Donald Maclean (1913-1983) was a British diplomat and a member of the Cambridge spy ring. Recruited by Soviet intelligence in the mid-1930s while at or just after Cambridge, he joined the Foreign Office in 1935. As first secretary at the British Embassy in Washington from 1944 to 1948 he served on the Combined Policy Committee on atomic matters and passed the Soviets information on Anglo-American atomic cooperation and on Allied policy, including correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt.

Decrypted Soviet cables (Venona) referred to a source codenamed HOMER, whom British investigators identified by 1951 as Maclean. Warned through Kim Philby, Maclean fled with Guy Burgess on May 25, 1951, traveling via France to Moscow. The British government acknowledged the defection in a 1955 white paper, and the pair appeared publicly in Moscow in 1956. Maclean worked as an analyst on Western affairs at a Soviet institute and died in Moscow in March 1983.

Sources

• United Kingdom, Foreign Office. Report Concerning the Disappearance of Two Former Foreign Office Officials. Cmd. 9577. HMSO, September 1955.
• Andrew, Christopher. Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
• Philipps, Roland. A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean. Bodley Head, 2018.

Summary entry. A fuller, document-based profile is in preparation.