Donald Maclean (secret agent)

Donald Maclean

Donald Duart Maclean junior (* 25. May 1913 in Marylebone , London; † 11. March 1983 in Moscow ) was a British secret agent of MI5 , who during the Second World War, along with four others, under the name Five Cambridge were known for the Soviet Union spied .

Maclean was born the son of the liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean senior (1864-1932) and attended Gresham's School in Norfolk . He then studied modern foreign languages ​​at Trinity Hall and met the rest of the Cambridge Five.

In 1934 he started working for the Foreign Office . While working at the British Embassy in Paris , he married Melinda Marling in 1940. After his transfer to the British Embassy in Washington, DC , he got access to details of the Manhattan Project , and eventually became Secretary of the Anglo-American Political Committee for Nuclear Development. As the strain on his double life increased, he began to drink heavily and became an alcoholic . In 1941 he was identified by the Soviet defector Walter Germanowitsch Kriwitzki .

Transferred to the British embassy in Cairo in 1948, he was made consular chief at the embassy there. Due to an episode of drunkenness, he was sent back to London to recover from a "nervous breakdown". In 1950 he was appointed head of the Americas division of the Foreign Office. Here he had access to information from the nuclear development program of the “ top secret ” level.

A year later, Kim Philby warned him that he was under suspicion and likely to be exposed. Together with Guy Burgess , Maclean fled to the Soviet Union on May 25, 1951, where they only reappeared five years later in Moscow and met on February 11, 1956 with a dossier in which they asserted that they had never worked as a Soviet agent , turned to Western journalists. In the Soviet Union he achieved the rank of colonel in the KGB with an apartment in Moscow and a dacha outside the city. In 1983 he died of a heart attack in Moscow and was cremated. His urn was later brought to England.

See also

Anthony Blunt , John Cairncross , George Blake , Melita Norwood , Profumo affair