Word: maclean
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Like the NKVD, His Majesty's Foreign Office took little interest in their secretary's love of ancient Samarkand and Bokhara. What delighted them was up-to-date, first-hand information about the Soviet interior that young Maclean shipped home in his reports. Before long they summoned him back to London, rejoicing at having added to the home staff so valuable an expert on Soviet affairs...
...Tape. They were quickly disillusioned. With the war on, Maclean was as repelled by his cozy desk job as his superiors were determined that he should stay in it. In Foreign Office Regulations, Diplomat Maclean found the loophole he was looking for: an inexorable rule that any civil servant who participated in politics would have to resign. Hurrying around to his chief, Sir Alexander Cadogan (for the last four years Britain's delegate to U.N.), Maclean declared a sudden passion for political controversy. "In that case," replied Sir Alexander with icy brevity, "you will have to leave the Service...
...Soon Maclean had taken the King's Shilling and been enrolled as a private in the Cameron Highlanders. But then Maclean heard rumors that the hoaxed and understaffed Foreign Office was taking steps to corral him back into the service. "Only one thing," Maclean concluded, "could save me: early election to Parliament." He consulted Tory headquarters and was advised to try his luck in a Lancaster by-election. The local party committee accepted him, and barely a month later, Maclean was voted M.P. for Lancaster. Then he got back...
When Winston Churchill heard the story, he was vastly amused. "Here," he said, introducing Maclean to General Smuts in Cairo later, "is the young man who has used the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience...
...Hardy & Hunted." In Egypt Maclean joined the S.A.S. (Special Air Service), a select, hand-picked force of parachute commandos who were dropped into the North African desert to destroy enemy installations. In 1942, Maclean, by then a captain, was sent to Persia, where in broad daylight he kidnaped Collaborationist General Zahidi and popped him into a plane bound for Palestine. It was ro wonder that when Prime Minister Churchill asked for the appointment of "a daring Ambassador-leader" to contact Tito's "hardy and hunted guerrillas," the choice fell on parachuting Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean...