A Spy Named Orphan
The Soviet Agent Who Stole the West's Greatest Secrets
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"[A] lively and beautifully engineered biography." —John Banville, New York Review of Books
Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous spies of the Cold War era, a member of the infamous "Cambridge Five" spy ring, yet the extent of this shrewd, secretive man’s betrayal has never fully been explored. Drawing on formerly classified files, A Spy Named Orphan documents the extraordinary story of a model diplomat leading a chilling double-life until his exposure and defection to the USSR.
Philipps describes a man prone to alcoholic rages, who rose through the ranks of the British Foreign Office while secretly transmitting through his Soviet handlers reams of diplomatic and military intelligence on the atom bomb and the shape of the postwar world. A mesmerizing tale of blind faith and fierce loyalty alongside dangerous duplicity and human vulnerability, Philipps’s narrative will stand as the definitive account of the man codenamed "Orphan."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this often exciting narrative, Philipps uses a trove of recently declassified files to trace the arc of Russian spy Donald Maclean's life. While studying at Cambridge, Maclean became a supporter of communism and fatefully met Kim Philby, a fellow member of the Cambridge Five spy ring. Philby went on to become a high-ranking British intelligence officer, and he recruited Maclean as a Soviet agent before Maclean landed a job with the Foreign Office in 1935. The valuable information Maclean was to share included the truth about America's nuclear capacity in 1948, as tensions flared over the division of Berlin, and secrets relating to America's development of uranium for use in nuclear weapons. Maclean and his co-conspirators were eventually discovered, leading to his flight to Russia in 1951, where he lived until his death in 1983. Maclean's motivations for betraying his country remain murky, despite Philipps's speculation that its seeds lay in the oppressive private school he attended Gresham's School, in an isolated pocket of eastern England. Philipps believes that the required loyalty oaths to the school's masters encouraged betrayals of one's classmates and contributed to making Gresham's "the perfect psychological training-ground for a nascent spy." Even though Maclean remains a mysterious figure, this is likely to be considered the definitive biography.
