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* extracted: comments on the Whi Paper ha =... disingenuous reticence-. . . huckets of whitewash . . . paucity of information . . * cover-up to protect men guilty of supplying jorma- successive Ministries with incomplete in| i admission of failure... an invult i Wo any’ reasonable man’s intelligence. «7° a ee ie ee Those sre quotations from comments ade by papers representing almost every mode by vo jitical opinion and thought in this country. I quote them because they bear out what I believe every speaker in the debate has tried to adopt as the tone of his speech—the non-party political approach that we have becn ining to make towards the very serious problem which has been exposed by the events in the Burgess aod Maclean case. Very many Governments are involved, perhaps ever since the time when Maclean entered the Foreign Service. It is idle and un- ‘ofitable now to apportion blame, and Pim glad we have not wasted our time trying 10 do 60. -5 . There is one quotation which 1 should Tike framed and hung in every depart- ment of the Forcign Office. It is from “Gulliver's Travels”; “Providence never intended fo make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended by & few persons of sublime sens ee ee I should like that quotation hung in every Government Department, but particularly” in the Foreign Office, because there, over the years, has been created a kind of order which I can only describe by saying that they have tended to regard themselves as a new Samurai of twentieth century Eng: land. It is an attitude of mind whi has been stressed by previous speakers. What is wrong with the Foreign Office is not only the inefficiency of its Security Services—that is one of the issues—but the attitude of mind and spirit of the place, which makes it an extremely awk- ward problem for any Government to deal ‘The point that ty seriously to make fs that there fs a reluctance, from. which many Governments have suffered —* the present Government suffer from it" fo tell the people the truth and the whole truth. The people will know how to. judge all right if they are told what the truth is. Never was there a more intelli- a of fair-minded public than is now to found in this country. What have we to be afraid of? Why not on every sible occasion give the benefit of the a wD wy . 1581 Former Poveign Office. 7 NOVEMBER 1955 Officials*isappearance 158% -extracted anything that might be ‘of. valuei-san. to the principle that, as far as possible, - the people of this country should be told. “4 the truth and the whole truth? .». 4 Gne of the difficuitics about the matt over the past few years has been reluctance to tell the people the tru That is responsible for all the omissi from the White Paper, the evasions . answers to Questions in this House and “7 ~ in another place, and the stupid situations __. in which successive Governments ha found themselves involved as a result of-----— following the Foreign Office tradition’ 2 that the world will come to an end if ;... ordinary people ate io3d a Siitle too much?" I will not_go through the White Paper’ . io detail. That would be a waste of time at the present stage. I merely want to. draw altention to two of three points, and. I will do so very briefly. On the Fri before Maclean had his Saturday morning off, just at the time when everthing was, approaching a climax, and after it had’ - been decided that there should be ques tions —incidentally, it was not eveo known that Maclean was missing until the ~~~ Monday, as has been pointed out’ by: previous speakers—the senior security: © officer, who knew that Macican was under but had no instructions to stop him. What sort of security arrangement is) * that? FR wee oa ¢ White Paper’ We now learn from that the Foreign Office was aware for twot ° years and three months before the dis-* appearance of the two men that secret information had leaked out. Theo sus-' picions narrowed down to two or three, ¢ people, and somewhere about that period, Sse so careful were those concerned not 10) =~ ew give Maclean any warning that he was, under observation that it was decided 6 deny him access to secret papers’ which would normally have gone to him in the course of his duties. Of course, anyone> as intelligent and as ‘competent Maclean had deen certified to be by Roger Makins and others who had had- him “under observatioun,” would havet | easily smelled a rat, to put it no higher! cnc ia~ as soon as secret documents were being’ withdrawn from his observation... Bven when Maclean has disappeared and investigators rushed to his home ‘at Tatsfield, they did not trouble to examii the mass of papers which he had feft be» hind. I: may well be that Maclean had OSE es