Donald Maclean (spy) - Departures

Departures

Melinda returned to the West, in 1979 to be with her mother and sisters; her children soon followed her. She died in New York, in 2010 without saying a single word to the media.

The three Maclean children all married Russians, but left Moscow to live in London and the U.S, as they still had the right to British or American passports. Fergus the eldest son enrolled at University College London in 1974, prompting a question in Parliament.

In May 1970 Hodder & Stoughton published Maclean's book British Foreign Policy since Suez which he wrote for a British readership. Maclean told journalists that he set out to analyse the subject rather than to attack it, but criticised British diplomatic support for the United States in the Vietnam war. He stated that he would donate the English royalties to the British Committee for Medical Aid to Vietnam. He foresaw a strengthening of British influence in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of economic recovery. Interviewed live by a BBC Radio reporter who detected a nostalgia for Britain in the book, Maclean refused to be drawn on whether he would like to return to London, for further research for his next book. Maclean was reported seriously ill with pneumonia in December 1982, and was housebound after his recovery. He died of a heart attack in 1983, at the age of sixty-nine. He was cremated and some of his ashes were scattered on his parents' grave in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Penn, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom.