Man Hunt

In ordinary times, the case would have rated a quiet police investigation, some chatter at cocktail parties, perhaps a feature article in the more lurid Sunday supplements. But when two middle-drawer British foreign-service men disappeared during a trip to the continent last month, the usually stolid British Foreign Office acted in a way the British call "hysterical" if displayed by Americans. Police on two continents, including Scotland Yard, launched a gigantic man hunt for Donald Duart MacLean and Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess. Everyone recalled the case of Atom Spy Klaus Fuchs and the flight of Britain's Atom Scientist Bruno Pontecorvo behind the Iron Curtain last year. The general fear last week: that the two men had gone over to the Russians, taking secret information with them.

Ordinarily, the two would not be in possession of top military secrets, but would have access to confidential information. If they were in fact working for the Russians, they could have got hold of a lot more. In Washington, Secretary of State Acheson agreed that their defection might be "quite a serious matter."

Midnight Sailing. When the two had been missing for three days, Scotland Yard took up the trail together with Britain's M.I.-5 counter-espionage agents. They found that Burgess had booked two tickets for a round-trip excursion steamer to Saint-Malo, Brittany, hired a small sports car for ten days. Headlights blazing, the car flashed through the deserted streets of Southampton just before midnight, screeched to a stop at the dockside. The two men tossed a couple of shillings to the dock attendant, shouted "Buy yourself a drink," and leaped aboard the steamer. "What about the car?" the man called. "We'll be back Monday," they answered.

But MacLean and Burgess did not come back. When the steamer returned to England, two of its 168 passengers were missing. In the cabins booked by the diplomats, ship's officers found two packed suitcases and a litter of towels and shaving gear. The pair, police later found, walked off the ship and hired a taxi; one of them asked the driver in flawless French to drive to Rennes at top speed. During the 90-minute ride, the two sat in taut silence; they gave the driver a 5,000-franc note, waited for 500 francs' change, rushed to catch the train to Paris.

Then they vanished.

Some 15,000 policemen in Western Germany, Austria, Italy and the Scandinavian countries peered into cafes, bordellos, hotels, airports. The search spread to Cyprus and Malta; Egypt's police were watching the entire western desert coastline.

But by week's end only three clues had turned up. Burgess' mother got a telegram from Rome ostensibly sent by Burgess; MacLean's wife and mother received similar telegrams from Paris. MacLean's message to his wife read: "Had to leave unexpectedly. Terribly sorry. Am quite well now. Don't worry darling. I love you. Please don't stop loving me. Donald." Handwriting experts examined the original forms, found they were written by neither Burgess nor MacLean, and "probably not by an Englishman."

Crackup. There the trail ended. But police and newsmen were also following another trail, into the two men's past. On the surface, tall, erudite Donald MacLean looked the very model of the modern British diplomat. He won honors at Cambridge, was a member of a respectable Scots family. His father, Sir Donald, was a leader of the Liberal Party, made such repetitious speeches that he inspired a parliamentary ditty: "Sir Donald MacLean, he says it over & over again." No stuffy diplomat, young MacLean loved gay parties; he and his attractive American wife often entertained in their Georgetown house when he was stationed in Washington as Acting First Secretary.

But when MacLean was promoted to a post as Counselor in Cairo, his polished calm cracked. One night he burst into the apartment of a friend, smashed every stick of furniture in the place. The Foreign Office considered him too valuable to let him go. He was recalled to London, given psychiatric treatment. His new job after the crackup: boss of the Foreign Office's American section.

There MacLean renewed an old friendship with hard-drinking Guy Burgess, who had been recalled from his job as Second Secretary in Britain's Washington embassy because of his "general unsuitability." (Last February Burgess had been stopped three times in a single day for speeding 80 m.p.h. on U.S. highways.) There was nothing to suggest that either had ever been Communists or fellow travelers.

The Theories. In addition to the possibility that the two may in fact have been Russian undercover men, police were considering three other theories:

>They had gone on a spree. This theory grew weaker as the days wore on. MacLean's wife is pregnant; his two sons, aged seven and five, are ill with measles. He was proud of his rambling, wistaria-covered country house in Kent, had just ordered new wallpaper for the nursery.

>The two men, both emotionally unstable, had been driven to suicide by some unknown personal troubles.

>They had gone to seek out Russian agents on the same type of crack-brained peace mission that drew Rudolf Hess to Great Britain in 1941.

The affair touched off an explosion of criticism against the Labor Government for appointing such unstable men to important positions in Britain's greatly respected civil service, and particularly in the Foreign Office. In the House of Commons this week, Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison dodged a barrage of questions. Said he: Any suggestion that the case of Burgess and MacLean points to "widespread sexual perversion in the Foreign Office" is "unfair and irresponsible." As for their possible desertion, Morrison said this was "a matter which we should not prejudge."

This week, British Military Intelligence Chief Sir Percy Sillitoe flew to Washington for talks with the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover. Their topic: a general tightening of U.S.-British security.

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