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o.-* a ade ee Rak oe most intractably hard-line capitals behind the Iron Curtain. To most they offer no more than a@ bare Tather a fear of returning to the Western rat race than a realised ideology? By GEOFFREY BOCCA NOT ALWAYS GREENER Policy Since Suez (Hodder), Donald Maclean explains bis pelle! flight from England like this: “When, after having spent the first 16 years of my working life in the Diplomatic Service, Tfound myself faced with the necessity of finding a pew profession, 1 decided afier much casting about, that what I was best qualified to do was to contri- bute to this much wider problem by making @ continous study... of the Process of development of contem- porary British foreign policy.” As a compulsive expatriate, having lived al) my adult life in almost any country bul my own, IT have always been fascinated by defection, There is a little of the defector in us all, restrained because we suspect that somewhere over the rainbow we will find some- thing not beticr but worse, the restraint Professor Bruno Pontecorvo, the Italian-born, British atomic scientist, defected to Moscow ia 1950, aged 37, after mysteriously . disappearing on boliday in Italy. Just before he vanished he was Photographed (left, in mac} with Prof. Enrico Fermi, the Italo American scientist, when they visited the Ultracosmic Ray Centre of Cervinia. Pontecorvo is one of the few who has been able to continue s brilliant career in Russia, working ic the laboratory at the Nuclear Research Centre at Dubna, near Moscow (right). In 1967 be was appoloted head of a pew Soviet School of Space Physics on Lake Buyka! in Siberia, earning at the same Gime £6,000 yearly in roubles in Dubna, and enjoying the rare privilege for a defector of acting host to visiting delegations of foreign scientists ~ . -. vr i. which holds one to a first marriage despite the temptation to try a second. The henpecked litte man in Noel Coward's Fumed Qak defected to Latin America to escape a monstrous life with a shrewish wife and daughter, and there the play ended. But if one takes the scene beyond the final cur- tain, it is safe to presume that the littke man would pever master Spanish, never soquire a taste for garbanzos, enjoy a good cup of tea or fill in another pools coupon, in other words, disillusion and bitterness. For the de- fectors to the East it is equally safe to assume that pot al) the hard-currency goods in the Berioska slores, of privileged holidays in Sochi, or tickets to endless performances of Swan Lake or even oceans of vodka compen- sate for what they have abandoned. Home for Pontecorve and his wife (left), and their sons, has been for the Lest 20 odd years the scientific village of Dubna, in the silver birch forests north of Moscow. There he leads the Hie ofa i scieutixt, well paid, entitled to Black Sea holidays, « car and aff the other privileges of the Soviet Union’s technocracy. Walking down Gorky Street, Moscow (right) he looks today mach like the other inhabitants of the Russian capital. Recently Pontecorro has been working ow a high- energy physics synchrocyclotron which accelerates minute particles of matter toward the speed of ligit. His brother, Guido, formerly Professor of Genetica at Glasgow University, works ‘We know it. They know we know it. Kim Philby’s casual admission to Roy Blackman of the Datly Express that be missed an occasional pint of bitter or a sunny afternoon at Lords, is profounder than it sounds. This is not amal] stuff. It is the essence of life and happiness. Which makes Philby’s defection in many ways the most intriguing of all. More vividly than anyone else he knew what be was letting himself in for because Guy Burgess was his best friend and told him endlessly of his misery. If Philby, in the comfort of Beinst in 1962, closed his eyes and thought of Burgess be would see a wretched man wearing a soup-stained Eton tie, permanently drunk, in a« qamped, overheated two-room flat, his teeth having been inocked out by hooligans, without even a car to help him escape from the stifling claustro- phobia (the authoriues decided he wasn't worth one and took it away, and friends believe the shock hastened his breakdown and death). Philby #%, forced to defect because he had found out, but he actually went further than Burgess and Maclean and became a Soviet citizen, which the other two never did. Taking the curious process of psychological self-immolation further, one notices that many of the most ostentatious defections took place during the harshest days of Stalin's Cold War; Burgess and Maclean: Bruno Pontecorvo; Noel Field, Ralph Parker; Archibald Johnstone and Robert Dagkish; John Peet; Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett who