Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2018024555 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018024555 |
| HEADING: | Philipps, Roland |
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| 001 | 10737411 |
| 005 | 20180430135555.0 |
| 008 | 180430n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2018024555 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 100 | 1_ |a Philipps, Roland |
| 670 | __ |a A spy named Orphan, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Roland Philipps) data view (Former managing and publishing director of Hodder & Stoughton and Macmillan London; lives in London) |
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Cambridge, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Publishing executive and writer. Hodder & Stoughton, London, England, former managing and publishing director; Macmillan London, England, former managing and publishing director; John Murray (publishing house), London, England, publisher.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Roland Philipps is a publishing executive and writer based in London, England. He has served as managing and publishing director for Hodder & Stoughton and Macmillan London and has held the title of publisher at John Murray. Philipps holds a degree from the University of Cambridge.
In 2018 Philipps released his first book, a biography called A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean. In this volume, he chronicles the life of Maclean, a British intelligence officer who worked as an agent for the Soviets. Philipps explains that Kim Philby, another British double agent, was responsible for recruiting Maclean. During WWII, Maclean shared secrets with the Soviets about American-made nuclear weapons, among other things. He fled to the Soviet Union after being found out and lived out the rest of his life there.
William Boyd, reviewer in the New Statesman, commented: “Roland Philipps relates the complex narrative of Maclean’s treason—and those of his colleagues—with tremendous aplomb, limpidity and acuity.” A Kirkus Reviews writer described A Spy Named Orphan as “a solid if sometimes plodding account, of much interest to students of espionage and counterintelligence.” “Even though Maclean remains a mysterious figure, this is likely to be considered the definitive biography,” asserted a contributor to Publishers Weekly. Mary Jo Murphy, critic in Washington Post Book World, remarked: “Philipps provides plenty of evidence for his version of the mysterious Maclean, and the details make for gripping, enlightening and occasionally exasperating reading. He is sometimes repetitive in conjuring the purity of his ‘tall, distinctive’ protagonist’s motives. He also doesn’t fully reconcile Maclean’s near-constant insobriety with his talent for both his taxing jobs. Details from Maclean’s three decades in the Soviet Union are understandably sketchy, but there are enough to make the case that Maclean found a life among the favored class there and never regretted his choices.” Reviewing the book on the London Guardian Online, Rachel Cooke suggested: “Philipps, a distinguished former publisher but a first-time author, sometimes indulges in a little too much noisy foreshadowing of what lies ahead, a technique that betrays a wholly unnecessary nervousness with his material. But this is a small thing. He writes so cleanly, and at such a clip, handling the big scenes with aplomb.” Cooke concluded: “This biography first grips and then lingers long in the mind. It is a page-turner of the most empathetic kind.” Another writer on the London Guardian Online, Richard Davenport-Hines, stated: “Philipps sets a great example by being punchy and hard-nosed in his handling of facts, but pliant, imaginative and humane in his understanding of motives and emotions.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean.
New Statesman, April 27, 2018, William Boyd, “The Silver Spoon Spy: How Donald Maclean Used the Establishment,” review of A Spy Named Orphan, p. 50.
Publishers Weekly, February 26, 2018, review of A Spy Named Orphan, p. 78.
Washington Post Book World, June 15, 2018, Mary Jo Murphy, “The High-Minded Justification of a Briton Who Spied for the Soviets,” review of A Spy Named Orphan.
ONLINE
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 23, 2018), Rachel Cooke, review of A Spy Named Orphan; (April 26, 2018), Richard Davenport-Hines, review of A Spy Named Orphan.
United Agents website, http://www.unitedagents.co.uk/ (September 5, 2018), author profile.
Washington Times Online, https://www.washingtontimes.com (July 10, 2018), Joseph C. Goulden, review of A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean
Roland Philipps went into publishing on graduating from Cambridge and is currently Publisher of John Murray. He has edited some leading novelists, politicians, historians, travellers and biographers. A SPY NAMED ORPHAN is his first book.
QUOTED: "Roland Philipps relates the complex narrative of Maclean's treason—and those of his colleagues—with tremendous aplomb, limpidity and acuity."
The silver spoon spy: How Donald
Maclean used the establishment
William Boyd
New Statesman.
147.5416 (Apr. 27, 2018): p50+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean Roland Philipps
Bodley Head, 425pp. 20 [pounds sterling]
Back in the mid-1960s, I went on a school trip to Inverness. We were allowed 30 minutes of liberty in the city centre before returning and as the senior boy I was responsible for counting heads to make sure all were present after our brief furlough. I counted and recounted--we were short by two. I turned to the teacher: "I'm sorry, sir," I said, "But Burgess and Maclean are missing." The unbridled hilarity that greeted my remark--from teacher and bus driver--alerted me to the fact that I had inadvertently stumbled on an adult joke. I was baffled. It was explained to me. It was the first time I heard of Donald Maclean.
