Donald Maclean 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 a 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.
Guy Burgess, though he preferred the company of the able to the artistic, also moved on the edge of the same world. He was of a very different physique, tall-medium in height, with blue eyes, an inquisitive nose, sensual mouth, curly hair and alert fox-terrier expression. He was immensely energetic, a great talker, reader, boaster, walker, who swam like an otter and drank, not like a feckless undergraduate as Donald was apt to do, but like some Rabelaisian bottle-swiper whose thirst was unquenchable.
Thus British Critic Cyril Connolly once described two flagrant and flamboyant British traitors: Guy Francis de Money Burgess, 44, and Donald Duart Maclean, 42. Last week the British government, prodded by the revelations of Vladimir Petrov, the Russian MVD boss who defected in Australia, told a bit more about the British spies who escaped in 1951 and are now apparently alive somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. The 3,500-word white paper was not the whole story, but with the facts contributed by Petrov, it made possible for the first time a cohesive account of The Case of the Missing Spies.
Recruited. Their treason began in the middle '30s at Cambridge, where apparently wild-minded Guy Burgess, the well-schooled son of a Royal Navy officer, first met Donald Maclean, son of a former Cabinet minister and a young man with a promising future. Both moved in Communist circles. It was just before the Spanish Civil War, and both were outspoken in their dissatisfaction with the conduct of world affairs, Maclean to the point of declaring that he wanted to work for the Russians. It was at this time, says Petrov, that they were recruited into the Soviet espionage service. Maclean entered the Foreign Office. Burgess took to journalism, joined the BBC, transferred to a propaganda section of the War Office with the outbreak of World War II. Maclean was already carving out a brilliant career in the Paris embassy and spending his spare moments at Left Bank spots. At the Café Flore he met a pretty American girl named Melinda Marling, who amused him by smoking cigars. They were married just before the fall of France, and went on together to London, and four years later to Washington.
As head of chancery in the British embassy, almost all secret documents relating to the allied effort in war and peace between 1944 and 1948 passed through Maclean's hands. He was also secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Developments, with a pass which admitted him to the U.S. AEC offices at any time of day or night. With his pretty wife and two young children, Maclean outwardly seemed like the perfect young diplomat. But behind his façade of charm, the strain of his double life began to tell.
He began drinking heavily, and preferred what he called his "ashcan life" and "craggy characters" to the Washington social round.