Word: macleans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...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...
...There MacLean renewed an old friendship with hard-drinking Guy Burgess, who had been recalled from his job as Second Secretary in Britain's Washington embassy because of his "general unsuitability." (Last February Burgess had been stopped three times in a single day for speeding 80 m.p.h. on U.S. highways.) There was nothing to suggest that either had ever been Communists or fellow travelers...
...They had gone on a spree. This theory grew weaker as the days wore on. MacLean's wife is pregnant; his two sons, aged seven and five, are ill with measles. He was proud of his rambling, wistaria-covered country house in Kent, had just ordered new wallpaper for the nursery...
...Government for appointing such unstable men to important positions in Britain's greatly respected civil service, and particularly in the Foreign Office. In the House of Commons this week, Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison dodged a barrage of questions. Said he: Any suggestion that the case of Burgess and MacLean points to "widespread sexual perversion in the Foreign Office" is "unfair and irresponsible." As for their possible desertion, Morrison said this was "a matter which we should not prejudge...