ZGram - 10/10/2004 - "The Guardian: Spies and Lovers"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

October 10, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Just an interesting read to round out a busy week:

[START]

Spies and lovers

The Cambridge spy ring is thought of as an all-male affair. The two 
women who linked Kim Philby and Donald Maclean to Moscow, acting as 
their minders and motivators, as well as their intimates, have been 
ignored or given little importance. And Melinda Maclean is generally 
dismissed as a dupe in her husband's double life. But it was not so. 
Natasha Walter pieces together their story

  Saturday May 10, 2003

  The Guardian

   In 1933, Kim Philby, the future spy, was an idealistic young man 
who had just finished at Cambridge. He set out for Austria, keen to 
witness the fight against fascism first hand, and a communist friend 
gave him an introduction to a leftwing Viennese family who were 
prepared to let out rooms to sympathisers. When Philby went to the 
house, it was the daughter of the family, Litzi Friedman, who 
answered the door. For the rest of his life, Philby remembered her 
sparkiness that afternoon. "A frank and direct person, Litzi, came 
out and asked me how much money I had," Philby said later. "I 
replied, one hundred pounds, which I hoped would last me about a year 
in Vienna. She made some calculations and announced, 'That will leave 
you an excess of £25. You can give that to the International 
Organisation for Aid for Revolutionaries. We need it desperately.' I 
liked her determination."

  Philby went on liking Litzi's determination, to such an extent that 
he went on to work with her, to fall in love with her, and then to 
marry her and take her to London. It was also Litzi who provided him 
with an introduction that would shape the rest of his life. This 
obscure Jewish woman from Vienna became the vital link between the 
idealistic men of Cambridge and the dark world of Soviet espionage.

  Litzi Friedman's story has often been lost or distorted in histories 
of the Cambridge spies, who are usually seen as a purely masculine 
elite. All the spies were men, two of them were homosexual, and 
whether you imagine Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean and Guy 
Burgess arguing with one another in smoke-filled rooms in Cambridge, 
buttering up naive diplomats in the Foreign Office, or sitting with 
grey-faced Russians on park benches, you are unlikely to imagine any 
women by their side.

  Yet the two most successful spies, Maclean and Philby, were inspired 
and supported by extraordinary women. Until archives in Moscow were 
opened after the end of the cold war, we knew very little about them, 
and many of the biographical sources are bafflingly contradictory. I 
have pieced together their stories from the sources that had the most 
access to Soviet archives, but it is still tough trying to work out 
where certainty lies.

  Litzi Friedman stands very far from the usual image we have of the 
Cambridge spies. A photograph of her in her youth shows a woman who 
looks as if she is living in the 1960s, rather than the 1930s, with 
her thick, cropped hair, sleeveless dress and bare legs. The 
energetic pose she has taken up, turning to look out of the picture, 
as if listening to someone, is utterly unselfconscious, the pose of 
an intelligent young woman at ease with herself.

  When Friedman and Philby met, she had the emotional and political 
experience that he signally lacked. She was first married at 18, but 
was divorced after just 14 months, then joined the Communist party. 
In Austria at the time, the government was cracking down on all 
leftwing activity, and in 1932 Friedman was imprisoned for a couple 
of weeks.

  For her, the young Englishman who presented himself at her door in 
1933 was, at first, a potentially useful helper and source of funds. 
But physical desire soon flowered between them. They first made love 
in the snow on a side street in freezing Vienna, heated by the touch 
of flesh on flesh. "I know it sounds impossible, but it was actually 
quite warm once you got used to it," Philby said to a later 
girlfriend. Male friends have also said that this was Philby's first 
sexual experience. First physical love, first political involvement; 
no wonder the affair fired him up as no other relationship in his 
life was to do.

  Philby had already been intellectually convinced by communism, but 
Friedman radicalised him. He began to work with her - begging people 
for money, acting as a courier for underground organisations, helping 
hunted militants to get out of Vienna, and seeing what the fight 
against fascism meant for people risking their lives because of it. 
As he himself said later, these experiences crystallised his faith.

  In February 1934, the political tensions in Vienna flared into armed 
conflict. As socialist leaders were arrested and executed, the 
rank-and-file blundered around in confusion. Philby and Friedman were 
at home when the revolt began, and the first they knew about it was 
when the lights went out, a result of a strike by the power workers. 
Then the telephone rang and a communist leader asked them to go and 
wait for him in a cafe. They went. Two hours later, he arrived and 
asked if they were prepared to set up a machine-gun post within the 
city. They agreed, and were told to wait for further orders. They 
spent that day at the cafe, waiting. At night they went home through 
a city full of patrols and roadblocks, which they passed by relying 
on Philby's British passport. The next day they waited at the cafe 
again, but the arms never materialised. In the end, they helped the 
revolt by collecting clothes and food for the strikers, and enabling 
some of the leaders to get into hiding.

  Given her previous brush with the authorities, once a crackdown on 
known revolutionaries began, Friedman was in real danger. At first, 
Philby tried to find her new sanctuaries, but eventually he took the 
only sure way to protect her. On February 24, in the Vienna town 
hall, he married her, and then took her with him to London. "Even 
though the basis of our relationship was political to some extent, I 
truly loved her and she loved me," he said later.

  It was at this point that Friedman played her most important role, 
as far as the history of 20th-century espionage is concerned. She had 
a friend in London already working for Soviet intelligence, a woman 
called Edith Tudor-Hart, a photographer and communist who was born in 
Vienna. According to Genrikh Borovik, a biographer of Philby's who 
gained access to the Soviet archives, Tudor-Hart recommended Friedman 
and Philby to the KGB for recruitment in 1934. Yuri Modin, a Soviet 
agent who handled the Cambridge spies throughout their careers, 
agrees that Friedman was undoubtedly the catalyst. "Contrary to 
received opinion, it was neither Burgess nor one of our own agents 
who lured Philby into the toils of the Soviet espionage apparatus," 
he has said. "It was Litzi." Since Philby then recommended his other 
Cambridge friends for recruitment, Friedman's relationship with 
Philby was a tipping point not only for him, but for the whole group.

  Before Philby could begin his new career, which was to work for 
British intelligence on behalf of his Soviet controllers, he had to 
get rid of all his obvious communist affiliations. He did so partly 
by working as a journalist for the Times, writing reports from Spain 
that were diligently pro-Franco. But he also had to put distance 
between himself and Friedman. It has only recently become clear that 
the two remained in touch for some years after this separation, not 
as lovers, but as fellow spies.

  It was Friedman who, during the purges of the late 1930s, when 
Philby's handlers were constantly being recalled to Moscow, kept 
contact going for the Soviets with their precious new recruit. She 
moved to Paris in the late 1930s, and until at least 1940 was paid by 
the KGB to maintain this contact with her husband. Although Philby 
started an affair with another woman in Spain, according to the 
Russian files, by then "she saw their relationship more as an 
espionage agreement than a love relationship".

  We are accustomed to seeing Philby as he presented himself - 
unswerving in his dedication to his cause. But in August 1939, the 
faith of many communists in Europe was shaken when the Soviet Union 
signed its pact of non-aggression with Nazi Germany. Given Philby's 
experiences in Austria, where he had seen the terror of facism first 
hand, it is hardly surprising that he found this move hard to take. 
One entry in his files reads, "According to Mary [Litzi's codename], 
to whom he complained in conversations, he was beginning to 
experience a certain disillusionment with us. He has never said this 
to us directly... The signing of the Soviet-German non-aggression 
pact caused Söhnchen [Philby's codename] to ask puzzled questions 
such as 'Why was this necessary?' However, after several talks on 
this subject, Söhnchen seemed to grasp the significance of this 
pact." So it was Friedman who enabled Philby to remain on board 
during those dark days at the beginning of the war, when the Soviet 
Union lost many of its friends in the west.

  By odd coincidence, Donald Maclean's faith in the Soviet Union was 
supported at exactly the same time and in the same place by a secret 
female companion. In August 1939, he was working at the British 
embassy in Paris. The KGB officer who was looking after him at the 
time was a woman called Kitty Harris, with whom he was also having a 
passionate affair. Just as with Friedman and Philby, Kitty Harris was 
way more experienced in both her political and personal life than 
Donald Maclean. For a start, she was 13 years older, and when they 
met she had already been working for the Soviet Union for 16 years.

  Harris was born in the East End of London, in a working-class Jewish 
family, but grew up in Canada and then Chicago, where the harsh lives 
of the workers made her receptive to the arguments of communists - 
including the man who was to become her husband, a charismatic party 
organiser called Earl Browder. She spent a couple of years with him 
in Shanghai, trying to organise the underground Communist party, 
before leaving him and moving to Europe, where she began to work for 
Soviet intelligence.

  Harris seems to have been a headstrong woman who passionately 
believed in her cause, but who also found it hard to keep up the life 
prescribed by the KGB, with its fixed protocols and minimal freedom. 
No wonder that, when the chance came for an intimate relationship 
within these constraints, she seized on it. And she obviously felt 
deeply for Maclean. At the time - before drink and misery ruined his 
looks - he was a striking man, blond, 6ft tall, absolutely the 
upper-class diplomat.

  In 1937, when one spy ring had been broken by British intelligence, 
Maclean had been put "on ice" by his Russian contact, and had been 
turning up to meeting after meeting without finding anyone there. And 
then, one day, he turned up as usual to find not his usual handler 
but Kitty Harris, who swiftly gave him the recognition phrase. "You 
hadn't expected to see a lady, had you?" she said. "No, but it's a 
pleasant surprise," he replied quickly.

  When she was given the task of becoming Maclean's go-between, Harris 
was told he was the most important spy they had. Cherish him as the 
apple of your eye, she was told by Moscow. She did. Maclean would 
visit Harris in her flat in Bayswater twice a week, late in the 
evening, bringing papers for her to photograph that he had sneaked 
out of the Foreign Office for the night. From the start, he'd bring 
flowers and chocolates with those papers, and after a few months they 
agreed to have a special dinner to celebrate their birthdays, which 
fell within a few days of each other. One evening in May 1938, 
Maclean turned up at her flat carrying a huge bunch of roses, a 
bottle of wine and a box holding a locket on a thin gold chain. 
Harris wore it for the rest of her life; when she died in 1966, it 
was still among her paltry possessions. He had ordered dinner from a 
local restaurant, and they sat eating it and listening to Glenn 
Miller on the radio. That was the first night they made love, and 
true to her training she reported the event to her controller, 
Grigoriy Grafpen, next day.

  Harris went on being entirely open in her reports, even telling her 
controllers that she and Maclean began and ended every meeting with 
sex. Sometimes this had adverse effects on their work. Telegrams from 
Moscow complained: "The material in the last two pouches turned out 
to contain only half of each image. What was the problem? Moreover in 
the last batch, many of the pages were almost out of focus..." It is 
rather wonderful to imagine the apparatchiks scratching their heads 
over photographs that had become blurred in the heat of Harris's 
passion.

  After Maclean was posted to the British embassy in Paris in 1938, he 
was so crazy about Harris that he asked Moscow if she could come, 
too; to their surprise, the lovers' request was granted. They went on 
working together until June 1940, when the Germans broke through the 
Maginot line and invaded France. In her final report on Maclean, 
Harris summed up his character for Moscow. "He is politically weak," 
she wrote, "but there is something fundamentally good and strong in 
him that I value. He understands and hates the rotten capitalist 
system and has enormous confidence in the Soviet Union and the 
working class. Bearing in mind his origins and his past... he is a 
good and brave comrade."

  The Cambridge spies are so often presented to us as loners fuelled 
only by cold ideology, but the sexual passion and political 
solidarity that flared between this working-class Jewish woman and 
the young British diplomat clearly sustained them both.

  Kitty Harris wrote such a positive final report on Maclean, even 
though she knew that, by this time, his sexual interest in her was 
waning: a friend of Maclean's, Mark Culme-Seymour, had introduced him 
to a young American woman, Melinda Marling, in a cafe on the Left 
Bank in January 1940, and he had fallen for her immediately. Until 
recently, it was assumed that their marriage was founded on Maclean's 
talent for duplicity, and that Melinda knew nothing about her 
husband's links to Russia until his defection 11 years later.

  But there is another layer to the story of Melinda Maclean. The 
friend who introduced the couple in the Cafe de Flore in 1940 was not 
particularly impressed by her then. "She was quite pretty and 
vivacious, but rather reserved," said Culme-Seymour. "I thought she 
was a bit prim." That is how many observers saw her - attractive, but 
also prim and spoiled. She was delicately good-looking, and carefully 
groomed - her lipstick glossy, her hair always waved, a double row of 
pearls usually clasped around her neck. She seemed to most people to 
have little interest in the world beyond family, friends, clothes and 
Hollywood movies. The success of the blandly conventional veneer she 
wore in public meant that, when Donald defected, she was easily able 
to pretend to everyone, even to MI5 and to her mother, that she had 
no idea that she had been married to a spy for more than a decade.

  But 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".

