Dissident Cites KGB’s Flawed Case Against Him : Shcharansky, Newsman Recall Arrests

He sleeps poorly but happily here after three days of freedom, and he is more hollow-eyed, despite his healthy and even jovial appearance now, than in 1977 when I had last seen Anatoly Shcharansky.

Alexander Luntz, who had introduced me to Shcharansky in Moscow, and I and Mrs. Lucia Luntz, who hovered in the background with hot soup and turkey slices, spoke with Shcharansky on Friday about many aspects of his eight-year imprisonment in the Soviet Union on charges of spying and anti-Soviet propaganda. He spoke:

About playing chess in his head during four months of solitary confinement to keep his sanity. “You are not really playing” he corrected, “you are analyzing.”

About the many errors in the Soviet case against him which, even when acknowledged, were not corrected.

About my children, whom he knew well in Moscow. “Tell Jenny her picture is on file with the KGB,” he laughed. “One in which I am hugging her was used as proof of my criminal behavior.” Jenny was then 9 years old.

And about my newspaper articles and interrogation by the Soviets, which were used as evidence to charge that he and I were spies.

When I tried to ask his views on world conditions as he found them after almost nine years, he complained impatiently:

“Always the correspondent.” But then he added with a smile: “You can consider this an interview or a meeting of friends, whatever you wish. I can’t meet with you separately as a friend and separately as a correspondent.”

During the long conversation, he said all of the major dissident statements and activities by the Jewish emigration movement, and most of those by the Helsinki monitoring group, of which he was also a leader, were blamed on him during the trial.

My Personal Relief

And to my personal relief, he said that none of my answers to questions during my interrogation by the Soviets had affected his case. He had read all of the protocols (accounts) made by the Soviets of my interrogation, and signed by me, he said.

“I found nothing bad for me in this testimony” he said. “There was nothing compromising there. . . . But the very fact that an American correspondent was interrogated was so unprecedented that . . . (I felt) something very serious had changed in the outer world.” He was in isolation at the time.

He asked me why I had responded to KGB questions following my arrest (for accepting papers on parapsychology, which the Soviets insisted were state secrets) and had signed the transcripts in English and in Russian, although I did not understand the language.

“Because you told me everything we did was open,” I replied. I could have added also that the U.S. Embassy had advised that I answer Soviet questions fully in the case.

“Of course everything we did was open” he said, “but you didn’t have my practice with the KGB (of knowing how interrogations were later used and manipulated) and so you acted differently than I.”

‘Told Correctly’

The account I gave about how Shcharansky had initially introduced me to the provocateur who gave me the parapsychology papers was, he said, “told by you correctly.”

“But now you know that if you are ever again interrogated by the KGB” Luntz interjected, “you should not tell such things (even if true).”

“My hope,” I said to Shcharansky, “it was dumb, but my hope was that (by responding to questions) the charge against you would be anti-Soviet propaganda, not espionage.”

“I thought the same thing” Luntz said.

“It was not espionage in the beginning” Shcharansky said. “It was high treason in the form of assistance to the capitalist countries. Only at the very end and all those documents that they confiscated from Luntz and the other guys became mine (blamed on him) was it changed to espionage.”

17 Soviet Investigators

The case against Shcharansky was brought to trial fully 16 months after his arrest, after a team of 17 Soviet investigators had collected material that filled 50 volumes, each 300 pages long, and a final 186-page book.

“I took 3 1/2 months to study it,” Shcharansky said of the evidence, and then, although refused a defense attorney, he filled four 300-page volumes in rebuttal.

One of the first issues on which he was interrogated was the Jackson-Vanik Amendment adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1974, which withheld favorable U.S. trade concessions unless the Soviets permitted a high rate of Jewish emigration. A figure of 60,000 immigrants per year was cited publicly in Washington as the minimum.

Moscow rejected this U.S. condition as interference in Soviet internal affairs, and Shcharansky was asked by his interrogators if he thought such an anti-Soviet action, which had been urged by Soviet Jews, could go unpunished.

“Of course someone has to be punished,” he was told. “You’ll be punished for it.”

Letters of Protest

This is only the first in a long list of his alleged offenses. Others included open letters of protest written to the U.S. President and Congress, a film of Jewish activists and Soviet repression of them that had been smuggled to British television, and an open letter to the Communist Party leaders of France and Italy, which prompted their criticism of Soviet actions.

The main accusation against Shcharansky was spying, and his primary accuser was Sanya Lipavsky, his former roommate who had been a KGB informer for at least a year before Shcharansky’s arrest and probably for much longer. A former Soviet prosecutor from the Central Asian region where Lipavsky was raised told the New York Times a few years ago that Lipavsky became an informer in 1961 in a deal to save the life of his father, who had been condemned to death for economic crimes.

