New light shed on Raoul Wallenberg mystery

Wallenberg, as World War II buffs know, was the Swedish diplomat who saved as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz. But, after he and his Hungarian driver drove off from Budapest in early 1945 with a Soviet escort, he disappeared from the pages of history.

Did he die in 1947, as has long been believed, or did he live on for years or even decades? Was his rescue mission financed by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency? If so, was he spying on the Soviets as well as rescuing Hungarian Jews?

Some of those questions are starting to get answers attached to them.

In the 1990s, the CIA acknowledged that the OSS recruited Wallenberg. It would seem he was an operative for the Pond, a supersecret agency unknown to all but President Franklin D. Roosevelt and select War and State Departments insiders.

About the Pond, little is known. But later this year the CIA is to release a stash of Pond-related papers accidentally discovered in a Virginia barn in 2001. These are the papers of John Grombach, who headed the Pond from its creation in 1942. CIA officials say they should be turned over to the National Archives in College Park, Md. …

The Pond relied on contacts in private corporations and hand-picked embassy personnel. It worked closely with the Dutch electronics company N.V. Philips, “which had access to ‘enemy’ territory as well as a far-flung corporation intelligence apparatus in its own right,” said former CIA analyst Mark Stout, who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.

The Swedish government has posted 1,000 pages of Wallenberg documents on government websites, which should also help.

As far as what happened to him inside the USSR, outside research suggests he lived until the 1980s, and not dying in 1947 as the Soviets claimed. He probably was in gulags, psychiatric hospitals and other Soviet custody situations.

n 1991, the Russian government assigned Vyacheslav Nikonov, deputy head of the KGB intelligence service, to spend months searching classified archives about Wallenberg.

“I think I found all the existing documents,” Nikonov e-mailed The Associated Press last month. The Soviets believed Wallenberg had been a spy, he said, but unlike many political detainees he never had a trial.

Nikonov’s conclusion: “Shot in 1947.”

Later in 1991, Russia and Sweden launched a joint investigation that lasted 10 years but failed to reach a joint conclusion.

The 2001 Swedish report said: “There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg,” and listed 17 unanswered questions.

The Russian report bluntly said, “Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947.” It named Viktor Abakumov, the head of the “Smersh” counterintelligence agency, as responsible for the execution and cover-up. It said the Russians consider the Wallenberg case “resolved.”

Unsatisfied, independent consultants and academics have kept digging, analyzing, reassessing old information and pressing for the Kremlin to release missing files.

That said, Sweden admits it had chances to at least try to regain Wallenberg’s freedom in the two years between his arrest by the Soviets and their claimed date of his execution, but that it had a “passive” attitude.

That then leads to the question: Did Stockholm know the OSS had recruited Wallenberg? Was it forced to take a more passive attitude on trying to win his release?

In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, the story notes. That prompted a memo from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier. Note how that contradicts Nikonov’s claim he was shot.

Here’s why the Soviets feared and mistrusted Wallenberg:

Wallenberg's very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust. Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.

The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him excluded — a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold War.

There’s plenty of additional fascinating stuff at the link, enough for somebody to start thinking about a great movie. There’s also more testimony from Russians who claim to have seen him alive after 1947, and links to websites with more about Wallenberg and his humanitarian deeds.

I think Wallenberg lived; I think Stalin would not have been stupid enough to execute him. And, how could his name be brought up in post-1947 spy swaps?

Assuming he did live, or even if he was shot in 1947, it’s time for post-Soviet Russia to do the proper things. Repatriate his remains, and open all the archives.

Ditto for the U.S. Beyond Wallenberg, World War II historians would love to learn more about the Pond.