Whites? Reds? Call the Feds!

After the first racketing assault on his hearing, the cop at the Clarkstown, N.Y. police station held the telephone several inches from his ear. A Russian--it sounded as if the caller were being flayed with a dull cabbage scraper--was on the other end of the line. The Russian was speaking from Reed Farm, a 70-acre estate operated by Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, youngest daughter of famed Russian Author Leo Tolstoy. A woman, the Russian cried, had been stolen.

What woman? The woman, Oksana Stepanovna Kosenkina! Not only stolen--kidnaped! Listening, the cop gathered that he was being informed of an international incident. Who had taken her? Reds! They had come in a big car. They had demanded the woman! They had driven off!

The cops tore out to the farm, where they heard a sinister tale. The woman was a schoolteacher who had been brought to New York from Russia two years ago to instruct the children of Soviet diplomats. She was to have returned to Russia at the end of July; the Russians had closed the school. But she was afraid to go because her husband had been "liquidated." She had asked the editor of a New York Russian-language newspaper for help. She was sent to Reed Farm, which the Countess ran as an asylum for Russian exiles.

Then the Reds had come. The woman had been terrified. "They will shoot me," she had cried. Then she had yelled: "All right! I'll go! If they shoot me it is the best way out!"

Things Went Black. Three hours later, the Russian consulate in New York invited newspapers to send men to an unprecedented press conference. As soon as reporters walked in, it was plain who had gotten Oksana Stepanovna Kosenkina. She was in custody of Jacob M. Lomakin, the handsome, blackhaired Soviet consul general. She was a plump, nervous-looking, middle-aged woman who wore a floppy-sleeved blouse, a black skirt, turquoise-colored bobbysocks, and red shoes. Lomakin announced, happily, that she had endured a rare ordeal and that she was about to describe it--through an interpreter, of course.

The woman began talking. The interpreter, translating, said that shortly before she was to have sailed for home, a doctor named Korzhinsky had approached her in the street and whispered: "You should not go to Russia--they will send you to Siberia." A little later a man named Leo Costello had lured her to a park bench on Riverside Drive and had deftly plunged a hypodermic needle into her arm. Then everything had gone black.

The next day, still the victim of the villainous drug, she had permitted a man in an automobile to take her to Reed Farm. Cried Consul Lomakin: "She did not know why she went with him! . . . Many people were around her. They watch her."

The Letter. Lomakin took over the telling of the tale. "Suddenly," he said, "she didn't arrive at the boat." Then he let slip the fact that two other teachers were on the loose: "At the same time they didn't come either on the boat Mikhail Ivanovitch Samarin, teacher of mathematics, and his wife, teacher of Russian languages."

How had he found the woman? She had written him a letter--here he triumphantly produced a letter with a Haverstraw postmark--and had smuggled it out in a "vegetable cart." He opened the letter and recited a dramatic line: "Once more I beg you not to let me perish here."

"Today," he said, "I took my vice consul, and my driver, and came there. I found her in the kitchen . . . Came a few men and took her hand and tried to pull her . . . Three men began to crack the car and damage it. But she still cried, 'Take me home! Take me home!' White Russian bandits, few big men, began to throw some stones. But we got her in the car and we came here."

All this excited verbiage led naturally to a question: What had really happened? Nobody, including Countess Tolstoy, seemed to know. The next day the Countess mused dourly that the woman might have been a Red spy. And the case was complicated by the fact that Mathematics Teacher Samarin dramatically turned himself over to the FBI. This week no less a person than Russian Ambassador Panyushkin asked that Samarin be returned forthwith.

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