The Propaganda Puppets

The predictable happened in Moscow last week: The Russian Foreign Office decided that the moment had come to produce missing British Diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Called to the television room of the National Hotel, the correspondents of Reuters news agency and the London Sunday Times (no other foreign press invited) were exposed to the presence of Burgess, 44, and Maclean, 42, just long enough (five minutes) to identify them. The ex-diplomats were dressed in dark blue suits and white shirts, looked relaxed, but showed more grey hair than when last seen in the West five years ago. No photographs were allowed. Smoking Russian cigarettes, they laughingly refused to answer personal questions and gave no hint of their present jobs or plans. Burgess, the burly homosexual, was more talkative--in a blustering, uninformative way--than Maclean. After handing the newsmen a signed statement, they were taken away in a Russian limousine.

In the prepared statement (which read as if written by someone else), Burgess and Maclean admitted that they had joined the Communist Party while students at Cambridge. They denied that they had been Soviet agents while working in the British Foreign Office: they had switched their allegiance to the Soviet Union because they had disagreed with the direction of British policy. Said the statement: "We had every possibility to know the plans of a small but powerful group of men who opposed the achievement of ... mutual understanding [with the Soviet Union], and for this reason we had every ground to fear these plans."

More & More Alone. Part way through the statement, the "we" was dropped, and the career of each man was discussed in the third person. The tall, truculent, but flabby Maclean was pictured as a man caught in the British Foreign Office "machine which, with the exception of the war period, was pursuing a policy unacceptable not only to Maclean, but also to many others . . . However, after the war he found himself more and more alone. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone to think of something else than the Communist menace, to understand the senselessness and danger of American policy in the Far East and Europe."

Followed by counterespionage agents, his telephone tapped while he was heading the American desk at the Foreign Office, Maclean was allegedly driven to desperation, while the hell-raising Burgess was depicted as a man racked with "the greatest anxiety . . . caused by the fact that at first no modus vivendi was reached be tween the East and West, and later on no attempts were made to reach it."

The statement gave Burgess the credit for masterminding their escape to Russia. "Only there, it seemed to them, was there a possibility to put into practice in one form or another the convictions which they had always held." Then, in its last paragraph, the statement switched back to the first person: "Our life in the Soviet Union has convinced us that we took at that time the correct decision."

Flat Liars. The statement said that the American-born Mrs. Maclean, who was pregnant at the time her husband fled, "arrived with her children in the Soviet Union in 1953." This made flat liars out of Russian leaders, up to and including Nikita Khrushchev, who have denied repeatedly, formally and informally, that they knew the whereabouts of the two traitors or their kith or kin.

Apparently Khrushchev & Co. hoped to get some windfall out of parading Burgess and Maclean at this moment, hoping either to smooth the way for Khrushchev's forthcoming trip to London, or to muddy up the recent Anglo-American accord. Foreign Office officials have suspected Maclean's hand in the skillful phrasing of Bulganin's two recent "peace" notes to President Eisenhower. But the circumstances of the hotel interview indicated that, though they might be useful in phrasing messages, the Russians regard the two ex-diplomats as no more than propaganda puppets.

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