Where is the modern Fitzroy Maclean ready to bring peace to the

Sunday Herald, The, Apr 18, 1999 by Trevor Royle

His suspicions that Tito was a female guerrilla proved unfounded when the pair met but the Scot hailed as a model for James Bond went on to play a vital role in helping the communist leader win power in Yugoslavia. Trevor Royle looks at an unlikely meeting of minds Back in the days when all that was asked of an aspiring diplomatist was a private income of #400 a year, a good hand and fluent French, the Foreign Office was awash with Balkans experts. One reason was the deliciously intractable nature of the Eastern Question, that seemingly eternal conundrum caused by the 19th century demise of the Ottoman Empire and the accompanying rise of national movements in the Balkans.

Another reason was the supposed romanticism of Balkans' politics. All those rugged hillmen fighting for their independence from Johnny Turk. From Byron onwards, there has been no shortage of British swashbucklers keen to navigate themselves round the intricacies of the local scene, convinced they had the solution - or at least the glimmering of one - to the aspirations of assorted Croats, Montenegrins, Bosnians and Serbs.

With that history in mind, it comes as little surprise when the widow of a distinguished British ambassador to Belgrade has called for the return of a man such as Sir Fitzroy Maclean, perhaps the last Briton who could unravel what was happening in the Balkans. Rosemary Garvey understood exactly what she wanted when she made the proposal. Not only did she spend seven years in the former Yugoslavia when it was ruled by President Josip Brod Tito, but her husband, Terence Garvey, an old Balkans hand, admired Tito's ability to hold together a country with two alphabets, three religions, four languages, five nations, six republics and seven neighbours. That Tito was enabled to manufacture that miracle owed everything to Maclean, surely one of the most unusual and charismatic men ever to have combined the career of soldier and diplomatist. In his day, he was hailed as a model for Ian Fleming's James Bond but, given his fascination for the Balkans, he was more Richard Hannay than 007. Buchan's hero, it will be remembered, was ordered to go to the Balkans in the first world war, having been told by Sir Walter Bullivant, a Foreign Office mandarin: "There is a dry wind blowing through the east and the dry grass waits the spark." Maclean was given a similar piece of advice by Winston Churchill in 1943, when he commanded Britain's military and political mission to Tito's Partisans at a time when there was still everything to play for in the Balkans. With his background in David Stirling's recently raised Special Air Service regiment and his patrician background - scion of a Highland clan, Eton and Cambridge - Maclean had all the qualifications as far as Britain's wartime prime minister was concerned. Churchill was particularly fond of men who could find an indirect approach to problems. Stirling was one - "the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat" - and Orde Wingate, the founder of the Chindit force, another. These men were iron dreamers, men of action who also possessed quicksilver minds. In other words, they had the credentials which Churchill might have seen within himself as a younger man. Certainly in Maclean, Churchill believed he had found a man capable of interpreting and executing British policy in the Balkans. "What we want," the prime minister told the Foreign Office, "is a daring ambassador-leader to these hardy and hunted guerrillas." To meet that need Maclean was appointed to co-ordinate the efforts of Tito's Partisans with General Draz Mihailovic's rival Cetnik force and to bring them into the allied war effort against the Germans. Given the secret nature of Maclean's mission there was also an ulterior motive - to keep Yugoslavia out of communist hands and to return it to a constitutional monarchy under the exiled king, Peter. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the policy became muddled and Maclean was forced to oversee a switch in support from Mihailovic to Tito. Half a century later, the rights and the wrongs of that policy still trouble historians. Some claim Maclean was responsible for the change. Certainly he admired Tito, who was only known to him by name before he left for the Balkans. (There were suspicions, or perhaps unfounded hopes, that "he" might turn out to a glamourous female guerrilla leader.) Others say Maclean was duped and that Britain made a disastrous choice by failing to back Mihailovic, who was the darling of senior Foreign Office officials. As Maclean's biographer Frank McLynn summarised the dilemma: "Did the British make the right choice? And was Fitzroy Maclean responsible for that choice?". With the benefit of time, the answers are probably yes and no. Although the Cetniks had waged a successful guerrilla war against the Nazis in Serbia, by the end of 1942, British military intelligence knew perfectly well that their resistance was on the wane and that the struggle was only continuing through Tito's Partisans. There was even evidence that the Cetniks were collaborating with the Germans. Against that background, and in the middle of a war still to be won, Churchill was right to prefer the pragmatism of Tito to the romanticism of Mihailovic, with its mystic belief in the integrity of Serb nationhood. In that sense Maclean bore the role of a John the Baptist, a bearer of good tidings to Tito and an enabler of Churchill's thinking. And in the Slav leader he discovered a man with whom he could do business. Maclean first met Tito after being dropped by parachute into the heart of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, and he was immediately struck by the Partisan leader's "readiness to discuss any question on its merit and, if necessary, to take a decision there and then". Tito seemed to Maclean to be a living embodiment of Napoleon's dictum that in time of war, it is not men who count most - it is the man. From that point, the Partisan leader enjoyed his unqualified support. Maclean immersed himself in the Balkans, becoming, as is so often the case with emissaries, just as patriotic and involved as his hosts. For him it was a throwing away of crutches. In Yugoslavia, with its fractured borders, ancient hatreds and pride in race, he saw a mirror image of his native Scotland and embraced it eagerly. More than that, he reported to London what he found, namely that Tito was the man to back - even though he was a communist. Ironically, given Maclean's aristocratic Highland background, it incurred the lasting enmity of the right, but to the end of his long life he would insist that you have to take life as you find it. That was the spur which led him to support Tito and, if recent history is his witness, he was right. For four decades after the war Tito held Yugoslavia together, giving it a cohesion it had lacked since the heyday of the Ottoman empire. Of course it involved compromise - which foreign policy has not? - but it kept a peace of sorts until rival nationalisms plunged the region into crisis in 1991. That much had been foreseen by Maclean in the concluding paragraphs of Eastern Approaches, his classic account of his wartime service. "To many people, Tito and the Movement of National Liberation seemed to represent the best, if not the only prospect of stable government, and that was an important consideration in a country which for years had been racked by every kind of external and internal strife and dissension." If Tito was the right man at the right time, then in Maclean it was a meeting of true minds. Known variously as the Tartan Pimpernel or the Balkan Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean was born in 1911. A founder member of the SAS, he served in North Africa and the Balkans, where he was Churchill's personal envoy to the partisans. After the war he was elected to parliament and served in two Conservative administrations. An acclaimed historian, he wrote books on subjects as different as Soviet Russia and Bonnie Prince Charlie. He died in 1996.