Poland names day for spy swap

Press, 8 February 1986, Page 10

Poland names day for spy swap

NZPA-Reuter Bonn The Polish Government has confirmed that an East-West spy swap that is expected to include a jailed Soviet Jewish dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky, will take place on Tuesday. A Government spokesman, Jerzy Urban, gave the first precise official comment on the timing of the swap yesterday, news of which has prompted

days of speculation and conflicting reports about a venue and the imprisoned East bloc and Western agents who may be swapped. Bonn Government sources have said the deal includes the release to the West of Mr Shcharansky, jailed in 1978 for 13 years on charges of spying for the United States. But, they say, the exchange could be in several places. “Bild,” the West Ger-

man newspaper that first reported the swap, said Dieter Gerhardt, a South African former naval officer jailed for life in 1984 for betraying military secrets to Moscow, would be among 22 imprisoned Eastern bloc and Western agents traded. It gave no source for the assertion but quoted a Western security adviser as saying, “Details of this East-West game of human poker will be finalised

only at the last minute." A Soviet journalist, Victor Louis, who has often leaked important Kremlin news to the West, wrote yesterday that Mr Shcharansky, aged 38, would go free but had yet to find out. “He will get the word a number of hours before they order him to get dressed and to leave the prison on his way to his release in the spy swap,” Louis wrote in the Israeli

newspaper “Yedioth Ahronoth.” Successive American presidents have denied that Mr Shcharansky, a prominent human rights activist who was also seeking the right to emigrate to Israel, had worked as an American spy. But Louis said, “From our point of view, Shcharansky is a spy, and we are exchanging him based on that.”