A fallen angel
Robert Cecil
While Maclean lay dying in Moscow, another former Cambridge under- graduate, Michael Straight, was in London, trying to explain to unsympathetic au- diences what it had been like to be young and spiritually adrift in the uncharted waters of the 1930s. It is indeed a vanished world: Cambridge in 1933 — the year in Which I first met Donald Maclean. Even the setting seems now like a faded photo of an earlier era: a late Victorian house, complete With shrubbery, where an elderly lady of means dispensed tea to a few under- graduates and a selection of the more Presentable girls of Newnham and Girton. Maclean's face is the only one I still recall from that gathering: aquiline, handsome,
but swept back in the Rupert Brooke style, out a masked, lizard look about the eyes, in
spite of their blueness. To these characteris- tics he added a mandarin attitude, as he rebuked me for having spoken disrespect- fully of Paradise Lost. I did not then suspect that I was being addressed by a satanic figure — one of Milton's fallen angels:
`• • • • ..... his baleful eyes That witness'd huge affliction and dismay Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate.'
He was already a Communist, having been converted by James Kiugman, his school-fellow at Gresham's; but it was over- weening pride in his own political judgment and hate of the failures of contemporary capitalism that turned him into a Soviet agent. The archangel, who could have become 'Sir Donald', like his father, ended as a traitor to his country and died in exile, a victim of cancer and alcoholism. We all knew Maclean was a Communist at Cambridge; he flaunted his beliefs by demanding student participation in running the colleges and the university at a time when such activity was almost un- precedented. Why, then, was he accepted by the Civil Service Commission as a can- didate for the Diplomatic Service? A full answer to this question would require a volume of social history. The short answer 15 that the older generation, which admitted Maclean to its sanctuaries, had no grasp of the impact of ideology on the young, and inkling nkling of the principles of internal security. There was, of course, no 'positive vetting'; indeed it was the Maclean-Burgess debacle of 1951 that first forced this precau- upon the Foreign Office. Yet Maclean's tutor at Trinity Hall, where the artP,ru sPY Alan Nunn May was a friend and fellow-student, must have known that his
Political motivation was serious. Did he speak up? If he did, he was ignored. Unlike Burgess and
Philby, Maclean, after his recruitment as a Soviet agent, made no extravagant anti-Communist gestures; he simply allowed it to be assumed that he had abandoned his youthful folly and rejoined 'the establishment'. The too facile acceptance of this explanation partly accounts for the fact that the Foreign Of- fice kept this viper in its bosom for so long; but here the added factor of professional solidarity was at work. The Diplomatic Ser- vice of the 1930s was a closed community of a particularly exclusive kind; once a new en- trant was made 'one of us' — and Maclean's quiet efficiency soon won him friends — ranks closed around him. It is easy to criticise this attitude; but it must be remembered that esprit de corps is essential to a small diplomatic community planted in foreign, sometimes hostile, territory. In 1938 the whole Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service numbered only 900 —
less than one-fifth of the size of today's amalgamated service. It was run like a fami- ly and, as in most families, its members did not explore one another's failings and resented public exposure of them. This is not to say that there was any deliberate cover-up, nor (as has recently been alleged) that even if Maclean and Burgess had been apprehended in 1951 they would have been granted immunity, as in the case of Anthony Blunt in 1964. There is no parallel between the two cases. In 1964 Blunt had been inactive for 13 years; moreover his misdoings concerned only Bri- tain. Tracking down Maclean, however, had been largely the work of the Americans, who would have insisted on retribution.
The American involvement closely af-
fected the handling of Maclean's case. The FBI had demanded that they be kept cur- rently informed and, since communications passed through the N416 channel, Philby in Washington knew of every development even before Edgar Hoover did. The most damaging evidence against Maclean came from American signals intelligence and could not have been produced in court; it was therefore hoped to reinforce it by cat- ching Maclean red-handed. He was shadowed in London on the assumption that contact with his Soviet 'control' would take place there and that, in any case, discreet surveillance would be impossible in Tatsfield, where Maclean was living. In the event he got wind of the fact that he was be- ing shadowed and contact with the Russians in the final week before his flight was main- tained through Burgess and Blunt. The end result was a fiasco; but it was not a sell-out.
How much damage did Maclean do to British interests? An accurate answer must await the opening of Kremlin archives; but speculation that he had much to do with the production of the first Soviet A-bomb in 1949 is wide of the mark. It is true that in 1947-8 he was joint secretary of the Anglo- American Combined Policy Committee and had access to the US Atomic Energy Com- mission; no doubt he collected valuable in- formation about stockpiling of A-bombs, rate of production, etc. But he was no scientist; in any case, the Russians had learnt what they needed to know from Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs for the purpose of producing their own A-bomb. One area in which Maclean must have inflicted grave damage was in revealing the evolution of Anglo-American policy in relation to Ger- many. The years 1947-8 saw the merging of the Western Zones of Occupation and moves leading to the founding of the Federal German Republic in 1949. When the USSR attempted to reverse this policy by blockading West Berlin, Maclean could have assured them that — incredible as it must have seemed to them — no contin- gency planning against such an eventuality had been undertaken. As head of the American Department in 1950-1, he could have supplied useful intelligence about Anglo-American disagreements on the con- duct of the Korean War; but General MacArthur's assertion that his strategic planning was betrayed by Maclean and Burgess is an absurdity. The gravest damage was done to the reputation of British securi- ty and to confidence between the British and American intelligence communities.
It seems probable that Maclean, with Philby and Blunt, who survive him, will prove to have been the last of the ideological spies for the USSR, though other motives, such as greed, will continue to operate. Young men will still be misled about the fictitious Communist Utopia; but at least they must now know that it is not to be found in the USSR and that Soviet policy does not promote it. The lessons of Poland and Afghanistan must surely have been learned even in Cambridge quadrangles.
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