Robinson Mystery

Donald Louis Robinson was born in Queens on March 25, 1905, buried there on March 21, 1909. Ruth Norma Birkland's brief history was somewhat similar: born in Brooklyn Dec. 28, 1909, she was buried there in 1915. A month ago, the chances that these mouldering infants would ever become posthumous celebrities seemed practically negligible. But last fortnight in Moscow a lady who was registered at the National Hotel under the name of long-dead Ruth Norma Birkland called the U. S. Embassy and said that her husband, long-dead Donald Robinson, was missing. When U. S. reporters went to call on Mrs. Robinson several days later she was missing too.

Ordinarily, when a U. S. citizen gets into such spectacular trouble abroad, his friends and relatives besiege the U. S. State Department demanding that something be done. Although the Robinsons' passport applications seemed in perfect order, the State Department began to have serious suspicions when no Robinson friends and relatives came knocking at its doors. Nonetheless Secretary Cordell Hull sternly asked Soviet Ambassador Troyanovsky for an explanation. Last week he backed down shamefacedly when he learned how the mysterious Robinsons had got their passports.

The story provided a simple education for all those interested in entering the profession of international spy. Three years ago the "Robinsons" wrote to the New York Board of Health and asked that the Robinson and Birkland birth certificates be sent to an apartment house on Manhattan's East 17th Street. Then they waited outside and presumably intercepted the mailman. When the apartment house superintendent, William Houston, seemed suspicious, Mrs. Robinson said: "I have a friend living here." Federal investigators were not able to find any friends of hers living there or anywhere else. Juiciest fact sniffed out by reporters was that the "Robinsons" had lied about their birth certificates in the very office of County Clerk Albert Marinelli, who resigned three weeks ago when Thomas Dewey said that most of his political associates were criminals. And who, everyone wanted to know, were the Robinsons? Dispatches from Moscow indicated, as the U. S. press had suspected all along, that they had indeed been imprisoned as spies. The Soviet press intimated that they were U. S. Trotskyists. Heads of the Trotskyist Fourth International in Manhattan positively announced that the Robinsons were not members. Columbia's famed Philosophy Professor John Dewey gave as his opinion that they were just being held to make people think that U. S. Trotskyists are up to something.

Meantime the U. S. State Department breathed a sigh of relief. It was saved the tough job of getting U. S. citizens out of a Russian prison, saved the unpleasant job of trying to intercede in a spy case, saved from doing anything at all because it had no evidence whatever that the "Robinsons" were U. S. citizens.

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