Appointment in the Park

In London's King George's Park one sultry evening last week, a pasty-faced young Briton kept an appointment with Pavel Kuznetsov, ferret-faced second secretary of the Soviet Embassy to Britain. The young fellow was William Martin Marshall, 24, a $21-a-week radio operator employed by the Foreign Office to transmit clear and coded messages to British missions abroad. Once a clerk in Britain's Moscow Embassy, he had been meeting Communist Kuznetsov clandestinely for several months.

Engrossed in their conversation, neither Briton nor Russian noticed three burly eavesdroppers lurking near the park's deserted bandstand. But as Marshall turned to go, the three men barred his way. Chief Inspector William Hughes of Scotland Yard's Special (counterespionage) Branch, stepped up: "You are William Martin Marshall?" The young man nodded. "We have reason to believe," said Hughes, onetime bodyguard to Prime Ministers Churchill and Attlee, "that you have committed offenses under the Official Secrets Act. We are arresting you."

In court next day, Marshall, whom friends describe as "an average, rather stupid young man," was formally charged with having "on divers dates and at divers places, for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state, communicated to another person, to wit, Pavel Kuznetsov, information . . . useful to an enemy." Marshall denied everything, and went to jail to await his trial. The Russian was safe from arrest, under diplomatic immunity. Scotland Yard would not say whether Marshall had given away any important secrets; handling code as he did, he was in a position to. He was the fourth Briton to be branded as a spy since World War II.*

* The others: Professor Alan Nunn May, convicted in 1946 as a member of Canada's atomic spy ring; Physicist Klaus Fuchs, now serving a 14-year sentence for selling atomic secrets to Russia; Cosmic-Ray Physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, who fled, presumably for Moscow, in 1930. Two other Foreign Office men, Diplomats Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess, who disappeared last year and have not been heard of since, are presumed to have fled beyond the Iron Curtain.

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