I very much doubt if the joke would detonate now. Donald Maclean along with Guy Burgess, two senior British diplomats, defected to the Soviet Union in 1951 although their presence there was not admitted until 1956. They were the first notorious alumni of what was to become known as the "Cambridge Five": that generation of British traitors and double agents, all graduates of Cambridge University, that so defines the British experience of the Cold War. Maclean, Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross are part of 20th-century espionage history-- though the infamous resonance that their names once generated is steadily diminishing. Spying has changed --it's all about surveillance and whistle-blowing now--and the privileged, intellectualised, haute bourgeoisie treason that the Cambridge Five represented seems almost passe--a curiosity, belonging to a different time and another world. But, as this superb biography
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makes clear, the story of Maclean and his fellow travellers is full of contemporary relevance, particularly for this country. The ideology--communism--that spurred these traitors on may be vanished or moribund but the attitudes, assumptions, patterns of behaviour and gross sins of omission that the Maclean and Burgess defection exposed are both timeless and very British.
Donald Maclean (1913-1983) was the son of a knighted cabinet minister. Every middle-class privilege--and curse--was his. Public school (Gresham's), Cambridge University (Trinity Hall) and early admission to the Foreign Office--he was only 22 when he became a third secretary-- seemed part of that inevitable progression granted to those with silver spoons clamped firmly between their teeth.
Maclean joined the Foreign Office in 1934 and was almost immediately provided with access to secret information. By then he was fully engaged in his double life having being recruited and "run" by an Austrian emigre named Arnold Deutsch, the NKVD's rezident in London and the man who was largely responsible for recruiting the Cambridge Five in the 1930s. Maclean was from the outset an astonishingly diligent supplier of useful information, taking files home with him from the office and having them photographed for delivery to Moscow Centre.
Tall, fair-haired and attractive, Maclean maintained a surface allure of patrician charm and super- efficiency that, as time went by, failed to obscure the demons wrestling beneath. An ideological communist whose core ideals managed to survive the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, he was to become as valued a spy for Moscow as Kim Philby. When Maclean was posted to Washington DC towards the end of the war the flow of information became even more vitally useful. In late 1944, as the defeat of Nazi Germany loomed, Maclean was able to supply Stalin with the full minutes of the secret meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in Quebec at which the two
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leaders pondered the shape of postwar Europe. Maclean, code-named "Homer" ("Orphan" had been his first pseudonym), was a massively important intelligence asset. More information followed: Stalin appeared mysteriously well briefed about the British and American positions at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 yet nobody suspected a thing.
Maclean's value increased in the early nuclear age once the war was over: accurate details about America's true A-bomb capability found their way swiftly to Homer's controllers. Maclean could specify the exact tonnage of uranium bought by the Americans in 1947--enough to make around 50 bombs. Russian foreign policy was modified as a result of the intelligence he was providing. However, while his smooth ascent of the Foreign Office hierarchy increased and, concomitantly, his importance as a spy, his personal life began to unravel.
In 1940 he had married Melinda Marling, an American, to whom, almost immediately, he confessed that he was a Russian agent. She was, somewhat amazingly, happy to live on with him in this duplicity. Children were born, two sons, and in 1948, at the very early age of 35, Maclean was posted from Washington to Cairo as "counsellor", the youngest in the Diplomatic Service. The next rung on the ladder would be an ambassadorship. At this stage of the Cold War, the Soviets had Maclean and Burgess at the centre of the British Foreign Office, Blunt in MI5, Cairn- cross at the Government Cipher School (later GCHQ) and Philby at MI6. The penetration was extraordinary and complete.
But the strain of the double life was beginning to tell. Maclean, a chain smoker, and always a heavy drinker, became a barely functioning alcoholic in Cairo in the late 1940s. His favourite tipple was a noxious blend of whisky and arak. In his cups he was violent and rude, expressing virulent anti-American sentiments and proclaiming himself a socialist. He confessed, while drunk, to being a member of the Communist Party and, on one occasion, even to being a Russian agent. One morning, after a binge, he was found wandering on a Cairo street, lost, dishevelled and dirty, his shoes in one hand, still drunk from the evening's excesses.
The self-destruction seemed almost like a wilful act of exposure. By now the Secret Intelligence Service was aware of "leaks" emanating from the Washington embassy. But no one ever suspected good old Donald. After trashing a flat while searching for booze he was sent back to England, where it was assumed that pressure of work had brought about a nervous breakdown. But the noose was tightening. American decryption of Russian telegrams made it increasingly obvious that the source was Maclean and yet, as Philipps eloquently puts it, "the blind eye of mandarin and class prejudice" appeared unable to see anything more sinister.
