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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On a Saturday morning half a century ago, the overnight ferry from Southampton docked at Saint-Malo. While most passengers headed for the boat train to Paris, two members of the British ruling class took a leisurely breakfast with beer. When the train had been safely missed, they hired a taxi to drive them fifty miles (very ruling class) to Rennes, where they paid the fare of forty-five hundred francs but failed to give the driver a tip (not very ruling class). At Rennes, they caught a less obvious train to Paris, and were not seen again for five years.
The sureness of hindsight makes it obvious what was happening. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Soviet spies recruited while at Cambridge, were defecting to Russia. The Americans were onto them, and the British had scheduled their top interrogator, William Skardon, who had broken the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, to start work on Maclean the following Monday morning. Only the looseness of surveillance and MI5's disinclination to work on weekends allowed the two spies to escape. Over the next decades, the nettle roots of the Cambridge conspiracy were slowly pulled up. Burgess and Maclean led to the Third Man, Kim Philby (suspected 1951, defected 1963), the most durable and damaging of the group. The Third led to the Fourth, the art historian Sir Anthony Blunt (granted immunity 1964, outed 1979), who is now the subject of a compelling biography by Miranda Carter, "Anthony Blunt: His Lives" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30). The Fourth Man led to the Fifth, John Cairncross, and to lesser, unnumbered agents.
But little of this seemed obvious at the time. Cyril Connolly, who knew both Burgess and Maclean socially (and had spoken to Maclean the day he escaped), became obsessed by their case, and published his speculations as "The Missing Diplomats" (1952). Missing: the neutrality of the adjective is eloquent. Connolly's monograph retains its fascination because of its very uncertainties and hesitant theories; its author, despite being an insider and despite the evidence in front of him, remains incapable of drawing the logical conclusions. For a start, what was a spy supposed to look like? Spies were known to be either grubby men seeking money or else idealists with staring eyes. Burgess and Maclean didn't fit either profile: they were public school and Cambridge, part of the "us" that for centuries had ruled "them." Connolly wrote of Maclean, a career diplomat, "We all felt that he was a rock, that if we were in trouble he would help us. . . . His charm was based not on vanity but on sincerity." Burgess was less conventional -- a more reckless drunk, and incautiously homosexual -- but in the days before he disappeared he had told a friend that he could never live abroad and was planning to settle down to "his great task, the addition of a final volume to Lady Gwendolen Cecil's biography of the Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, which he thought the best biography in English." How could such men be traitors to the Crown?
They were,...
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