A few weeks later, at Arlington Hall, came the break the decoders had been hoping for, and Philby had been dreading: Meredith Gardner finally decrypted a message dating back to June 1944, indicating that the spy ‘Homer’ had a pregnant wife who was then staying with her mother in New York. Melinda, Maclean’s American-born wife, had been expecting a child in 1944; her wealthy divorced mother lived in Manhattan; therefore Homer must be Donald Maclean.
News of the breakthrough flew to London, and then bounced back to Philby in Washington. He was now the closest to exposure since Volkov had threatened to unmask him in 1945. But time was on his side. There was no evidence, as yet, to connect him directly with Maclean, and the two men had not met for many years. Moreover, instead of arresting Maclean at once, MI5 opted to wait, and watch, in the hope of gathering further evidence. The Venona material was simply too secret to be used in court: by tapping his telephone, bugging his office, intercepting his post and putting him under surveillance, MI5 hoped to catch Maclean in direct contact with his Soviet controller. But the Security Service may also have been suffering from the sort of paralysis that affects organisations when faced with a situation that is deeply embarrassing, potentially ruinous and entirely unprecedented. Maclean, the most senior spy ever detected inside the British government, would remain at liberty for five more weeks.
Philby immediately relayed the bad news to Makayev, and demanded that Maclean be extracted from the UK before he was interrogated and compromised the entire British spy network – and most importantly Philby himself. But with Maclean now under close surveillance, arranging his escape was a delicate task, since any overt contact with the Soviets would trigger his immediate arrest. Maclean must be warned and told to flee by a third party who would not arouse suspicion. The ideal messenger, Philby concluded, was close at hand, in the disreputable and dishevelled shape of Guy Burgess, whose diplomatic career was about to come to an end in a car crash, almost literally. Whether by accident or design, he collected no fewer than three speeding tickets in a single day by hurtling around Virginia in a grey Lincoln convertible, claimed diplomatic immunity on all of them, insulted the officers who stopped him, and provoked a furious official protest from both the State Department and the governor of Virginia. It wasn’t quite goats, but for the ambassador it was the last straw. Burgess, in disgrace but wholly unrepentant, was instructed to return to London immediately. Philby would later claim that Burgess’s recall had been a carefully engineered ploy; it was probably more a lucky accident, but either way it presented an ideal opportunity to warn Maclean that he must flee to Moscow.
The night before Burgess’s departure, the two spies dined in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Washington, selected because it had individual booths with piped music, to stymie any eavesdroppers. They rehearsed the plan: Burgess would make contact with the Soviets in London, then visit Maclean at his office and, while making innocuous conversation, hand over a sheet of paper setting the time and place for a rendezvous. Burgess had not yet been formally fired, and there would be nothing suspicious in the newly returned information officer from Washington reporting to the head of the American desk. The Soviets would then arrange Maclean’s escape. ‘Don’t you go too,’ said Philby, only half-joking, as he dropped Burgess off at Union Station. Burgess, however, was congenitally incapable of doing what he was told.
Burgess arrived back in England on 7 May 1951, and immediately contacted Anthony Blunt, who got a message to Yuri Modin, the Soviet controller of the Cambridge ring. ‘There’s serious trouble,’ Blunt reported. ‘Guy Burgess has just arrived back in London. Homer’s about to be arrested . . . It’s only a question of days now, maybe hours . . . Donald’s now in such a state that I’m convinced he’ll break down the moment they arrest him.’ Modin informed Moscow, and received an immediate response: ‘We agree to your organising Maclean’s defection. We will receive him here and provide him with whatever he needs.’
A graduate of the Leningrad Naval Academy, Yuri Modin had, in his own estimation, ‘no predisposition to be a spy’. But he was very good at it. He had inherited the Cambridge network at a time when it was falling apart, yet he had handled Burgess’s drinking and Maclean’s volatility with tact and competence. Spiriting Maclean to Moscow, however, was by far the greatest challenge he had yet faced.
MI5’s surveillance unit, A4, was known as ‘The Watchers’. In 1951, it numbered about twenty men and three women. Most were former Special Branch police officers, selected for their sharp eyesight, good hearing, and average height (‘men who are too short . . . are just as conspicuous as tall men’, ruled the chief Watcher). They were expected to dress in trilby hats and raincoats, and communicated with each other by hand signals. They stood on street corners, watching, and trying to appear inconspicuous. They looked, in short, exactly like surveillance agents. Since the end of the war, A4 had kept watch on the Soviet intelligence residency in Kensington Palace Gardens, and the Soviets, in turn, had kept a close watch on them. Modin knew that the Watchers did not work in the evenings or over the weekends. He knew, too, that surveillance of Maclean did not extend beyond London, because MI5 feared that a man hanging around in a trilby might be a giveaway in the countryside. Maclean lived in Tatsfield in rural Kent, and commuted to and from London by train. The Watchers trailed after him during the day but, Modin observed, ‘at Victoria, MI5’s men saw the train out of the station, and then headed home like good little functionaries. There was no one at Tatsfield to take up the chase.’ Modin believed Maclean would be arrested on Monday 28 May. On Friday 25 May, the very day the Foreign Secretary gave formal approval for Maclean’s interrogation, the escape plan swung into action.
That evening, which happened to be Maclean’s thirty-eighth birthday, Burgess appeared at the Maclean home in Tatsfield with a rented car, packed bags and two round-trip tickets booked in false names for the Falaise, a pleasure boat leaving that night for St Malo in France. He had spent the previous day at his club, talking loudly about a road trip he planned to take to Scotland with a new boyfriend. Burgess had dinner with Donald and Melinda Maclean (who was party to the plan), and the two men set off for Southampton in a state of high excitement and unaccustomed sobriety. They arrived just minutes before the midnight sailing, parked the car askew on the dockside, and scrambled up the boat’s gangplank. One of the dockworkers shouted that the car door was still open; ‘Back on Monday!’ Burgess shouted back. He may have thought he was telling the truth.
Before Burgess left Washington, Philby had made him promise he would not flee with Maclean to Moscow. ‘Don’t go with him when he goes. If you do, that’ll be the end of me. Swear that you won’t.’ Modin, however, had insisted that Burgess must accompany Maclean. Burgess at first objected. He pointed out that he had no desire to defect and found the prospect of life in Moscow perfectly ghastly. But finally he had agreed, apparently on the understanding that he could steer Maclean to Moscow and then return and resume his life just as before. The Soviets had other plans: Burgess and Maclean were travelling on one-way tickets. As Modin wrote: ‘The Centre had concluded that we had not one, but two burnt-out agents on our hands. Burgess had lost most of his former value to us . . . Even if he retained his job, he could never again feed intelligence to the KGB as he had done before. He was finished.’ What the Soviets had failed to take properly into account was the knock-on impact the double defection would have on Kim Philby. Modin later acknowledged that allowing Burgess to leave with Maclean had been an error. In the spy world, nothing is supposed to occur by accident, but in this case, Modin’s explanation was probably true: ‘It just happened . . . intelligence services do silly things sometimes.’