The denouement is now a familiar story. Philby, in the US, aware of the ticking clock of discovery and exposure, had Burgess tell Maclean the game was up. The two men (with the complicity of Melinda) fled in May 1951--to Paris, Bern and then Prague--and then disappeared. Only in 1956 would the "missing diplomats" surface in Moscow. A few years later Philby joined them. All three lived out their final years in Soviet Russia, Philby indulging in the ultimate double-cross of having an affair with Melinda that brought the Maclean marriage to an end. Maclean died in 1983 of cancer.
Roland Philipps relates the complex narrative of Maclean's treason--and those of his colleagues--
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with tremendous aplomb, limpidity and acuity. Despite his manifest torments, Maclean somehow always believed in what he was doing--not necessarily the case with the others. Intriguingly, he seemed happy in his Russian exile while Burgess and Philby drank themselves to death. What made the treason of the Cambridge Five so abidingly disturbing was the British establishment's purblind reluctance to give it credence. People like us just don't betray their country. Philby's treachery was equally devastating to this upper-class complacency. Not our Kim, surely? Only clever American code-breakers discovered the perpetrators and it took decades for the reputation of the British secret service to recover since the establishment's efforts to cover up and minimise the damage were as inept as its attempts at counter espionage.
What makes members of the privileged elite betray their country? My own belief is that it is, fundamentally, the result of a growing hatred of that very class into which they were born. General ideological reasons --the fight against fascism in the 1930s were transformed over years into an ardent personal desire to foul the nest, to put it very simply. Interestingly, all these British traitors had remote, austere fathers with demanding or eccentric moral codes--and adoring mothers. Over to you, Dr Freud.
And the cost of such constant duplicity? Maclean's degenerate crack-up in Cairo is testimony to the pressures of living the life of a spy. Philipps is very astute on the nuances of psychological interpretation; he tellingly quotes another traitor, Klaus Fuchs (who helped the Russians build their atom bomb), who stated that being a spy meant living a life of "controlled schizophrenia". For Maclean controlling that schizoid life soon became impossible--overtly serving one system and hating it while covertly yearning for and abetting another. Maybe that explains the paradoxical tranquillity of his modest Russian exile. He was finally happy--the spying was over.
Secrets and lies: Maclean's wife Melinda went on to have an affair with Kim Philby
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Boyd, William. "The silver spoon spy: How Donald Maclean used the establishment." New
Statesman, 27 Apr. 2018, p. 50+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A537981782/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c27720de. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537981782
QUOTED: "a solid if sometimes plodding account, of much interest to students of espionage and counterintelligence."
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Philipps, Roland: A SPY NAMED ORPHAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Philipps, Roland A SPY NAMED ORPHAN Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-393-60857-1
A tale of the tangled web spun by a Briton who spied for the Soviet Union and ended his days in Moscow exile.
Less cynical, and perhaps less effective, than his contemporaries Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, fellow members of the spy ring that came to be called the Cambridge Five, Donald Maclean (1913-1983) was a true believer in the communist cause. After defecting to the Soviet Union, he wrote to his mother that he had "done nothing of which I am ashamed and of which you need be ashamed for me." The British government felt differently, of course. Philipps, whose grandfather worked alongside Maclean in the Foreign Office, turns in a careful though fairly bland study of Maclean and his motivations, which, though apparently pure, were given a desperate edge by a long dependence on alcohol. As the author writes, if the Cambridge University of the 1920s was a broadly conservative place, by the 1930s, in the words of the poet Julian Bell, "a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates are Communists, or almost Communists." That was certainly true of Maclean, who otherwise had few of the psychological markers that Soviet spy recruiters sought--e.g., low self-esteem and distance among family members. Maclean was a solid performer as a spy, heeding instructions not to socialize with his fellow spooks inasmuch as it was "against Soviet tradecraft to allow social contacts between agents," even as Philby and Burgess broke that rule by living together. Maclean performed his government job well, too, leading to a posting in Washington, D.C., where he enjoyed "unparalleled access...[in] the hub of the Western allies in the rapidly burgeoning Cold War." Even so, writes Philipps, the Soviets were careful to shield him from the likes of Alger Hiss, the Venona project, and other spy operations.
A solid if sometimes plodding account, of much interest to students of espionage and counterintelligence.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Philipps, Roland: A SPY NAMED ORPHAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650682/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8f290e3c. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650682
QUOTED: "Even though Maclean remains a mysterious figure, this is likely to be considered the definitive biography."
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A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean
Publishers Weekly.
