But it was more than that. These men sat at the top of the British intelligence and diplomatic corps. The nation’s faith in its political and academic elites was permanently shaken, and the partnership between the US and UK spy agencies became a minefield of distrust and paranoia at the very moment that the West needed a united front more than ever.
Needless to say, this rich ground has been thoroughly plowed by historians and novelists alike over the years, and many a spy thriller owes its inspiration—directly or indirectly—to one or more of the Cambridge Five. But as I dug deeper into these men and their lives, I was less fascinated by the mechanics of espionage—the what and the how of what they did, the narrow escapes and unspeakable blunders—than by the who and the why. How could these intellectually brilliant men cling so willfully and catastrophically to their beliefs, even as the everyday evils of the Soviet state lay so plain before them? How could they betray their friends with such cold disregard? Consign women and men to their deaths without a second thought? How did this constant betrayal and secrecy affect them psychologically? And my God, what did it do to their families? The wives and children who bore the brunt of their inner torment? Were they unwilling passengers or fellow travelers?
These questions brought me to the marriage of Donald and Melinda Maclean, a fraught and complex partnership if ever there was one. At various points in their relationship, Melinda was his victim and his enabler, sometimes fed up and other times addicted, and easily the steelier of the two. Because the intelligence service dismissed her as a brainless housewife, she was able to facilitate Maclean’s defection in 1951 while eight and a half months pregnant, then slip away to join him with the children two years later. It hit me that the spymasters and spy catchers on both sides were missing a trick or two, and this kernel of inspiration grew and transformed into Our Woman in Moscow.
Sasha bears a physical and psychological resemblance to Maclean, and certain scenes are inspired by real-life incidents that marked Maclean’s deterioration into alcoholism and self-loathing—the farce on the Isle of Wight, for example, is roughly drawn from a disastrous picnic expedition on the Nile during Maclean’s posting to the British embassy in Cairo. Despite these parallels, Sasha and Iris are fictional characters and the narrative itself arises from my own imagination. Maclean died of natural causes in the Soviet Union in 1983; Melinda returned to the United States permanently in 1979, though not before having had an affair with Kim Philby, who defected in 1963.
Meanwhile, on a personal note, my own grandfather was born in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century to a British father and a Russian mother. At the outbreak of revolution in 1917, he fled across Scandinavia to England and never returned. As I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, it seemed impossible to me that Deo had grown up in Russia, speaking Russian as well as English, summering at his grandfather’s dacha near the Finnish border. Of course, I never talked to him much about it, which I now deeply regret, but he and my grandmother had the foresight to write down their recollections in memoirs for the family. The fictional flight from Russia in Our Woman in Moscow might just owe its inspiration to Deo’s flight a hundred years earlier.
For those readers interested in learning more about the Cambridge spy ring, I can enthusiastically recommend the exhaustively researched Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies, and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines, as well as Ben Macintyre’s thorough and intensely readable narrative of the Kim Philby case, A Spy Among Friends. For a gripping account of Donald Maclean’s life and espionage career, reach for A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps, which meticulously captures the complex psychology of Maclean and his tortured marriage.
A final technical note: the Soviet intelligence services combined, split apart, and recombined in dozens of different incarnations over the first few decades of Soviet history, each time with a different name. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to the pre–Second World War agency as the NKVD and the postwar agency as the KGB familiar to Cold Warriors, although it didn’t actually take on this final form until 1954. My apologies to the historical sticklers for this narrative convenience.
I wrote much of Our Woman in Moscow during the intense stress of the coronavirus shutdown in the spring of 2020, while juggling the physical and emotional needs of my large family all gathered together for weeks on end. For her patience and understanding （and timely care packages of artisan chocolate） I can’t thank my editor, Rachel Kahan, enough. In fact, the entire team at William Morrow came through like heroes during this abrupt change of plan and working conditions—Tavia Kowalchuk, Brittani Hilles, Alivia Lopez, and all my other champions in sales and marketing and production, you are so deeply appreciated! Special gratitude is due to my eagle-eyed copyeditor, Laurie McGee, who kept my timelines straight and my hyphenation in order. My warmest thanks as well to my superstar agent, Alexandra Machinist, and her assistant Lindsey Sanderson, for handling the business side of things so ably while I tangled myself in knots of Cold War history.