apply for the British diplomatic service. Maclean had little trouble
fooling his superiors, and he became a “high flyer” in the foreign ser-
vice. In the late 1930s he provided Moscow with thousands of British
diplomatic dispatches, a window on British foreign policy during the
Munich crisis and the run up to World War II.
During and after the war Maclean served in Washington, where he
provided Moscow with detailed information about U.S. military
strategy and nuclear weapons development. According to one former
KGBofficer, Maclean’s reporting in 1942 filled 45 volumes. In the
late 1940s, Maclean was posted to Cairo as the youngest minister-
counselor (the equivalent of a deputy chief of mission) in the British
foreign service. In Egypt, Maclean’s life began to unravel and he
drank heavily. One evening, he and a British colleague smashed up
the apartment of an American diplomat in fits of drunken rage.
Maclean was returned to Britain in disgrace, but he was made head
of the American Department.
In his last few months in the department in 1950–1951, Maclean
provided Moscow with detailed information about American and
British policy in Korea. By this time, however, he had been pin-
pointed by American counterintelligenceas a Soviet mole. Decryp-
tion of Soviet intelligence cables from 1944–1945 identified a Soviet
agent codenamed “Homer.” Kim Philby, serving in Washington as
the British intelligence representative, was aware of the danger and
used Guy Burgess, another Soviet agent in the British establishment
and serving in the British embassy in Washington, to warn Maclean.
On 25 May 1951, Maclean and Burgess traveled to France and dis-
appeared. The KGB resettled Maclean under the name Mark Petro-
vich Fraser. He and Burgess surfaced in Moscow in 1956.
Maclean was never truly happy in Moscow, despite the KGB’s ex-
filtration of his wife, Melinda, and their children from London to
Moscow two years later. The KGB and the Soviet system did not
know how to use defectors, nor did they fully trust them. Maclean
lived in Moscow for the next three decades; disillusioned with Soviet
domestic policies, he remained a “stranger in a strange land.” After his
death, his ashes were returned to Scotland and buried there. Perhaps
the best assessment of the damage he caused in the first days of the
Cold Warcame from Secretary of State Dean Acheson: “That son-of-
a-bitch knew everything.” See alsoHARRIS, KITTY; VENONA.MACLEAN, DONALD STUART (1913–1984) • 15106-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 151