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.

Obama takes a pass on getting tough on Fox

After his advisors’ tough talk about how Barack Obama was going to talk back to Fox, after Bill Moyers’ sympathetic and in-depth interview of Rev. Jeremiah Wright gave Obama the perfect leverage for pushing back, he didn’t.

I don’t watch the Sunday news talks, so I don’t know exactly how mild he was, but it doesn’t sound good. It’s like he’s lost his Politics of Change™ soul in the last month, accepted the Politics of Timidity™ after attack ads, combined with the lack of depth behind the Politics of Change™ left him there, and hasn’t moved on.

Easy Blogger hack for scroll boxes for labels and such

I blog about a lot of different things, and I like having my labels visible for others. But, with 300 or so labels, that makes for a long list.

When Blogger came out with “Beta,” now new Blogger, in 2006, all sorts of people started inventing hacks. One was a multistyle way of displaying labels. I didn’t want the zoom version, though. I actually wanted a version of a collapsible/expandable list, similar to what Blogger lets you do with your list of archived posts.

But, nobody invented such a hack, despite me e-mailing a couple of people about it. So, I did nothing. But, as my labels list continued to grow, I needed to take action.

I tried CumulusBlog and Hackosphere’s hacks, and tried tweaking them to get something that would just let me do a scrollable list, but theirs weren’t working. Then, via some blog, I came on this page about how to make a scrollable box for a MySpace page.

Works like a charm.

Note: ALWAYS back up your template before doing something like this!

For “labels,” go to “edit HTML.” Click “expand the widgets.” You’ll want to copy everything from the “

” to the “

” and paste that in the “your text” box on that page I linked just above. You’ll also need to know how wide the box needs to be to fit in your sidebar column, and then you’ll need to decide what depth you want it to be. (My sidebar is about 240 pixels wide, and I set the depth at 300 pixels, which displays about 16 label links.)

Don’t worry about the colors or anything else, as Blogger’s codes for the whole sidebar will override that.

Get the new code, paste it in to replace what you just copied from your Blogger template, and save.

Quotable quotes updated – religion, prophecy, atheism

“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet” — Quran
“There is no god, and I am his prophet” — SocraticGadfly

I don’t claim to be as strident an atheist as Chris Hitchens.

Nor is my riposte meant to be anti-Muslim.

But, in the United States, more people who are secularists need to stand up for their unbeliefs.

It’s hypocritical when Kevin Drum claims to be a “godless blogger” in a blog post, but has never, ever, to the best of my knowledge, actually written a post about his personal atheist take on life.

Got a famous quote you’d like to see updated? Drop me a line at socraticgadflyAThotmailDOTcom.

Time to tax international food shipping costs?

Why are those Chilean grapes so cheap in our supermarkets? Why is Italy now ahead of New Zealand as the world’s largest kiwi-growing country? Why are Argentine lemons going to Spain’s Citrus Coast while local ones rot in groves?

Because a Bretton Woods-era agreement keeps international fuel for food shipping from being taxed. And, today, we pay the environmental costs for that, in the above and even greater food absurdities, like Britain both importing and exporting 15,000 tons of waffles a year or 20 tons of bottled water.

Under a little-known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry, fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.

But the European Commission, once again light-years ahead of the U.S. in 21st-century insight, is going to change that. As the story notes, all freight-carrying flights into and out of the E.C. are supposed to be included in its emissions-trading program by 2012, meaning shippers will have to purchase permits for the pollution they generate.

The commission is negotiating with the International Maritime Organization, over various alternatives to reduce greenhouse gases on sea freight as well. If they don’t craft a solution by the end of the year, sea freight will also be included in the emissions-trading program.

Meanwhile, European grocers are also ahead of American ones.

Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket chain, known as a vocal promoter of green initiatives, is introducing a labeling system that will let consumers assess a product’s carbon footprint.

Some foods that travel long distances may actually have an environmental advantage over local products, like flowers grown in the tropics instead of in energy-hungry European greenhouses.

“This may be as radical for environmental consuming as putting a calorie count on the side of packages to help people who want to lose weight,” a spokesman for Tesco, Trevor Datson, said. …

The problem is measuring the emissions. The fact that food travels farther does not necessarily mean more energy is used. Some studies have shown that shipping fresh apples, onions and lamb from New Zealand might produce lower emissions than producing the goods in Europe, where — for example — storing apples for months would require refrigeration.

But those studies were done in New Zealand, and the food travel debate is inevitably intertwined with economic interests.

The story also notes that Europe has a situation a bit analogous to the U.S. one with Mexico. But in Europe, the labor isn’t being imported. Instead, the labor costs of African countries is being used to get more cheap food into European groceries. Especially given historic contacts all around the Mediterranean Rim, this is only going to increase, even with an emissions tax.

Here in the U.S. it would be another way for cities, counties or regions to get beyond BushCo’s inaction on environmental issues. It would be tough for a central city to do it without suburbs also being involved, or would it?

It might give suburbs incentive to preserve more farmland if produce in their own supermarket didn’t have a carbon tax.

For instance, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert is moving beyond his predecessor, Laura Miller, in trying to make Dallas a green city. A carbon tax on produce would help this, with sliding scales for local/regional, outstate, national and international food.

It’s too late to save much farmland on the north side, but here in the Best Southwest, there’s still time.

Best Southwest Iraq casualty

Staff Sgt. Jason Brown, a 29-year-old 1997 DeSoto High School graduate was killed in Iraq April 17.