  Recent revelations from the Soviet archives confirm the existence of 
this other Melinda, a woman who was the greatest dissembler of them 
all. From the start, she and Donald had a relationship founded not on 
duplicity, but on trust. As Donald told Kitty Harris, on the very 
first evening he met Melinda, he saw another side to the prim 
American from the one his friends saw. "I was very taken by her 
views," he told Harris. "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."

  Soon after they started dating, Melinda broke off the whole thing, 
apparently bored by the correct English diplomat. It was in order to 
get her back that Maclean told her the full truth: that he was not 
only a diplomat, but also 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".

  There is no evidence that Melinda worked alongside Maclean, but it 
has been revealed that she supported 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 and on one occasion he physically attacked 
her in public. But they stuck together, even beyond his defection.

  They married in June 1940, days before the Germans marched into 
Paris, and spent the rest of the war being bombed out of one flat 
after another in London. Then they moved to Washington where, from 
the Soviet point of view, Maclean did his most valuable spying work 
in the position of first secretary at the British embassy. In 1948, 
he was appointed head of the chancery at the British embassy in 
Cairo. As soon as he arrived, however, Maclean had problems with his 
KGB contact, who arranged their meetings in the Arab quarter. Yuri 
Modin, a Soviet agent who has published his reminiscences of the 
Cambridge spies, says that the tall, blond Briton in immaculate suit 
and tie felt as inconspicuous "as a swan among geese". Maclean 
suggested that, instead of these absurdly dangerous games, Melinda 
should simply pass the information to the wife of the Soviet resident 
at the hairdresser. "Melinda was quite prepared to do this," Modin 
reports.

  By now, the game of duplicity was telling on Maclean. He began 
drinking, brawling and even telling acquaintances about his life as a 
spy - confessions that they discounted as the talk of a dreamer. 
Cyril Connolly described him vividly as he struck him in London in 
1951. "He had lost his serenity, his hands would tremble, his face 
was usually a livid yellow ... he was miserable and in a very bad 
way. In conversation, a kind of shutter would fall as if he had 
returned to some basic and incommunicable anxiety."

  At this point, Philby, who was then based in Washington, discovered 
that MI5 had broken Maclean's cover and was planning to interrogate 
him. Philby passed this information to the Soviets, and they were 
desperate for Maclean to get out, fearful that, in his current state, 
he would crack immediately under interrogation. Maclean shilly 
shallied, afraid of staying, afraid of going, until he sounded out 
Melinda about the defection. According to Modin, she responded: 
"They're quite right - go as soon as you can, don't waste a single 
moment."

  The day eventually earmarked for Maclean to make his escape happened 
to be his 38th birthday: May 25 1951. He came home by train from the 
Foreign Office to their house in Kent as usual that evening, and soon 
after Guy Burgess, who had just been persuaded to get out, too, 
turned up. After eating the birthday supper that Melinda had 
prepared, Maclean said goodbye to his wife and children, got into 
Burgess's car and left. They drove to Southampton, took a ferry to 
France, then disappeared from view, sparking a media and intelligence 
furore. It was all of five years before Krushchev finally admitted 
that they were in the Soviet Union.

  The following Monday, Melinda Maclean telephoned the Foreign Office 
to ask coolly if her husband was around. Her pose of total ignorance 
convinced them; MI5 put off interviewing her for nearly a week, and 
the Maclean house was never searched. No doubt their readiness to see 
her merely as the ignorant wife was enhanced by the fact that she was 
heavily pregnant at the time - three weeks after Donald left, she 
gave birth to a daughter, their third child.

  The evening of his defection, Donald had taken a cliché straight 
from an Eric Ambler novel, tearing a postcard in two, giving Melinda 
half, and telling her not to trust anyone who did not produce the 
other half as a sign. He later passed his half to Modin. More than a 
year later, Modin intercepted Melinda on her way home from school, 
just after she had dropped off the boys. He followed her Rover, then 
passed her and pulled up, signalling her to do likewise. "This she 
did, but not quite in the way we had expected. She burst out of the 
car like a deer breaking cover, yelling abuse at us for our bad 
driving." When Modin had recovered, he drew the half postcard from 
his pocket. Melinda immediately fell silent, reached across for her 
bag in the car, and produced the other half.

