◆ SpookStack

> Guy Barges: died in Moscow on August 30, 1963, of a heart disease. A crem I stion service was beld on September 4. It was attended by his brother Nigel Burgess (left), colleague Georgy Stetsenko and Melinda and Donald Maclean (right) Dagieish, unlike his former boss, John- stone, retained his British passport and when he decided to marry Ina Gregorievna Nogtich, formerly « switchboard operator at the British Embassy, be had the chutzpah to exert bis right as a British citizen and get married at the Embassy. Traditionally the Ambassador himself performs such Pleasant litte ceremonies. On this occasion the Ambassador of the time, Sir William Hayter, decided be had other dutics, and delegated the task to a kesser official, There was no reception afterwards. Maclean was repeatedly described tome by my cricketing friend es “the man who plays second fiddle to the Third Man”. He lives in a sixth-floor apartment on the Shevchenko Boule- vard which stands on the Moskva River and the living room has a fine view of the Foreign Office skyscraper. He is still exceptionally handsome, though greying, but he has nin some- what thick and his posture is stooped, 85 is often the case with very tall men. He was wearing an old flannel dressing gown and tattered Soviel pyjamas, and he rebuked me mildly when I knocked for interrupting the BBC news. He was $0 Anxious Hot to admit me into his apartment that he succeeded in hocking us beth out, so we bad to wait in an unheated corridor in a Moscow January until his dabushka returned from walking his terrier, Scamp, one of the few dogs in Moscow. Despite these annoyances he was very court- eous, and wholly uncommunicative. He said he was working at the Academy of Science, “noi exactly digging with a spade" he added. He touched his forehead. “Still using "the old grey matter.” Travel? “There are still a lot of places in the Sowet Union T haven’t seen.” T tried without success to sce Philby Dee eee a ll hee re I ee and Melinda. In fact I set eyes only once on Philby, but in circumstances which perhaps add a microscopic foot- ote to history. In 1962, neveral months before the Philby defection sensation broke, I was having drinks with vanious Western journalists in the bar of the Hotel Intercontinental in Bein. Philby came in with another group and sat at another table. One of the men from my group called across, “How's the espionage biz, Kim?" Philby laughed heartily. Back briefly io Ralph Parker and my own experience with him. J] was in Moscow to do a piece about Soviet film stars for the Saturday Evening Post. It was an innocuous story but in those days, before the Novosti Press Agency made fife so much easier for foreign correspondents (at a price), it peeded contacts with all sorts of snail- like bureaucratic channels. To seek a shott cut I telephoned Wilfred Bur- chett with whom I had once worked op the Daily Express but he was out of town (Burchett, at the moment of writing, is trying to have his Australian passport restored. It was taken away ai the time of the Korean war. He wants his children to grow up Austra- lian). So I made contact with Ralph Parker and we met in the restaurant of the Hotel Metropole. He was a big, suspicious man, wearing a stained, old-fashioned double-breasted suit and a chit from GUM, The eggplant colour of his nose indicated tastes which J satisfied by repeatedly refilling his vodka glass. Parker had not much longer to live. He had long since ceased to be a big shot in the hier- archy of defectors and correspondents, and, serving the Soviet Union no more useful purpose, he had been tossed on to the scavenger-beli of translation. ] Offered him $100 if be could get me into Mosfilm Studios. Tt was a pot ungemerous offer for a task that required only a coupk of telephone calls to the right people. Parker, however, was visibly uneasy, looking pver his shoulder, although at 4 p.m. restaurant was almost empty. He drew beavily on a Russian cigaretic and said, “There is only one man in Moscow who can help you, Victor Louis." He was referring to the tather mysterious Soviet citizen who acts #5 an unofficial link between the western press and the Soviet author. ities. Officially, Louis is Moscow cor- respondent for the London Evening News, and he has an English wife, the former Jennifer Statham. Parker gave me the number without consulting his book, and lumbered off. ] went straight to my hotel room to dial, But evidently Parker had got to the telephone first and said something like ‘there's an Englishman with an Italian name working for the Americans, ready to give you $100 to get into Mosfilm Studios.” MADE & date with Louis to meet him at his apartment. He opened the door and held out his hand, which I shook. This was not, however, what he had in mind. “Where,"' he asked, “is the $1007" Jennifer Louis hovered in the beckground. “Cash in advance,” be said. As this did not seer: particularly reasonable, the dea! did not go through, but ] got my story anyway, and Louis subsequently des- cribed me to other Western corres- pondents as “that limey Wop". The story is worth telling if only because it demonstrates the fofaliry of suspicion among this group which the Western correspondents call “the Jittk grey men”, the Western defectors who lurk in Moscow. To Moscow defectors, the most baffling defector of all was Lee Harvey ny 2 eo) Oswald (the man who was himself murdered after the assassination of John Kennedy), a loner who made no senst even by the iopsy-turvy logic of defection. As my cricket fan said, “This fellow was a weirdo. The Soviet Union can recognise a weirdo as quickly as anyone else. Not only do they allow him in, which is ridiculous, they allow him to marry, which is insane. Not only do they allow him to marry, they allow him to marry a girl of major education, nm which the Soviet Union has invested important years and capital, which is inconceiv- able. And then they allow them both out, which is impossible. Meanwhile many honest, sober, upright, would- be defectors can’t even get in m the first place.” Two other Americans who upeet the general pattern of defection were the naval code clerks, Bernon F. Mitchell and William Martin who defected in 1960, when they were 31 and 29 respectively. They had worked three years for the super-secret National] Security Agency in Washing- ton, and their defection forced a deeply mortified Pentagon to change all its codes. The two men gave a press conference at the House of Journalists in Moscow, and said everything that Washington boped would be left unsaid by Americans. They defected, they said, because they discovered American agents spied on friendly as % well as unfnendly countries, that CIA manipulated money and military hardwear uw try and overthrow un- friendly governments, that U.S. spy Planes invaded other countries’ air space, that U.S. policy was a build-up for a preventive war which would leave them “emperets over the gre yard of civilisation”. The two then disappeared into the obscurity which the Soviet Union reserves for turpogats with no further purpose. To move from the Moscow colony to the Prague colony is to move if nol to a different world at least to a different continent, The Moscow col- ony is predominantly British. The Praguers are mostly Ametican, and even like to call themselves “the American group", to the deep indig- nation of the United States Embassy. Even before the “Czech spring” of 1968, the Praguers were fairly relaxed and in som cases quite communic- able. Their telephone oumbers were, and are, frequently listed in the Prague directory, and provided they were assured they would not be embarrassed by What was published they were occasionally mildly frank They were secure in enjoying the full protection of the Novotny regime, and merely had to pick up the tele phone to have any oosy journalist kicked out of the country. The most distinguished are Alfred Stern and his wife, Martha Dodd. In pre-war Berlin, Martha Dodd, then young and attractive, was an impor- fant figure. She acted as her father's hostess, met Hitler and most of the Other leading Nazis, and her views were considered extreme Lefi even in a period when, to many, the Left 17