Richard Curzon and Natasha Frazer Shielded Soviet Spies Maclean and Goodlett

By Vera Kessler · August 20, 2026

A high-ranking diplomat and his American wife spent decades hiding behind a web of seven aliases, betraying the British Foreign Office to Moscow before vanishing in 1951.

A high-ranking diplomat's betrayal compromised the British embassy in Washington and endangered allies during the early Cold War. For twenty years, Donald Maclean lived a double life that turned the Foreign Office into a sieve for Soviet intelligence.

Richard Curzon and Natasha Frazer

The file's catalogue entry for KV 2/4152 records the meticulous bookkeeping of a double life. Donald Duart Maclean, a man who operated at the highest levels of British diplomacy, did not merely possess a secret; he possessed a rotating wardrobe of identities. The record lists four aliases used by Maclean: Richard Curzon, Mark Frazer, Percy Maclean, and S Madzoevsky.

He was not alone in this performance. His wife, Melinda Goodlett Maclean, an American and British national, operated under her own set of masks. The catalogue description attributes three aliases to her: Melinda Marling, Melinda Philby, and Natasha Frazer.

These names served as a layer of insulation between the couple's official roles and their clandestine service to the Soviet Union. In the world of intelligence, an alias is more than a pseudonym; it is a tool for survival, a way to communicate, travel, and receive instructions without alerting the security services of the state they were paid to serve. The sheer number of identities suggests a sophisticated operation of concealment that lasted for decades.

May 1951

The facade collapsed in 1951. According to the catalogue entry for KV 2/4152, Maclean was identified that year as the source of a "leakage from the Washington Embassy" that had occurred some years earlier. The identification triggered an investigation that brought the Security Service to his door.

Rather than face the consequences of his betrayal, Maclean vanished. He did not flee alone. The catalogue description for file KV 2/4107 records that Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess—who used the aliases Roger STYLES and Jim Andreyevich ELIOT—disappeared from London in May 1951 alongside Maclean.

Both men were assessed by the security services as having been Soviet agents since the 1930s. The public record clarifies the depth of this penetration: Maclean was part of the Cambridge Five, a ring of spies recruited during their university days. Their flight to Moscow was not a sudden impulse but the final act of a long-term infiltration. While Burgess and Maclean found sanctuary in the USSR, they left behind a shattered trust between the British and American intelligence communities, having spent years feeding Moscow the inner workings of Western diplomacy.

A High Flying Employee

The Security Service described Maclean in his personal file as a "high flying employee of the Foreign Office." This description is not an overstatement of his career trajectory. Public records show a man who ascended the ranks with alarming speed. By 1938, he was Third Secretary at the British embassy in Paris. His subsequent postings took him to London and Washington, D.C., where he achieved the rank of First Secretary.

From there, Maclean’s influence grew. He served in Egypt and eventually reached the position of head of the American Department in the Foreign Office. This gave him access to the most sensitive diplomatic traffic between the two most important allies of the Cold War. Every promotion was a victory for Moscow; every new office was a new source of intelligence.

The betrayal was not merely a matter of passing documents but of steering the perception of British policy. By the time he was identified as the source of the Washington leaks, Maclean had spent nearly two decades as a mole within the heart of the British establishment. He had been an asset to the Soviets since the 1930s, meaning he had spent almost his entire professional life as a lie.

The scope of the surveillance required to track these movements is evident in the archival structure itself. The National Archives holds multiple fragmented records on the couple, including files KV 2/4152, KV 2/4153, KV 2/4156, KV 2/4157, and KV 2/4147, reflecting the sprawling effort to document a betrayal that had gone undetected for twenty years.