Word: macleans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...spite of the scandals kicked up by Atomic Scientists Alan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo, and by Diplomats Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess, most Britons still find it hard to take their home-grown Communists seriously. Party membership is down to fewer than 30,000 and falling; the Communists lost their only two Members of Parliament in the general elections of 1950. One reason for this state of affairs is that the Communists themselves have shifted from electioneering to getting a hold on industry. Last week Britain was learning what Communists could do when they had firm control...
Last week the U.S. magazine World fleshed out the MacLean-Burgess story with still more details gleaned and pieced together by its overseas staffers. World traces its story back to the late 1930s, when leftward-leaning young MacLean, then the ambitious foreign-office cub, and his future wife first made friends with an other young couple-Italian-born Scientist Bruno Pontecorvo, a favorite pupil of France's Physicist-Communist Frederic Joliot-Curie, and Pontecorvo's Swedish mistress...
...friendship continued through the 1940s, when Pontecorvo joined an atomic-research team working in Canada and MacLean was posted to the British embassy in Washington. In 1950, MacLean, whose reputed homosexuality, increasing drunkenness and Soviet-sympathizing had nearly cost him his career, was approached by Russian agents. They sought a nuclear physicist after Britain's Klaus Fuchs had been discovered as a spy. According to World, MacLean suggested Pontecorvo. His friend, Guy Burgess arranged the details, and after a few weeks, Pontecorvo and his wife (the former Swedish mistress) went on a vacation to Sweden and disappeared. Nine months...
Influential Friend. From that time on, American-born Melinda MacLean worked single-mindedly at the business of trying to rejoin her husband. Donald, says World, was able to establish contact with her through Soviet agents. Melinda moved first to France and then to Switzerland to make the job easier. Donald pleaded with his Soviet bosses to let Melinda come to him, but as an American and a nonparty member, Melinda was felt to be too great a risk. All the Communists would offer was a "We'll see," while Melinda waited in Switzerland...
Then, last August 1953, thanks in part to the aid and knowledge of Bruno Pontecorvo, the Russians set off a superbomb explosion on the Aksu River. The Italian-born physicist and friend of MacLean was suddenly one of the most honored figures in Russia. When he added his plea to that of MacLean's, the Communists no longer denied him. Donald wrote Melinda, and soon the MacLean family was on its way to the ten-room villa they now occupy as the wife and children of a top-ranking Red bureaucrat...