Donald Maclean Used Four Aliases to Leak Washington Embassy Secrets
By Vera Kessler ·
British diplomatic secrets were funneled to Moscow for twenty years by a man the Security Service later tracked through a web of aliases before he fled to the USSR in 1951.
Trust in the British Foreign Office was shattered when its own high-flying employees funneled diplomatic secrets to the Soviet Union. The betrayal cost the West strategic intelligence and left the Security Service scrambling to track men who had spent decades operating under false names.
The file's catalogue entry for reference KV 2/4144 in the UK National Archives captures the summary of a life spent in dual loyalty. Donald Duart Maclean is described as a "high flying employee of the Foreign Office" who, by the time he was identified in 1951, had already spent nearly twenty years serving a foreign power.
"A high flying employee" The public record describes Maclean's rise through the British civil service as a trajectory of calculated ambition. After being recruited by a Soviet agent during his time as an undergraduate, he entered the heart of the British diplomatic machine. By 1938, he was appointed as Third Secretary at the British embassy in Paris. His subsequent postings to London and Washington, D.C., were not merely career milestones but strategic placements for an agent of the Soviet Union.
In Washington, Maclean achieved the rank of First Secretary. The catalogue entry for KV 2/4144 records that he was eventually "identified as the source of a leakage from the Washington Embassy some years earlier." While the catalogue does not specify the exact contents of those leaked documents, the stakes were immense. As a senior diplomat in the American capital during the 1940s, Maclean was positioned to see the most sensitive communications between the UK and the US. The "leakage" mentioned in the record was not a minor breach; it was a systemic drain of intelligence from one of the most critical diplomatic posts in the world.
Richard Curzon and Mark Frazer The Security Service did not just track a diplomat; they tracked a collection of ghosts. The archival records—which include a sprawling array of related files such as KV 2/4140, KV 2/4159, KV 2/4155, KV 2/4146, and KV 2/4145—reveal a man who existed in multiple identities. Maclean operated under the aliases Richard Curzon, Mark Frazer, Percy Maclean, and S. Madzoevsky.
The use of such diverse aliases suggests a sophisticated level of Soviet tradecraft, designed to compartmentalize his communications and protect his primary identity as a British official. The catalogue entry assesses that Maclean had been a "Soviet agent since the 1930s." This means that for the duration of his service in Paris, Washington, and as the head of the American Department in the Foreign Office, his primary loyalty was to Moscow. Every report he wrote and every cable he handled was potentially subject to Soviet scrutiny.
Melinda Goodlett The espionage was not a solitary endeavor. The catalogue entry explicitly links Maclean to Melinda Goodlett Maclean, an American and British national. The record indicates that she, too, existed behind a screen of false names, listed under the aliases Melinda Marling, Melinda Philby, and Natasha Frazer.
The inclusion of her names in the Security Service’s Personal (PF Series) files—specifically the section for "SOVIET INTELLIGENCE AGENTS AND SUSPECTED AGENTS"—indicates that the investigation viewed the marriage as a tactical partnership. The mention of the name "Melinda Philby" is particularly telling. In the context of the Cambridge Five spy ring, the name Philby is inextricably linked to Kim Philby, another high-level Soviet mole. While the catalogue entry does not detail her specific operational role, the overlap in aliases suggests a tightly knit cell of collaborators who shared both a household and a handler.
May 1951 The endgame came when the Security Service finally closed in. The catalogue entry for KV 2/4144 notes that while Maclean was "under investigation he fled to the USSR with Guy Burgess."
The flight of Maclean and Burgess in May 1951 was a public humiliation for the British government. It was not merely the loss of two officials, but the revelation that the security apparatus had been blind to a twenty-year infiltration. The fact that Maclean could be "identified" only after the leakage had already occurred "some years earlier" underscores the lag between Soviet action and Western reaction.
The records in the KV 2 series serve as a ledger of this failure. The repeated entries across multiple files—KV 2/4140, 4159, 4155, 4146, and 4145—show the breadth of the dossier the Security Service had to compile to make sense of Maclean's double life. The files leave open a haunting question: how many other "high flying" employees were operating under aliases like Richard Curzon while sitting in the offices of the Foreign Office?