Donald Maclean (spy)

Donald Duart Maclean (; 25 May 1913 – 6 March 1983) was a British diplomat who conveyed government secrets to the Soviet Union.

As an undergraduate, Maclean openly proclaimed his left-wing views, and was recruited into the Soviet intelligence service, then known as the NKVD. He entered the Civil Service and in 1938, he was made Third Secretary at the Paris embassy. He then served in London and was sent to Washington, D.C. from 1944 to 1948, achieving promotion to First Secretary. He was posted to Egypt and then was appointed head of the American Department in the Foreign Office. The Soviets helped Maclean to defect to Moscow in 1951. In Moscow, Maclean worked as a specialist on British policy and relations between the Soviet Union and NATO. He died there on 6 March 1983.

Childhood and school

Born in Marylebone, London, Donald Duart Maclean was the son of Sir Donald Maclean and Gwendolen Margaret Devitt. His father was chosen as chairman of the rump of the 23 independent MPs who backed H. H. Asquith in the Liberal Party in the House of Commons. As the Labour Party had no leader and Sinn Féin did not attend, he became titular Leader of the Opposition. Maclean's parents had houses in London (later in Buckinghamshire) as well as in the Scottish Borders, where his father represented Peebles and Southern Midlothian, but the family lived mostly in and around London. He grew up in a very political household, in which world affairs were constantly discussed. In 1931 his father entered the Coalition Cabinet as President of the Board of Education.

Maclean's education began as a boarder at St Ronan's School, Worthing. At the age of 13, he was sent to Gresham's School in Norfolk,S.G.G. Benson and Martin Crossley Evans, ''I Will Plant Me a Tree: an Illustrated History of Gresham's School'', London: James & James, 2002. where he remained from 1926 until 1931, when he was 18. At Gresham's, some of his contemporaries were Jack Simon (later Baron Simon, a Law Lord), James Klugmann (1912–1977), Roger Simon (1913–2002), Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) and the scientist and Nobel laureate Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin.

Gresham's was then looked on as both liberal and progressive. It had already produced Tom Wintringham (1898–1949) a Marxist military historian, journalist, and author. James Klugmann and Roger Simon both went with Maclean to Cambridge and joined the Communist Party at around the same time. Klugmann became the official historian of the British Communist Party, while Simon was later a left-wing Labour peer.

When Maclean was 16, his father was elected for the North Cornwall constituency, and he spent some time in Cornwall during vacations.

Cambridge

From Gresham's, Maclean won a place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, arriving in 1931 to read modern languages. He also played rugby for his college through the winter of 1932–33. In Maclean's second year at Cambridge his father died. Maclean's political views grew much more apparent in the following years in light of "his admiring, if sometimes puzzled, mother". In his final years in college Maclean had become a campus figure with many knowing he was a communist. In the winter of 1933–34, he wrote a book review for ''Cambridge Left'', to which other leading communists contributed, such as John Cornford, Charles Madge and the Irish scientist, J. D. Bernal. Donald reviewed ''Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution'' by J. D. Charques, praising the book for its readiness "to hint at a Marxist conception of literature". In 1934, he became the editor of the ''Silver Crescent'', the Trinity Hall students' magazine. His editorials stressed the decline in world trade, rearmament and arms trafficking. In one article, he insisted: "England is in the throes of a capitalist crisis....If the analysis in the ''Editorial: A Personal'' is correct, there is an excellent reason why everyone of military age should start thinking about politics." In a letter to ''Granta'' he ascribed the demand for a democratically elected student council, equality for female students and rights to use college premises for political meetings.

In his last year, 1934, Donald Maclean became an agent of the Soviet Union's People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated from the Russian as NKVD. Maclean was then instructed to give up political activity and enter the Diplomatic Service. He graduated with a First in Modern Languages. After spending a year preparing for the Civil Service examinations, Maclean passed with first-class honours. At the Final Board, Maclean was asked by one of the panel interviewing him, whether he had favoured communism while a university student, ostensibly because the panel knew of a trip he had taken to Moscow in his second year at Cambridge. Maclean said: "At Cambridge, I was initially favourable to it but I am little by little getting disenchanted with it." His apparent sincerity satisfied members of the panel, which included a family friend, Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

London

In August 1935, Maclean was duly admitted to the diplomatic service. In October, he started work at the Foreign Office, and was assigned to the Western department, which dealt with the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland, as well as the League of Nations. In 1936, Maclean became closely involved in the work of the Non-Intervention Committee set up to monitor the activities of the chief powers, Germany, Italy, and the USSR and their involvement in determining the outcome of the Spanish Civil War.

