Several of his handlers were recalled to Moscow and executed in Stalin’s purge, but Maclean just kept going. He was methodical in lifting documents from his offices, photographing them and delivering copies to his handlers. “It stinks but someone has to do it.” And he did it well. It was “like being a lavatory attendant,” Maclean said. Guy Burgess, the Cambridge Five spy with whom Maclean fled to Moscow, relented, accepting “expenses,” and “bought a gold, soft-topped, second-hand Rolls Royce on the grounds that he was such a terrible driver that a ‘sturdily built’ car was a life-saving necessity.” But Maclean made few such concessions to capitalism and didn’t even like the work of being a spy, Philipps reports. At the end of the war, the Soviets wanted “to reward the agents who had made the most significant contributions to victory” with annual pensions, Philipps writes. None of the Cambridge Five took money for their work, according to Philipps.
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