He perfected, Philipps says, “the spy’s most essential art of keeping himself hidden while remaining a model of conformity in plain sight”.īritain and Stalinist Russia were close allies against Germany in 1941-45. He joined the diplomatic service in 1935, and began remitting to Moscow intelligence he gleaned while working in key Foreign Office departments and in the Paris embassy. His open avowal of communism halted after his recruitment in 1934 as a penetration agent of the NKVD (later renamed KGB): his codename was Orphan. Maclean gained a first in modern languages from Cambridge in the early 1930s. Despite the later allegations of establishment protection and cover-ups, he was never a “toff” by birth, tastes or assimilation. In the 1930s his mother ran a knitting shop and jigsaw-puzzle lending library.

Gaelic was his grandmother’s first language. His paternal grandfather was a Hebridean fisherman and shoemaker. His father was a solicitor who was active in Cardiff chamber of commerce and elected as a Liberal MP. Philipps believes that the required loyalty oaths to the school's masters encouraged betrayals of one's classmates and contributed to making Gresham's 'the perfect psychological training-ground for a nascent spy.' Even though Maclean remains a mysterious figure, this is likely to be considered the definitive biography.Maclean was born in 1913. Maclean's motivations for betraying his country remain murky, despite Philipps's speculation that its seeds lay in the oppressive private school he attended Gresham's School, in an isolated pocket of eastern England. Maclean and his co-conspirators were eventually discovered, leading to his flight to Russia in 1951, where he lived until his death in 1983. The valuable information Maclean was to share included the truth about America's nuclear capacity in 1948, as tensions flared over the division of Berlin, and secrets relating to America's development of uranium for use in nuclear weapons. Philby went on to become a high-ranking British intelligence officer, and he recruited Maclean as a Soviet agent before Maclean landed a job with the Foreign Office in 1935. While studying at Cambridge, Maclean became a supporter of communism and fatefully met Kim Philby, a fellow member of the Cambridge Five spy ring. In this often exciting narrative, Philipps uses a trove of recently declassified files to trace the arc of Russian spy Donald Maclean's life.

A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps