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The Homosexual Side. Transferred to the Cairo embassy in 1948, Maclean drank more heavily than ever. He had homosexual friends, and once raided and demolished the apartment of a young woman working at the U.S. embassy, was returned to London on six months' leave for treatment by a psychiatrist. The analyst, his wife wrote during the time, "is still baffled a bit at the homosexual side which comes out when he is drunk, and I think a slight hostility in general to women." Friends who met him at this time found him constantly drunk and of ghastly appearance. But at the end of his leave, the Foreign Office took him back and made him head of its American Department, where he could put his hands on many secret documents.
Meanwhile, Burgess, after going back to the BBC for a couple of years, had joined the Foreign Office and worked as special assistant to Minister of State Hector McNeil, then the No. 2 man in the Foreign Office. During this time, he was living with a male prostitute named Jack Hewitt, and though British security officers reported overhearing him blurt out secret information, Burgess in 1950 was made a second secretary to the embassy in Washington, where he soon caused trouble (driving his car while drunk and speeding, expressing anti-British and anti-American sentiments). Recalled to London, he returned to his old haunts and habits, while the Foreign Office tried to figure out what to do with him.
One of the Russians who handled the secrets delivered by Burgess and Maclean was a talkative MVD cipher clerk in the London embassy, named F. V. Kislytsin, who was the source of most of Petrov's information. An MVD man once told Kislytsin that Burgess had given him briefcases full of documents which had been photographed in the embassy and then returned to the Foreign Office files. Burgess brought other secret information which Kislytsin coded and radioed direct to Moscow. Maclean, meanwhile, was developing his own microfilms, using the darkroom of an obscure pharmacy near his suburban home in Kent.
The Tipoff. Not until 1949 did the British discover that their diplomatic secrets were leaking to the Russians. From several suspects, investigators slowly narrowed down to one, Donald Maclean. The Foreign Office, then headed by Laborite Herbert Morrison, fidgeted uncomfortably, finally authorized an investigation.
Though Maclean was under suspicion, the security men did not watch his house—for fear of alarming him, the white paper explained. Anyway, it was too late. On May 25, 1951, the very day authorities were to question Maclean, the two spies told the Russians in great alarm that they were in danger. Someone, still unidentified, tipped off Maclean and Burgess.
"In some countries," explained the white paper, 4½ years later, "no doubt Maclean would have been arrested first and questioned afterwards. In this country, no arrest can be made without adequate evidence." Until the investigators found such evidence, "both men were free to go abroad at any time." The Russians organized the getaway.