Dubious Detour

As the owner of a lucrative travel agency catering to Harvard students, Vladimir Kazan, 42, qualified for VIP treatment when he visited Moscow last October at the cordial invitation of Intourist, the Soviet state travel bureau. In fact, the Russians picked up the bill for his entire stay. But Kazan, a former Czech who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1955 and become a citizen, discovered that Communist hospitality can still be highly uneven. Returning to the U.S. via Paris, Kazan's Soviet Aeroflot jetliner made an unscheduled stop in Prague for what Czech authorities said was a "radar breakdown." When it took off again, Kazan's seat was empty; the Czechs had arrested him.

Just why the Communists wanted Kazan so badly is not clear. In 1951, his name--originally Vladimir Komarek--had been linked with a spy ring at the trial of Associated Press Newsman William N. Oatis, who later served two years in a Czech prison on a trumped-up espionage charge. The Czechs also claimed that Kazan once had a role in a gaudy murder in which a secret agent, supposedly firing through his raincoat pocket, killed a policeman in Prague. But when Kazan-Komarek came to trial last week before a three-man tribunal in Prague's municipal courthouse--dressed in the same blue blazer, yellow sports shirt and slacks that he had on when he left Russia--he was no longer charged with being an accomplice to a murder. The Czech press stopped referring to him as a U.S. spy. Instead, he was accused of having recruited agents for French intelligence and helped people cross the Czech border westward from 1948 to 1950, almost 20 years ago.

Whatever the reasons for the kidnap plot, the Czechs went easy on Kazan --possibly because Czechoslovakia is seeking trade advantages from the U.S. and an expansion of tourism, which could hardly be encouraged by the martyrdom of a U.S. citizen. He was sentenced to a comparatively light eight years in prison; he could have got as much as 20. At week's end KazanKomarek's sentence was suspended, and, having satisfied the Czechs' mysterious purpose, he was released and put aboard a flight to New York.

In another example of what appears to be a more mellow Communist policy, East Germany last week freed, before the end of their allotted terms, four Americans who had been in East German prisons for more than a year. Three of them--Frederick Matthews, 24, Moses Herrin, 26, and Mary Battle, 26--had been convicted of the once unpardonable offense of assisting persons who wanted to flee the Iron Curtain. The fourth, William Lovett, 26, was imprisoned in May, 1965 for his part in a serious auto crash in Leipzig.

Since the U.S. does not recognize East Germany, a private citizen played a major role in negotiating the release of the four. He was New York Attorney Maxwell M. Rabb, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and a former secretary to the Eisenhower Cabinet, who has lately spent considerable time arranging freedom for other Communist captives. He won the release last March of John Van Altena, a young American who had also been convicted of assisting an East German family trying to flee to the West.

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