Donald Maclean (spy)

Donald Duart Maclean ( born May 25, 1913 in Marylebone, London, † March 11, 1983 in Moscow) was a British secret agent of MI5, who during the Second World War, along with four others, who were known as the Cambridge Five, for Soviet Union was spying.

Maclean was born as the son of the Liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean (1864-1932) and attended Gresham 's School in Norfolk. He studied modern languages ​​at Trinity Hall ( Cambridge ), where he met the rest of the Cambridge Five know.

In 1934 he began to work for the Foreign Office. During his work at the British Embassy in Paris in 1940, he married Melinda Marling. After his transfer to the British Embassy in Washington, DC he got access to details of the Manhattan Project, secretary of the Anglo-American political committee was even finally to nuclear development. When the stress of his double life grew, he began to drink heavily and became an alcoholic. 1941 identified him, the Soviet defector Walter Hermanovitch Krivitsky.

Puts on the British Embassy in Cairo in 1948, he was at the embassy there to Konsularchef. Due to a drunken episode, he was sent back to London in order to recover from a " nervous breakdown ". In 1950 he was appointed head of the U.S. Department of the Foreign Office. Here he had access to information from the nuclear development program, the level of secrecy "top secret".

A year later warned him Kim Philby that he was under suspicion and will quite likely unmasked. Together with Guy Burgess sat Maclean place in the Soviet Union, where they appeared five years later in Moscow again and on 11 February with a dossier in which they professed to have never worked as a Soviet agent, turned to Western journalists. In the Soviet Union, he brought it to the rank of colonel in the KGB with an apartment in Moscow and a dacha outside the city. In 1983, he died in Moscow from a heart attack and was cremated. His urn was brought to England later.