"Ambassador-Leader"

ESCAPE TO ADVENTURE (419 pp.)--Flfzroy Maclean--Little, Brown ($4).

Britain's dingy, cotton-weaving city of Lancaster (pop. 50,250) has lost most of the glamour and importance that clung to its name in the days of John of Gaunt and the Wars of the Roses. But it cherishes today one spectacular bloom in the person of its dashing Tory M.P., Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, 39, whose recently published bestseller, Eastern Approaches, has made its author one of the most popular political figures in the United Kingdom.

As Escape to Adventure, Scotsman Maclean's book is likely to repeat its success in the U.S. It belongs to that special category of letters wherein the British, led by the great T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, have excelled through two world wars-- the crisp, lively, unimpassioned military-diplomatic memoir. Moreover, Escape to Adventure has a highly topical fascination in that it reflects the destiny of today's would-be lone ranger: try as he may to make his adventurous career a personal affair, he is pretty likely to wind up half lost in a huge crowd, becoming (in the words of one of Maclean's sergeants) just another of the " -- ing cogs in this gigantic -- organization."

Off with White Ties. This destiny was invisible to Fitzroy Maclean when, in 1936, aged 25, he sat sullenly at a British embassy desk in Paris and decided that he had already had a bellyful of life as a conventional diplomat--"those pinstriped suits from Scholte; those blue and white shirts, from Beale and Inman, with their starched collars . . . big official dinner parties, with white ties and decorations . . ." Rushing to diplomacy's opposite extreme, Maclean became "the first member of the service" ever to plead to be transferred to "such a notoriously unpleasant post" as the British embassy in Moscow.

From this tough base Maclean set out to enjoy himself. Between 1937 and 1939, dressed in an old suit and carrying a rucksack, he explored thousands of miles of the Soviet Union, all the way from the Urals to the borders of Chinese Sinkiang and Afghanistan. Maclean broke into many a forbidden area by the simple expedient of quietly climbing aboard the appropriate train. Provincial units of the NKVD were often too bewildered by Maclean's sudden appearances to know just what to do about him. When they put agents on his trail, Maclean went complacently about his sightseeing of ancient ruins. Sometimes he even became quite chummy with his shadows, sharing meals and train coaches with them.

Like the NKVD, His Majesty's Foreign Office took little interest in their secretary's love of ancient Samarkand and Bokhara. What delighted them was up-to-date, first-hand information about the Soviet interior that young Maclean shipped home in his reports. Before long they summoned him back to London, rejoicing at having added to the home staff so valuable an expert on Soviet affairs.

Man in Red Tape. They were quickly disillusioned. With the war on, Maclean was as repelled by his cozy desk job as his superiors were determined that he should stay in it. In Foreign Office Regulations, Diplomat Maclean found the loophole he was looking for: an inexorable rule that any civil servant who participated in politics would have to resign. Hurrying around to his chief, Sir Alexander Cadogan (for the last four years Britain's delegate to U.N.), Maclean declared a sudden passion for political controversy. "In that case," replied Sir Alexander with icy brevity, "you will have to leave the Service."

Soon Maclean had taken the King's Shilling and been enrolled as a private in the Cameron Highlanders. But then Maclean heard rumors that the hoaxed and understaffed Foreign Office was taking steps to corral him back into the service. "Only one thing," Maclean concluded, "could save me: early election to Parliament." He consulted Tory headquarters and was advised to try his luck in a Lancaster by-election. The local party committee accepted him, and barely a month later, Maclean was voted M.P. for Lancaster. Then he got back to the war.

When Winston Churchill heard the story, he was vastly amused. "Here," he said, introducing Maclean to General Smuts in Cairo later, "is the young man who has used the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience."

"Hardy & Hunted." In Egypt Maclean joined the S.A.S. (Special Air Service), a select, hand-picked force of parachute commandos who were dropped into the North African desert to destroy enemy installations. In 1942, Maclean, by then a captain, was sent to Persia, where in broad daylight he kidnaped Collaborationist General Zahidi and popped him into a plane bound for Palestine. It was ro wonder that when Prime Minister Churchill asked for the appointment of "a daring Ambassador-leader" to contact Tito's "hardy and hunted guerrillas," the choice fell on parachuting Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, M.P.

Maclean's account of life with Tito takes up the most absorbing half of a wholly absorbing book. His prime duties as "Ambassador-leader" were, as Churchill explained, simply to find out which of the guerrilla forces--Tito's Partisans or Royalist General Draja Mihailovich's Chetniks--was "killing the most Germans," and to "suggest means by which we could help them to kill more." It did not take Maclean long to conclude that, as a killer, Tito was deadly earnest, Mihailovich increasingly apathetic. Besides, reported Maclean, it was pretty clear that Tito's Partisans were going to be running Yugoslavia after the liberation, whether the Western Allies helped him or not.

From then until the fall of Belgrade, Brigadier Maclean shared the rugged guerrilla life. But from then on, too, his own life became more & more that of one of the "-- ing cogs" in the "gigantic -- organization" of Allied strategy. Chiefly as a result of his enthusiastic reports, his staff was enlarged to a small army of technicians, supply experts and liaison officers.* Amazed to find a Communist who acted with Tito's assurance and independence, Maclean questioned whether Tito would ever completely relapse into the normal Communist role of "blind unquestioning obedience" to the Kremlin.

Time has since answered this question --about the only one left open in a book whose quiet but vigorous decisiveness helps to make it one of the most readable and instructive memoirs of World War II.

*Including Randolph Churchill and Novelist Evelyn Waugh.

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