PERIPATETICS: Man Hunt

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In ordinary times, the case would have rated a quiet police investigation, some chatter at cocktail parties, perhaps a feature article in the more lurid Sunday supplements. But when two middle-drawer British foreign-service men disappeared during a trip to the continent last month, the usually stolid British Foreign Office acted in a way the British call "hysterical" if displayed by Americans. Police on two continents, including Scotland Yard, launched a gigantic man hunt for Donald Duart MacLean and Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess. Everyone recalled the case of Atom Spy Klaus Fuchs and the flight of Britain's Atom Scientist Bruno Pontecorvo behind the Iron Curtain last year. The general fear last week: that the two men had gone over to the Russians, taking secret information with them.

Ordinarily, the two would not be in possession of top military secrets, but would have access to confidential information. If they were in fact working for the Russians, they could have got hold of a lot more. In Washington, Secretary of State Acheson agreed that their defection might be "quite a serious matter."

Midnight Sailing. When the two had been missing for three days, Scotland Yard took up the trail together with Britain's M.I.-5 counter-espionage agents. They found that Burgess had booked two tickets for a round-trip excursion steamer to Saint-Malo, Brittany, hired a small sports car for ten days. Headlights blazing, the car flashed through the deserted streets of Southampton just before midnight, screeched to a stop at the dockside. The two men tossed a couple of shillings to the dock attendant, shouted "Buy yourself a drink," and leaped aboard the steamer. "What about the car?" the man called. "We'll be back Monday," they answered.

But MacLean and Burgess did not come back. When the steamer returned to England, two of its 168 passengers were missing. In the cabins booked by the diplomats, ship's officers found two packed suitcases and a litter of towels and shaving gear. The pair, police later found, walked off the ship and hired a taxi; one of them asked the driver in flawless French to drive to Rennes at top speed. During the 90-minute ride, the two sat in taut silence; they gave the driver a 5,000-franc note, waited for 500 francs' change, rushed to catch the train to Paris.

Then they vanished.

Some 15,000 policemen in Western Germany, Austria, Italy and the Scandinavian countries peered into cafés, bordellos, hotels, airports. The search spread to Cyprus and Malta; Egypt's police were watching the entire western desert coastline.

But by week's end only three clues had turned up. Burgess' mother got a telegram from Rome ostensibly sent by Burgess; MacLean's wife and mother received similar telegrams from Paris. MacLean's message to his wife read: "Had to leave unexpectedly. Terribly sorry. Am quite well now. Don't worry darling. I love you. Please don't stop loving me. Donald." Handwriting experts examined the original forms, found they were written by neither Burgess nor MacLean, and "probably not by an Englishman."