Ralph J. Donaldson

The Third Man Mystery

It must be frustrating to write a book about a mystery, only to have the mystery solved before the book gets into print. Also, to have one of the principal characters die just as you are predicting he is about to write his memoirs.

This is what happened

to Anthony Purdy and Douglas Sutherland, authors of "Burgess and

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Co-

Maclean,' published by Doubleday & Co. It is the story of two British foreign service officers, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who disappeared mysteriously in 1951 and were cevealed as Communist agents after they turned up in the Soviet Union. Burgess died in Moscow a few days ago.

RALPH J. DONALDSON

THE MYSTERY IS who tipped them off that they were under suspicion? Who was the Third Man?

At the time they wrote the book, the authors apparently thought they knew who the Third Man was, but did not have sufficient confirmation to identify him. They said he was a former senior member of the foreign service, that he had been a close friend of Burgess and that he was a homosexual, as Burgess was, but that is as far as they went.

But last July 1, during the uproar over the Profumo-Christine Keeler-Ward scendal, Edward Heath, Lord Privy Seal, told the House of Commons that the Third Man was H. A. R. Philby, former diplomat and newspaper correspondent. Philby had been first secretary of

the British embassy in Washington from 1949 to 1951.

CURIOUSLY, PURDY and Sutherland mentioned Philby in another connection. They said Philby and Burgess had been close friends at Cambridge, that both had Communist affiliations at that time, and that when Burgess was assigned to Washington he lived with Philby.

The laxness of British intelligence in examining the backgrounds of applicants for the foreign service, prior to the Burgess-Maclean affair, is incredible. One foreign service officer explained that to pry into their past associations would look too much like "McCarthyism."

A man answering Maclean's description was identified in 1939 as a Communist agent by a Russian defector, Gen. Krevitsky, but the information was not acted upon. Krevitsky was assassinated by Soviet agents in a Washington hotel in 1941. Another defector from the Soviet embassy in Australia, named Petrov, also warned that a British diplomat stationed in Washington was a Soviet spy, but nothing came of this either.

ONE GETS THE IMPRESSION from reading this book that, while it may not have been necessary to be a practicing or former Communist, a homosexual, or a tosspot in order to get into the British foreign service, it is not a handicap.

Although the book is co-authored, the singular pronoun is used throughout. Thus, "I was informed," or "he told me," never "we" or "us." Perhaps this is not so strange. After all, the British still say, "the government are...

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