More complex than a mass of contradictions
Robert Kee
A DIVIDED LIFE: A BIOGRAPHY OF DONALD MACLEAN by Robert Cecil
Bodley Head, £12.95, pp.212
Donald Maclean, quintessential like- able, intelligent English liberal charmer, spent almost half his life in the Soviet Union. He was, in a way, lucky to be able to do that; he would otherwise have spent it in gaol. From Moscow he wrote to an old friend of the absurdity by which his name was now linked as inseparably with Burgess — a very different charmer for whom he had small empathy — as was Swan's with Edgar or Debenham's with Freebody. He might equally well have said the same of his association on the record with the KGB Colonel Philby, but there was no joke to be made there. All three had perforce elected for the Soviet Union and all three can be accurately categorised by the crude name: spy. Yet the crudeness of that word obscures much of the interest of their story. Not only did their personali- ties differ; the quality of motivation in all three was different. One of the several merits of this sensible, well-ordered book is that it enables us to see this difference.
Above all, it enables us to see Maclean more clearly. For a relatively short period before his flight I knew him well. This is the first time I have been able to recognise coherently in print the friend whose be- haviour after nearly 40 years still presents something of an enigma.
How was it possible for a man who could be so engagingly open with his political indignation, so hopelessly disordered often in his expression of it — drunkenly, for instance, once in a night-club accusing the former Communist Goronwy Rees of hav- ing 'ratted' — so concernedly analytical with friends of British and American poli- cy, to have been at the same time some- thing so coldly clinical as a spy? How could his pretty and intelligent wife, Melinda, not have known that he was one, and have been as bewildered by his flight as his many friends? On the strength of some personal acquaintance with her, before and after that flight, I share Cecil's view that she knew nothing of what had been going on. Others who knew her disagree. This mere- ly illustrates the nature of the very special perplexity Maclean left behind.
Cecil himself knew both Macleans and indeed worked with Donald in the Washington embassy and under him in the Foreign Office's American department in London. In my view he sometimes reads the Le Carre concept of 'spy' rather too simplistically back into Maclean's past, using the convenient formula of a split in his personality to make the sense which those who knew him need to make. When, in 1937, Maclean was best man at the smart wedding of a Foreign Office friend to a girl he himself had known at Cambridge, Cecil has him 'finding it no problem to take on the protective clothing of those among whom he would be working'. When he replies to his Foreign Office examination board that he 'hasn't entirely shaken off the left-wing views he expressed as a Cambridge undergraduate, Cecil catego- rises this as 'deceptive candour'. Maclean doesn't resign at Munich (like his friend Con O'Neil) because 'he had chosen the dishonourable jungle-path of espionage'.
Now of course it is possible, and in some ways easier, to see such a clear dramatic
dichotomy. There is no doubt whatever — and Cecil has conducted very competent research into such matters — that after Maclean had been contacted at Cambridge by a cultured Hungarian agent of the Comintern (soon to be liquidated by Sta- lin) he subsequently gave away over a period of many years to other professional Soviet agents both diplomatic and military information of inestimable value, from Paris, Washington and London.
So far as is known, he received no financial reward for this. It would have been wholly out of character if he had.
Donald Maclean's problem was exactly that: his character was not conveniently divided, though his loyalties were. It was this unresolved single tension which led to such obvious and often hurtful manifesta- tions of strain in his personal life. Philby broke up no Cairo flats, disturbed no Gargoyle Club, saw no psychoanalyst, went on no Soho sexual rampage.
Cecil, while settling partly for the con- ventional Le Carre-type diagnosis (as in his title) also gives us all the necessary pointers to the complex truth. He himself experi- enced something of that Thirties Cam- bridge (and Oxford) ethos in which young idealists, rebelling against a particularly repellent political orthodoxy with its indif- ference to social hardship and smug arro- gance in foreign affairs, could see conven- tional patriotism as by no means expend- able but on the sidelines. If they were particularly single-minded or had their own sub-conscious personal reasons for doing so, they mistakenly put their principles where their mouth was and acted. It was still then possible, before the Nazi-Soviet Pact, to put on rose-coloured spectacles to view the Soviet Union.
We know little of how Maclean dealt with the psychological awkwardness of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. But he only had to wait 20 months before misgivings on any score about communicating with Soviet agents could seem unimportant to him. The short- term objective — the winning of the war against Germany — was now identical for Britain and the Soviet Union and remained so for the next four years while the Soviet Union did much of the winning. For Maclean the cold war seemed like a be- trayal of what had happened when the war was hot. In any case, as Cecil says, what motivated Maclean was his fatal over- whelming puritanical sense of 'the inno- cence of the long-term objective'. This goes to the heart of the matter. Guilty of espionage as Maclean undoubtedly was, the real charge against him is one of dangerous innocence. It can be a crime leading to terrible things, though it is not without its attractions. In Donald Mac- lean's case, Gorbachev may eventually do something to redeem it.
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