End of the Affair?

With speed and resolution that were conspicuously lacking when they popped the closet eleven years ago, Her Majesty's government moved last week to reinter Britain's Public Skeletons 1 and 2: Donald Duart Maclean, now 48, and Guy Francis de Money Burgess, 51, the blue-eyed Foreign Office homosexuals whose 1951 elopement to the Soviet Union prompted one of then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson's rare outbursts. Said he: "My God, Maclean knew everything!"

On a tip from M.I.6, Britain's overseas intelligence branch, the government learned that the Red queens--they have long since parted--might be leaving Moscow, swore out warrants for their arrest under Britain's Official Secrets Act. At week's end, after checking every train, plane and ship from Russia, British police and intelligence agents from Accra to Zanzibar were still waiting. Some highly placed Britons hoped they would wait a long, long time.

At the time of their defection, intimates and superiors--who included some of Britain's most respected intellectuals and public officials--argued by spy-thriller logic that neither Donald Maclean nor Guy Burgess could possibly be a spy. Said one friend: "They were too obvious." Both, it turned out, were combative, neurotic alcoholics who blabbed official secrets at cocktail parties, were avowed proCommunists, had been officially reprimanded for their indiscretions.

Throughout his lower-echelon Foreign Office career, handsome, curly-haired Guy Burgess was constantly in trouble, physically dirty and in debt; naturally, no one took seriously his close friendship with Atom Spy Alan Nunn May. Though a known homosexual and prone to savage fits of violence, flabby, fair-haired Donald Maclean was privy to top-level U.S. atomic information as wartime First Secretary in Britain's Washington embassy, later headed the American desk in the Foreign Office. To one casual acquaintance, Maclean's allegiance to Communism "stuck out a mile." Yet, though they might be "eccentric," both were "gentlemen." Today, there are still many in Britain who scream "McCarthyism" at the suggestion that scientists or civil servants should be more closely screened. This month, in the wake of two other flagrant espionage cases, a government committee investigating security procedures recommended drastic reforms. Its findings stirred angry protests against what the Laborite Daily Herald called "spy mania." If Maclean and Burgess do return to Britain and come to trial, the full story of their defection should persuade the public that there have been occasions when pansies and pinks were presumed to be patriots.

Meanwhile, the pair seemed to be sitting tight in Moscow, wearied by all the sudden interest. "Oh, tell them I've gone to Cuba," was all that questioners got out of the man who is known to his friends as Jim Andreevich Burgess.

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