265.9 (Feb. 26, 2018): p78+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean
Roland Philipps. Norton, $28.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-393-60857-1
In this often exciting narrative, Philipps uses a trove of recently declassified files to trace the arc of Russian spy Donald Maclean's life. While studying at Cambridge, Maclean became a supporter of communism and fatefully met Kim Philby, a fellow member of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Philby went on to become a high-ranking British intelligence officer, and he recruited Maclean as a Soviet agent before Maclean landed a job with the Foreign Office in 1935. The valuable information Maclean was to share included the truth about America's nuclear capacity in 1948, as tensions flared over the division of Berlin, and secrets relating to America's development of uranium for use in nuclear weapons. Maclean and his co-conspirators were eventually discovered, leading to his flight to Russia in 1951, where he lived until his death in 1983. Maclean's motivations for betraying his country remain murky, despite Philipps 's speculation that its seeds lay in the oppressive private school he attended--Gresham's School, in an isolated pocket of eastern England. Philipps believes that the required loyalty oaths to the school's masters encouraged betrayals of one's classmates and contributed to making Gresham's "the perfect psychological training-ground for a nascent spy." Even though Maclean remains a mysterious figure, this is likely to be considered the definitive biography. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean." Publishers Weekly, 26 Feb. 2018, p.
78+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530637474 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=cd7d1129. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530637474
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Book World: The high-minded
justification of a Briton who spied for
the Soviets
Mary Jo Murphy
The Washington Post.
(June 15, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Murphy, Mary Jo. "Book World: The high-minded justification of a Briton who spied for the
Soviets." Washington Post, 15 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542886373/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=435fdcf6. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542886373
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Story TOpics
Roland Phillips
Foreign Office
Donald Maclean
Cambridge
By Joseph C. Goulden - - Tuesday, July 10, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
A SPY NAMED ORPHAN: THE ENIGMA OF DONALD MACLEAN
By Roland Phillips
W.W. Norton, $28.95, 440 pages
Even after the passage of more than half a century, anyone even vaguely familiar with national security clearances must blink at British handling of the coterie of Soviet spies known as “The Cambridge Five.”
Consider the rogue at hand, Donald Maclean. Although a blithering drunk for much of his career in the Foreign Office, he seemed on a path to be foreign minister while in his mid-30s.
Roland Phillips, who had a long career in London publishing, uses newly-released British archives to add fresh details on the oft-told story of the five Cambridge students recruited as Soviet agents the 1930s.
He also gained access to Maclean family papers.
Aside from H.R. “Kim” Philby who culminated his career as counterintelligence chief for British intelligence, Maclean was the most effective agent.
Campus communists inevitably drew the attention of Soviet recruiters. Maclean possessed four desirable qualities of a secret agent: “an inherent class resentfulness, a predilection for secretiveness, a yearning to belong, and an infantile appetite for praise and reassurance.” He was given the code name “Waise” in German, meaning “Orphan.”
When interviewed for the Foreign Office, Maclean was asked about his “strong communist views” while at Cambridge. He decided to “brazen it out,” replying that “I haven’t entirely shaken them off.”
He was hired. In the 1930s, a time of worldwide depression, with Hitler rising in power, student communism raised no security concerns.
But in later years, when the Soviet Union emerged as a threat to the West, Maclean’s early background somehow did not draw any serious scrutiny,
Maclean began his spying in the pre-war years when Foreign Office security was non-existence. Hence he could carry home a briefcase filled with classified documents.
Office policy was that “secret” papers should not be removed from the office. “But nobody checked because they assumed that the edict would be heeded,” even as “his briefcase bulged more and more each evening.”
In 1935, he was assigned as a handler an English-born woman named Katy Harris, who had lived briefly in Chicago. While there, she married Earl Browder, secretary of the Communist Party USA (who already had a wife and son in Russia).
Defying tradecraft rules, the two became lovers. In five years Maclean gave Harris enough documents to fill 45 boxes, each containing 300 pages — 135,000 in all. (The sheer volume caused Moscow analysts to worry that British intelligence was feeding false information.)
In 1939, while living in Paris, Maclean met and married an American woman, Melinda Marling, from a well-do-to family. Early on, he told her he was a spy. As Mr. Phillips concludes, “he needed a secret sharer in his life a silent witness.”
The bride, whose father was alcoholic, worried at her husband’s dependence on booze. She pleaded, “If you feel an urge to have a drinking orgy, why don’t you do so at home — so at least you will be able to get safely to bed “
Maclean ignored her. When he was in the embassy in Cairo, he became irate on a boating trip and began choking Melinda. Horrified friends dragged him away.
Foreign Office colleagues ignored Maclean’s heavy drinking, and his frequent absences from the office because he “had a cold.”
Nor did security offices pay significance attention to Maclean’s classmate Guy Burgess, also in the Foreign Office. In an era when homosexuality was a criminal offense in England, Burgess made no secret of his affairs.
He was proudly flamboyant, happy to entertain pub crowds by singing, “Little boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday “
(Burgess would claim he and Maclean had homosexual relations while at Cambridge, and Mrs. Maclean later said that her husband told her of sexual trysts with men.)
But a particularly outrageous drunken episode resulted in Maclean being recalled from Cairo. He and a friend capped an evening by trashing the apartment of a woman assigned to the U.S. embassy. He was sent home but his clearance remained intact.
Maclean gave Russia a steady flow of secret documents before and during the war. Posted to Washington later, he revealed details of Cold War strategy.
