Eastern Approaches
Eastern Approaches is a memoir of the early career of Fitzroy Maclean. It is divided into three parts: his life as a junior diplomat in Moscow and his travels in the Soviet Union, especially the forbidden zones of Central Asia; his exploits in the British Army and SAS in the North Africa theatre of war; and his time with Josip Broz Tito and the Partisans in Yugoslavia.
Maclean was considered to be one of Ian Fleming's inspirations for James Bond, and this book contains many of the elements: remote travel, the sybaritic delights of diplomatic life, violence and adventure. The American edition was titled Escape To Adventure, and was published a year later. All place names in this article use the spelling in the book.
Golden Road: the Soviet Union
Fresh out of Cambridge, Maclean joined the Foreign Office and spent a couple of years at the Paris embassy. He loved the pleasures of life in the French capital, but eventually longed for adventure. Against the advice of his friends, he requested a posting to Moscow, which he received right away; once there, he began to learn Russian. Travelling within the Soviet Union was frowned upon by the authorities, but Maclean managed to take several trips anyway.The Caucasus
In the spring of 1937, he took a trial trip, heading south from Moscow to Baku on the Caspian Sea. The Intourist official tried to dissuade him, but he found a ship to take him to Lenkoran, where he witnessed the deportation of several hundred Turko-Tartar peasants to Central Asia. Stuck there for a few days, he bargained for horses with which to explore the countryside, and was arrested by the NKVD cavalry near to the Persian border. He explained that he held diplomatic immunity, but his captors could not read his Soviet diplomatic pass. Eventually, as the only person literate in Russian, Maclean "read out, with considerable expression, and such improvements as occurred to me" the contents of his pass, and was set free. He took an 1856 paddle steamer back to Baku, and then a train on to Tiflis. British troops had supported the Democratic Republic after World War I, and Maclean sought out the British war cemetery, in the process discovering an English governess who had lived in the town since 1912. He caught a truck through the Caucasus Mountains, via Mtzkhet, the former capital of Georgia but by then merely a village, to Vladikavkaz, and then a train to Moscow.To Samarkand
His second trip, in the autumn of the same year, took him east along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Although he disembarked without warning at Novosibirsk, he acquired an NKVD escort. He travelled on the Turksib Railway south to Biisk, at the foot of the Altai Mountains, and then to Altaisk and Barnaul. On the trains he heard the complaints of the Siberian kolkhozniks and witnessed another mass movement, this time of Koreans to Central Asia. His first main destination was Alma Ata, the capital of the Kazakh republic, which lies near to the Tien Shan Mountains. He characterised it as "one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union" and particularly appreciated the apples for which it is famous. From there he took a truck to a hill village called Talgar and went walking with one of his NKVD escorts; Maclean availed himself of peasant hospitality and commented on the general prosperity. He managed to hire a car and made it to Issyk-kul, the lake that never freezes, but had to turn back because of the season. From Alma Ata Maclean took the train for Tashkent, passing through villages where "nothing seemed to have changed since the time when the country was ruled over by the Emir of Bokhara"; men still rode bulls and women still wore veils made of black horsehair. From Tashkent, which then had a reputation for wickedness, he made the final leg to the fabled city of Samarkand. He returned to Moscow with plans for a further trip.Maclean spent the winter working in Moscow and amusing himself at the dacha of American friends, including Chip Bohlen. In March 1938 a show trial was announced, the first such public event in over a year; he attended every day of what became known as the Trial of the Twenty-One. The book goes into great detail, spending 40 pages on description and analysis of the trial, its prominent figures and its twists and turns.
To Chinese Turkestan
When the weather became more conducive to travel, Maclean began his third and longest trip, aiming for Chinese Turkestan, immediately east of the Soviet Central Asian republics he had reached in 1937. This journey, unlike the previous two, was at the request of the British government. They wished him to investigate the conditions in Urumchi, the capital of the province of Sinkiang, which had fallen under Soviet influence. He was commissioned to talk to the tupan there about the situation of both the consul-general and the British Indian traders. The first stage was retracing his steps on a five-day train journey to Alma Ata; the train ran via Orenburg and the Aral Sea, then parallel to the Syr Darya and the mountains of Kirghizia. From Alma Aty he travelled four hundred miles north through the Hungry Steppe to Ayaguz, where "a road which had been made, and was being kept up, for a very definite purpose" led to the frontier town of Bakhti. The Soviet officials were, at first, willing to assist him but the Chinese ones were not, and in the course of the negotiations that surrounded his passage, Maclean discovered that the Soviets exercised some influence over at least the consul if not the provincial government of their neighbours. He crossed the border into China, where he was refused permission to continue; he was forced to return to Alma Aty, whence he was expelled. Soon he found himself back in Moscow.To Bokhara and Kabul
