Maclean was sharing information about uranium with Moscow in the early days of WWII, so he was up to speed on its usage and importance, Philipps writes. During World War II, Maclean worked for the British Foreign Office and, between 19, he passed more than 5,000 documents to the USSR including high-level details of the atomic bomb project. Despite his antics, Maclean was a competent double agent, leaking thousands of classified documents to his Russian handlers from the start of his recruitment in 1934. Maclean offered the injured man gin as an anesthetic. Maclean was tackled to the floor by the first secretary at the British Embassy who sustained a double fracture of his ankle. While the rest of the group watched, Maclean put his hands around his wife Melinda’s neck - as if to throttle her - then grabbed the rifle of an armed guard and beat him with it, according to Roland Philipps, author of A Spy Named Orphan. During one such outing with friends in Egypt, Maclean was imbibing a lethal combination of whisky and Zebib, an Egyptian version of Arak. Maclean appeared to have a self-destructive streak and engaged in legendary drunken benders. There were also early signs of instability. Although Melinda initially claimed she was unaware of her husband’s activities, it later transpired that he’d revealed early on that he was a Soviet spy. Maclean married his wife, Melinda, in 1940, and to the outside world they were the epitome of domestic bliss. ĭonald Maclean and his wife, who later had an affair and lived with Philby The international incident had “severely shaken” the US State Department's confidence in the integrity of officials of Britain’s Foreign Office, the British Embassy reported back to the UK. Furthermore, Washington told London to “clean house regardless of who may be hurt”, according to declassified papers released by Britain’s National Archives. The Americans pointed out that drunkenness, recurrent nervous breakdowns, sexual ‘deviations’, and other human frailties were considered security hazards and dismissible offenses in the US.
They were described as hopeless drunks, unstable and promiscuous characters who’d been appointed to top jobs in London and at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the US was livid. Among the most notorious of the traitors was Donald Maclean, a British diplomat and intelligence officer who disappeared in 1951 along with a fellow operative, Guy Burgess.
US confidence in British intelligence nosedived during the Cold War after a ring of Cambridge University-educated spies working for the British government smuggled intelligence to the KGB. Among the most notorious atomic spies - Klaus Fuchs, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and Alan Nunn May - one name is often forgotten: Britain’s Donald Maclean, one of the Cambridge Five spies who undermined the Manhattan Project.
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