He was such a trusted figure that the Atomic Energy Commission gave him a visitor’s past enabling him to roam the top-secret facility with an escort.
Soviet spy cables intercepted by the U.S. eventually led to disclosure of the ring. Maclean and Burgess fled to Russia.
Mr. Phillips — who notes that he is the grandson of a prominent British communist — maintains that Maclean “always disliked the grubbiness inherent in the physical business of spying. He justified spying saying it was “like being a lavatory attendant: it stinks but someone has to do it.”
He succeeded because trusting colleagues ignored stinks that should have alerted them to an untrustworthy man. A horrible example of “personnel security.”
• Joseph C. Goulden writes frequently on intelligence and military matters.
Copyright © 2018 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
QUOTED: "Philipps sets a great example by being punchy and hard-nosed in his handling of facts, but pliant, imaginative and humane in his understanding of motives and emotions."
A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps review – the Enigma of Donald Maclean
An effective counter to ‘He-Man’ espionage history, this humane study emphasises the Cambridge spy’s strength of political feeling
Richard Davenport-Hines
Thu 26 Apr 2018 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Fri 27 Apr 2018 19.10 EDT
Donald Maclean with his wife, Melinda, and sons in the early 1950s.
Donald Maclean with his wife, Melinda, and sons in the early 1950s. Photograph: Keystone-France/Getty Images
For generations the history of espionage has been dominated by He-Men. Wrapping themselves in the union flag, trampling down subtleties, recycling one another’s hoary old half-truths, mixing wrathful indignation with false bonhomie à la Farage, they churned out their crude and misleading potboilers. It was a heavily gendered approach, with good blokes and bad, black and white, straight and bent.
Improvements began in this century with Miranda Carter’s superb life of Anthony Blunt, and then Gill Bennett’s biography of Desmond Morton. Now a new generation of male authors is learning from their example. Andrew Lownie’s study of the “Cambridge” spy Guy Burgess, and now Roland Philipps’s biography of Burgess’s fellow agent Donald Maclean, show that it is possible for men to write espionage history without patriotic bluster or imperialist nostalgia.
Enemies Within by Richard Davenport-Hines review – the Cambridge spies and distrust of the elite
Read more
Maclean was born in 1913. His father was a solicitor who was active in Cardiff chamber of commerce and elected as a Liberal MP. His paternal grandfather was a Hebridean fisherman and shoemaker. Gaelic was his grandmother’s first language. In the 1930s his mother ran a knitting shop and jigsaw-puzzle lending library. Donald helped to fit it out. Despite the later allegations of establishment protection and cover-ups, he was never a “toff” by birth, tastes or assimilation.
Maclean gained a first in modern languages from Cambridge in the early 1930s. His open avowal of communism halted after his recruitment in 1934 as a penetration agent of the NKVD (later renamed KGB): his codename was Orphan. He joined the diplomatic service in 1935, and began remitting to Moscow intelligence he gleaned while working in key Foreign Office departments and in the Paris embassy. He perfected, Philipps says, “the spy’s most essential art of keeping himself hidden while remaining a model of conformity in plain sight”.
Britain and Stalinist Russia were close allies against Germany in 1941-45. Conservative leaders, including Churchill, hailed the Red Army and even Stalin as saviours. This enabled Maclean to rationalise his continuing betrayal of top secrets after he was sent in 1944 to the Washington embassy. As a diplomatic high-flier he had, as Philipps writes, “Access All Areas”, including dossiers on the atom bomb and the beginnings of the strategy of nuclear deterrence.
A crisis came when he was transferred to Cairo in 1948. He-Men historians venerate the epoch when world maps were covered in the red of the British empire. They seldom mention the fervent anti-colonialism of Maclean and other Cambridge spies as a motivation, but it deserves respectful consideration. Maclean’s loathing of the exploitation of developing world labour and resources would now be considered mainstream decency. In Cairo the strain of his double life and his repugnance at the racism, privileges and smugness of other Anglo-American officials drove him by 1950 to alcoholic violence, a nervous breakdown and an emergency repatriation to London for medical treatment.
Red Square, Moscow, in 1950.
Red Square, Moscow, in 1950. Photograph: Frederic Lewis/Getty Images
The decrypting of intercepted Soviet espionage messages brought him under MI5 investigation in 1951. He and Burgess absconded days before he was going to be detained for questioning, and did not reappear until a press conference in Moscow in 1956.
Maclean wrote one book in retirement, British Foreign Policy Since Suez (1970), which covered the years between 1956 and 1968. It is often described as boring verbiage by commentators who have clearly never read it. In chapters of mandarin elegance and precision, he examined Britain’s failure to adjust its self-importance in a post-colonial world, and made a coded plea for the Soviet Union to move towards glasnost. Philipps rightly calls the book’s arguments “compelling”.
