MYSTERY OF MACLEANS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27151, 22 September 1953, Page 9

MYSTERY OF MACLEANS

New Theory On Telegram

(Rec. 11 p.m.) LONDON, Sept. 21. The Geneva correspondent of the “Daily Mail” says that Swiss security chiefs drew up plans yesterday for an all-out drive to round up Communist agents who, they are satisfied, Slotted the flight of Mrs Melinda [aclean and her children behind the Iron Curtain.

The police suspect that the telegram supposed to have been written to reassure her mother, Mrs Melinda Dunbar, in fact came'from the Soviet intelligence service. They think that the telegram was intended to convey a double message to the spies still on Swiss soil—,first that the Macleans had reached their destination, and, second, that it was time to disperse. Geneva’s police chief, Commandant Charles Knecht, and the head of the Lausanne Special Branch, Brigadier Andre De Costerd, who are planning the round-up of the agents, worked together in 1943 to break up a. Soviet spy ring in the Lausanne region. British security agents, trying to pick up the trail of the American-born woman, who vanished as suddenly as her British diplomat husband, Donald Maclean, are now satisfied that she is not in any of the Western-occupied areas of Austria. They argue that the local police would have found her. The police today turned from interrogating taxi-drivers, hotel clerks, and station porters who might have seen Mrs-Maclean to the shadowy underground groups that flourish under divided rule. Two London morning Lord Rothermere’s “Daily Mail and Lord Beaverbrook’s “Daily Express”— have offered a total of £l2.ooo’in rewards for information leading to the whereabout of Mrs Maclean.