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respondent tele- y! id, is London offichameeeSsage rang false. It was ni inquiries . next mot the news was blazoned ac¥pss the front page of two British newspapers. When Melinda read the head- 9 British Diplomats g,” and the story below hich suggested that they were “trying toe get to Moscow,” she said pathetically to Mrs. Dunbar, “Oh, Mummy, they can't be referring to ald. can they?" Wire from France Her fears that the head- jJines pointed at Donaid were confirmed the next morning Not only were the names Donald Maclean and Guy Bur- gess impossible to avoid when- paper, but telegrams from the missing men were received that day. There were two from Donald: one to his mother, Lady Mac:ean, signed by hi childhood nickname “ Teento.” and the other to Melinda, They had been posted in the Post Office in the Place de la Bourse in Paris, which is open all night for telegrams, at 10 p.m, the previous day by a heavily made-up womah, The original~Of'‘the“telegram _re- ceived by Melinda contained many mistakes in English, most of which wete corrected in transmission. It read: MRS. MACLEAN MELINDA. BEACON SHAW. TATSFIELD NEAR WESTERHAM., SURREY. 7 [AD TO LEAVE SORR’ A QUITE WELL NOW. DON’T WORRY DAR- LING. I LOVE YOU. PLEASE Luo-fold search This was both meaningless and frightening. The foreign handwriting and the obvious mistakes showed that Maclean could not hae written it, That meant either that he had had ah accident ar that he was no longer a free agen! But even it he had dictated it, he would at least have got ,the address right. He would ‘not have placed Tatsfield in Surrey when he knew that its ever one looked at & news- ! k made, and the a telegram he would ever have Am quite wejl now left. “Don’t worry, darling”; what. insufferable futility t This telegram, to paralleled 27 months later after Melinda, in her turn, had dis- appeared, throws an interesting ight on the mentality of the organisers of these disappear a. ne two-fold search for the ; yo men—unofiic j; Bnd shrouded in complete , Secrecy, by the security organi- i gations — reached its zenith | during the next few days. While hordes” of _ zealous reporters besieged Tatsfield, scores of their colleagues. scoured the Continent. A few more details were added to the insignificant little mound of | known facts—and a massive mountain of conjecture, specu- | lation and rumour soared every | day higher and higher. 'A- string of questions What the police and the In- telligence services discovered , Was not revealed, and if the | Government knew anything i they kept it to themselves. Sniped at angrily by a Press which felt itself baulked of official’ confirmation of {ts various theories ,about the | Missing Diplomats and their | fate, the Foreign Secretary, Mr.. Herbert Morrison, was finally ‘forced to make a statement in the House_of Commons on June 11, For any light it threw on the mystery he might just as well have saved him- self the trouble. His statement ended with words: “The~security aspects me 1 and highly lublicised by the Press : official gal lic interest to disclose them » A few more facts, more in- | ‘teresting than anything con- tained In the _ ment, were elicited by a string of questions. -The most impor- tant and the ‘most reassuring. was the Foreign Secretary's assertion that there was no evidence that Maclean and Burgess had taken documents “with them But in reporting the debate the next day one newspaper noted that. Mr. Morrison “appeared evasive” whey sked whether they possesse; lany knowledge which hi potential value to Russia. It was, anyway, a fairly ‘dificult. question to answer. Who could know what these two men knew? Had they really been collecting informa- tion for Russia—of which there was no evidence at all—they ' could easily have gone outside their own particular niches in the Foreign Office. Mr. Morrison was at pains to decry the importance of Donald Maclean's position as Head of the American Depart- ment— which Mr. Eden described as “perhaps the heaviest and most onerous posi- tion inthe Foreign Office at the present time "—by pointing out that many of the “matters concerned with negotiafions - with the United States are ° actually dealt with in other departments.” A Foreign Office spokesman followed this up the next day. He said that the America Department was not respon- sible for current questions such as North Atlantic Treaty Organisation matters: the Japanese Peace Treaty or robiems considered by the inited Nations Atomig Enersy mission. Se, e original state © (Mr, ave cots are ander es AE they — eo said . dn fact, he sald, it really concerned itself with “ domestic developments inside the United States and questions of purely Anglo-American con- cern."—whatever that might mean. What were extremely in- teresting in the Commons de- bate were the tributes to Donald Maclean. %4r, Morrison, after stating that“ the medical evidence was that Maclean had fully recovered from his ‘ breakdown, said that™ a report on Mr Maclean’s work was that he was an exceeding-y able official Then came Mr. Anthony Eden, who had been Foreign Secretary when Maclean was. at the British Embassy in Cairo. |" May Tbe allowed to say, as Maclean was serving ‘under me at the time in Egypt, that all the reports I received of the work he did there were very good indeed ?” And to this day, that is realy the sum total of all that “official sources"—the Foreign Office and the Government— had 10 say about the dis- appearance of Maclean and Burgess. There have been her statements. many them—al} equally negative. afl ually unilluminating. [World copyright}