Donald Duart Maclean
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Image:Maclean.jpg Donald Duart Maclean (May 25, 1913- 6 March 1983) was one of the Cambridge Five, members of MI5 and MI6 who acted as spies for the Soviet Union in the Second World War. Born in London and sent to Gresham's School, he was the son of the Scottish Liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean.
Maclean was recruited into Soviet intelligence in 1934 while studying political history and philology at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Like the others in the Cambridge Five, MacLean came from a privileged background. Two of the others were known to be homosexuals, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, and it is sometimes stated that MacLean was too. However, it seems more likely that he was a bisexual. Guy Burgess claimed to have seduced him.
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London
While in London Maclean was under the operational control of GPU Rezident Anatoli Gorsky. Gorsky used Vladimir Borisovich Barkovsky as the case officer for Maclean, himself an engineer capable of dealing with technical details.
Maclean reported from London on 16 September 1941 the uranium bomb might be constructed within two years through the efforts of Imperial Chemical Industries with support of the British government. The project to build a uranium bomb was called Tube Alloys, code-named Tube. Maclean sent to Moscow a sixty-page report with the official minutes of the British Cabinet Committee on the Uranium Bomb Project.Template:NamedRef
Washington
His most fruitful period was during his tenure with the British Embassy in Washington D.C. (1944-1948), when he was Stalin's main source of information about communications and policy development between Churchill and Roosevelt, and then Churchill and Harry S. Truman. Although he did not transmit technical data on the atom bomb, he reported on its development and progress, particularly the amount of uranium available to the United States. He was the British representative on the American-British-Canadian council on the sharing of atomic secrets and was able to provide to the Soviet Union minutes of Cabinet meetings. This knowledge alone gave the Soviet scientists the ability to predict the number of bombs that could be built by the Americans. Coupled with the efforts of Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs, who provided scientific information, MacLean's reports to his KGB controller helped the Soviets not only to build the atom bomb, but how to estimate their nuclear arsenal's relative strength against that of the United States.
In 1941 he was possibly identified by Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet defector, who is rumored to have been assassinated by Soviet agents in the Bellevue Hotel in Washington D.C.. It was said that Krivitsky had claimed there was a mole in British intelligence who was "a Scotsman of good family, educated at Eton and Oxford (sic), and an idealist who worked for the Russians without payment."
His continual monitoring of secret messages between Truman and Churchill allowed Stalin to know how the Americans and the British proposed to occupy Germany and carve up the borders of Eastern European countries. Stalin was forearmed with this information not only at the Yalta Conference, but at the Potsdam and Tehran Conferences as well.
MacLean reported to Moscow that the goal of the Marshall Plan was to ensure American economic domination in Europe. The new international economic organization to restore European productivity would be under the control of American financial capital. The message revealed the Marshall Plan was intended to be a substitute for the payment of reparations by Germany. At that time the Soviet Union had no export earnings, war reparations were the sole source of foreign capital to rebuild the wartorn Soviet economy. Yalta and Potsdam agreements allowed German reparations in the form of equipment, manufacturing machinery, cars, trucks, and building supplies to be sent to Russia for five years. The flow of goods were unregulated by international control, and could be used for whatever purposes the Soviets chose. Six months after the Marshall Plan was rejected by the Soviet Union, multiparty rule in Eastern Europe ended.
In 1948, MacLean was transferred to the British Embassy in Cairo. Undoubtedly, MacLean's information was significant in assisting Stalin in his strategy for the Cold War.
Detection and defection
The story of the Burgess and Maclean defection, and the subsequent implication of Philby, is a fascinating one of code-breaking, detection, and discovery. In 1949, Robert Lamphere, FBI agent in charge of Russian espionage, along with cryptanalysts, discovered that between 1944 and 1946 a member of the British Embassy was sending messages to the KGB. The code name of this official was "Homer." By a process of elimination, a short list of three or four men were identified as possible Homers. One was Maclean.
Shortly after Lamphere's investigation began, Kim Philby was assigned to Washington, serving as Britain's CIA-FBI-NSA liaison. As such, he was privy to the decoding of the Russian material, and recognized that Maclean was very probably Homer. He confirmed this through his British KGB control. He was also aware that Lamphere and his colleagues had found that the encoded messages to the KGB had been sent from New York. Maclean had visited New York on a regular basis, ostensibly to visit his wife and children, who were living there with his in-laws.
