Book Review : Into Soviet Prison, Out to Tell About It

Transit Point Moscow by Gerald Amster and Bernard Asbell (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: $14.95)

Ten years ago, Europe was full of Americans like Gerry Amster--lounging on the Spanish Steps, sleeping on the beaches, waiting for something to turn up. By the middle of the decade, the action was in Amsterdam--lots of company, no hassles, lenient drug laws that made possession no more serious than a parking-meter violation. Amster loved it.

A few years older, slightly more solvent than most, Amster by 1976 had hit the tail end of a small inheritance. Drifting and floating, he was looking for a way to stay for a while longer. The alumnus of a school for disturbed teen-agers, an inept blackmailer who’d stolen a batch of illicit gems from his last employer, a con man in the making and on the make, Amster was no Eagle Scout. He had a sidekick in Darrell Lean, the brother of an ex-girlfriend; a younger kid who idolized him. In June of that year, the pad of traveler’s checks was down to the vinyl, and when a mysterious Malaysian smiled and offered him a job, he didn’t ask questions or offer unsolicited answers.

Gerald Amster’s occupation was “looking for work,” and he was in no shape to be particular. When Amster heard the proposition, he not only agreed but called an old buddy, Pete Benack, in Las Vegas to fly over and help out.

The job sounded easy. Amster and his pals would fly to Kuala Lumpur, pick up three new suitcases and collect $8,000 each when they got back to Amsterdam. They realized they wouldn’t be carrying pirated rock tapes or ersatz Rolex watches, but they couldn’t have cared less. As Amster had good reason to know, the Dutch authorities lived and let live. Only slightly disconcerted by the information that the return flight stopped in Moscow, Amster figured that his employers--real pros--knew what they were doing. They assured him that transit passengers didn’t go through customs in Moscow; the bags were routed straight through to the final destination.

Suitcase Rehearsal

Only Benack seemed worried, but he relaxed after a fancy Chinese dinner and a visit to a Malay tailor. In Kuala Lumpur, the three couriers were given heavy leather valises, so weighty that they spent the day rehearsing how to lift them as if they contained nothing more than clothes, a blow dryer and a razor. By then they knew they’d be moving 30 kilos of heroin, divided more or less evenly.

The customs regulations in Moscow had changed since the Malaysians’ last business trip, and the three Americans were searched and arrested. Amster and Benack pleaded guilty to carrying contraband; the younger man was found guilty too, despite his denial. All three were sent to prison for seven to nine years.

In 1980, Amster was released and lost no time in finding Bernard Asbell, a reputable free-lance writer, to collaborate on his story, swearing that it was absolutely true and should be presented as nonfiction. The riveting part was not the dreary imprisonment, but Amster’s miraculous escape from a Soviet gulag, engineered with the help of a woman paramedic who found him sexually irresistible. Not only had he gotten away from the prison, but he had successfully hidden in Moscow for three months, a near-miraculous feat for a foreigner.

He said he told his story to the American vice counsel, who negotiated his token return to the prison in a face-saving maneuver for the Russians, a top-secret arrangement culminating in Amster’s early release. “His story was very convincing, as well as being . . . terribly exciting,” Asbell says, “and when I couldn’t get the official records I concluded that even if he pulled a successful con on me, there was no social harm done.”

Asbell did a terrific job for Amster, letting him run on about his unhappy childhood, listening to him brag about sexual conquests and the string of short-term jobs culminating in the jewel theft. Asbell dutifully took down every word of the imprisonment and the astonishing story of the escape, patiently recorded the impossible romance with the Soviet woman. He gave his smarmy collaborator a fair shake, keeping a neutral non-judgmental tone even when his credulity was severely taxed.

Nevertheless, a distinct skepticism emerges in his uninflected chronicle. “I take the whole escape episode and that woman doctor to be chiefly an entertainment,” Asbell now says, but he wrote it down all the same and sold the manuscript to Holt, Rinehart & Winston as a “real-life thriller as gripping as the finest suspense fiction.”

Denial From Embassy

If not more so. A week after publication day, the U.S. embassy in Moscow denied that Amster had ever escaped from the gulag or that any deal had been made with the Russians for his release. Amster had been let go, embassy officials said, because the Soviet Union had studied him for three months in a psychiatric hospital and decided that he was mentally ill. “All I can say is they’re saying what they’re supposed to be saying,” Amster coolly insists.

While the embassy fumes and his editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston explains that “it’s very hard to pin down the exact dates when you’ve been disoriented by a lengthy prison sentence,” our man in Moscow at the time, T. Dennis Reece, categorically denies the dramatic events in the book ever took place. Not to worry; if you want to know what Soviet prisons are like, read Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” and for “the finest suspense fiction,” pick anything by John le Carre. This dish of stale kasha is neither one nor the other.