GREAT BRITAIN: The Missing Spies

Donald Maclean was sandy-haired, tall, with great latent physical strength, but fat and rather flabby. Meeting him, one was conscious of both amiability and weakness. He did not seem a political animal but resembled the clever, helpless youth in a Huxley novel, an outsize Cherubino intent on amorous experience but too shy and clumsy to succeed. He sought refuge on the more impetuous and emancipated fringes of Bloomsbury and Chelsea.

Guy Burgess, though he preferred the company of the able to the artistic, also moved on the edge of the same world. He was of a very different physique, tall-medium in height, with blue eyes, an inquisitive nose, sensual mouth, curly hair and alert fox-terrier expression. He was immensely energetic, a great talker, reader, boaster, walker, who swam like an otter and drank, not like a feckless undergraduate as Donald was apt to do, but like some Rabelaisian bottle-swiper whose thirst was unquenchable.

Thus British Critic Cyril Connolly once described two flagrant and flamboyant British traitors: Guy Francis de Money Burgess, 44, and Donald Duart Maclean, 42. Last week the British government, prodded by the revelations of Vladimir Petrov, the Russian MVD boss who defected in Australia, told a bit more about the British spies who escaped in 1951 and are now apparently alive somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. The 3,500-word white paper was not the whole story, but with the facts contributed by Petrov, it made possible for the first time a cohesive account of The Case of the Missing Spies.

Recruited. Their treason began in the middle ’30s at Cambridge, where apparently wild-minded Guy Burgess, the well-schooled son of a Royal Navy officer, first met Donald Maclean, son of a former Cabinet minister and a young man with a promising future. Both moved in Communist circles. It was just before the Spanish Civil War, and both were outspoken in their dissatisfaction with the conduct of world affairs, Maclean to the point of declaring that he wanted to work for the Russians. It was at this time, says Petrov, that they were recruited into the Soviet espionage service. Maclean entered the Foreign Office. Burgess took to journalism, joined the BBC, transferred to a propaganda section of the War Office with the outbreak of World War II. Maclean was already carving out a brilliant career in the Paris embassy and spending his spare moments at Left Bank spots. At the Café Flore he met a pretty American girl named Melinda Marling, who amused him by smoking cigars. They were married just before the fall of France, and went on together to London, and four years later to Washington.

As head of chancery in the British embassy, almost all secret documents relating to the allied effort in war and peace between 1944 and 1948 passed through Maclean’s hands. He was also secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on Atomic Developments, with a pass which admitted him to the U.S. AEC offices at any time of day or night. With his pretty wife and two young children, Maclean outwardly seemed like the perfect young diplomat. But behind his façade of charm, the strain of his double life began to tell.

He began drinking heavily, and preferred what he called his “ashcan life” and “craggy characters” to the Washington social round.

The Homosexual Side. Transferred to the Cairo embassy in 1948, Maclean drank more heavily than ever. He had homosexual friends, and once raided and demolished the apartment of a young woman working at the U.S. embassy, was returned to London on six months’ leave for treatment by a psychiatrist. The analyst, his wife wrote during the time, “is still baffled a bit at the homosexual side which comes out when he is drunk, and I think a slight hostility in general to women.” Friends who met him at this time found him constantly drunk and of ghastly appearance. But at the end of his leave, the Foreign Office took him back and made him head of its American Department, where he could put his hands on many secret documents.

Meanwhile, Burgess, after going back to the BBC for a couple of years, had joined the Foreign Office and worked as special assistant to Minister of State Hector McNeil, then the No. 2 man in the Foreign Office. During this time, he was living with a male prostitute named Jack Hewitt, and though British security officers reported overhearing him blurt out secret information, Burgess in 1950 was made a second secretary to the embassy in Washington, where he soon caused trouble (driving his car while drunk and speeding, expressing anti-British and anti-American sentiments). Recalled to London, he returned to his old haunts and habits, while the Foreign Office tried to figure out what to do with him.

One of the Russians who handled the secrets delivered by Burgess and Maclean was a talkative MVD cipher clerk in the London embassy, named F. V. Kislytsin, who was the source of most of Petrov’s information. An MVD man once told Kislytsin that Burgess had given him briefcases full of documents which had been photographed in the embassy and then returned to the Foreign Office files. Burgess brought other secret information which Kislytsin coded and radioed direct to Moscow. Maclean, meanwhile, was developing his own microfilms, using the darkroom of an obscure pharmacy near his suburban home in Kent.

The Tipoff. Not until 1949 did the British discover that their diplomatic secrets were leaking to the Russians. From several suspects, investigators slowly narrowed down to one, Donald Maclean. The Foreign Office, then headed by Laborite Herbert Morrison, fidgeted uncomfortably, finally authorized an investigation.

Though Maclean was under suspicion, the security men did not watch his house—for fear of alarming him, the white paper explained. Anyway, it was too late. On May 25, 1951, the very day authorities were to question Maclean, the two spies told the Russians in great alarm that they were in danger. Someone, still unidentified, tipped off Maclean and Burgess.

“In some countries,” explained the white paper, 4½ years later, “no doubt Maclean would have been arrested first and questioned afterwards. In this country, no arrest can be made without adequate evidence.” Until the investigators found such evidence, “both men were free to go abroad at any time.” The Russians organized the getaway.

On May 25, 1951, Maclean’s 38th birthday, both men went down to Maclean’s house at Tatsfield in Kent. That night they drove in a hired car to Southampton and caught the 11:45 p.m. cross-Channel boat to St. Malo, France. Next morning they stayed in their cabin drinking beer until the other passengers caught the Paris train, and then hired a taxi to take them to Rennes, 50 miles away. That is the last that is positively known about the whereabouts of Burgess and Maclean.

The best guess is that at Rennes they caught the train to Paris and then took a Russian plane via Czechoslovakia to Moscow, where they were met by Kislytsin.

There followed a mysterious garble of messages, rumors, subterfuges. By simple, earnest conversations, Mrs. Maclean, who was about to go to the hospital for a Caesarean, convinced security officers that not only was she innocent, but that she had all along been the injured party. She subsequently went to the Continent, and one day, 27 months after her husband’s disappearance, Mrs. Maclean drove with her three children to Lausanne, left her car in a garage, took the train to Schwarzach St. Veit in Austria, and disappeared in the Russian sector of Austria. Said Petrov last week: “She is now living with her husband in Moscow as he secretly continues with his work for the Soviet Foreign Ministry alongside his fellow spy Guy Burgess.”

Maximum Secrecy. It was obviously not all of the story, but even if the British government knew more, it refused to divulge it. “Espionage is carried out in secret,” said the white paper. “Counterespionage equally depends for its success upon the maximum secrecy of its methods. Nor is it desirable at any moment to let the other side know how much has been discovered …” What the government could not hide was the shocking laxity of British security for years after the thoroughness of Soviet espionage had become apparent. (As of 1952, said the white paper, “searching inquiries have been made into the antecedents and associates of all those occupying or applying for positions in the Foreign Office involving highly secret information.”)

Neither could the government consider the case closed. The lordly London Times called the paper “scandalously late,” and it found discrepancies between the paper and earlier official statements. “An insult to any reasonable man’s intelligence,” sneered the Daily Express,