The pressure on Philby now began to grow. If Maclean was unmasked as a Soviet agent, then, were he to confess, the trail might lead to the other Cambridge spies. Philby, now in a very important position in his ability to provide information to the Soviets, might be implicated, if for no other reason than his association with Maclean at Cambridge. Concerned that Maclean would be positively identified, interrogated, and, in the process (because of his highly agitated nervous state) confess to MI5, Philby and Burgess concocted a scheme in which Guy Burgess would return to London (where Maclean was now the Foreign Service officer in charge of American affairs). Burgess would then warn Maclean of the impending unmasking. Burgess managed to receive three speeding citations in a single day.
Before Burgess left, Philby was explicit in his instructions to Burgess. He was not to defect with Maclean.
The Philby-Burgess plan was for Burgess to visit Maclean in his Foreign Office quarters, give him a note identifying a place where the two could meet - it was assumed that Maclean, now under suspicion and denied sensitive documents, had a bugged office - and Burgess would explain the situation. They met clandestinely to discuss Maclean's imminent exposure and necessary defection to Russia. Yuri Modin, the controller at the time, made arrangements for Maclean's defection. Maclean was in an extremely nervous state, and reluctant to leave alone. Modin was willing to serve as his guide, but KGB Central demanded that Burgess escort Maclean behind the Iron Curtain.
In the meantime, MI5 had insisted that Maclean be questioned. They had decided that he would be confronted with the FBI and MI5 evidence on Monday, May 28 1951.
Life in the Soviet Union
On Maclean's birthday, May 25, the Friday before the Monday when he was to be interrogated, Burgess and Maclean fled to the coast, boarded a ship to France, and disappeared. Had Blunt learned of the impending questioning of Maclean, and warned Burgess that the time had come? Blunt never admitted to that, and it is possible that Burgess and Maclean had selected Friday to flee whatever the current circumstances. Both Modin and Philby assumed that Burgess would deliver Maclean to a handler, and that he would return. For some reason, the Russians insisted that Burgess accompany Maclean the entire way. Perhaps Burgess was no longer useful to the KGB as a spy, but too valuable to fall into the hands of MI5.
Maclean, unlike the self-indulgent Burgess, integrated himself into the Soviet system, learning Russian, and eventually serving as a specialist on economic policy of the West, and British foreign affairs. However, when living there, he spoke up for Soviet dissidents, and actually gave money to the families of some of those imprisoned. Maclean was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Combat.
His American wife, Melinda joined him in Russia, but they were divorced and Melinda returned to the U.S. He died of a heart attack in 1983, was cremated and the ashes interred in the family crypt in London.
Chronology
- 1913 Born on May 25 in London
- Attended Gresham's School in Norfolk
- Read Modern Languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge
- 1934 Started work at the Foreign Office
- 1940 Married Melinda Marling while working at the British Embassy in Paris shortly before evacuation.
- Relocated to Washington as Secretary in the British Embassy. It was here that he had access to details of the atomic bomb program eventually becoming the Secretary for the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Development.
- As the pressure of his double life began to mount, he started to drink heavily and became an alcoholic
- 1941 Identified by Walter Krivitsky, a Soviet defector
- 1948 Relocated to Cairo and promoted to Head of Chancery in the British Embassy
- After a drunken episode he was sent home to London to "recover" from his "nervous breakdown"
- 1950 Promoted to head the American Department in the Foreign Office. Here he had access to top secret information on the atomic development program
- 1951 Warned by Philby that he is under suspicion and will most likely be unmasked. Maclean and Burgess both defect to the Soviet Union
- 1956 They appear in Moscow, he is made a colonel of the KGB with a Moscow apartment and a dacha outside the city.
- 1963 Kim Philby defects to Soviet Union.
- 1983 Died of a heart attack in Moscow on March 11th
- Cremated. His ashes were later returned to England
- 1985 His ashes were taken to Dayton Ohio by His son Ronald E MacLean Sr. , where his family now lives.
See also
Note
- Template:NamedNote KGB Archives File number 13676, vol. 1.