Wallenberg data may solve puzzle

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and scrambles onto the roof of a cattle car.

Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus “passports” that extended Sweden’s protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on, dumbfounded.

Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and gentle manner.

Recruited and financed by the U.S., he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in Budapest’s ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a war criminal.

Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, days after the Soviets moved into Budapest, the 32-year-old Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, drove off under a Russian security escort and vanished forever.

And because he was a rare flicker of humanity in the man-made hell of the Holocaust, the world has celebrated him ever since. Streets have been named after him, and his face has been on postage stamps. And researchers have wrestled with two enduring mysteries: Why was Wallenberg arrested, and did he really die in Soviet custody in 1947?

Researchers have sifted through hundreds of purported sightings of Wallenberg into the 1980s, right down to plotting his movements from cell to cell while in custody. And fresh documents are to become public, which might cast light on another puzzle: Whether Wallenberg was connected, directly or indirectly, to a super-secret wartime U.S. intelligence agency known as “the Pond,” operating as World War II was drawing to a close and the Soviets were growing increasingly suspicious of Western intentions in Eastern Europe.

Speculation that Wallenberg was engaged in espionage has been rife since the CIA acknowledged in the 1990s that he had been recruited for his rescue mission by an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, which later became the CIA.

About the Pond, little is known. But later this year, the CIA is to release a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the National Archives in College Park, Md.

In February, the Swedish government posted an online database of 1,000 documents and testimonies related to Wallenberg’s disappearance. In a few months, independent investigators plan to launch a Web site with their nearly 20-year research into Russian archives and prison records.

Russia is building a Museum of Tolerance that will feature once-classified documents on Wallenberg, and the CIA last year relaxed its guidelines to reveal details of its sources and intelligence-gathering methods in the case.

Despite dozens of books and hundreds of papers on Wallenberg, much remains hidden. The Kremlin has failed to find or deliver dozens of files; Sweden has declined requests to open all its books; and as many as 100,000 pages of declassified OSS documents await processing by the National Archives.

The Russians say Wallenberg died in prison in 1947, but they never produced a proper death certificate or his remains.

Independent research suggests he may have lived many years — perhaps until the late 1980s. If true, he likely was held in isolation, stripped of his identity, known only by a number or a false name and moving like a phantom among Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric institutions.

In 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified archives about Wallenberg.

“I think I found all the existing documents,” Mr. Nikonov e-mailed the Associated Press. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.

Mr. Nikonov’s conclusion: “Shot in 1947.”

Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.

The 2001 Swedish report said: “There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg,” and listed 17 unanswered questions.

The Russian report bluntly said, “Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947.” It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the “SMERSH” counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case “resolved.”

Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging, analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to release missing files.

Wallenberg arrived in Budapest in July 1944. With the knowledge of his government, his task as first secretary to the Swedish diplomatic legation was a cover for his true mission as secret emissary of the U.S. War Refugee Board, created by President Roosevelt in an attempt to stem the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.

In the previous two months, 440,000 Hungarian Jews had been shipped to Auschwitz for extermination. They were among the last of 6 million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Of the 230,000 who remained in the Hungarian capital in mid-1944, 100,000 survived the war.

After the Red army arrived in January, Wallenberg went to see the Russian military commander to discuss postwar reconstruction and restitution of Jewish property. Two days later, he returned under Russian escort to collect some personal effects, then was never seen in public again.

And what did his country — or his influential cousins — do about it?

Looking back a half-century later, the Swedish government acknowledged that its own passive response to the detention of one of its diplomats was astounding, and that it had missed several chances to win his freedom.

“The worst mistakes were done in the first two years,” said Hans Magnusson, the Swedish co-chairman of the 10-year investigation with the Russians. Sweden felt intimidated by the mighty Soviets and unwilling to challenge them, he said.

In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, prompting a memorandum from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier — at age 34.

As more testimony came in that Wallenberg was still alive, Stockholm periodically raised the issue with Moscow — but without results, said Mr. Magnusson, interviewed in the Netherlands where he is now ambassador.

Sweden could have pushed harder, he said, “but I doubt it would have achieved more.”

“It is inconceivable,” says Wallenberg’s half-sister, Nina Lagergren. “Here is a man sent out by the Swedish government to risk his life. He saved thousands of people — and he was left to rot.”