Three years earlier Slater had written a remarkable short novel, The Conspirator. “The missing diplomats” as they came to be called were not reliably glimpsed again until they surfaced in Moscow nearly five years later.Ĭonnolly and Slater both had prior reason to suspect that Maclean was a Soviet agent. That evening, Maclean joined up with Guy Burgess and caught the midnight boat train to St Malo. There he bumped into two other Fitzrovia cronies, the writers Cyril Connolly and Humphrey Slater, an ex-Communist who had been Commissar of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, during which he had changed his name to Hugh because he thought it sounded more proletarian. He celebrated by taking his oldest friends to lunch at Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street, notorious for its heavy German food and its surly German waiters. Photo: © GETTY IMAGESįriday 25th May 1951 was Donald Maclean’s 38th birthday. The Cambridge Spies hoodwinked the Establishment by hiding in plain sight.
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