World Famous Spy Scandals by Vikas Khatri & Vikas

Author:Vikas Khatri & Vikas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Famous, Spies, Information, Country, Lives, Spymasters.
Publisher: Pustak Mahal
Published: 2010-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Outside of his studies, Maclean’s main —in fact, almost sole—interest was undergraduate journalism, which he used to popularise Marxism. He had quite clearly accepted the whole Communist philosophy. It was therefore a surprise to his friends when he announced that he proposed to seek a career in the British Foreign Office—the very anthesis of Red belief.

“I have decided to join the oppressors instead of the oppressed,” Maclean uttered. It was an uncharacteristically flip explanation which, along with his uncompromisingly Left-wing written views, should have aroused suspicion.

As it was, the Foreign Office accepted Maclean as a more than passable recruit. If the pro-Communist sympathies he had shown in the past were considered at all, they were dismissed as the not-uncommon excesses of an intellectual undergraduate. It did not occur to anyone in authority that he was already a committed Soviet agent.

Luck was to prove unusually kind to Maclean in his role as a spy. He was posted in the spring of 1944 to Washington as a First Secretary. With him went his wife, Melinda. The fact that he was only 31—unusually young for such a job—is an indication of the esteem in which he was held at the Foreign Office—who regarded him as one of the brightest of their bright young men.

It was only natural, when the post became vacant a couple of years later, that Maclean should be appointed British Secretary to the Combined Policy Committee on atomic affairs. The function of the Committee was to control the exchange of information on atomic matters between the United States, Canada and Britain.

This post not only enabled him to pass on to the Soviet Union details of vital atomic secrets being pooled between the countries—he was able to lay his hands on even more important information held back by the United States for security reasons.

This came about because he managed, as part of his duties, to obtain a non-escort pass to the U.S. Atomic H.Q. in Washington. He made frequent use of the privilege—usually at night when the building was more or less deserted.

Nobody knows, or is ever likely to know, exactly how much information he managed to filch on these nocturnal visits. One secret—at a time when uranium was believed to be in critically short supply—was almost certainly a cheap American process for converting waste from South African goldmines into high-grade uranium.

Eventually, a security officer, Brian La Plante, became suspicious of the frequency with which Maclean made use of his non-escort facility and the unusual hours he kept. “I reported him and the pass was withdrawn,” said La Plante. But by then the damage had been done and, with no follow-up investigation, Maclean was able to move on to his next coup.

From his privileged position he was able to monitor for his Russian task masters the top secret negotiations which led up to the signing of the Western defensive alliance—the North Atlantic Pact—in April 1949. During the negotiations, Maclean was switched to a new post, Head of Chancery at the Cairo embassy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.