On Thursday 7 June, almost two weeks after the flight, the story broke in the Daily Express. ‘Yard Hunts Two Britons’ screamed the headline. Larry Solon, chief correspondent of the Paris bureau, had been tipped off by George Gherra, the crime reporter of France-Soir, that two Foreign Office employees had disappeared and the French police had been asked to check their movements, though initially the two men were not named.1
The Foreign Office was forced to put out a bland statement. ‘Two members of the Foreign Service have been missing from their homes since May 25. One is Mr D.D. Maclean, the other Mr G.F. de M. Burgess. All possible enquiries are being made. It is known that they went to France a few days ago. Mr Maclean had a breakdown a year ago owing to overstrain, but was believed to fully have recovered. Owing to their being absent without leave, both have been suspended with effect from June 1.’
Burgess was described as: ‘5 ft 8 in. Thickset. Slightly bald. Grey at temples. Walks with toes turned in. He is invariably untidily dressed. Talks a great deal and is fond of discussing politics, philosophy and the arts. Fluent in French.’ Whilst Maclean was: ‘Height 6 ft 2 in. Hair brushed back and parted on left. Incipient baldness. Slightly round-shouldered. Long thin legs. Tight-lipped mouth, good features. Carelessly but well dressed. Speaks French but not perfectly.’2
The two families were besieged by the press – the Bassetts in Arlington Street and Melinda in Tatsfield – to the extent that the drive gates at Beaconshaw had to be padlocked and blinds pulled down on all the windows. Maclean’s son Fergus, then aged six, was followed back from school, had stones thrown at him, and was told his father was in prison. A girl who looked after the children was offered £100 for any documents or photograph she could smuggle out of the house. Blunt’s friendship with Burgess also led him to be swamped by press. His appointments were postponed and for days he hid in his flat. Harold Nicolson wrote glumly in his diary:
I am horrified to read headlines in the evening papers that Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess have absconded. I thought Guy was a brave man, I should imagine that he had gone to join the communists. As I know him to be a coward, I suppose that he was suspected of passing things on to the Bolshies, and realising the guilt, did a bunk … I fear this all means a witch hunt. James is in a hysterical state and wishes to do something about it. I must say it is rather alarming.3
All Alan Maclean and Colonel Bassett – ‘dressed for war, impeccably pin-striped, complete with bowler and rolled umbrella and just a whiff of expensive aftershave’ – could do was stoically collect the clothes left behind on the Falaise from Waterloo station. After they had identified the obvious clothing for each man – Maclean was some five inches taller than Burgess – only two items were left. ‘The first was a pair of really dirty, torn black pyjamas and the other a revolting pair of socks, which were quite stiff with dried sweat and had holes in heels and toes. I was sure that they were both Guy’s and said so. The Colonel was equally sure that they were both “your chap’s”.’ Maclean said his brother never wore pyjamas, so they agreed they belonged to Burgess, and in turn Maclean accepted the socks – both were dropped into the nearest bin.4
The press descended on Rees in Sonning. Burgess hadn’t paid for his call to Margie and a notice to that effect had been posted on the Reform Club noticeboard together with Rees’s number. ‘Their cars packed my drive; the doorbell and telephone rang incessantly; they took photographs of my wife, myself, and my children from every conceivable angle’, Rees later wrote. Enquiries were made in the local shops and pubs, and journalists pressed chocolates and half-crowns on Rees’s children, who were only too happy to exercise their imagination on satisfying the curiosity of the journalists. One reporter attempting to interview Margie Rees introduced himself with the words, ‘It’s all right to talk to me, Mrs Rees. I’m bisexual myself.’5
The furore was further fanned when on 8 June Mrs Bassett received a cryptic telegram postmarked Rome: ‘Terribly sorry for my silence. Am embarking on long Mediterranean Holiday. Do forgive. Guy.’ Melinda and Lady Maclean also received a reassuring telegram signed ‘Teeno’, Donald’s nickname as a child.
On 7 June the American embassy in London asked the Foreign Office for more information on the pair and were disingenuously told they had disappeared on a trip to France, ‘but there was no reason to believe they had carried any secret papers with them’.6 The Foreign Office may have been noncommittal in public, but privately they were closely monitoring press reaction around the world and especially in the US.7
‘Would the Foreign Secretary,’ George Wigg asked on 11 June, ‘institute inquiries into the suggestion made in a Sunday newspaper that there is widespread sexual perversion in the Foreign Office …?’ ‘I can only say that perhaps I have not been long enough at the Foreign Office to express an opinion,’ was Herbert Morrison’s response.