In the early 50s London officials were cowed by the US’s accusations of lax security in government departments. They did not counter that security had been no better in Washington – the American equivalent of MI6, the OSS, had been riddled with Soviet agents. Part of London’s self-defence relied on a campaign of sexual scapegoating. Burgess had been openly gay, and faced the world, it was said, with his flies unbuttoned. The widespread story that Maclean was bisexual is false. As Philipps shows, his orientation from the age of 20 was towards women. Nevertheless, in order to placate J Edgar Hoover, the homophobic closeted head of the FBI, Whitehall made homosexuality a reason for withholding security clearance. The police launched a campaign of surveillance and entrapment that damaged tens of thousands of lives in the 50s and 60s, and drove men such as Alan Turing to suicide. He-Men writers have nevertheless upheld the fiction that Maclean was gay or bisexual, and encouraged half a century of homophobia.
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Espionage history writing still has too much high-testosterone nationalism. The subject should be integrated into all studies of contemporary politics: intelligence and counter-espionage have been central to government since the late 40s, when the prime minister, Clement Attlee, and the head of MI5 counter-espionage talked almost daily. Philipps sets a great example by being punchy and hard-nosed in his handling of facts, but pliant, imaginative and humane in his understanding of motives and emotions.
• A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean is published by Bodley Head. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "Philipps, a distinguished former publisher but a first-time author, sometimes indulges in a little too much noisy foreshadowing of what lies ahead, a technique that betrays a wholly unnecessary nervousness with his material. But this is a small thing. He writes so cleanly, and at such a clip, handling the big scenes with aplomb."
"This biography first grips and then lingers long in the mind. It is a page-turner of the most empathetic kind."
A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean – review
Roland Philipps’s gripping retelling of the Soviet spy’s life reveals his appetite for self-destruction
Rachel Cooke
Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Mon 23 Apr 2018 02.00 EDT
Donald Maclean: ‘the most quietly productive of the Cambridge spies and perhaps the strangest too’
Donald Maclean: ‘the most quietly productive of the Cambridge spies and perhaps the strangest too’. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images
In 1949, Donald Maclean, then a senior diplomat at the British embassy in Cairo, and his American wife, Melinda, arranged to take some friends on a picnic. Two feluccas were booked to sail the party, who would eat in the moonlight as they travelled up the Nile to the grand house of a double-barrelled British businessman. There, they would drink port and coffee with his guests, and perhaps play party games, after which they would return to Cairo by road. What could be lovelier? On paper, it must have sounded like a recipe for perfect happiness.
Alas, it was precisely the opposite. Things went wrong from the start, among them the failure of one of the feluccas to appear; the party having crowded on to a single vessel, its progress was slowed dramatically by the weight of its cargo. There was no breeze, and no moonlight. Worst of all, Maclean was drinking even more purposefully than usual: on this occasion, a lethal combination of whisky and zebib, an Egyptian version of arak. By the time they all came ashore, he was smashed. In full sight of the rest of the group he first put his hands around Melinda’s neck and made as if to throttle her. A little later, following a furious argument, he grabbed the rifle of the armed guard who had been employed to patrol the riverbank and began beating him with it. Fearing a diplomatic incident, Lees Mayall, the first secretary at the embassy, nervously tackled his superior to the floor – a move that resulted, when Maclean fell on him, in the double fracture of his ankle. Contrite but still sodden, Maclean offered the poor man gin as an anaesthetic.
This story, chaotic and desperate but tinged with glamour all the same, appears about two-thirds of the way through Roland Philipps’s brilliantly fluent retelling of the life of Donald Maclean, surely the most quietly productive of the Cambridge spies, and perhaps the strangest – and it stands, here, for many others like it. Maclean had a self-destructive streak as wide as the Volga, and his benders were both legendary and highly alarming to those who witnessed them (though on occasion the only onlooker was equally inebriated: he and his friend, the writer Philip Toynbee, once consumed six bottles of Gordon’s between them in the course of a single day).
We expect spies to be lonely, isolated. What we do not expect, perhaps, is that they should worry about grubbiness
But it also talks powerfully to the central mystery of Maclean’s career. He was an extremely good spy, passing many thousands of classified documents to the Russians from his recruitment in 1934 to 1951, when he was finally unmasked. That he evaded detection for so long is less surprising when you consider that the British authorities refused to listen to warnings from the US, even after the FBI had established that an agent code-named Homer had been operating inside the British embassy in Washington during the war.
What is truly amazing, though, is the way Maclean’s personality was split three ways: the almost pedantically efficient diplomat whom his colleagues liked and trusted; the energetic spy whose politics would never waver, not even after the Soviets’ brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956; the miserable soak whose drinking provided his sole escape valve. How is it that the last Maclean never brought down his two other selves? And what are we to make of his loathing for the work of a spy, even as he was determined to do it? Ideology and distaste for the job were always at war inside him; it was, he said, “like being a lavatory attendant – it stinks but someone has to do it”.