In the summer of 1937, for a time, multiple occasions passed when no one showed to meet Maclean. Then Kitty Harris (wife of the Communist Party of the USA's party leader) arrived in place of his usual controller and gave the recognition phrase. "You hadn't expected to see a lady, had you?" she said. "No, but it's a pleasant surprise", he replied. Maclean would visit Harris's flat in Bayswater after work, with documents to photograph. Over the next two years, 45 boxes of documents were photographed and sent to Moscow. "She was a cut-out between Maclean and his NKVD controller", said Geoffrey Elliott, who wrote a book about her with Igor Damaskin, a former KGB officer.Elliott, Geoffrey, and Igor Damaskin, ''Kitty Harris: The Spy with Seventeen Names'', London: St Ermin's Press, 2001.

Paris

On 24 September 1938, Maclean took up a post as Third Secretary at HM Embassy, Paris. In the spring of 1939, an Anglo-French attempt was made to include the Soviet Union into the "peace front" that was intended to deter German aggression. Because of the French involvement in these Moscow negotiations, the telegrams passing between embassies allowed Maclean access to much information. Maclean kept Moscow informed in regard to relations between Germany and the British Empire, on the one hand, and Britain and France on the other, as the French foreign minister Georges Bonnet worked to end French security commitments in Eastern Europe. He also kept Moscow informed about the development of Anglo-French plans for intervention in the war between Finland and the Soviet Union.Michael Holzman, ''Donald and Melinda Maclean: Idealism and Espionage'', Briarcliff Manor, New York: The Chelmsford Press, 2014.

In December 1939, Maclean met Melinda Marling, the daughter of a Chicago oil executive. She was a teenager when her parents had divorced, her mother moving to Europe. In October 1929, Melinda and her sisters went to school at Vevey, near Lausanne, where their mother rented a villa, and spent their holidays at Juan-les-Pins in France.Geoffrey Hoare, ''The Missing Macleans'', New York: The Viking Press, 1955. Melinda Marling's mother moved to New York, marrying Charles Dunbar, an executive in the paper industry, and brought her daughters to live with them in Manhattan, where Melinda Marling attended the Spence School. After graduation she spent some months in New York City then returned to Paris, where she enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study French literature. Mark Culme-Seymour later described her as "quite pretty and vivacious, but rather reserved. I thought that she was a bit prim. She was always well-groomed, lipstick bright, hair permed, a double row of pearls around her neck. Her interests seemed limited to family, friends, clothes and Hollywood movies."''The Guardian'' (Manchester and London), 10 May 2003.

In the 1950s, Culme-Seymour tracked down the exiled Macleans in Moscow, and another Melinda emerged. She told him that she knew she would be going to Russia right from the beginning, even before Maclean defected.

Soviet archives confirm this view. As Maclean told Harris, on the evening he met Melinda Marling, he saw more to her "I was very taken by her views. She's a liberal, she's in favour of the Popular Front and doesn't mind mixing with communists even though her parents are well-off. There was a White Russian girl, one of her friends, who attacked the Soviet Union and Melinda went for her. We found we spoke the same language." Maclean had told Melinda Marling about his role as a spy. He told Harris that Marling not only reacted positively, but "actually promised to help me to the extent that she can and she is well connected in the American community".

On 10 June 1940, as the German Army approached Paris, Donald Maclean and a pregnant Melinda Marling were married at the local '' Mairie''. The British Embassy was evacuated and the Macleans drove south with one of Donald Maclean's colleagues. They were able to escape France on a small merchant ship and went to London.

London during the Second World War

Maclean was assigned by the British Foreign Office to work on economic warfare matters. Maclean became one of the Foreign Office's experts on economic warfare, civil air matters, military base negotiations and natural resources useful in the war, such as tungsten. Three days before Christmas 1940, Melinda Maclean went to New York to have her baby, which died shortly after its birth. Some weeks later she flew back to London and went to work in the BBC
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