  It was another year before Melinda finally slipped the net of 
British intelligence and press interest. Her secret life during that 
last year in the west must have become a terrible burden. She knew 
the dangers if she had been implicated in her husband's treachery; 
two months before she left, an American couple, the Rosenbergs, were 
sent to the electric chair for spying for the Soviet Union. But, 
unlike her husband, Melinda always hid her feelings under a bland 
veneer that people often read as stupidity. "I will not admit that my 
husband, the father of my children, is a traitor to his country," she 
told everyone in outraged tones. She seemed to be settling into a 
directionless but comfortable life, wandering with her mother and 
children as the seasons changed from beach villa in Majorca to skiing 
holiday in the Alps. But in Geneva on the evening of September 10 
1953, she told her mother that she was going to stay with friends for 
the weekend, got into her black Chevrolet car with her three 
children, drove to Lausanne and disappeared.

  She prepared for her great flight in the way you might expect of a 
bourgeois American, rather than a closet Red. The day before, she 
spent hours at a salon having her hair and nails done. That morning 
she had gone shopping, then returned 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 at Territet. After lunch, at which she 
seemed no more than preoccupied, she got the children and herself 
ready, throwing an electric blue Schiaparelli coat over a black skirt 
and white blouse.

  When Melinda did not return on Monday morning, her mother telephoned 
the British embassy. Intelligence agents tracked reports of a woman 
with a bright coat and three pretty children on the train to Austria, 
where the trail went cold. Weeks later, Melinda's mother received a 
letter, postmarked Cairo. In it, Melinda said, "Please believe, 
darling, in my heart I could not have done otherwise than I have 
done." Later, it transpired that Melinda had been met by KGB 
officials in Austria and flown to Moscow.

  In the late 1960s, Eleanor Philby, Kim's third wife, brought a rare 
glimpse of the Macleans back to the west. Melinda hadn't quite 
accepted the Soviet way of life: she and her children cut 
incongruously elegant figures in Moscow, dressed out of the parcels 
of American clothes sent by her mother and sister. But when the 
Philbys and Macleans sat in their Moscow apartments of an evening, 
getting toweringly drunk on Soviet champagne, Melinda joined in the 
dreaming. "In moments of nostalgia," Eleanor said, "Donald and 
Melinda would talk of the good times they would have in Italy and 
Paris 'when the revolution comes'. I found this world of fantasy 
slightly unnerving."

  Melinda's marriage did not long survive the constraints of life in 
Moscow, and when it broke down she began a brief affair with Philby, 
who had arrived there in 1963. Given their practised secrecy, it's 
not surprising that their relationship remains rather obscure. After 
that relationship, too, broke down, it seems that the day-to-day 
reality of life in the Soviet Union told on Melinda. Finally, in 
1979, she returned to the west, to be with her mother and sisters, 
and her children soon followed her. She is still alive in New York, 
but she has never said a single word to the press.

  One thing is for sure: all three of these women who were close to 
the Cambridge spies were just as good as the men at keeping secrets. 
Litzi Friedman never spoke of how Kim Philby had been recruited 
through her; the archives spoke for her. She settled in East Germany, 
marrying again and making a decent career for herself in the film 
industry. Phillip Knightley, the last journalist to speak to her, 
said that she seemed entirely satisfied with her life.

  Kitty Harris had a very different end. She had spent the rest of the 
war continuing her career as a successful intelligence agent in 
Mexico, and in 1946 was brought to the Soviet Union, where she stayed 
until her death in 1966. But once she reached Russia, she found that 
the society for which she had worked so tirelessly and at such risk 
to her own safety fell far short of her dreams. "The only thing I 
know is that I am terribly lonely," she wrote in her diary during her 
last years. "My life is in pieces."

  Melinda Maclean, still preserving her glacial silence, is the most 
mysterious of them all. Some experts believe her final return to the 
US was allowed by western intelligence only on the grounds that she 
did not reveal anything about her husband's (amazingly successful) 
career as a spy. She may indeed be living under such a constraint. Or 
she may have chosen to remain silent for her own reasons; perhaps she 
cannot bear to revisit Donald's descent into disillusion, and her own 
corroded ideals. Her secrets remain, finally, her own

  · Acknowledgment is particularly due to The Philby Files: The Secret 
Life Of The Master Spy, by Genrikh Borovik and Phillip Knightley; A 
Divided Life, by Robert Cecil; Kitty Harris: The Spy With Seventeen 
Names, by Igor Damaskin with Geoffrey Elliott; The Missing Macleans, 
by Geoffrey Hoare; Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed A Generation, by 
David Leitch, Bruce Page and Phillip Knightley; Kim Philby: The Life 
And Views Of The KGB Masterspy, by Phillip Knightley; My Five 
Cambridge Friends, by Yuri Modin; Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved, by 
Eleanor Philby.

  Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 

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