TO ROBERT CECIL

Robert Cecil (b.1913) was a historian and the biographer of the defector Donald Maclean.

14th February 1989

Dear Robert Cecil,

Thank you so much for getting your publisher to send me your book which I found fascinating reading. It was a change to have a well-written book on the subject and not the usual journalistic type. I never knew Maclean and I only met Burgess twice, once over coffee with David Footman²⁸during the war and once when he forced himself on me on my visit to Moscow as a guest of British Airways in 1961. I don’t know why he particularly wished to see me as I didn’t like him. I was leaving early the next morning and I had begun a serious attack of pneumonia. However curiosity won and I asked him in for a drink. He drove away my very nice translator saying that he wished to be alone with me but the only thing that he asked of me was to thank Harold Nicolson for a letter and on my return to give Baroness Budberg a bottle of gin!

One thing strikes me as odd. On page 138 you speak of his telephone call to Stephen Spender to ask for Auden’s address in Ischia which ‘falls into the same pattern of deception.’ I wonder why he was playing the same deception all those years later in 1961 when he told me in the course of our meeting that he had intended to split from Maclean in Paris and go on to stay with Auden in Ischia. I remember he said that he was caught up in the arrangements which had been made for them and had to go on to Prague with Maclean. Perhaps he thought I would write an article about our meeting, but why persist with the Ischia story after so many years?

Again thank you so much for this excellent book.

Yours ever
Graham Greene

P.S. I see that you have answered my question about Burgess in your final pages!

Before his escape to the Soviet Union, Burgess tried to create a cover-story by calling Stephen Spender and asking for Auden’s address in Ischia. Cecil notes that the KGB sought to surround the British defectors in as much disinformation as possible to avoid giving credibility to the revelations in 1955 of the Soviet defector Vladimir Petrov. Burgess himself entertained hopes of returning to England.²⁹

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 801