Static

For two years Polish squatters have refused to budge from the two top floors of the building officially set aside for the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. Offers of 150,000 zlotys ($1,500) per family have failed to move them. Meanwhile, the U.S. Ambassador has had to live in the dumpy, third-rate Hotel Polonia.

Last week the new U.S. Ambassador, Stanton Griffis, a former businessman and captain on the U.S. General Staff during the World War I, decided to try undiplomatic tactics. In an upper room of the Embassy, he installed two short-wave radios, set them at different wavelengths to insure round-the-clock squawking. He was simply testing, he explained, the effect of varying weather conditions. The squatters have admitted that the static is getting on their nerves, especially when two squalling babies provide an infantile obbligato.

Poland's Russian-controlled Government also tried out some static, Moscow style. Sixteen Poles were convicted of spying for "a foreign government." One of the charges was that they had supplied ex-Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane with material for his article "How Russia Rules Poland," which appeared in LIFE, July 14.* The sentence: death for nine, long imprisonment for seven.

Two of the convicted men were leaders of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant Party. Wrote Warsaw's Communist paper, in a blood-chilling front-page editorial titled The Analogy: "In Bulgaria, the leader of reaction, Nikola Petkoff [see above] has been seated on the defendant's bench next to his subordinate, Ivanoff. In Cracow, Mierzwa [Mikolajczyk's subordinate in the Polish Peasant Party] is seated on the bench. Will the similarity of events end there?"

Some observers thought that Mikolajczyk would be in jail before Christmas.

* Lane replied, in a letter to the New York Times: "My article . . . was based on actual happenings which were known to many American press correspondents in Poland. There was no need to employ spies, even had I had the unwise desire to do so. ... I [instructed] members of my staff that they should avoid contact with the underground, for I did not wish to endanger the safety of persons not in sympathy with the Polish Government. . . ."

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