◆ SpookStack

, : _ { The three favourite refuges for defectors are Moscow, Prague and East Berlin in that order — the three scratching existence. Yet those who have gone over will not admit disillusionment. Is their commitment WHERE THE GRASS IS Sailing, assured, master spy Kim Philby (right} denied 4 implication tn the Burgess- t Maclean defection of 1955 to Moscow. He himself followed - from Heiret - = 1962, and in 1967 married Maclean's wife, Melinda, with whom be is seen (left), They were photographed by John Philby (below left), his 26-year-old gon by his second wife, Alleen Amanda Forze, who died in 1957, Porze, ei! Roscian: awarded Philby the fr oF” .$ Order of the Red Banner (far on 2 + gt, + left) for 30 years of spying. The _ Va >, inscription reads *“Workers See!" of the Workd, Unite!” mayer i? Be te SONS Gaeta of East Berlin recently with Joho Peet. In 1950, Peet, while Reuter’s eorrespondent i West Berlin, sud- denly defected to the East. A humor- 35, attractive, untidy man in his arly 7 tues he now runs an efficien and often witty Communis propaganda theet called Democratic German Re- port from a Cluttered office in Krausen- Wrasse, just on the wrong side of him was not 8 much “Why?” a “Why then?T", to defect when the Berlin blockade and the Communist coup d'état in Caechosiovakia in 143 were stil! hot news, revealing the real hand of Stalin. His reply waa, “It was not the Ger- many { was defecting fo. It was the Germany 1 was defecting from.” His id | Pano in the Press Club reply could be argued as jegitimate in the gontext of the time, the American fearming of Wes! Germany, the fears of re-emerging Nazism, the Gestapoish undertones of the Adenaver Seat Service under the sinister Reinhard Gehlen. But it is not legitimate pow. ‘West Germany under Willy Brandt has perhaps the most tancly ibera] regime the western world. Defection has certainly not made Peet rich, His suit wes nondescript, his East German Wartburg car battored .... But at Jeast Peet replied, which iz rare among the defectors. Archibald Johnstone replied, too. He was Mos- cow oditor of British Ally, an Engtish tmagazine on sale in the Soviet Union afler the war, and be defected in 1949, followed Jess than a year later by his aasistant Robert Dagicish. In his thick Scottish socent fh said, “Ah dinna lake he evidently did not include Joseph Sualin. Usually, when one tracks down a defector, not an easy tack in itself, the response ig a shy, sly smike which infers, “Ah! If] told you the truth, God, how surprised you would be!” And silence. And usually one finds that there are two answers, sometimes mor. A fuggested that his decision to defect WAS DOL UNcONNected with alimony arrears. And Johnstone knew that the Soviet authorities were about to close down British Ally and was terrified of Teturning to the rat race of private enterprise, and possible unemptoy- ment. He preferred security on & Pittance, translating poetry by the fine House, complaining that Mayakovsky was out of fashion, Mayakovaky writing siaccato poetry, with sone- stone died secure and poor, an active member of the Moscow Robert Burns Society. And even when the answer is simple, a second one has to be invented. The reason for the defection of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Brono Ponte- corvc, the etom scientist, could aot have been simpler. They got out by the back door as the Fuzz was coming in by the from. But they have fe- written their histories. Now it all has something to do with American war- mongering, Joe MoCarthy, im perialism, peace. Indecd, in his book, British Foreign