Frightened Face

The big murals of the Spanish inquisition on the walls of Budapest's Marko Street courthouse had been obliterated with a coat of pastel blue paint since Cardinal Mindszenty's trial (TIME, Feb. 14, 1949). But the same judge who had sentenced Mindszenty was in charge--Court President Vilmos Olti, a prominent, fascist of the Hitler era now known as the Red "government hangman." Mindszenty's prosecutor, Gyula Alapi, was also on hand again.

The principal defendants, however, were different. For the first time Budapest's Red regime was trying its tactics on Anglo-American businessmen, and their alleged Hungarian associates.

"A Fine Job." The seven defendants standing before "Hangman" Olti looked freshly clothed and scrubbed. Quipped a newsman: "The undertaker did a fine job in preparing them."

Among them stood an American, handsome Robert Vogeler, 38, a graduate of Annapolis and M.I.T. He had come to Hungary in 1948 as U.S. representative of the International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. Friends in Budapest and back home knew him as a skilled sportsman (fencer, marksman, skier, golfer) and a gay companion. One day last November,

Bob Vogeler had stepped from Budapest's Hotel Astoria and into his black Buick sedan, intending to drive to Vienna to see his pretty, blonde wife Lucile and their two children. He never made it. Secret police hauled him off as a spy. For three months, Vogeler lay in a Budapest jail, denied counsel or bail, while the U.S. ineffectually protested.

Beside the American stood his British assistant, grey-haired, once debonair Edgar Sanders; a Hungarian barmaid (listed as "Baroness" to give her the proper upper-class air), Edina Dory, who had worked as an I.T. & T. switchboard operator; a Hungarian official of I.T. & T., Imre Geiger; and three more Hungarians accused of complicity in the "spy ring."

"I Am Sorry." The defendants were asked the usual question: "Do you feel guilty?" They gave the usual reply: "Yes."

In a dead, flat voice, Sanders recited his lesson: he had delivered espionage reports to British and American officials. Next day Vogeler took the stand. Dressed in neat black with a clean white handkerchief in his pocket, he stood for almost three hours .facing the judges with his back to the spectators.

"Bob is a nervous, quick-moving, high-strung guy," said one of his close friends later. "He could no more stand calmly and confess than he could fly to the moon." Nevertheless, Vogeler stood almost motionless^ before the Budapest court and, in a voice as monotonous as the drone of a litany, confessed to having plotted against the Red regime.

He had, he said, undergone training for this work at an FBI school in Chicago eight years ago. His answers were so ready that he interrupted the judge in mid-question. He even used the penitential kind of phrase coined by Red inquisitors: "I am sorry for the detrimental deeds that I have committed."

Judge Olti nodded, at last directed the prisoner to sit down. As Vogeler turned to find his chair, the spectators saw for the first time the face of the American who had been confined, friendless and isolated, under nameless dread and threat, for three months in a Red Hungarian jail.

"It looked." reported CBS's Alexander Kendrick, "like the face of a frightened rabbit. He was scanning the courtroom as if trying in vain to catch the eye of another American."

This week Hangman Olti pronounced sentence: for Bob Vogeler, whose country was not even powerful enough to get him a lawyer, 15 years; for Sanders, 13 years; for Geiger and another Hungarian, death.

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