The Missing Macleans
The Missing Macleans. By Geoffrey Hoare. (Cassell, 12s. 6d.) OF all the mysteries created by the disappearance of the Macleans, there Are two that really matter: Why did they go? And why was the Foreign Office so unprepared for their going? Mr. Hoare is probably as well qualified as anyone outside Russia to answer these questions. He knew them both personally, and followed their careers professionally.
Of Melinda, to whose letters he had access, he has drawn a full three-dimensional likeness. We see a nice but unremarkable pro- duct of Fifth Avenue New York, out of her depth with Donald sober and grossly abused by Donald drunk—a tragic figure, though not of heroic proportions, who was the victim of men and ideas she never understood. With Donald, Mr. Hoare is less successful. All the available facts have been faithfully assembled. But one is left, as one is always left after discussing Maclean with his acquaintances, with the impression of two irreconcilable men. He was the son of Sir Donald Maclean, MP, a man who marched sternly along the narrow path to virtue and public distinction. Like most of us, Donald rejected his father's precepts. He embraced, or at least flirted with, Communism at Cambridge, and developed a progressive partiality for drink and disreputable friends. He then entered the Foreign Service. While he was head of chancery in Washington just after the war—a job which he performed superbly well—he acquired a virulent hatred of Americana and simul- taneously, or so Mr. Hoare deduces, he became a Communist agent. He was subsequently transferred to Cairo where he debauched so obstreperously that he had to leave for psychiatric treatment. After six months, he was reappointed on promotion to the Foreign Oflice whence, in 1951, he disappeared, almost certainly to Moscow. Why? fundamental disease? For a man with Maclean's knowledge of what life must be like for a British renegade in Soviet Russia, it was little short of suicide to go there. After having read the story that Mr. Hoare has to tell, one has the impression that suicide, or some form of self-destruction, was what Maclean was bent on.
Why was the Foreign Oflice so blind? Everyone knew that Maclean had got to the stage where he could only face his official life with a bottle of whisky in each pocket; and everyone knew that he had been a Communist. Mr. Hoare suggests that somebody was 'covering up' for him. The truth is probably rather less crude but no more satisfactory. Confused and left behind by the prolifer- ation of its employees after the war, the Foreign Service was still clinging to the only criterion It had any experience of—that it was safer to make allowances for those whose fathers it knew than for those whose fathers it did not know. The question is whether it has found any better ones since 1951.
JENNY NASMYTH
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