Don't Go Near the Water

Seattleites were pleased but slightly puzzled by Soviet Naval Lieutenant Nikolai G. Redin. The dark, handsome, 29-year-old lieutenant did his work as a Soviet Purchasing Commission liaison officer without a word about Marx, Engels, commissars or strikes. He was polite, played squash, drank bourbon and once enlivened a New Washington Hotel stag party by dropping to his heels and doing the "kazatski." After he had been in Seattle a while (he came in 1942), some people who had been a little uppish about Russians began to think better of them.

One day last week Lieut. Redin seemed like a stranger all over again. He had been arrested on a Portland, Ore. pier, dressed in a sweatshirt and grey slacks, just as he was getting aboard the Soviet Steamship Alma Ata. The FBI had arrested him as a spy. He had been under "intensive observation" for months, said the FBI, which charged that he had "induced another to obtain plans, documents and writings relating to the Yellowstone, a U.S. destroyer tender." The information, it added, "was to be used to the advantage of a foreign nation, to wit: the U.S.S.R."

But by the time he had been released on $10,000 bond (with a warning not to go within 200 feet of any navigable water), it was apparent that any specific evidence against the young Soviet officer was being kept strictly on ice. In Washington, a naval commander offered to bet that the Yellowstone "had no more top secrets than my desk." Politicians began asking out loud if Redin was perhaps really connected with an atomic spy ring.

Cried Lieut. Redin: "The whole case is all built up. It is a provocation." In a telephone call to his wife, in Seattle, he added: "They did not find a thing on me: no papers or plans. They have nothing." His Seattle landlady seemed to agree. Said she: "I don't understand how a man who paid his rent so promptly could be a spy."

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