THE SPY WHO BE AT HIS WIFE

Burgess and Philby we know about, but fellow Cambridge traitor Donald Maclean – who leaked our atomic secrets – remains an enigma. Now, newly released papers reveal how, as the net closed in, he resorted to manic drinking and brutality – yet STILL the Est

THE two old chums were on the bender to end all benders, two days of unfettered drinking in the Egyptian capital of Cairo. They downed a coma-inducing six bottles of gin before staggering off in search of yet more booze. They banged on the door of a flat they thought belonged to someone they knew, but was in fact where the U.S. ambassador’s secretary lived. Thankfully, she was not at home. They pushed their way past the startled housekeeper into the flat and ransacked the place.

They emptied drawers and upset furniture and then, having found nothing to drink, in their anger and frustration they went berserk. In the bathroom, they shoved clothes down the lavatory, and one of them picked up a large mirror and brandished it above his head before crashing it down into the bath. The mirror stayed intact; the bath split in two.

Then the pair of them sat weeping alcoholic tears of remorse and self-pity before creeping away, going upstairs to another friend’s flat and passing out.

It was unseemly behaviour for two men in their mid-30s, but all the more shocking because one of them was a leading British diplomat, ranked number three in the Cairo embassy.

Tall and handsome with an aristocrat’s bearing, Donald Maclean was, on the surface, the perfect gentleman in his pinstriped suit and bow tie. His sharp brain, photographic memory, grasp of complex situations and unflappability had made him a high-flyer in the Foreign Office, a British civil servant par excellence.

The son of Scots Liberal politican Sir Donald Maclean, he was charming and well connected. He had served with distinction in London, Paris and Washington before arriving in Cairo as the next step on a glittering career path which seemed certain to culminate in him becoming an ambassador. Perhaps even higher up the chain of command — head of the Foreign Office even, was the whisper. Admiring colleagues already dubbed him ‘Sir Donald’ in anticipation of future greatness.

To others, though, he was ‘Gordon’ — after the brand of gin he downed like water. This Donald Maclean disappeared on selfdestructive binges and was all too often angry and violent, with an uncontrollable temper. At parties he’d have blistering rows at the drop of a hat. More than once he took his fists to his long-suffering American wife, Melinda.

Why he drank so much was a mystery at the time. Only later would the reason emerge: Maclean, the quintessential Whitehall mandarin, was a Russian spy.

In Moscow Centre, HQ of the Soviet intelligence network, they knew him as ‘Orphan’, ‘Lyric’, ‘Stuart’, then ‘Homer’ — just a few of his agent codenames, as for 15 years he passed vital secrets to his masters in the Kremlin.

He was leading a double life, risking everything, in constant danger of being discovered. Alcohol, in vast quantities, was his refuge. His binges should have alerted the authorities that he was a security risk.

But, to their shame, they refused to believe that a man with his credentials — MP father, public school education, First from Cambridge, impeccable references — could be a traitor. MACLEAN has always been dismissed as the least interesting member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring, whose activities on behalf of Moscow as moles inside the British Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service, once they were exposed, shocked the nation.

Kim Philby was the ruthlessly calculating spymaster supreme; Guy Burgess a flamboyant and debauched character who recklessly flaunted his (then illegal) homosexuality; Anthony Blunt, the nonchalant aesthete and art historian who rose to become a senior member of the royal household as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.

But Maclean was a greyer figure, lurking more in the background. Three years ago, MI5 and Foreign Office files on him were released. They show the full extent of his betrayal of his country and the Western alliance, and of the troubled double life he led before he defected to Moscow, along with Burgess, in 1951.

He came from the very heart of the British Establishment as the son of a respected and knighted Liberal MP and government minister.

References from his public school, Gresham’s in Norfolk, acclaimed his ‘exceptional’ moral character, his reliability and his integrity. He was simply not the sort to let anyone down.

This was reinforced by his unbending and moralising Presbyterian father — ironically a fervent teetotaller and campaigner for temperance. From him, young Donald learned to be a man of conscience, believing that you had to do what you thought was right, whatever the cost.

And, as he progressed from Gresham’s to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1931, what he increasingly thought was right was communism.

The university was a hotbed of Marxism, seen by a group of radical dons and their students as the only credible political solution to the ailing economies, unemployment and fractured societies of that era, dominated by the General Strike, the Depression and the rise of fascism.

Intoxicated by the rhetoric of international proletarian revolution (and ignorant of the reality of Stalin’s Terror), they believed that the Soviet Union stood for peaceful progress.

Maclean was a total convert to the anti-capitalist cause. According to a family friend, ‘he identified himself so much with the masses that he sold all his clothes, wore second-hand ones instead and went about in a generally scruffy way, especially as regards his fingernails’.

HE MADE no secret of his new allegiance, joining Left-wing demonstrations and decorating his college rooms with red banners, slogans and Marxist tracts.

So burning was his certainty about socialism that his plan, on graduating in 1934 with a First in French and German, was to renounce what he called his British ‘privileges’ and move to Russia to teach English while he awaited world revolution.

A supper with Philby — a fellow socialist at Cambridge — at a flat in Kilburn changed all that. Philby, now a journalist, confessed that he was devoting his life to communism and had been recruited as an agent by Otto, the codename of a Soviet spy in London.

The first job Otto gave him was to enmesh Maclean, who they both reckoned stood a good chance of passing the punishing exams for entrance to the Foreign Office and could do ‘special work for us there’.

Maclean didn’t hesitate. He’d been longing for the opportunity to put his beliefs into practice. This was it.

Two days later, he walked into a North London café carrying a book with a bright yellow cover as an identification signal for the first of his many meetings with Otto. There and then he committed himself wholeheartedly to the cause, and to a life of secrecy as a Soviet mole.

He carefully filled in his application to the Foreign Office, showing himself the master of the deft deflection by leaving blank the box about political affiliations.

He relied instead on his Cambridge tutor’s glowing reference that he was ‘a man who had the courage of his convictions and able to make up his own mind firmly and decisively after hearing various