Diplomat, Soldier, Adventurer, Author
One of my literary heroes is Fitzroy Maclean. By the age of 34, he had lived an exceptional life, experiencing enough for several lifetimes. As a young man, he joined the British foreign service in the mid 1930s where he was posted to the British embassy in Paris. He became bored with his duties there and requested a transfer to the British embassy in Moscow. Maclean witnessed Stalin's show trials during the Soviet purges. At the same time he traveled extensively outside Moscow to remote and forbidden areas of the Soviet Union. He was always tailed by the Soviet secret police and made a game of trying to lose them. In 1939, he resigned from diplomatic service to volunteer in the military. He became one of the founding members of the British SAS (an elite commando team, roughly equivalent to our Special Forces) and raided behind the German and Italian lines in North Africa. Other wartime exploits including kidnapping a German...