Foreign News: Lonely & Ruined Man

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Moscow last week was soberly ablaze with old-school ties from Eton (black and light blue). Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sported one at the Bolshoi Theater performance of the ballet Romeo and Juliet. So did one of the principal Foreign Office types he brought along. The third was worn by Guy Burgess, infamous for his 1951 flight from his Foreign Office job to Russia with Fellow Diplomat Donald MacLean.

Wearing his Eton tie and an English suit darned at the knee, Burgess called on another Etonian, his old classmate Randolph Churchill, one of the visiting British newsmen, who was disconsolately staying at Moscow's Hotel National. Burgess, now stocky, florid, and with greying hair, seemed fidgety but in good health. His mission was to ask Churchill's help in appealing to someone in the Macmillan party for a safe-conduct that would enable Burgess to visit his sick 70-year-old mother in England. Churchill refused (another British correspondent, over a Scotch, promised to make inquiries, but with little likelihood of a favorable answer). Though rebuffed, Burgess chatted for several hours with Churchill.

"I told Burgess I had long cherished the hope that he was really a double agent and was working for our side," wrote Churchill in the London Evening Standard. "He said, 'If I were doing that I naturally wouldn't tell you or anyone else, but I did work for military intelligence before the war.' " To Churchill, Burgess appeared to be "a lonely and unhappy man who has ruined his life." He now works for a Russian publishing house, says that he had quarreled with his Co-Conspirator MacLean and scarcely ever sees him, and told Churchill, "I am still a Communist and a homosexual."