to her to excuse his lateness for their meetings when he was busy handling documents and rendezvousing with his Soviet handler. But he also did it to impress her.
He feared that she would dump him because he was just a boring official in the British diplomatic service — so ‘to make myself look better and more important, I told her the reason why I led such a life’.
She liked it that he was a man with strong beliefs, and agreed to stand by him. She would be his silent witness for all the difficult years ahead.
And in 1951, as his spying activities unravelled and his Soviet masters told him to defect, she agreed the best course of action was for him to be ‘ex-filtrated’ rather than try to brazen out the accusations of treachery that were soon to be levelled at him.
Although she would be left pitied, even censured, and alone in a country in which she had spent barely one-tenth of her life, it might be better that he should be free to live a new life in Moscow than spend a decade behind bars.
Maclean’s outward calm in the face of exile was greatly bolstered by his wife’s support. He’d been worried about leaving her and their children to carry on without him, but she’d given him the allclear to go.
Once he’d gone, she rode out the public furore, the door- stepping journalists, the MI5 questioning, the abuse and insinuations, the bullying of her sons at school.
She was an object of both pity and fascination, and to get away from it all, she moved from their house on the Kent-Surrey border to Switzerland, with her mother.
She put the two boys into the International School in Geneva and finally explained to them what had happened to their father, reporting to her sister 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 because that would be a good place to hide.’
She emphasised the strength and goodness of their father’s moral and political beliefs as a committed communist who wanted peaceful co- existence between East and West. Fergus announced to some children with whom he was playing that ‘My Daddy wants to stop all wars’.
But as the months turned into years and no word came from him, she sank into depression at the realisation that she was now bringing up their children alone. When her brother-in-law, Alan Maclean, asked her whether she would join Donald if she knew for sure that he was behind the Iron Curtain, she gave a firm ‘No’.
Her mood changed, though, with Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the prospect that the Soviet Union might now become a more open place. She hoped Donald would now find a way of getting in touch with her.
That summer, friends thought her distracted. And while on holiday in Majorca, she gave away a lot of her clothes to the maid of a family she was staying with. THE
boys told a child they met on a beach that the photos he had taken could not be forwarded to them ‘as we are going away and we don’t know where we are going’.
A few days after her return to Switzerland, she told her mother she had run into an old friend in the local market and he’d invited her and the children to stay with him for the weekend in his villa at the other end of Lake Geneva.
She cashed a substantial cheque, bought her toddler daughter some new clothes and settled an outstanding garage bill. Then she drove off with the children.
When they had not returned on the Sunday night, her mother was frantic. The next day she notified the British Consul in Geneva.
Melinda, it turned out, had driven to Lausanne, where tickets were waiting and luggage had been left in a station locker. They took the train to Zurich, where they changed trains to Schwarzach in Austria. There, a porter recalled taking their luggage to a 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 what was described as a small military-type aircraft which flew them to Moscow to be reunited with Donald.
Given all that Melinda had gone through, the pity she had had to accept and the dissembling she had had to practise, that first meeting — overseen by Soviet officials — was a strained affair.
Maclean was unsure how to act, feeling a mixture of guilt and love, not knowing where he stood with the children he had abandoned and not been able to contact. He barely embraced his wife.
When the news broke in Britain that she, too, had defected, the Press rounded on Melinda, turning the ‘pathetic and lonely figure’ they’d previously portrayed her as into a scheming deceiver.
Then, with no more information to be had, the story of the Macleans went dead. TWO years later, a Sunday Times correspondent was in Moscow and about to pack his bags after an unsuccessful attempt to interview the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, when, out of the blue, he was invited to a room in his hotel.
There, a tall man in a blue suit and red bow- tie held out his hand and said: ‘I am Donald Maclean.’ With him in the room was Guy Burgess.
The two men said very little and the interview lasted barely five minutes. But, after a silence of nearly five years, here was the first actual sighting and confirmation that the runaways were alive.
In a written statement, they admitted they had been Communists since their Cambridge days and disingenuously described themselves as political refugees, not spies.
In time, details emerged of their lives after they defected. On their first night in Moscow, an elated Burgess and Maclean had dined in style on ‘a great hotel balcony on the first floor overlooking the Kremlin’ and got drunk on vodka.
But such treatment did not last and they were quickly dispatched to the closed city of Kuybyshev, 600 miles east of Moscow — far away, they were told, from British assassination squads.
Guarded night and day by KGB troops, and rigorously de-briefed to make sure they were not double agents, to all intents and purposes they were under house arrest.
Burgess did not cope well. He got drunk and roamed Kuybyshev looking for action, on one occasion having his teeth knocked out in a brawl. But Maclean sobered up and went cold turkey in a detoxification clinic. He got himself a job teaching English in a school.
