A Rap on the Door

A fashionable and distinguished-looking Londoner, Mrs. John R. Bassett, found a Christmas note from her son in the mail one day last week. This commonplace occurrence made headlines all over Britain, for Mrs. Bassett is the mother of Guy Burgess, the young British diplomat who disappeared behind the Iron Curtain more than two years ago with his foreign-office colleague, Donald MacLean.

The note, dated November and written in ink in a hand positively identified as Guy's by Mrs. Bassett, was the first tangible evidence that Burgess is still alive. Beyond that fact, it proved nothing. Written on British stationery and enclosed in an envelope postmarked "Dec. 21, London, S.E. 1," the note might have been written anywhere and mailed by any one of thousands wandering the streets of southeast London that day. Two Soviet cargo ships were tied up in London at the time, and the Waterloo Airways Terminal is part of the postal district in which the letter was mailed. The message itself, according to Colonel Bassett, gave no clue to Burgess' whereabouts. It came, as The Manchester Guardian put it, "like a rap on the door--but when the door is opened, nobody is there."

Senior Evaluator. The disappearance of Burgess and MacLean, followed last year by the similar disappearance of MacLean's wife and three children from their home in Geneva, still ranks high in the hearts of British mystery lovers as one of the top unsolved riddles of the age. Last week's rap on the door sent a new blizzard of speculation swirling through pubs and drawing rooms. But in point of fact, except for the lack of official documentation, the mystery surrounding Burgess and the MacLeans has grown fairly thin.

After sifting hundreds of contradictory reports, British intelligence officers are now reasonably satisfied that Burgess is working for the Russians in Moscow as adviser on English-language broadcasts, that MacLean is living with his wife and children in Kladno, Czechoslovakia as "senior evaluator" of Western diplomacy and propaganda.

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.

The 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 later, Burgess and MacLean followed suit, leaving behind MacLean's now-famous telegram to his wife: "Please, don't stop loving me."

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.

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