Old Spies Don’t Fade Away--They Hold Conventions

--It’s no secret that 120 former spy catchers are meeting this weekend in Boston. They arrived for a convention as the nation observes the 50th anniversary of the start of World War II. In swapping stories about their super-secret missions for the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, known as the CIC, the low-profile operatives told of their hunt for Japan’s Gen. Hideki Tojo and the security arrangements surrounding D-Day and the Manhattan Project. But it was the capture of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie in Bolivia that led a former CIC agent to disclose in 1983 that the 20,000-member agency had used Barbie as a paid informant, an admission that upset a number of former agents. “You people forget we were at war,” said Jack Brockway, 75, of Highlands, N.C., one of the 1,800 agents who survive today. “It was kill or be killed. . . . We had to pay Barbie. He turned in a bunch of Nazis.” Two ex-agents who passed up the convention were former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and author J.D. Salinger.

--Samantha Smith’s sway knows no national boundaries. The American child-ambassador who was killed, along with her father, Arthur, in an airplane crash in August, 1985, in Maine, her native state, and who was 11 years old when she visited Moscow in 1983 on a personal mission for world peace, has been honored in the Soviet Union with the opening of a museum. The Samantha Smith Museum of the International Children’s Movement in Tashkent, the capital of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, displays more than 1,000 works of art by children from 33 countries. Two highlights of the exhibit are a portrait of Samantha surrounded by a thousand paper cranes made by Soviet schoolchildren and a letter she wrote in 1982 to Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov, telling of her fears of a nuclear war.

--Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale has a few words of advice for the leaders of Poland--and he’ll deliver them in person. Mondale, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and former Sens. Howard H. Baker Jr. and Thomas F. Eagleton will travel there this week to shed some light on the finer points of parliamentary government. “If we can create and help create an independent Poland, that would do more for the national security of (the United States) than another hundred billion dollars of guns, because, if Poland is free, the Russians could never fight a war in Europe,” Mondale said.