◆ SpookStack

“within his capacity.” ‘here 1s sompething of hindsight in tHis apglogia. Some hindsight also comes ini) the account of Mrs Maclean Jin Switzerland. Would it not be failly true to say that British security was deceived? Jt thought that Mrs Maclean could not be sympathetic towards a husband who had not treated her over well ; and besides, she was an American. At any rate, there was no watch on her, Call it “old school tie” or what you will, there was great reluctance to believe the worst of these two. For this most people who look at the evidence calmly will not be dis- posed to be highly censorious of the Foxpign Office. It was natural enough thyt his colleagues should be loth to sugpect one of themselves, a man bf great personal attraction, bearing pn honoured name, He had his defefts of ycharacter, but he seemed to pe ovfreoming them. What we do mot gef from the White Paper is any hint ofjthe evidence on which the security! inquiry was based, It was investigat- ing a leukage that took place “some years” before 1949; this -might have been only a_ casual indiscretion. Clearly security had not the remotest idea that in the archives of Moscow was a whole Maclean-Burgess sub-depart- meft under the busy Kislytsin. n. the keneral question of-the treechedy of Hlaclean and Burgess there is npt much new to say. That they had Communist leanings at Cambridge in thd carly thirties means little, Those wefe the days of the Popular Frbnt, of Bpain, of the Left Book Club. Ckm- munism was an epidemic disease andi with most of its sufferers—and from{ all appearances with Maclean and} Burgess—it quickly passed. We shall; never know why, like Alger Hiss, these two men developed the strange sepipatled them in the late forties 0 feed documents to the Kussians. We do not, for instance, know when this spying is supposed to have begun ; we shail probably find that it was during ; the war when the Grand“Alliance was in being and everybody was prepared to think so well of our Eastern ally. Thjs is not a case of a generation being on trial, but of two clever|but rajher unbalanced persons gbing wrpng. The new security chbkeks adopted by the Foreign Office in 1951 are all very well in their way, but if areally clever man wants to be a spy a check on his antecedents and asso- ciates is not necessarily a sure means of discovery. (What, for instance, of jurgess. who played about with the, Anglo-German Club?) No doubt there is much to be said in censure of the rather wild life in which Burgess | and Maclean sometimes indulged. It} should be a warning to others in the Foreign Service. But we must remember too that Alger Hiss was impeceably well-conducted, There is jno clear moral to be drawn except that the Foreign Office must look anxiously to its standards of efficiency, conduct, and alertness. It take it a long time to recover vfrqm the effects of this terrible ekpo- isurp, and the Government wil} do well not to ride of in any complacency,