His fourth and final Soviet trip was once more to Central Asia, spurred by the desire to reach Bokhara, the capital of the emirate which had been closed to Europeans until recent times. Maclean recounts how Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly were executed there in the context of The Great Game, and how Joseph Wolff, known as the Eccentric Missionary, barely escaped their fate when he came looking for them in 1845. In early October 1938 Maclean set out again, first for Ashkhabad, then through the Kara Kum, not breaking his journey at either Tashkent or Samarkand, but pushing on to Kagan, the nearest point on the railway to Bokhara. After trying to smuggle himself aboard a lorry transporting cotton, he ended up walking to the city, and spent several days sight-seeing "in the steps of the Eccentric Missionary" and sleeping in parks, much to the frustration of the NKVD spies who were shadowing him. He judged it an "enchanted city", with buildings that rivalled "the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance". Aware of his limited time, he cut short his wanderings and took the train towards Stalinabad, disembarking at Termez. This town sits on the Amu Darya, and the other side of the river lies in Afghanistan. Maclean claimed that "very few Europeans except Soviet frontier guards have ever seen it at this or any other point of its course". After more negotiations, he managed to cross the river and thus leave the USSR, and from that point his only guide seems to have been the narrative of "the Russian Burnaby", a colonel Nikolai Ivanovich Grodekov, who rode from Samarkand to Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat in 1878. The following day he and a guide set out on horseback, riding through jungle and desert, and detained on the way by dubious characters who may or may not have been brigands. They rode past the ruins of Balkh, a civilization founded by Alexander the Great and destroyed by Genghis Khan. After a night in Mazar, Maclean managed to get a car and driver, and progressed as rapidly as he could to Doaba, a village half-way to Kabul, where he had arranged to meet the British minister, Colonel Frazer-Tytler. Together, they returned to the capital via Bamyan and its famous statues. Maclean circled back to Moscow via Peshawar, Delhi, Baghdad, Persia, and Armenia.Orient Sand: the Western Desert Campaign
The middle section of the book details Maclean's first set of experiences in World War II. He was invited to join the newly formed Special Air Service, where, as part of the Western Desert Campaign, he planned and executed raids on Axis-held Benghazi, on the coast of Libya. When it became clear that the North African Campaign was drawing to a close towards the end of 1942 and it became too quiet for his taste, he travelled east to arrest General Fazlollah Zahedi, at the time the head of the Persian armed forces in the south.Joining up
The first challenge Maclean faced was getting into military service at all. His Foreign Office job was a reserved occupation, so he was not allowed to enlist. The only way around this was to go into politics, and on this stated ground Maclean tendered his resignation in 1941 to Alexander Cadogan, an FO mandarin. Maclean immediately enlisted, taking a taxi from Sir Alexander's office to a nearby recruiting station, where he joined the Cameron Highlanders, his father's regiment, as a private. Later, his erstwhile employers discovered that his resignation had been merely a ruse or legal fiction along the lines of taking the Chiltern Hundreds. Maclean was thus forced to run for office and, despite his self-confessed inexperience, was chosen as a Conservative candidate, and eventually elected MP. Prime Minister Winston Churchill jocularly accused him of using "the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience".Benghazi and the desert retreat
After basic training, Maclean was sent to Cairo, where David Stirling invited him to join the newly formed Special Air Service, which he did. They worked closely with the Long Range Desert Group, a mechanised reconnaissance unit, to travel far behind enemy lines and attack targets such as aerodromes. Maclean's first operation with the SAS, once his training was completed, was to Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, in late May 1942. He was joined on this operation by Randolph Churchill, son of the prime minister. They drove from Alexandria via the seaport of Mersa Matruh and the inland Siwa Oasis. They crossed the ancient caravan route known as the Trigh-el-Abd, which the enemy had laced with little bombs, and camped in the Gebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain just inland from the coastal plain. Once inside the occupied city, their patrol came face to face with Italian soldiers several times; Maclean, with his excellent Italian, managed to bluff his way out of all of these encounters by pretending to be a staff officer. They spent two nights and a day in the city. They had hoped to sabotage ships, but both the rubber boats they had brought with them failed to inflate, so they treated the visit as a reconnaissance mission. The drive back was uneventful, but nearing Cairo, Maclean, along with most of his party, was seriously injured in a crash and spent months out of action.Once he had recovered, Stirling involved him in preparations for a larger SAS attack on Benghazi. They attended a dinner with Churchill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff General Alan Brooke, and General Harold Alexander, who was about to assume control of Middle East Command, the post responsible for the overall conduct of the campaign in the North African desert. Four operations were designed to create a diversion from Rommel's attempt on El Alamein: attacks on Benghazi, Tobruk, Barce, and the Jalo oasis. These all started out from Kufra, an oasis 800 miles inland. Maclean's convoy drove to the Gebel across the Sand Sea at its narrowest point, Zighen, and made it there undetected, although "bazaar gossip" from an Arab spy indicated that the enemy expected an imminent attack. When Maclean's group reached the outskirts of Benghazi, they were ambushed and had to retreat. Axis planes repeatedly bombed them, destroying many of the vehicles and most of their supplies. Thus began a painful limp of days and nights over the desert towards Jalo, without even knowing whether that oasis was in Allied hands. They existed on rations of "a cup of water and a tablespoon of bully beef a day.... We found ourselves looking forward to the evening meal with painful fixity". When they got to that oasis, they found a battle going on between the Italian defenders and the Sudan Defence Force, and despite their offers to help, they received orders from GHQ to abandon the assault. Some days later they made it back to Kufra.