Whilst Morrison was making his short and noncommittal statement to the House of Commons, Percy Sillitoe, the head of MI5, flew to Washington with his colleague Arthur Martin, ‘who had been selected to accompany Sillitoe to brief Hoover, because he was regarded as the most plausible liar in the office’.8 It was a damage limitation exercise to reassure the Americans, who were furious that they had not been fully briefed on the investigations and escape, a matter of particular concern, because Maclean had been granted unescorted access to the US Atomic Energy Commission’s headquarters and attended key secret meetings on the Korean War. Martin explained apologetically to Robert Lamphere that Maclean’s high position in the Foreign Office had made the investigation very sensitive and the Foreign Office had forbidden MI5 from informing the FBI of their suspicions against Maclean. To make matters worse, Martin also admitted there were now grave suspicions that Philby was also a Soviet agent.
The pattern for the cover-up was becoming established. The British were withholding information from the Americans, hoping they could contain the situation themselves. The CIA was withholding information from the FBI, who in turn were withholding it from the State Department. Each organisation was determined to protect itself and avoid too much publicity.
The same day, the disappearance was discussed at Cabinet, and it was decided to set up an enquiry to look at Foreign Office security by those ‘who, in virtue of their past or present experience, have been indoctrinated in the top secret security matters affecting this case’. It was to be chaired by Sir Alexander Cadogan, a former Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He was to be assisted by Sir Nevile Bland, who had been asked the previous year to look at the intelligence services, and Sir Norman Brook, Secretary of the Cabinet. Its remit was ‘primarily one of Service administration and ethics. In such matters, the solution is usually best sought from within the ranks of the Service itself.’ There was great concern that they should not create, ‘A system of spying which would be both repugnant to our traditions and destructive of morale.’9
The government was playing its cards close to its chest, with Morrison telling the Commons that afternoon, ‘The security aspects of the case are under investigation and it is not in the public interest to disclose them.’ Percy Sillitoe had also produced a brief for the Prime Minister about the two men, though it’s difficult to ascertain from the surviving document if Burgess’s role in JBC, with MI5 and in IRD, has since been removed or simply was never revealed.10
Harold Nicolson disclosed his anguish about the disappearance in his diary on 11 June:
No news or ideas about Guy Burgess … It means that the old easygoing confidence of the FO, which was like the non-red-tapiness of the National Trust, will be destroyed and henceforth everybody will begin to distrust everybody else. I do hate that. It is the loss of one more element of civilisation. We used to trust our colleagues absolutely. Now we cannot any more. I feel so angry with Guy in some ways – feel that he has behaved so much like a cad – but in others deeply sorry for him.11
Meanwhile Philby had been recalled to London and was interrogated by MI5 between 12 and 16 June.12 They were particularly interested in how Burgess might have learnt about the identification of Homer. Liddell, who dared not believe his intelligence colleague could be implicated, tried to rationalise in his own mind the possible scenarios:
Personally I think it not unlikely that the papers relating to Maclean might have been on Kim’s desk and that Burgess strolled into the room while Kim was not there. Alternatively, of course, Burgess may have learned something from the general administrative enquiries which were being conducted within the Embassy under the direction of Bobby Mackenzie, although it is alleged every possible precaution was taken.
But looking back at the Konstantin Volkov case, even Liddell realised it wasn’t looking good for his friend. ‘One of the British intelligence agents was said by WOLKOF to be head of the CE department. Kim was in fact head of R.5 at the time.13 Whilst in the USA, Sillitoe had interviewed Esther Whitfield who told him:
Guy Burgess was an extremely erratic and irresponsible person, given to boasting, but with a very lively mind and an attractive personality. He was very well read, had a good memory and his knowledge ranged over a wide field. He liked conversation and to impress his audience with his friendship with the great. In most ways he was unreserved but he enjoyed a mystery and a feeling of ‘being in the know’. He was very loyal to his friends and very dependent on them. Politics were his chief interest, especially the Far Eastern aspect. His other great interest was in motor cars. He once said that the things he would like to do were to write either a history of the Far East, or of motor cars – or both.14
MI5 began to follow leads on all of Burgess’s Cambridge communist contemporaries and his close associates and began to interview them. Jack Hewit was summoned to an interview with Jim Skardon in Carlton House Terrace. ‘It was quite a small room painted in the usual office cream and brown colours’, he remembered. ‘It contained a table and three chairs. There was a telephone on the table and the window in the room overlooked the Mall.’ Lighting his pipe, Skardon began his questioning. ‘There was an air of quiet authority about him. He had a soft well-modulated voice and a very deceptive manner. I answered as best I could, but I did not tell him everything I knew or thought I knew.’15
Rosamond Lehmann later claimed she had approached Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, on the Friday and the following week she was interviewed by MI5 ‘in a Mayfair mews house’, where she told them of her suspicions about Burgess, Blunt and Rees. However, a contemporary MI5 file concluded she ‘had little of value to impart’.16 Pollock was interviewed by MI5 on 12 June and suggested Burgess’s closest friends after Blunt were W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Tom Wylie, Goronwy Rees, Ellis Waterhouse, Victor Rothschild and Isaiah Berlin.17
