More than four years after their flight from Britain Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean re-emerged at a press conference in Moscow on Saturday night. The conference, which was attended by only two British correspondents and two from ╥Pravda,╙ was held in a private room in the National Hotel and lasted for five minutes. The former diplomatists issued a joint statement explaining the reasons for their defection, but refused to give any information on their present occupation in the Soviet Union.
No official comment is yet forthcoming on the statement, which devoted much of its space to denouncing British foreign policy before the war and American policy since 1945. Mr. Selwyn Lloyd and his advisers at the Foreign Office were yesterday studying the dual apologia and considering whether a statement should be made. If a statement is regarded as necessary, then it may be made by the Foreign Secretary in the House of Commons to-day in reply to a private notice question by Mr. Herbert Morrison, who was Foreign Secretary when Burgess and Maclean defected.
No report has yet been received from the British Embassy in Moscow. Meanwhile it is not the contents of the two statements but the circumstances in which they were made that is of interest. Experts on Soviet affairs in London emphasised yesterday that the decision to produce the two men, if only for five minutes, was without question taken at very high, if not the highest, level in the Kremlin.
In Washington it was stated that the Burgess-Maclean affair would be studied by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee during its present investigation of Soviet activities in the United States. The chairman, Senator Eastland, said that the inquiry was planned before the re-emergence of the two men in Moscow. He added: ╥I thought everyone knew already they were in Russia.╙