Kim Philby, the Observer connection and the establishment world of spies
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We expect spies to be lonely, isolated. What we do not expect, perhaps, is that they should worry about grubbiness; that their job and their conscience should sometimes fall on different sides (his colleagues Guy Burgess and Kim Philby were, as Philipps notes, entirely without this kind of morality). Philipps is ever attentive to such things, and it is they who make his book so fascinating – far more so, I think, than all the unlikely meetings in Leicester Square with handlers carefully carrying copies of novels by AJ Cronin.
Maclean, the son of a Liberal politician whose devout nonconformism could be traced back to Tiree in the Inner Hebrides, attended Gresham’s school in Norfolk, an establishment whose insidious disciplinary code was described by another old boy, WH Auden, as an engine for turning boys into “remote introverts”. In 1931, he went to Cambridge University, which was where he became a communist (Philipps suggests that his conversion may have been, at least in part, an antidote to the blackly depressing times). Recruited as a spy by Arnold Deutsch, the Austrian (or possibly Hungarian) academic who also signed up Kim Philby, he knuckled down to the diplomatic service exams only because this would make him useful (Maclean really wanted to be a teacher). Once inside the Foreign Office – his first codename was “Orphan” – he was soon handing over so many documents at a time, Deutsch was compelled to ask him to slow down; he needed a breather, even if Maclean didn’t. Such activity continued – it seems almost to have been a kind of mania – in Paris and Washington, the cities to which he was first posted, and where he had a ringside seat for, among other things, the carving up of Europe by the allies and the work of the combined policy committee on atomic energy.
Philipps, a distinguished former publisher but a first-time author, sometimes indulges in a little too much noisy foreshadowing of what lies ahead, a technique that betrays a wholly unnecessary nervousness with his material. But this is a small thing. He writes so cleanly, and at such a clip, handling the big scenes with aplomb – particularly the dramatic and oddly poignant days before and after the defection of Burgess and Maclean on the latter’s 38th birthday in 1951, a move made all too easy by the complacency of MI5. But there is something even better here, in the form of the melancholy thread that is Maclean’s singular, flexible and, at times, deeply loving marriage. This runs through his book, like gold. Philipps never loses sight of the mother of Maclean’s three children, and all the various roles she plays. (How much did she know? A very great deal – and yet, in another way perhaps, nothing at all.) Harder to read even than her husband, she was just as capable of grand betrayal (once she had joined her husband behind the iron curtain, she ran off with Kim Philby). In the end, it’s thanks to her that this biography first grips and then lingers long in the mind. It is a page-turner of the most empathetic kind.
• A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps is published by Bodley Head (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
QUOTED: "Philipps provides plenty of evidence for his version of the mysterious Maclean, and the details make for gripping, enlightening and occasionally exasperating reading. He is sometimes repetitive in conjuring the purity of his 'tall, distinctive' protagonist’s motives. He also doesn’t fully reconcile Maclean’s near-constant insobriety with his talent for both his taxing jobs. Details from Maclean’s three decades in the Soviet Union are understandably sketchy, but there are enough to make the case that Maclean found a life among the favored class there and never regretted his choices."
By Mary Jo Murphy
Editor
June 15
Everyone’s a traitor these days. Tattlers in the White House spilling their discontent? Traitors, says President Trump. The paycheck patriots who’ve taken foreign cash while in Trump’s orbit? Traitors, say Americans counting the indictments in the Russia investigation. James Comey? A traitor, asserts a Facebook page called “James Comey is a traitor.”
But there are traitors, and then there’s Donald Maclean. Now here was a card-carrying turncoat. Maclean rose swiftly and efficiently through the diplomatic ranks of the British Foreign Office, all the while delivering reams of documents to his Soviet handlers. He was a lesser-known member of the Cambridge Five — a group of top-drawer British men who spied for the Soviets before, during and after World War II and well into the Cold War, whose ranks included Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. After 15 years, Americans uncovered Maclean’s treachery (the Brits were willfully blind to it), and the spy defected to Russia, never to set foot on Her Majesty’s soil again. He was 38.
[U.S. intelligence problems in North Korea — a new story that is very old]
ADVERTISING
“A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean,” a scrupulous new biography by Roland Philipps, follows Maclean from boarding school in the English countryside to Cambridge University, London and Paris, to Washington, New York and Cairo, back to London and then on to Moscow. Maclean left behind no journals or memoirs, so much of his life has remained in the shadows. Philipps does an admirable job of piecing together the spy’s tale, relying heavily on a trove of previously classified files released by the British security service MI5 in 2015. Philipps also has a family connection to Maclean’s story: His grandfather was Sir Roger Makins, Maclean’s colleague in Washington at the Atomic Energy Commission (whose secrets Maclean pilfered) and also in London, where he was the last person in the Foreign Office to see Maclean before he slipped away from the dolts who had finally caught on to him.
