Infection from the Enemy

The disappearance of British Diplomats Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess was still a mystery without solution. A "well-informed source" said that the pair crossed the Pyrenees from Spain into France last week, traveling under assumed names; tourists said they saw them hurrying into Italy from Switzerland by way of the Simplon Pass; some amateur sleuths were sure the two had doubled back on their own trail, were back in Britain and hiding. When a daughter was born to Mrs. MacLean last week and her husband failed to give any sign, police all but abandoned hope that he and Burgess were still in Western Europe. Their guess: the two were either dead or behind the Iron Curtain.

MacLean and Burgess had left London on May 25, were last definitely reported in Rennes, France, running to catch a train to Paris. MacLean was head of the Foreign Office's American section and both men had served in the British embassy in Washington; they had access to plenty of confidential information which the Russians would be glad to get. Last week, London's Whitehall buzzed with rumors that the British counter-espionage unit, M.I.-5, was putting all Foreign Service men through a new and tighter security check, looking for traces of Communist sympathies or of homosexuality.

British newspapers were also hot on the trail. To check some tales about Burgess' private life, London's Daily Express dispatched its Hollywood reporter to Friend Christopher Isherwood, novelist (Prater Violet) and onetime parlor pink. "Was he a Communist?" mused Isherwood. "Well, like the rest of us, he was very much in favor of the United Front and Red Spain and so forth ... It meant, don't you see, that we were pretty favorable towards Russia ... I mean, it went without saying. But as far as I know, Guy was never a card-carrying party member. I have the strongest personal reasons for not wanting to go to Russia and I should think Guy Burgess would have exactly the same sort of reasons. We both happen to have exactly the same sort of tastes, and they don't meet with the approval of the Soviets. In fact, I'm told they liquidate chaps with our views--rather beastly, don't you think?"

Most Britons were less casual about the case. It stabbed sharply into the vitals of British pride and security. "It is the same sort of wound," wrote the weekly Time & Tide in a soul-searching article last week, "as that caused in the U.S. by the opening phases of the Hiss-Chambers duel . . . What reality is there now in our English assurances, in whose subtlety and strength we have taken such quiet pride? . . . Here are no lately nationalized refugee scientists, no fly-by-night fanatics making somber rendezvous ... If there is a particle of truth in the sinister rumors and speculations which have been rife, what Mr. Hydes are masked by the agreeable Dr. Jekylls whom everybody knows and likes? . . . [What can] stem the infection which the enemy appears able to inject into the bloodstream of us all, so that brother looks sideways at brother, and the friend of thirty years, the guest at lunch party or weekend frolic, becomes a bad security risk?"

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