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On May 25, 1951, Maclean's 38th birthday, both men went down to Maclean's house at Tatsfield in Kent. That night they drove in a hired car to Southampton and caught the 11:45 p.m. cross-Channel boat to St. Malo, France. Next morning they stayed in their cabin drinking beer until the other passengers caught the Paris train, and then hired a taxi to take them to Rennes, 50 miles away. That is the last that is positively known about the whereabouts of Burgess and Maclean.
The best guess is that at Rennes they caught the train to Paris and then took a Russian plane via Czechoslovakia to Moscow, where they were met by Kislytsin.
There followed a mysterious garble of messages, rumors, subterfuges. By simple, earnest conversations, Mrs. Maclean, who was about to go to the hospital for a Caesarean, convinced security officers that not only was she innocent, but that she had all along been the injured party. She subsequently went to the Continent, and one day, 27 months after her husband's disappearance, Mrs. Maclean drove with her three children to Lausanne, left her car in a garage, took the train to Schwarzach St. Veit in Austria, and disappeared in the Russian sector of Austria. Said Petrov last week: "She is now living with her husband in Moscow as he secretly continues with his work for the Soviet Foreign Ministry alongside his fellow spy Guy Burgess.''
Maximum Secrecy. It was obviously not all of the story, but even if the British government knew more, it refused to divulge it. "Espionage is carried out in secret," said the white paper. "Counterespionage equally depends for its success upon the maximum secrecy of its methods. Nor is it desirable at any moment to let the other side know how much has been discovered ..." What the government could not hide was the shocking laxity of British security for years after the thoroughness of Soviet espionage had become apparent. (As of 1952, said the white paper, "searching inquiries have been made into the antecedents and associates of all those occupying or applying for positions in the Foreign Office involving highly secret information.")
Neither could the government consider the case closed. The lordly London Times called the paper "scandalously late," and it found discrepancies between the paper and earlier official statements. "An insult to any reasonable man's intelligence," sneered the Daily Express,