Fitting Reunion in Jerusalem for Reporter, Source

It was fitting that freed Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky and Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert C. Toth should finally be reunited Friday at the Jerusalem home of mathematician Alexander Luntz.

The two first met at Luntz’s former home in Moscow, only a few months after Toth arrived in the Soviet capital in August, 1974, as his newspaper’s bureau chief there.

Luntz was a leader in the Soviet Jewish emigration movement, and Shcharansky, who had been refused permission to leave a year earlier, was becoming increasingly active in the cause.

By early 1975, Shcharansky, who spoke English, had become the chief spokesman for the movement to Moscow’s Western press corps. And a few months later, after he helped found an unofficial group to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki accords on European security, Shcharansky also became a leading voice on that issue.

Their respective callings inevitably brought the dissident and the journalist together, and besides that, Shcharansky, a computer expert, and Toth, a former science writer, shared a particular interest in the workings of Soviet science.

Izvestia Accusation

The first sign that their relationship would play a role in the dissident’s subsequent imprisonment came 11 days before his arrest when the government newspaper, Izvestia, printed an article on March 4, 1977, accusing Shcharansky of being a spy for the CIA.

The article referred specifically to information Shcharansky had collected about the jobs of Soviet Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate because their work allegedly put them in possession of state secrets. Toth had written an article for The Times a few months earlier, noting that U.S. firms were supplying technology to some of these supposedly sensitive Soviet establishments and suggesting that either the sales were inappropriate or that the “state secrets” argument was a phony.

Toth was due to leave Moscow at the end of his tour in June, 1977, about three months after Shcharansky’s arrest. But six days before his scheduled departure, Toth was detained by the KGB on a busy Moscow street after being handed an envelope by a man subsequently identified by dissidents in Moscow as a secret police provocateur.

Toth was ordered not to leave the country and was interrogated by the KGB for 13 hours over the course of three days. At first, his questioners charged that the documents he received on the subject of parapsychology were secret. But then the interrogation turned to his contacts with Shcharansky.

Toth was finally permitted to leave Moscow with his family in late June, 1977, and was assigned to The Times’ Washington Bureau.

The protocols of his interrogation were introduced by the state among 50 volumes of evidence against Shcharansky when he was tried a year later and sentenced to 13 years in jail and prison camps for high treason and anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.