Christopher Isherwood, interviewed on 18 June, described Burgess as ‘a “pusher” and an intensely ambitious person and one who took great satisfaction in being close to the great and near-great in the British Foreign Service’.18 Moura Budberg, herself already the subject of investigations, was being used to draw material from Burgess’s circle, including from James Klugmann, who was thought to have been involved in the escape, Peter Pollock, Gerald Hamilton, Philip Toynbee, Andrew Revai and James MacGibbon, who were all put on the watch list at the ports and many had their phones bugged, including the Bassetts.19
To John Lehmann, the defection ‘acted like a small but violent earthquake in the fairly closely knit intellectual world of our generation’ as more and more of Burgess’s circle were called in for questioning and began to name each other. He was to suffer himself personally after a private letter about the missing diplomats sent to Stephen Spender was passed to a journalist. The result was to create a rift between old literary friends, who themselves felt betrayed by each other.20
Tess and Victor Rothschild ‘felt there were a certain number of people whom they knew who had had a considerable Left Wing past at the University and who should in present circumstances come forward and assist the authorities’, wrote Liddell in his diary. ‘They were considering the desirability of going to those people and urging them to do their duty; failing which they would have to take the matter into their own hands.’21
The one person who appeared not to have fallen under suspicion, at least by Guy Liddell, though the press had been besieging him and in spite of Rees’s statement, was Blunt. Liddell wrote in his diary on 12 June, ‘I feel certain that Anthony was never a conscious collaborator with Burgess in any activities that he may have conducted on behalf of the Comintern.’22
With suspicions of a cover-up, fresh questions in the House of Commons were being asked and statements prepared by the Foreign Office. Were the authorities aware of Burgess’s communist sympathies? Why had he not been properly vetted? MI5’s response was disingenuous. As Liddell wrote in his diary, ‘Our answer is that Burgess was never employed by MI5, but that during the war we were in contact with him in connection with information which he brought from a friend, Eric Kessler, relating to German activities. The Foreign Office asked us to vet Burgess in January 1950, and we replied that although we had no security information against him, we regarded him as both untrustworthy and unreliable.’23
Six days later, Liddell confided to his diary, ‘The DG returned about midday. He seems to have been successful in keeping Hoover quiet. The only grievance seems to be we didn’t tell the FBI about our short list.’24 That was not entirely true. The Americans were calling for answers and the importance of a joint line, but this found no favour in London.
The FBI had begun their own investigations and interviews, including a search of Burgess’s abandoned car, which yielded a hotchpotch of material, ranging from The Complete Short Stories of Jane Austen and Up at the Villa by Somerset Maugham, maps for the Carolinas and Virginias, Delaware and Maryland, a photograph of a boy and girl aged about six, to hundreds of copies of two graphs – ‘Defense Expenditure as Percentage of National Income’, comparing the US and UK 1943-1950, and ‘Defense Manpower – Men in Armed Forces as a Percentage of all Men Aged 18-44.’25
Bernard Miller told the FBI he had arrived in London on 21 May and seen Burgess at his flat for cocktails and dinner two days later. He ‘recalled that at various times Burgess mentioned a desire to go to the Continent, particularly to Paris. He recalled further Burgess mentioning a friend who had settled in a beautiful place in Locarno in Switzerland …’26
Shortly before the flight, the Americans had been moving towards closer co-operation on intelligence and atomic matters, in spite of the cases of Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo, an Italian nuclear physicist who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1950. They now broke off all atomic energy intelligence liaison, in the words of the CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, ‘for the time being’.
Tim Marten set out the situation for Roger Makins on 20 June, saying that while the Atomic Energy Commission and State Department were still open to co-operation, the CIA and Defence were not. ‘The one gleam of hope is that Bedell Smith and the Department of Defence may be prepared to reverse their present attitude of opposition, if some solution of the Maclean-Burgess affair is found which is not damaging to the reputation of British security.’27
In fact, as a senior MI6 officer at the time, with close ties to the Americans, later admitted, ‘The B&M defection caused a terrible rift between us and American intelligence, and at the time they simply clamped down and stopped giving us anything.’28
The Americans now had their suspicions of Philby. On 13 June, Bill Harvey submitted a five-page memo to the Director of the CIA, laying out why he believed Philby was a Soviet agent. Walter Bedell Smith then sent it to Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6. It was clear that if the ‘special relationship’ was to survive, Philby must go.29 Ramifications over Philby continued through the summer. Menzies’ deputy, Jack Easton, was dispatched to Washington on 13 July to tell Hoover and Smith that Philby had certainly been indiscreet and an inquiry was being set up, but there was no firm evidence against him. The Americans were unconvinced, but the problem was that without a confession and only circumstantial evidence, Philby knew he was in the clear.
Many in the intelligence community found it difficult to believe that Philby and Burgess had been spies. MI6 officer Nigel Clive would often see Burgess after work at Brooks’s club, with their mutual friends Goronwy Rees and David Footman. He had first met Burgess in 1946, introduced by Dick Brooman-White, having heard he was a ‘clever, amusing, stimulating character’. They lunched at Pruniers, one of Burgess’s favourite restaurants, where Clive had noticed his immorality. After they had been served, Burgess clapped his hands and asked for the head waiter, claiming there were worms in his prawns and hinting that it would make an item in a newspaper diary. The two men were immediately, amidst profuse apologies, given complimentary champagne. Clive was shocked but Burgess delighted. ‘I thought it would be fun so just tried it on.’30
The disappearance was a godsend to the press and no paper seized the opportunity more enthusiastically than the Daily Express, which had broken the news of the disappearance. On 30 June they offered £1,000 reward for information that established the whereabouts of the diplomats and shortly afterwards the Daily Mail raised the reward to £10,000. By 1962 the Express had spent nearly £100,000 on the story.31 Nigel Burgess was offered £500 to collaborate with a water diviner to find his missing brother, whilst Jack Hewit was sent by the Express to Paris to go round old haunts – the Left Bank, a hotel near the Bourse, the Ritz hotel bar – in the hope of finding his former boyfriend.
Some 15,000 policemen in West Germany, Austria, Italy and the Scandinavian countries peered into cafés, bordellos, hotels and airports. The search spread to Cyprus and Malta; Egypt’s police were watching the entire western desert coastline, and the French Foreign Legion were brought in.32 Auden’s home in Ischia was watched constantly by press and intelligence services alike and Peter Rogers, a friend on the way to stay with Auden on Ischia, was arrested on the quayside at Naples on suspicion he was Burgess.33
The photographer Humphrey Spender, the younger brother of Stephen, and the writer Geoffrey Grigson, touring Wiltshire for a photo-article for Picture Post, found themselves arrested whilst trying to develop some film at a chemist in Warminster. ‘We have reason to believe that you and your friend in the car outside are Mr Burgess and Mr Maclean,’ intoned the policeman. The two, wondering ‘which of us was Burgess, which Maclean’, duly trooped down to the police station, where their identity was only confirmed when a call was put into the editor, Tom Hopkinson.34
Stanley Karnow, the Time correspondent in Paris, was asked to check out a rumour that Burgess and Maclean were hiding in a chateau near Paris. Presenting himself with a colleague at the heavy oak door, he asked, ‘Je m’excuse de vous deranger, monsieur mais Burgess et Maclean vous savez les diplomats anglais, est-ce qu’ils sont ici, par hazard?’ ‘No, I’m afraid you’re terribly mistaken,’ came the reply. Relieved, he could only manage, ‘Oh well, I just happened to be in the neighbourhood, and I thought I’d ask.’35
There was a frenzy of sightings throughout the summer in Brittany, Monte Carlo, Berlin, fishing villages near Naples, in Rome, in Andorra and the Soviet district of Vienna. The police in British Guiana were put on alert, and men called Burgess on motoring holidays on the Continent were routinely stopped. A swoop on one hotel for two ‘Englishmen’ turned out to be two Irish priests spending a holiday there.36
One paper said they had registered at a hotel in Barcelona as Marshall McLean and Willis John Burgess, another that they had been exfiltrated by ship from Antwerp, while there were rumours Burgess had gone to see Truman Capote in Sicily.37 FBI reports are filled with suspicions the men had fled to Buenos Aires disguised as women, or been seen at a Greyhound Bus Station in New York waiting for a bus to Florida – Maclean described as having ‘very black hair and protruding teeth’.
In January 1952 the Associated Press was quoting diplomats in Berlin that the two men were in the Lubyanka prison, having been held for months in Prague.38 People reported that Burgess had attended a conference in the Chinese province of Kwei-Chow, whilst the Graphic in June claimed he was staying with Freya Stark in Italy.39 ‘Evidence that the missing British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean may have travelled to Poland in a Polish ship from Dunkirk a few days after they were last seen in Brittany in May of last year has been obtained by German intelligence agents from a communist agent arrested in Bremen’, wrote the Washington Post confidently in July.40
The truth was no one had a clue.