◆ SpookStack

- , & ‘ in the middle thirties; he wa: « classical scholar of distinction to whom the code-name Homer would be appropriate; Homer, in its Rus- sian form of Gomer, was a near- anagram of Gore; as for ideals, Gore-Booth was a Christian Sci- entist and 2 teetotaler. What more could I want? It was a neat bit of work, good enough, I hoped, to give London pause for a few days. Burgess packed up and left. We dined together his last evening in a Chinese restaurant where each booth had “personalised musi which helped to drown our voices. We went over the plan step by step. He was to meet a Soviet contact on arrival in London,‘and give him & fuli briefing. He was then to call a sheet of paper giving the time and place of rendezvous which he would* slip across the desk. He would then meet Maclean and put him fully in the picture. From then on, the mat- * ter was out of my hands. Burgess * did not look too happy, and I must have had an inkling of what was on his mind. When I drove him to the station next morning, my last words, spoken only half-jocularly, : “Don’t you go too.” were not particularly im- 2 hy Mackenzie’s brainwave -e-Booth. Confronted by act list, they were looking odd man out, the man who -d least to pattern. It wa. i sent procedure, and it led tii to put Maclean at the top of the list. He had never enjoyed the social round of the diplomatic corps. He had preferred the society of independent minds. By contrast, the others on the list were depressingly conformist. In communicating to us their conclusions, MI-5 informed us that Maclean would probably be ched wl the case against was complete. Meanwhile, cer- tain categories of Foreign Office 1. ogr would be withheld from him, . his movements would be put under surveijlance, These last two decisions, taken presumably to soothe the Americans, were foolish, but I saw no reason to challenge them. I judged that they might serve me in good stead if anything \ ~ 7 - went wrong. I was quite right. I was nevertheless alarmed by the speed with which the affair was developing, and at the next meeting with my Soviet contact told him of the pressing need for haste. I was also given a pretext for writing to Burgess direct. The Embassy trans- port officer had twice asked me what was to be done about the Lincoln Continental which he had left in the car park. So I wrote to Burgess in pressing terms, telling him that if he did not act at once, it would be téo late—because I would send his car to the scrap-heap. There was nothing more that I could do. One morning, at a horribly early hour, Geoffrey Paterson called me by telephone. He explained that he had just received an enormously long Most Immediate telegram from London. It would take him all day to dec$pher without help, and. he had just sent his secretary on a week’s leave. Could he borrow mine? I made the necessary ar- rangements and sat back to compose myself. This was almost certainly it. Was Maclean in the bag? Had Maclean got away? I was itching to rush round to the Embassy and lend a third hand to the telegram. But it was clearly wiser to stick to » My usual routine as if nothing had happened. When I reached the Em- bassy, I went straight to Paterson’s office. He looked grey. “Kim,” he said in a half-whisper, “the bird has flown.” I registered dawning hor- ror (F hope), “What bird? Not Maclean?” “Yes,” he answered. “But there’s worse than that... Guy Burgess has gone with him.” At that, my consternation was no pretence. Jawa : URGESS’ DEPARTURE with Mac- lean faced me with a fateful decision. From the earliest discus- sions of Maclean’s escape, my Soviet colleagues had been mindful that something might go wrong and put me in danger. To meet such a pos- sibility, we had elaborated an es- cape plan for myself, to be put into fF mn in case of u.creme emergency. Tt was clear that the departure of Burgess gave nige to an emergency. But was it an extreme emergency? I had to put aside the decision for a few hours, in order to deal with two . immediate problems. One was to get rid of certain compromising equipment hidden in my house. The other’ was to get the feeling of the FBI, since that might affect the details of my escape. Getting rid of - the equipment was perhaps the most urgent task of the two, but 1 de- cided to let it wait. It would have fooked very odd if I had left the Embassy immediately after hearing the news; and Paterson's telegram gave me a good excuse for testing the FBI without delay. It concluded with instructions that he should in- form Boyd of its contents. Paterson, doubtless thinking that his face would be pretty red by the end of the interview, asked me if I would accompany him on the grounds that two red faces might be better than one. The fact that my face was probably more grey than red did not alter the principle of the thing. Boyd took the news able calm. A few flashes of mischief suggested that he might almost be h rem pleased that the bloody British had- made a mess of it. But I guessed that his calm masked a personal worry. Boyd hac often met Burgess at my house, and had invited him back to his own. Against all the odds, they had got on well together. Both were aggressive, provocative characters; they exchanged insults with mutual appreciation. At their first meeting, Burgess had attacked the corruption and graft which, he alleged, made nonsense of the Indi- anapolis motor trials, and in doing so took several hefty sideswipes at the American way of life in general. Boyd positively liked it, He had probably never heard a prissy Eng- Jishman talk that way before. In the present crisis, he would not have been Boyd if he had not wondered how much “the boss,” Hoover, knew about his own acquaint.rce with Burgess, I concluded tha: Tsoyd’s personal interest would work in my favour. From him, we wezi to see Lamphere, whose manner was quite 21. 21