A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps
Miranda Carter
A Spy Named Orphan By Roland Philipps Bodley Head £20 Oldie price £17.80 inc p&p
Of all the Cambridge spies, Donald Maclean was the most decent and the least known. Kim Philby was a destructive charmer, Guy Burgess a destructive drunk, and Blunt a repressed, chilly academic. But, as Roland Philipps argues in his admirable biography, Maclean was a sincere, ideological convert who wanted to make the world a better place.
A slim volume about Maclean by his friend Robert Cecil came out thirty years ago. Philipps, using British security service and Foreign Office files released in 2015, as well as fascinating information that has emerged since glasnost from the Russian archives,
and a slew of more recent memoirs, draws a far more satisfying picture of Maclean’s life and spying.
Maclean was born in 1913 into an austere Presbyterian home presided over by his father, an exhaustingly moral, teetotal Liberal MP. Here and at public school – Gresham’s in Norfolk, famous for its ‘honour system’ whereby boys swore to ‘avoid impurity’ and, more toxically, to inform on others who failed to – he learned to keep ‘himself hidden while remaining a model of conformity’.
At school, Maclean lost his faith and found Marx. At Cambridge – after his father died suddenly in 1932 – he sold all his clothes, out of what a contemporary called ‘a humanitarian interest in the underdog’, and joined the Communist Party. In 1934, after he graduated with a first, Kim Philby, a fellow Cambridge communist, suggested he carry out ‘special work’ from inside the Foreign Office. Maclean instantly accepted. Days later, he met Arnold Deutsch, the brilliant NKVD agent who recruited all the Cambridge spies. He codenamed the solitary, diffident young man ‘Orphan’.
Deutsch, who’d studied psychology in Vienna, looked for four qualities in a spy: class resentment, a predilection for secrecy, a yearning to belong and an infantile appetite for praise and reassurance. Maclean scored on all fronts. When Maclean joined the Foreign Office in 1935, he was rapidly tipped for the top, praised for his capacity for hard work and grasp of detail – though there were murmurings about ‘immaturity’ – possibly code for drinking. As he rose, he passed on thousands of documents: from Britain’s war preparations against Germany, to the D-day landings plans; from Churchill’s communications with Roosevelt and Truman on Yalta and the Soviet invasion of Poland, to the Manhattan Project; from early proposals for Nato to the Marshall Plan.
Maclean must have been the most valuable of the Cambridge spies to the Soviets but, unlike Philby, he hated his double life, likening spying to cleaning lavatories. But it was also the only thing that made him feel useful. Out of contact in the early 1940s, he begged Moscow to be back in the fold: ‘It is my life, I live for it.’ Outside work he was an increasingly scary, rude, violent drunk.
In 1948, he was posted to Cairo where, in a miasma of self-loathing and alcoholism, he caused scene after scene, breaking a friend’s leg, beating his pregnant wife, Melinda, and trashing an embassy flat. The Foreign Office turned a wilfully blind eye, but Melinda finally begged he be sent to London to be treated for a ‘nervous breakdown’.
American intelligence, meanwhile, had rumbled to the presence of a mole in the Foreign Office. In his cups, Maclean frequently declared himself to be the English Alger Hiss. British intelligence — long unwilling to accept that a member of the ‘Establishment’ (a phrase coined in the aftermath of the affair) might be a Soviet spy – finally had him followed, but kept delaying an interview. In May 1951, he disappeared, along with Guy Burgess. Melinda was eight months pregnant.
‘The Missing Diplomats’ became an international news story, and a massive embarrassment to the British government. Everyone knew they were in Russia, but they only publicly resurfaced at a press conference in Moscow in 1956.
Maclean spent the rest of his life in Russia, writing and lecturing on international affairs for the wellrespected Institute of World Economics and International Relations. Unlike his fellow exiles Burgess and Philby, he was never nostalgic for Britain and, Philipps argues convincingly, was certain he had done the right thing. Philipps also claims, with lesser authority, that the information Maclean provided significantly de-escalated the Cold War; for example, by convincing the Russians that, despite Truman’s declaration that hundreds of atom bombs were trained on Soviet targets, the Americans were less of a threat than they claimed. One of Maclean’s friends described him as ‘misguided’ but a ‘noble victim’.
Melinda was arguably the greater victim. Party to his secret and tirelessly loyal, she put up with years of abuse. She followed him to Russia in 1953 but after 25 years she left him for Philby (who traded her in, three years later, for a younger model). His children left Russia for the US and the UK – with his blessing: he felt he’d ‘deflected’ their lives ‘from their normal course’.
As Philipps describes in this compassionate, absorbing book, Maclean died alone, stoic and uncomplaining, in 1983.