Unordinary Case

A KGB frame-up

Anatoli Shcharansky, the Soviet computer expert and Jewish activist who has become the leading target of Moscow's campaign against dissidents, is nearing a grim anniversary: as of next week, he will have been held incommunicado for a full year in Moscow's Lefortovo prison while awaiting trial on espionage charges. Last week the regime gave him a present of sorts, a state-appointed lawyer named Silva Dubrovskaya, who was described by the chairman of the Moscow bar association as a "lovely woman and a very experienced trial lawyer." One of her first acts was to express surprise to Western newsmen at their interest in what she called "an ordinary case." Said she: "Very soon the time will come when you will find out everything you want to know."

Shcharansky faces a sentence that ranges from ten years in prison to an unlikely extreme of execution if he is convicted, and Attorney Dubrovskaya probably could not get him off even if she seriously attempted to. After all, he has already been convicted in the Soviet press. Tass Commentator Yuri Kornilov, for instance, insists that he will be found guilty because he helped a foreign state (meaning the U.S.) in hostile activities against the Soviet Union. Moscow radio's foreign-language broadcasts have frequently cited "facts" to "demonstrate" his guilt.

Most important, the regime has already made clear that it has a star witness to link the leader of Soviet "refuse-niks"--Jews who have sought but were refused permission to leave the country --with the CIA. Dr. Sanya L. Lipavsky, a Jewish surgeon who knew Shcharansky, signed an "open letter" to Izvestiya last March in which he implicated Shcharansky in an alleged, largely Jewish spy ring that supposedly included dissidents, U.S. embassy officials in Moscow and members of the American press corps.

Lipavsky's broadside caused much discomfort in the Carter Administration. Shortly after Shcharansky was charged with treason last June. President Carter broke a Washington policy of not commenting on spy charges* and said publicly what the Soviets had already been told privately: Shcharansky, Carter announced, "has never had any sort of relationship to our knowledge with the CIA." The Administration had hoped that this might halt the Soviet momentum toward a Shcharansky trial, but it has not been successful; the trial is expected to begin soon--after the Belgrade conference on human rights closes.

The Administration is troubled, TIME has learned, because Lipavsky--though not Shcharansky--did indeed once have a brief link with the CIA, which Carter knew about when he made his June statement. In Moscow in 1975, Lipavsky presented himself as a "walk-in," or volunteer spy, to CIA agents and offered to provide information on the basis of his contacts in the Soviet scientific community. Soviet walk-ins are often KGB operatives. Nevertheless, to the CIA'S later regret, it was decided to string Lipavsky along and see what developed. Little did, and eventually concern arose that he was a KGB agent provocateur whose contacts among intellectuals would later be used to frame dissidents--as they have been. Lipavsky was cast off nine months after he first walked in, but it was too late. As it happened, after the CIA cut Lipavsky loose, he shared a Moscow apartment with Shcharansky for a time; this thin bit of guilt by association may be all that Shcharansky's prosecutors need to make a treason case plausible.

Thus the Shcharansky affair has become a problem for the U.S. and the Soviet Union. If he were to be convicted of espionage in spite of Carter's public assertion of his innocence, the Soviets would in effect be accusing the President of telling untruths. If the U.S. were to accept a Soviet offer to exchange Shcharansky for some Russian operative held in the West --which some observers insist may be Moscow's aim--the U.S. would in effect seem to be admitting that Shcharansky was a trade-off CIA man after all. From this imbroglio the lesson is, unfortunately, clear: CIA activity aimed at producing espionage results can also play into the hands of the KGB in its efforts to persecute innocent dissidents.

*Reason: if false accusations were challenged publicly, charges that were not specifically refuted might be taken to be true.

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