Donald Maclean (spy) - Maclean's Information

Maclean's Information

It has been reported that Maclean suggested to Moscow that the goal of the Marshall Plan was to ensure American economic domination in Europe. Secretary of State George Marshall addressed the graduating class of Harvard University on June 5, 1947. Standing on the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, he offered American aid to promote European recovery and reconstruction. Russia was an intended recipient as were the countries under Russian occupation. Although initially the US had planned to extract war reparations under the Morgenthau Plan, this had been abandoned. and the US simply took over patents and intellectual property worth perhaps $10 billion at today's prices. The Marshall Plan was rejected by Stalin and his collaborators steadily imposed Communist-party rule throughout Eastern Europe, whilst stripping East Germany bare of plant and machinery and scientists. Before the war, Stalin had arrested Western technical experts as spies and Maclean seems to have fed this paranoia over US aid.

Maclean is also reported to have commented on the World Bank created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and the International Monetary Fund, a related institution. John Maynard Keynes a British economist and Harry Dexter White had devised the plans and rules for these. They were in effect an Anglo-American creation. Both are based in Washington, D.C., the World Bank is run by an American, and the IMF by a European. Maclean reportedly suggested to the KGB that they would be under the control of American financial capital. Whilst arguably true, since the bank's initial capital of $7.67 billion was mostly from the US, this was neither secret nor helpful. Now that the Venona transcripts have been published, it is clear that Maclean's 12 cables did not mention such information. In fact, neither he nor his Soviet controller provided any commentary. So this report may have been disinformation from British Intelligence to protect Philby, who was still operational.

The Venona decrypts identified Harry Dexter White as a Soviet agent denoted at various times under the code names "Lawyer", "Richard", and "Jurist". Two years after his death, in a memorandum dated 15 October 1950, White was positively identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), through evidence gathered by the Venona project, as a Soviet source, code named "Jurist". Years later, the Justice Department publicly disclosed the existence of the Venona project which deciphered Soviet cable traffic naming White as "Jurist", a Soviet intelligence source. White was the key American architect of the World Bank and IMF.

The State Department in Washington admitted, after his disappearance that Maclean had been a member of the committee that exchanged information between the partners in the development of the atomic bomb. He added that information about fissionable materials, production processes, weapons technology, and the development of stockpiles of fissionable materials and weapons had ceased in 1946. Maclean had information of Canadian, United States, and British atomic patents for peacetime uses, and amounts of uranium available to the three countries at that time. Some of the information available to him in 1947 and 1948 (when he was Secretary of the Combined Policy Committee concerned with atomic energy policy) was classified and would have been useful at that time to the Soviet atomic energy department and strategic planners. But changes in the rate and scale of the United States program in the intervening years would have made the information obsolete by 1951.

The author S.J.Hamrick (alias W.T.Tyler a Foreign Service officer) claims that Maclean was deliberately exaggerating the size of the stockpile.