Donald Maclean (spy) - Moscow

Moscow

Maclean, unlike Burgess, assimilated into the Soviet Union and became a respected citizen, learning Russian and serving as a specialist on the economic policy of the West and British foreign affairs. After a brief period of teaching English in Kuybyshev (now Samara) at a Russian provincial school, Maclean joined the staff of "International Affairs" in early 1956 as a specialist on British home and foreign policy and relations between the Soviet Union and NATO. He shared a small room with his new Soviet colleagues on the second floor of the journal's Gorokhovsky Pereulok premises. He also worked for the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Maclean was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Combat. His Soviet name was Mark Petrovich.

Melinda Maclean and their children joined him in Moscow, more than a year later. Before slipping away from her mother's home in Geneva, she spent hours at a salon having her hair and nails done. The next morning she returned from shopping to tell her mother that she had bumped into an old friend who had invited her to spend the weekend with the children at his villa in Territet, a village close to Montreux. After lunch, at which she seemed preoccupied, she left in her mother's Chevrolet wearing a blue Schiaparelli coat over black skirt and white blouse. They continued by train from Lausanne oddly dressed.

An American colonel on the Arlberg Express remembered the two fair-haired little boys in grey flannel suits who told him they went to school in Geneva, the large suitcase and the two raffia carry-alls from Majorca and Melinda wearing a cheap boy's watch. They left the train before the Austrian border on the morning of Saturday, September 12 and after a quick breakfast were driven off in an American car by a man with an Austrian accent. Melinda was aware of her risks as a collaborator to her husband. Two months earlier, the Rosenbergs had sat in the electric chair for spying. But Melinda usually concealed her thoughts behind an expressionless look. "I will not admit that my husband, the father of my children, is a traitor to his country", she would say in outraged tones.

While living in Moscow, Maclean spoke up for Soviet dissidents, and gave money to the families of some of those imprisoned. Eleanor Philby provided a rare glimpse of the Macleans' life. Melinda hadn't accepted Soviet penury: she and her children cut incongruously elegant figures in Moscow, dressed from parcels sent by her family. When the Philbys and Macleans sat in their Moscow apartments getting drunk on Georgian champagne, Melinda and Donald would talk wistfully "of the good times they would have in Italy and Paris 'when the revolution comes'. Eleanor found this fantasy unnerving." Perhaps the Macleans knew that the apartments were bugged.