Insecure Security

One night last week in his Bristol home, Professor Cecil Frank Powell, a Nobel-Prizewinning nuclear scientist, was packing his bags for a trip. He had been invited by the Foreign Office to lecture in West Germany on British nuclear research. His packing was interrupted by the doorbell. At the door, he was confronted by a policeman who said: "Will you please call Whitehall 7033 at once."

When Powell did so, he found himself talking to an apologetic Foreign Office official. The trip was off. "The lectures we sponsor have no political flavor," said the official, "and because of your association with the British peace movement, we think your visit would have an over whelmingly political flavor."

The Foreign Office's sudden turnabout kicked up a storm in the British press, not so much because of Scientist Powell, but because of what it revealed about the startling laxity of security in the oft-burned Foreign Office. A specialist in cos mic radiation, Powell has a record of affiliation with Communist-line causes. As vice president of the British Peace Com mittee, a Communist propaganda front, he so distinguished himself in its activities that he was nominated to the bureau of the Communist-manipulated World Peace Council (he declined). He twice had visited Atomic Spy Dr. Alan Nunn May in prison, but only, he said, to discuss "scientific matters."

The Foreign Office either was not aware of, or did not care about these circumstances; its only security check on Powell had been a cursory look at his record in a few reference books like Who's Who. Only when the curious London Daily Express telephoned to ask why Powell had been selected, did the Foreign Office take a second look; then it reacted as if it had suddenly discovered considerably more about Scientist Powell's background than was public knowledge. "There is a normal checking routine in all cases," explained the Foreign Office lamely, "but in this particular one, it broke down."

Tie press was appalled. Twenty months after Diplomats Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess had disappeared with knowledge valuable to the Communists, the Foreign Office was still all too easygoing about the serious business of securing itself against subversion and espionage.

"True, the Foreign Office [now] states that steps have been taken to put matters right," exploded the Express. "But is not this precisely what the Foreign Office said after MacLean and Burgess disappeared?"

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