Donald Maclean (spy) - Paris

Paris

When Maclean was sent to the British embassy in Paris, Kitty Harris followed him. Their affair continued until Maclean's marriage to Melinda Marling. The daughter of a Chicago oil executive, her parents had divorced when she was a teenager, her mother moving to Europe. In October 1929, Melinda and her sisters went to school at Vevey, near Lausanne, where their mother rented a villa, and spent their holidays at Juan-les-Pins in France.

She had enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study French literature. She was introduced to Maclean by Mark Culme-Seymour, in the Café Flore on the Left Bank in January 1940. Culme-Seymour later described her as "quite pretty and vivacious, but rather reserved." I thought that she was a bit prim. She was always well-groomed, lipstick bright, hair permed, a double row of pearls around her neck. Her interests seemed limited to family, friends, clothes and Hollywood movies."

In the 1950s, Culme-Seymour tracked down the exiled Macleans in Moscow, and another Melinda emerged. She told him that she knew she would be going to Russia right from the beginning, even before Maclean defected. By this time, he looked terrible and was obviously drinking heavily, but she seemed just fine. And when he said something that implied faint criticism of the Soviet Union, she "jumped down his throat".

Soviet archives confirm this view. As Maclean told Kitty Harris, on the evening he met Melinda, he saw more to her "I was very taken by her views. She's a liberal, she's in favour of the Popular Front and doesn't mind mixing with communists even though her parents are well-off. There was a White Russian girl, one of her friends, who attacked the Soviet Union and Melinda went for her. We found we spoke the same language."

Maclean proposed but Melinda was in an agony of indecision. She liked him too well for an outright refusal, and yet she could not bring herself to accept him. She wanted to return to the United States to think it over. But Maclean argued that she would not get back to Europe until the war was over. Finally she decided that she could not marry him. He would drive her to Bordeaux to find a ship. But events overtook them, with the French collapse. Melinda changed her mind. On June 10, 1940, with gunfire sounding faintly in the distance, they were married at the local Mairie

Maclean came clean about his role as a diplomat, a communist and a spy. It was an outrageous risk, one quite out of character for him at that time, but he reassured Harris that Melinda not only reacted positively, but "actually promised to help me to the extent that she can - and she is well connected in the American community".

Sam Lesser, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, befriended Maclean in Moscow, where he was correspondent for the KGB-funded British newspaper The Daily Worker. He annoyed the KGB by revealing that Melinda Maclean had always known about her husband's spying activities.

There is no evidence that Melinda worked alongside Maclean, but she did support him in his dangerous double life throughout their marriage. It was never an easy relationship: Maclean drank heavily, he expressed homosexual desires, they were often on the verge of splitting up. But they stuck together, until she moved in with Philby.

They escaped on a British warship and spent the rest of the war being bombed out of one flat after another in London. For Maclean, who told Melinda's sister Harriet "There's nothing I like so much as the comfortable houses of my rich friends" this was genuine hardship, although his Soviet controllers would not have understood that outlook.