British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 by Donald Maclean is an interesting book because of who the author was, quite apart from its contents. Maclean was a British civil servant who was also one of the Cambridge Five who spied for Russia from the 1930s until 1951.
Maclean wrote the book in 1970 when he was living in Moscow. Hodder and Stoughton published the book in the UK with Foreign Office approval.
I bought a second-hand copy after reading about it in Roland Philipps biography A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean. The book showed Maclean to be a complex, tortured, principled and highly intelligent and capable man.
And it made me reflect on how I would have behaved if I had been similarly motivated as a young man. I don’t think I would have lasted five minutes, and it is a reflection of Maclean’s capability that he did it for years.
It also showed how divided loyalties involve some kind of self-delusion – a young man’s (or woman’s) game.
I knew of Donald Maclean and the Cambridge spies, after all I am British and grew up with the revelation in 1979 of Anthony Blunt’s spying.
Blunt was Professor of the History of Art at the University of London, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures.
He was giving immunity from prosecution in 1964 in return for spilling the beans, but it was kept secret from the public for another fifteen years. On a recent guided walk around London that I joined, the guide suggested that the Intelligence Services were prepared to do a deal with Blunt because of what Blunt did in the Intelligence Services at the end of the war. He had been responsible for looking through the papers describing Edward VIII’s involvement with the nazis before and perhaps during the war. It would have been embarrassing if that had come out, so better to do a deal.
I grew up with the talk of the fifth spy, the unknown man in the UK establishment, a big secret until an MI5 agent revealed what he knew, and named John Cairncross in a book he wrote and had published in Australia.
It was all exciting stuff, but until I read Roland Philipps’ biography of Maclean I thought Maclean was a minor civil servant.
In fact he was very high up in the service, privy to all kinds of secrets at the highest level, and in line for an appointment as British Ambassador to the United States.
There’s a lot of stuff in British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956-1968 about Britain’s relationship with Europe and the United States. Maclean talks about the changing fortunes of Britain and the history of the uneasy straddling of Europe and the United States that Britain has been pursuing since the Second World War.
When I finished the book, it seemed to me that what really got up Maclean’s nose were the people he called the ultranationalists. They were interested in only one thing and that was for Britain to stay on top and for them to be secure at the top there. They would do anything, do any people and any country down in order to stay on top.
You could say this is a general truth about countries and about many people in power but I think it offended Maclean’s humanity, and he detested them. So maybe he was a fool for love after all. Perhaps that set him apart from the other members of the spies club because I don’t think Kim Philby was cut from the same cloth. I shall perhaps know more when I have read the book on Burgess written by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert.
According to Biteback Publishing “Hulbert and Purvis conducted extensive detective work into historical espionage figures, such as uncovering an MI5 suspect at the Isokon Flats, and researching British individuals with ties to communist activities.”
