A SPY NAMED ORPHAN: The Enigma of Donald MacLean
ROLAND PHILIPPS
Bodley Head, 2018, 440 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
At Cambridge University in the
1930s, Donald MacLean was popularly known as Donald MacLenin because he was a Red-hot
undergraduate, a Communist Party member who railed against “the economic
situation, the unemployment, vulgarity in the cinema, rubbish on the
bookstalls, the public [private] school, snobbery in the suburbs, more
battleships, lower wages”.
None of his radicalism,
however, stopped MacLean from being hired by the Foreign Office, as Roland
Philipps recounts in his biography of the famous Soviet spy (one of the famous
Cambridge five - Burgess, Philby, MacLean, Blunt, Cairncross). As the FO boffins saw it, MacLean’s campus political
fervour could be dismissed as the ‘passing fancy of youth’ (in the words of one
of MacLean’s ‘handlers’) especially amongst such ‘scions of the bourgeoisie’ as
MacLean, son of a senior anti-communist politician, and a graduate, with blue-ribbon
academic and sporting honours, of prestigious private school and elite
university.
Besides, despite their
(presumably) temporary Marx crush, the FO valued the Cambridge (presumably ex) communists
who formed a rich talent pool of analytically sharp intellects with the added
benefit that they, as former Reds, would be invaluable because they knew how
the political enemy thought.
The FO knew its target
demographic well (rich, upper class students, half of whom had, after all,
acted as ‘volunteer’ strike-breakers during the 1926 General Strike) but
MacLean, however, was made of stouter political stuff, having fallen
permanently out of love with, in his handler’s words, the ‘intellectual
emptiness and aimlessness of the bourgeois class to which he belonged’.
Britain’s diplomatic and
intelligence services, however, were not the only ones fishing for recruits in
the radicalised universities of the Thirties.
Stalin’s regime, facing capitalist and fascist hostility, was also on
the lookout for covert assistance from abroad.
As most socialists of the time
mistakenly saw Stalin as the almost apostolic embodiment of Marxism, those Western
communists tapped on the shoulder to clandestinely help Moscow were predisposed
to assist, especially (in the words of Kim Philby) through their ‘enrolment in
an elite force’ of revolutionaries.
Although he rated the actual
business of espionage as ‘like being a lavatory attendant – distasteful but
necessary’, MacLean passed UK and US diplomatic state secrets to Moscow for a
decade with a WikiLeaks intensity (but a much narrower audience) in the firm belief
that he was assisting world peace and socialism.
The psychological toll from
continually denying his true self in public, however, became a debilitating strain
that was only relieved by chronic alcoholism.
MacLean’s loose lips during his booze binges risked blowing his cover - at
a dinner-party with a Minister from the newly-elected Labour government, for
example, MacLean stormed out, saying that ‘this government is just as bad as
any other British government – suppressing coloured people’, prompting the observation
by another guest that evening that MacLean ‘looks like a Tory and talks like a
Communist’.
In her report to Moscow,
another of Maclean’s handlers noted the personal tensions arising from
MacLean’s unsustainable double life, appending to her praise for the ‘good and
brave comrade’ the caveat that ‘he’s been totally detached from party work
where he might have grown and learned’.
Gone, for MacLean, was the opportunity for uninhibited debate and
discussion amongst a wide range of comrades, replaced by his stunting confinement
to the hated world of “stuffy formal dinners and receptions”, his colleagues’
incessant chatter about the ‘communist menace’, their hyperbolic exaggeration
of the Soviet threat, and their casual class loathing of the lives and potential
political power of the non-Oxbridge lower orders.
Clandestinity had forced the
separation of MacLean from class and ideological struggle, and from the
lifeblood of comradeship. MacLean could
have been a superb radical intellectual grounded by active membership in a
working class Marxist party but his political world had, instead, shrunk to the
humdrum office drudgery of document copying.
When MacLean was eventually
about to be tumbled, with a long spell in Wormwood Scrubs awaiting him, he was
exfiltrated to Russia in 1951, where he found job satisfaction as a researcher on
foreign policy and as an advocate for peaceful detente between East and West. With Stalin still in power, however, official
Moscow was still paranoid about double agents, so MacLean was not entirely safe
- as a Russian friend put it, ‘MacLean was decorated with the Order of the Red
Banner. He might equally well have been
shot’.
MacLean was relieved when
Stalin died in 1953 and although he initially supported the Soviet crushing of the
1956 Hungary revolt, MacLean opposed the 1968 Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia, fraternised with Solzhenitsyn and other dissidents, and wrote
on his ballot paper for the Supreme Soviet that whilst dissidents are held in
prison ‘I can not participate in elections’.
It was a calmer but somewhat
anti-climactic end to a high, but ultimately faux-climactic, life of
espionage. Much of the Cambridge spies’
efforts yielded little return – Stalin famously dismissed as ‘disinformation’ the
covert intelligence that signalled the devastating invasion by Nazi Germany of
the Soviet Union, whilst high-level espionage material also failed to add
substantively to anything which was not already discernible through intelligent
observation and objective interpretation (assets which MacLean possessed in
abundance).
Philipps’ biography of
MacLean, with its focus on espionage tradecraft, spy psychology and adventure narrative,
has all the political depth of a Boys Own
Bumper Book of Spies, and lazily rests in an ‘our spies good, their spies
bad’ framework. It only lightly intersects
with the bigger political dimension of the spy drama. Whilst the book automatically associates,
with Pavlovian predictability, the ‘t’ words (treason, treachery) with MacLean,
the real betrayal going on was the corruption of socialist values and
revolutionaries’ lives by Stalinism, which in turn had its roots in the capitalist
military and economic war waged against the fledgling Bolshevik state, a war which
created the material scarcity and isolation that nurtured the rise of a
privileged, undemocratic, bureaucratic class.
The Stalinist casualty roll
was gigantic and it included MacLean amongst its number. Donald MacLean, socialist, was more betrayed
than betrayer.