Shcharansky’s first surprise during his interrogation was testimony of a fellow refusenik named Adamsky from Vilnius, Lithuania, who offered corroborating evidence of Lipavsky’s charges that Shcharansky had been collecting information for the CIA.

However, Adamsky credited his information to another man, Davidov, at a time when Shcharansky knew that Davidov had already emigrated a full year before to Israel.

When confronted by Shcharansky during the closed part of his trial, Adamsky attempted to retract his charges. But the judge threatened to bring charges against him if he did so. So he reaffirmed them.

Sought to Challenge Evidence

Shcharansky then demanded that Adamsky appear at the open trial to be held the next day, so that he could challenge the evidence. But Soviet officials, after first agreeing, did not produce Adamsky the next day, claiming that he had already returned home and could not be recalled.

But his “biggest surprise” came when he was told of my arrest and interrogation. He was particularly challenged on an article I had written a year earlier, which had examined the background of several Soviet refuseniks who were denied exit visas on grounds of having “state secrets” which they had learned at their former jobs.

The article pointed out that many refuseniks denied visas on this ground had in fact worked at research institutes which the Soviets, when they were seeking high-technology equipment like computers from the West, had claimed did no secret work.

Either the Soviets lied about the refuseniks having secrets, or they were inadvertently revealing that secret work was under way in ostensibly non-defense institutes, the article indicated.

Shcharansky, who had been cited by name in the article, with his approval, as an example of this Soviet practice, recalled that he had immediately reacted to the headline of the article as it appeared in the Paris-based Internatinal Herald Tribune when it published the story.

Crucial Headline

The headline said “Russia Indirectly Reveals Centers of Its Secret Installations” Shcharansky recalled, “and this title (headline) played a crucial role” in raising the charge against him to espionage rather than anti-Soviet propaganda (although in the end he was charged on both counts).

Later, the Soviet authorities tried to persuade him to blame correspondents for spying by stating that his own activities had been innocent but that the information he provided was used for espionage as well as for news stories. “I was to condemn the American correspondents for using it for espionage” Shcharansky said.

He was allowed to read accounts of my interrogation. “And I said yes, it of course was reality about our meetings. From the point of view of the texts, there was nothing compromising there. But they were not satisfied.”

Still seeking to gain his cooperation, the Soviets showed him evidence ostensibly found by the garbage collector in my building. “I could see all this garbage, which included all the papers which he could find in your bureau on the problems of the release of refuseniks, and so on” Shcharansky said.

“But here they made a very interesting mistake” he related. The garbage man, named Zakharov, claimed to have found copies of my articles on Shcharansky’s arrest one day before the arrest had actually occurred.

Zakharov’s Lucky Broom

“I appealed, asking how can Zakharov’s broom be so lucky as to find an article written the next day,” Shcharansky said. Embarrassed, the authorities changed Zakharov’s story but then made another error by specifying that the collection date was one month later. This suggested that Zakharov had not collected any garbage for a full month, Shcharansky smiled.

The Soviets also mistook the conventional journalistic sign-off numerals at the bottom of my stories, which gives the month, day and hour of the dispatch, as a “secret index code,” Shcharansky said.

Soviet translators made many mistakes in converting my stories from English into Russian, Shcharansky said, but the “worse change” dealt with my statement during the interrogation about the article that had been headlined provocatively in the Herald Tribune.

My testimony said in English, “very correctly” Shcharansky said, “that ‘the article was partially written with the help of information which I received from Anatoly Shcharansky.’

“They translated this article to say ‘the part of the information which I (Toth) received from Anatoly Shcharansky was used to write this article.’ ”

Wrong Translation

The effect of the wrong translation was to support Soviet charges that my articles were only part of an iceberg to mask my spying activities, Shcharansky said. He succeeded in confronting the Soviet interpreter used in my interrogation and got an admission that the translation was in fact wrong. The chief Soviet investigator then offered to quote the English text in the middle of the Russian charges rather than the translation, but Shcharansky refused to accept this solution.

Nonetheless, in the end, the charge against Shcharansky contained the words in English. Worse, in his sentencing, the discredited and far more damaging Russian mistranslation was used, he said.

“I knew that in the end these mistakes would have no effect on my sentence, but I knew that one day I’ll be able to tell it to you, so you are the first one who finds out this story,” Shcharansky said.

“Exclusive,” he laughed. “But I don’t promise you that I won’t use it myself later on.”