Volume 49, Number 2 · February 14, 2002
'Cowboys and Indians'
By John Banville
Anthony Blunt: His Lives
by Miranda Carter
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 590 pp., $30.00
On March 30, 1951, a British cryptographer working on the Anglo-American VENONA counterespionage project cracked a coded message from Russian Intelligence which identified Donald Maclean as a Soviet agent. Maclean, son of a Liberal cabinet minister and a graduate of Cambridge University, had worked in the British embassy in Washington for four years, from 1944 to 1948, during which time he had passed to the Russians extremely valuable information on, among other things, the American atomic weapons program. After Washington he moved to the embassy in Cairo, where he suffered a nervous collapse brought on by stress and overdrinking. Nevertheless, after six months' leave he returned to work for the Foreign Office in London, and was appointed head of the American Department. Before being exposed, he had been in the habit of telling friends that he was a Communist agent. They did not believe him, even after he had punched an acquaintance for saying that Whittaker Chambers had been right in identifying Alger Hiss as a spy. 'I am the English Hiss,' Maclean declared.
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