Our Woman in Moscow(119)

“How far is Northolt?”

Philip looks at his wristwatch. “If we hop in the car this instant, I can drive you there in time.”

“Will they let me on?”

“By God,” says Philip, “they’d better.”



For a moment, Iris and Philip stand to watch Ruth as she bounds to the cottage to collect her toothbrush and passport. Her gold hair flies from the patterned silk scarf around her head. In the perambulator, Gregory’s eyes flash open. His mouth screws in preparation for a good yell. Iris puts her hand inside Philip’s hand.

“Will he live?” she whispers.

He turns his troubled face to her and smiles.

“Fox? Of course he’ll live. He’ll live for her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Can you think of a better reason?”

In the distance, the sun flashes against Ruth’s bouncing gold hair. Gregory lets loose with a lusty cry. Philip takes the handlebar of the Silver Cross perambulator to guide them back to the cottage.





Author’s Note




I became familiar with the Cambridge spy ring sideways, while I was researching something else. The more I learned, the more desperate I became to set everything else aside and write about this.

In Great Britain, their names are as synonymous with treason as Benedict Arnold’s is in the United States—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross—and the flight of Burgess and Maclean to the Soviet Union in May 1951 is the stuff of legend. Recruited by the Soviet spy agency NKVD in the 1930s, when communism was fashionable among the young elites of Oxford and Cambridge, they graduated and duly entered the corridors of power, where they served up their country’s vital secrets to the Soviet Union for the next two decades, using their influential positions and the cultural capital of an Oxbridge man—no Englishman could possibly imagine a traitor among the chaps he went to school with, college with, clubs with—to avoid detection. Eventually it all came tumbling down, of course, but not before Stalin was privy to all the British negotiating points at Yalta, not before the minutes and papers of the Atomic Energy Commission were delivered into Soviet hands, not before the secrets of the nuclear program allowed Soviet scientists to create their own weapons, not before countless brave intelligence agents had been unmasked, tortured, executed.

But it was more than that. These men sat at the top of the British intelligence and diplomatic corps. The nation’s faith in its political and academic elites was permanently shaken, and the partnership between the US and UK spy agencies became a minefield of distrust and paranoia at the very moment that the West needed a united front more than ever.

Needless to say, this rich ground has been thoroughly plowed by historians and novelists alike over the years, and many a spy thriller owes its inspiration—directly or indirectly—to one or more of the Cambridge Five. But as I dug deeper into these men and their lives, I was less fascinated by the mechanics of espionage—the what and the how of what they did, the narrow escapes and unspeakable blunders—than by the who and the why. How could these intellectually brilliant men cling so willfully and catastrophically to their beliefs, even as the everyday evils of the Soviet state lay so plain before them? How could they betray their friends with such cold disregard? Consign women and men to their deaths without a second thought? How did this constant betrayal and secrecy affect them psychologically? And my God, what did it do to their families? The wives and children who bore the brunt of their inner torment? Were they unwilling passengers or fellow travelers?

These questions brought me to the marriage of Donald and Melinda Maclean, a fraught and complex partnership if ever there was one. At various points in their relationship, Melinda was his victim and his enabler, sometimes fed up and other times addicted, and easily the steelier of the two. Because the intelligence service dismissed her as a brainless housewife, she was able to facilitate Maclean’s defection in 1951 while eight and a half months pregnant, then slip away to join him with the children two years later. It hit me that the spymasters and spy catchers on both sides were missing a trick or two, and this kernel of inspiration grew and transformed into Our Woman in Moscow.

Sasha bears a physical and psychological resemblance to Maclean, and certain scenes are inspired by real-life incidents that marked Maclean’s deterioration into alcoholism and self-loathing—the farce on the Isle of Wight, for example, is roughly drawn from a disastrous picnic expedition on the Nile during Maclean’s posting to the British embassy in Cairo. Despite these parallels, Sasha and Iris are fictional characters and the narrative itself arises from my own imagination. Maclean died of natural causes in the Soviet Union in 1983; Melinda returned to the United States permanently in 1979, though not before having had an affair with Kim Philby, who defected in 1963.

Meanwhile, on a personal note, my own grandfather was born in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century to a British father and a Russian mother. At the outbreak of revolution in 1917, he fled across Scandinavia to England and never returned. As I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, it seemed impossible to me that Deo had grown up in Russia, speaking Russian as well as English, summering at his grandfather’s dacha near the Finnish border. Of course, I never talked to him much about it, which I now deeply regret, but he and my grandmother had the foresight to write down their recollections in memoirs for the family. The fictional flight from Russia in Our Woman in Moscow might just owe its inspiration to Deo’s flight a hundred years earlier.