COLLUSION IS ALWAYS ABOUT HATING YOUR OWN COUNTRY:

Spying has changed - it's all about surveillance and whistle-blowing now - and the privileged, intellectualised, haute bourgeoisie treason that the Cambridge Five represented seems almost passé - a curiosity, belonging to a different time and another world. But, as this superb biography makes clear, the story of Maclean and his fellow travellers is full of contemporary relevance, particularly for this country. The ideology - communism - that spurred these traitors on may be vanished or moribund but the attitudes, assumptions, patterns of behaviour and gross sins of omission that the Maclean and Burgess defection exposed are both timeless and very British.

Donald Maclean (1913-1983) was the son of a knighted cabinet minister. Every middle-class privilege - and curse - was his. Public school (Gresham's), Cambridge University (Trinity Hall) and early admission to the Foreign Office - he was only 22 when he became a third secretary - seemed part of that inevitable progression granted to those with silver spoons clamped firmly between their teeth.

Maclean joined the Foreign Office in 1934 and was almost immediately provided with access to secret information. By then he was fully engaged in his double life having being recruited and "run" by an Austrian émigré named Arnold Deutsch, the NKVD's rezident in London and the man who was largely responsible for recruiting the Cambridge Five in the 1930s. Maclean was from the outset an astonishingly diligent supplier of useful information, taking files home with him from the office and having them photographed for delivery to Moscow Centre.

Tall, fair-haired and attractive, Maclean maintained a surface allure of patrician charm and super-efficiency that, as time went by, failed to obscure the demons wrestling beneath. An ideological communist whose core ideals managed to survive the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, he was to become as valued a spy for Moscow as Kim Philby. When Maclean was posted to Washington DC towards the end of the war the flow of information became even more vitally useful. In late 1944, as the defeat of Nazi Germany loomed, Maclean was able to supply Stalin with the full minutes of the secret meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in Quebec at which the two leaders pondered the shape of postwar Europe. Maclean, code-named "Homer" ("Orphan" had been his first pseudonym), was a massively important intelligence asset. More information followed: Stalin appeared mysteriously well briefed about the British and American positions at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 yet nobody suspected a thing. [...]

Roland Philipps relates the complex narrative of Maclean's treason - and those of his colleagues - with tremendous aplomb, limpidity and acuity. Despite his manifest torments, Maclean somehow always believed in what he was doing - not necessarily the case with the others. Intriguingly, he seemed happy in his Russian exile while Burgess and Philby drank themselves to death. What made the treason of the Cambridge Five so abidingly disturbing was the British establishment's purblind reluctance to give it credence. People like us just don't betray their country. Philby's treachery was equally devastating to this upper-class complacency. Not our Kim, surely? Only clever American code-breakers discovered the perpetrators and it took decades for the reputation of the British secret service to recover since the establishment's efforts to cover up and minimise the damage were as inept as its attempts at counter espionage.

What makes members of the privileged elite betray their country? My own belief is that it is, fundamentally, the result of a growing hatred of that very class into which they were born. General ideological reasons - the fight against fascism in the 1930s - were transformed over years into an ardent personal desire to foul the nest, to put it very simply. Interestingly, all these British traitors had remote, austere fathers with demanding or eccentric moral codes - and adoring mothers. Over to you, Dr Freud.

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