The Defector

Except for a few facts about his professional background, few of his colleagues ever got to know very much about the solemn, sullen associate professor in engineering that St. Louis University hired in the summer of '54. Born in the Ukraine, Orest Stephen Makar, 47, had taught in Warsaw and Munich before coming to the U.S. in 1949. He was a specialist in photogrammetry,* worked for the U.S. Interior Department's Geodetic Survey, later got limited security clearance for a job at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. By the time he arrived in St. Louis, he and his wife were well on their way to becoming U.S. citizens.

As the months passed, students and facultymen began to realize that there was something very strange about Makar. When he wasn't haranguing about photogrammetry, his major obsession, he was blasting the U.S. or excoriating his students for their stupidity. Eventually, so many of his students complained about his unreasonable ways that the university had to fire him as incompetent. Then, one night in September, the Makars suddenly disappeared.

Last week the U.S. embassy in Stockholm revealed that the Makars had written a letter "without a return address" renouncing their U.S. citizenship. During their stay in Sweden, they had gone to the Soviet embassy, declared their desire to become Soviet citizens, had finally boarded a plane for Moscow. There, in a downtown hotel, they furtively tried to avoid Western newsmen. But they had already spoken freely to the Soviet press, explaining that they had come to Russia because it had a big head start in Makar's field, "while in the United States we were just starting." The explanation was little comfort to some U.S. officials: it was just possible, they felt, that Makar had taken to his Communist hosts data on new American missiles tested at White Sands. Most likely, he was merely a tragic neurotic befuddled by his scientific obsession. But the haunting suspicion remained: Could he be another Klaus Fuchs?

*The science of map making from photographs.

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