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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 his pelle) fight 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 after much casting about, that what 7 ‘was best qualified to do was to contri- bute to this much wider problem by making & continous study. . . Process of development of contem- porary British foreign policy.” As a compulsive expatriate, having lived all my adult life in almost any gountry but my own, I have always been fascinated by defection, There is a little of the defector in us all, restrained because we suspect thal somewhere cover the rainbow we will find some- thing not better but worse, the restraint of the, scientist, defected to Meeeow ia 1950, aged 37, after mysterioasly disap; on holiday tn ely. Se before be vanished he pootograpbed (eft in mac} with Prof. Fermi, the Italo-American scientist, when they visited the Ultrscosmic Ray Centre of Cervinia, Pontecorvo is one of the few at Dubna, near Moscow (right). In 1967 be was appolated head of ‘8 pew Soviet School of Space Physica oe Lake Buyka! in Siberia, earning at the same time £6,000 yearly in roubles in Dubna, and enjoying the rare privilege for a defector of acting bost to visiting Selegations of foreign scientists which holds one to a first marriage despite the temptation to try a second. ‘The henpecked litte man in Noel Coward's Fumed Oak defected to Latin America to escape # 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 little man would never master Spanish, never acquire 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 stores, or privileged holidays in Sochi, or tickets to endless performances ‘of Swan Lake or even oceans of vodka compep- sate for what they bave abandoned. Ps -. Home for Pontecorvo and his wife (left}, ané their sons, has been for the Last 20 odd years the ngs physics _Eynchrocy cotron of matter toward the of light. His brother, at Glasgow University, works ‘mm Loodon for the Imperial (Cancer Research Fond We know it, They know we know it. Kim Philby’s casual admission to Roy Blackman of the Daily Express that he missed an occasional pint of bitter or a sunny afternoon at Lords, is profounder than it sounds. This is not amall 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 he was letting himself in for because Guy Burgess was hit best friend and told him endlessly of his misery. If Philby, in the comfort of Beirut in 1962, closed his eyes and thought of Burgess be would vee « wretched man wearing a soup-stained Eton (ic, permanently drunk, in @ overheated two-room flat, bis teeth having been knocked out by ‘ooligans, without even a car to help him escape from the stifling claustro- phobia (the authorities decided be ‘wasn't worth one and took if away, ‘and friends believe the shock hastened his breakdown and death). Philby = forced to defect because he had found out, but be actually went further than Burgess and Maclean and became 18 Soviet citizen, which the other two never did. Taking the curious process of prychological 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 Macloan; Bruno Pontecorvo; Noe! Field, Ralph Parker; Aschibald Johnstone and Robert Dagleish; John Peet; Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett who