London
In 1934, Maclean started work at the Foreign Office in London. While there, he was under the operational control of GPU rezident, Anatoli Gorsky. Gorsky, who was appointed in 1939 after the entire London rezidentura was liquidated, used Vladimir Borisovich Barkovsky, a recent graduate of Moscow's Intelligence School as the case officer for Maclean.
The writer Cyril Connolly describes Maclean at this time. He was sandy-haired, tall, with great latent physical strength, but fat and rather flabby. Meeting him, one was conscious of both amiability and weakness. He did not seem a political animal but resembled the clever, helpless youth in an Aldous Huxley novel, an outsize Cherubino intent on amorous experience but too shy and clumsy to succeed. He sought refuge on the more impetuous and emancipated fringes of Bloomsbury and Chelsea.
In 1937, Maclean was put "on ice" by his Russian contact. At meeting after meeting nobody turned up. Then Kitty Harris arrived in place of his usual controller and gave the recognition phrase. "You hadn't expected to see a lady, had you?" she said. "No, but it's a pleasant surprise," he replied. Harris was told he was the most important spy. Cherish him as the apple of your eye, she was told. Maclean would visit Harris' Bayswater flat, after work, with documents to photograph. He would arrive with flowers and chocolates with those papers, and by May 1938 they had a dinner to celebrate their birthdays. Maclean came with a bunch of roses, a bottle of wine and a locket on a thin gold chain. They ate a take-away and listened to Glenn Miller on the radio. That was the first night they made love, and loyal to her mission she reported this to her controller, Grigoriy Grafpen.
Over the next two years, 45 boxes of documents were photographed and sent to Moscow. "She was a cut-out between Maclean and his KGB controller," said Geoffrey Elliott, who wrote a book about her with Igor Damaskin, a former KGB officer.
Kitty Harris was born to poor Russian emigres in London's East End; she had emigrated to Winnipeg in Canada and then Chicago where she met and married Earl Browder, later leader of the American Communist Party. He took her to Shanghai, where she was recruited by the OGPU as a courier and housekeeper of a safe house when she returned to London after discovering that Browder was already married.
Read more about this topic: Donald Maclean (spy)
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