PERSPECTIVE ON RAOUL WALLENBERG : Honor This Hero by Getting to the Truth About His Fate : World War II: The least that America can do for its “honorary citizen” is to pursue his case with the Kremlin.

It was on July 9, 1944, that Raoul Wallenberg, the 32-year-old Swedish aristocrat, arrived in Budapest on his extraordinary mission to help rescue a desperate Hungarian Jewry. Few knew then and remarkably few know today that his employer was an unusual government agency--the U.S. War Refugee Board.

The board was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January, 1944, shortly after he learned from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. that the State Department had been engaged in a conspiracy to subvert rescue efforts. The most stunning achievement of the board was its hiring of the courageous Wallenberg to operate out of the neutral Swedish legation in Hungary. He saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, a significant part of the estimated 200,000 rescued by the War Refugee Board.

Wallenberg was kidnaped by Moscow’s intelligence services in January, 1945, and disappeared into the Soviet gulag. The U.S. government, at its highest level, has done precious little to ascertain his fate. Only at the beginning of Wallenberg’s apprehension did Washington seek to vigorously intervene, although quite indirectly.

In the face of the massive and changing Kremlin deception and cover-up of the Wallenberg case, continuing until the present, top Washington officials have been silent. It is time to end that silence.

Moscow’s policy of dealing with the Swedish hero falls into four stages.

Stage 1 coincided with Wallenberg’s kidnaping. The Swedish Embassy in Moscow was officially informed by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Dekanosov that “Russian military authorities have taken measures to protect Raoul Wallenberg and his belongings.” In fact, he had already been incarcerated in the notorious Lubyanka prison and held as a prisoner of war.

It was only at this stage that indirect high-level Washington intervention occurred. On April 9, 1945, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius cabled the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, asking him to extend “all possible support” to the Swedes in their diplomatic efforts on behalf of Wallenberg.

The Stettinius cable was prompted by a message to the State Department from the U.S. minister in Stockholm that intervention was appropriate as “we had a special interest in Wallenberg’s mission to Hungary.” At about this time, Secretary Morgenthau advised the War Refugee Board’s executive director: “Let Stettinius know that I am personally interested in this man.” Afterward, high-level inquiries ceased.

Stage 2 was formally initiated on Aug. 18, 1947, when, in response to foreign, mainly Swedish, inquiries, the new Soviet deputy foreign minister, Andrei Vyshinsky, declared that “Wallenberg is not in the Soviet Union and is unknown to us.”

Stage 3 was launched in 1957, in response to overwhelming evidence from released gulag prisoners who had seen Wallenberg. That April, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko acknowledged that Wallenberg had been in the Lubyanka prison but had died of a heart attack on July 17, 1947. The evidence was a report presumably written by the chief prison medical officer, Dr. A.L. Smoltsov to Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov. Smoltsov went on to say that the corpse had been cremated.

It was assumed that the documentation would prove convincing. Gromyko said no “other information whatsoever” was found. Since Smoltsov died in 1953 and Abakumov was executed in 1954, the case, conveniently, was said to be wrapped up.

Even then, however, sharp challenges could be posed. How could the 35-year-old Wallenberg, known to have been in excellent health throughout his stay in Budapest, suddenly succumb to a heart attack?

Casting even greater doubt on the Smoltsov report was a 1992 investigation by a Swedish-Soviet commission that revealed that the only crematorium in Moscow, in its list of cremations for 1947, carries no mention of Wallenberg.

Stage 4 of the cover-up began with a Tass dispatch of April 24, 1991, about a meeting between high Soviet security and foreign-office representatives with Wallenberg’s half-brother, Guy von Dardel. Von Dardel was told that Wallenberg’s death in 1947 was “an irrefutable fact” and “there is no reason to continue to investigate his fate.” Why not? The answer was sharp and pointed: “All the available materials” have been opened and “there is nothing more.” Significantly, nothing at all was mentioned about the Smoltsov document, so discredited had it become.

That security officials are continuing to perpetuate a lie was disclosed by the top archival official in Moscow, Rudolf Pikhoya. In late 1991, he bitterly complained in a major Soviet publication that the KGB had deliberately classified certain documents on Wallenberg as “operational intelligence” and thereby closed them to public scrutiny. Indeed, very recent disclosures by former spymaster Pavel Sudoplatov identify the specific files where information on Wallenberg is located.

While Moscow was engaged in its vast deception, Congress was stirred to action by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), a survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary. It enacted a statute in the fall of 1981 granting Wallenberg the almost unique status of “honorary citizen.” Only Winston Churchill had been accorded that honor.

At the level of diplomacy, however, intervention was modest and only in forums of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Ambassador Max Kampelman vigorously raised the issue at Madrid in 1980, as did Ambassador Warren Zimmermann at Vienna in 1988.

We still don’t know what happened to Wallenberg nor why he was kidnaped. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, in his 1992 address to the U.S. Congress, promised that the Kremlin would engage in “no more lies.” It is time to put him to the test at the highest level of government. That’s the very least we can do for the unusual employee of the U.S. War Refugee Board who became America’s “honorary citizen.”