Required to take new names and identities, Maclean chose to be Mark Petrovich Frazer (after the Cambridge anthropologist Sir James Frazer of Golden Bough fame, a 12-volume study of mythology and religion). His cover story
was that he was a political émigré, a trade union leader persecuted in england for his political views.
when Melinda and the children joined him, they moved into a small apartment and the children were put into the local Soviet schools.
Melinda, now officially natasha frazer, hated kuybyshev, which she found ‘ very primitive’, and for a while Donald was depressed and disillusioned by the reality of Soviet Russia.
He became more optimistic once the family was deemed fully rehabilitated and they moved to Moscow in 1955.
in the capital, he became a magazine correspondent, then a teacher and analyst in a research institute for foreign and economic affairs. Melinda translated Russian stories into english for the weekly english paper, Moscow news.
Donald refused to become part of the twilight brigade community of defectors, ‘ down- at- heel, disillusioned and wondering how they had got there’.
The Macleans lived well, housed in a smart building overlooking the river, in a splendid s six-room flat which they gradually filled with bric-à-brac and furniture shipped from f home. They had access to the special shops reserved for the Soviet elite, and were able to import canned goods and drinks from Denmark. They even had a dacha — a country cottage 20 miles from Moscow where the children could swim, fish, bicycle and forage for mushrooms. Maclean’s study resembled b that of a cambridge professor, p with copies of Trollope, T biographies of Gladstone and airmail editions of The Times. He was able to order new books from Bowes & Bowes B bookshop in cambridge, br who checked with Mi5 M whether they should be supplying him.
After A five years of silence, sil communications were we re-established with family fa and friends. Melinda put the bravest of f faces on her situation when wh she wrote to her still sti grief-stricken mother that th she understood the su‘ B suffering she had caused.
‘But believe me i did the right rig thing and don’t regret it,’ she wrote, aware of those who might read her letters on both sides of the iron curtain. ‘ Donald is well and happy to be with his family again. This is absolutely the best place for us. life is good here in every way.’
Maclean seemed totally at one with Soviet ways and believed to his death that the USSR and its ‘new society has a much better prospect than the old of overcoming the major ills and injustices of our civilisation’.
He would say ‘we’ and ‘our’ when speaking of the Soviet Union and defended his adopted country’s brutal crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 — an event that disgusted many leftwing supporters back in the Uk. But though his love affair with ‘ the cause’ never wavered, his love affair with Melinda did.
All was reasonably well between them until kim Philby — the master-spy who recruited him back in their cambridge days — himself defected in 1963. His wife eleanor joined him in Moscow, and the Philbys and the Macleans spent a lot of time together, going to the ballet or just having dinner and playing bridge.
eleanor found Melinda amusing but ‘nervous and highly strung’ and yearning ‘for the luxuries of western capitalism’. She sensed that the Macleans’ marriage was a difficult one again, with Donald on occasion still getting hopelessly drunk.
But the two men, for so long ideological comrades, fell out. Maclean accused Philby of being a double agent working for the British and they stopped speaking.
Philby, though, began seeing Melinda on the side, confessing as much to his wife and saying that he was just ‘trying to make [ Melinda’s] life happier’ as she had been miserable for the last 15 years.
Melinda walked out on her husband, leaving the children with Donald, and moved in with Philby. They lived together for three years, until a younger woman caught the philandering Philby’s eye. Melinda returned to Donald, but two years later moved to her own apartment. He
DiDn’T seem to mind that their marriage was over. He was happy in Moscow and fulfilled by his work.
eventually, Melinda went back to her home country, the U.S., bringing to an end nearly 40 years of endurance, loyalty and betrayal. By the time she left Russia, Maclean was in his final decline, in and out of hospital with cancer from his lifetime of smoking.
He died in 1983 at the age of 69, recording beforehand that ‘i do not at all regret having done what seemed and still seems to me my duty’.
His ashes were brought back to england, as he had requested, and buried in his parents’ grave — after dark and by torchlight so that the press would not get wind of it. it seemed a fitting finale for such a notable spy.
Burgess predeceased him by 20 years, carried off by angina, an abused liver and hardening of the arteries.
As for Melinda — the central figure in the circle of loyalty and secrecy, desertion and reconciliation, love and solitariness that was the human drama of Donald Maclean’s life — she lived well into her 90s before dying in new York in 2010, silent to the end about her years with one of Britain’s most infamous traitors.
aDaPtED from a Spy named orphan by Roland Philipps, to be published by the Bodley head on april 26 at £20. to order a copy for £15, visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P free on orders over £15. offer valid until May 1, 2018.