The man Philipps wants us to see is equal parts contradiction and constancy. Maclean threw off his father’s Calvinism early, adopting communism as his creed at Cambridge. (What is it about Cambridge and Russians? A quite open community of Cambridge communists thrived in the 1930s, while more recently, a university researcher developed the app that Cambridge Analytica used to gather Facebook data and worked with Russians on data-gathering techniques. And a Cambridge lecturer whom President Trump inaccurately labeled a spy was engaged by the FBI to assess the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.)
“A Spy Named Orphan,” by Roland Philipps (Norton)
Maclean never wavered in his commitment to communism, which was grounded in his fervent anti-fascism. Many comrades, by contrast, abandoned their youthful ideology when Stalin made a surprise pact with the Nazis just before the war. As author Arthur Koestler put it: “No death is so sad and final as the death of an illusion.” But communism was no illusion for Maclean. Communism would secure world peace. And world peace, in Philipps’s telling, is what animated Maclean’s ideology, even when that ideology warred with his patriotism. He betrayed his country but not his conscience. He hoped his country would catch up.
While at Cambridge, before he was recruited by Philby, Maclean wrote a poem celebrating those “who’ve dared”:
“Dared to leave a herd they hate
“Dared to question the church and state
“Dared to ask what poppies are for,
“Dared to say we’ll fight no more,
“Unless it be for a cause we know
“And not for the sake of status quo.”
Was this the defiant passion of a naive student? Of course, but in Philipps’s telling, Maclean cast himself in this lofty role and stuck to it for the rest of his life.
None of the Cambridge Five took money for their work, according to Philipps. At the end of the war, the Soviets wanted “to reward the agents who had made the most significant contributions to victory” with annual pensions, Philipps writes. All refused. Guy Burgess, the Cambridge Five spy with whom Maclean fled to Moscow, relented, accepting “expenses,” and “bought a gold, soft-topped, second-hand Rolls Royce on the grounds that he was such a terrible driver that a ‘sturdily built’ car was a life-saving necessity.” But Maclean made few such concessions to capitalism and didn’t even like the work of being a spy, Philipps reports. It was “like being a lavatory attendant,” Maclean said. “It stinks but someone has to do it.” And he did it well. He was methodical in lifting documents from his offices, photographing them and delivering copies to his handlers. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. Several of his handlers were recalled to Moscow and executed in Stalin’s purge, but Maclean just kept going. He excelled at his diplomatic job, too. Philipps writes that both the British and the Soviets found his ability to analyze and synthesize foreign policy problems unmatched.
Still, Maclean was such a committed alcoholic it’s a wonder that he got any spying or diplomatic work done, and that he didn’t betray his double life, given how outrageously impolitic he was when he was drunk, which, in Philipps’s portrayal, was most of the time. At a Georgetown party hosted by The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, he picked a fight with another guest and peed in Graham’s garden (a version of this anecdote made it into Graham’s memoir). Maclean had to leave Cairo, his final foreign posting, after he and his drinking buddy, writer Philip Toynbee, ransacked and defiled an apartment while scavenging for booze. In his London days, before he fled, Maclean was drunk and belligerent when he muttered to Toynbee a reference to Alger Hiss, an American accused of spying for the Soviets: “I am the English Hiss.” How happy Maclean must have been to reach Moscow, with its tubs of vodka flowing from proletariat-plated taps!
Maclean, whose first code name was Orphan and his last Homer, told no one of his secret life except his American wife, whom he met in Paris before the war. He must have been hell to live with, but Melinda Marling stuck with him, fleeing with their three children to join him in Russia a year or so after his escape with Burgess. Maclean died in Moscow in 1983 at age 69.
[THE EARLY CHAPTERS]
Philipps provides plenty of evidence for his version of the mysterious Maclean, and the details make for gripping, enlightening and occasionally exasperating reading. He is sometimes repetitive in conjuring the purity of his “tall, distinctive” protagonist’s motives. He also doesn’t fully reconcile Maclean’s near-constant insobriety with his talent for both his taxing jobs. Details from Maclean’s three decades in the Soviet Union are understandably sketchy, but there are enough to make the case that Maclean found a life among the favored class there and never regretted his choices. “His life in the Soviet Union was always characterised by an exceptional absence of nostalgia,” Philipps writes. An absence of nostalgia could apply to “A Spy Named Orphan,” too. Philipps does not make the life of his unhappy antihero seem fun.
Had MI6 spotted Maclean and Burgess in Bern, Switzerland, where they had stopped on their way to Russia, the two men might have drunk their last, because “a “decanter of poisoned scotch” had been prepared for them. The runaway pair had to wait two days for a flight out, but they showed no signs of agitation. As Philipps writes, “Maclean lay on his bed, calm and focused now that he had no agency in his immediate future, smoking and reading Burgess’s edition of Jane Austen.” No nostalgia indeed.
A SPY NAMED ORPHAN
The Enigma
of Donald Maclean
By Roland Philipps
Norton. 440 pp. $28.95