One Stowaway

Three days at sea, the 16,000-ton Polish motorship Batory radioed a routine passenger count back to New York. It ended, ". . . additional, one stowaway, first-class passage paid." As required by law, the Gdynia America Line, operators of the vessel, forwarded the message to U.S. Immigration officials.

Immigration wanted more information on the stowaway. It got a hair-raising reply: "Re telegram 10th. Stowaway Gerhart Eisler, German, disembarking Gdynia." Was it the Gerhart Eisler--the chubby little Comintern agent who had been called the No. 1 U.S. Communist?

Gone. FBI agents rushed to the Manhattan apartment in which Eisler had been living while appealing two jail sentences--one for contempt of Congress, another for falsifying an application for an exit permit. Eisler was gone. The Department of Justice was not only red-faced, but flabbergasted. The little man had been trying to get back to Germany ever since publicity had ruined his effectiveness in the U.S. in 1946. (The U.S. preferred to jail him rather than let him loose to raise trouble in Berlin.)

Once he had got away, why had he given the ship's purser his right name? If he were being smuggled out by Communists in the vessel's crew, why had he even been reported as a stowaway?

It soon began to look as though Gerhart was operating strictly under his own steam and was perhaps a victim of his own ego. Carol King, his attorney and a longtime defender of Communists, almost exploded when she heard that he had jumped his $23,500 bail--money that had been put up by Communist-front groups. Cried she: "Reprehensible!"

Meanwhile Gerhart politely told a fellow passenger, a free-lance reporter named Richard Yaffe, just how his one-man escape act had been worked. He had simply gone to Manhattan's Pier 88, bought a 25-c- visitor's ticket to the Batory, and gone aboard. When the ship got past Ambrose Light, he reported to the purser and paid for passage. "I gave the U.S. authorities a chance to correct their uncivilized attitude toward my person, and to stop using me as a bogey man," said Gerhart. "But [they] did not take the chance. I have another purpose in life than to be watched by the FBI."

Caught. But as he spoke the U.S. Government was still watching him. It urgently asked Great Britain to hold him for extradition. When the Batory dropped anchor off Southampton a tender bearing a Scotland Yard inspector, a covey of beefy British plainclothesmen, two indignant Polish diplomats and a scattering of U.S. officials chugged out to meet her.

The Batory's master, Captain Jan Cwiklinski, refused to surrender his passenger. His argument: Eisler a) had paid for his passage, b) had broken no British laws, c) was under the protection of the Polish flag, and d) had been assured the right of asylum when the ship reached Communist-dominated Poland. Faced with these arguments, the boarding party retreated. Three hours later it was back., This time the Scotland Yard man not only had a warrant for Eisler's arrest but also a tough cablegram from the U.S. State Department. Its gist: the U.S. might seize the vessel, and kick the Gdynia America Line out of New York if the captain didn't listen to reason.

The captain gave in. Gerhart was arrested, and led quietly out on deck. But then he saw an amazing spectacle: 100 newsmen were circling the ship in rented craft, cameras and notebooks poised. Gerhart Eisler threw himself on the deck and yelled as though he were having lighted cigarettes pushed into his eyes. The plainclothesmen picked him up by arms & legs and lugged him down the gangway, while cameras clicked.

Returned. Gerhart was docile as a dove as the tender reached for the dock, and he was polite and pleasant after being installed in Southampton jail. But the Polish embassy in Britain issued a statement for him: "I am the first prisoner of the North Atlantic pact, this unholy alliance of reaction . . . Down with the American gendarmes ... I am being kidnaped by the British authorities . . ."

By the time Gerhart walked into Bow Street Police Court this week he was--in an international sort of way--hotter than a sheriff's pistol. He was ordered to show cause why he should not be extradited to the U.S., and put in jail without bail for the eight days until the hearing begins.

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