"It Could Happen to Anybody"

Along the stretch of road leading from the Hungarian border post of Rajka to the Austrian frontier station at Nickelsdorf walked a man carrying a suitcase and a traveling bag. He was pale, with deep shadows under his eyes; every few moments, he paused to catch his breath. An official U.S. car drove up, and out jumped a U.S. diplomat. "How are you, Bob?" cried Hal Ekern of the U.S. High Commissioner's staff in Austria. "Let's go, let's get out of here."

The man with the suitcase said only: "Those dirty bastards . . ." Then he got in the U.S. car, and was whisked off toward Vienna.

Thus last week Robert Vogeler regained his freedom after 17 months as a prisoner of the Communists.

In the car, Vogeler wept when told that his wife was waiting for him in Vienna: his jailers had told him that she was under arrest, too. He knew nothing of what had happened in the outside world since November 1949. "You mean there's real fighting?" he asked when told of Korea. At his house in Vienna's U.S. sector, Vogeler leaped from the car, embraced his pretty blonde wife and two sons, 11 and 9. Exclaimed one of the boys: "Gosh--at last!" Vogeler wept.

Methods, Physical & Mental. After more than a year of negotiations, the U.S. State Department had reached a settlement with Hungary: after Vogeler's release, 1) the Hungarian consulates in New York and Cleveland, closed by the U.S. after his arrest, would be reopened; 2) as stipulated in the Hungarian peace treaty, Budapest would get all Hungarian goods seized by the Nazis during World War II and now held in West Germany. (This property does not include the crown of St. Stephen.)

To the reporters in Vienna last week Vogeler said: "I can't believe I'm here. I'm afraid to wake up." Then he spoke, hesitantly, of the thing that seemed to be uppermost in his mind--the confession of espionage he had made in court (TIME, Feb. 27, 1950). "I am very sorry that. . . I feel badly that . . . that I didn't perhaps live up to American tradition under the pressure . . ." His wife prompted: ". . . that you were under."

Vogeler told the reporters about the kind of pressure it had been. "There are two methods [to prepare one for trial], One is physical, one is mental. Both methods are used in Hungary." Before the trial, Vogeler lived for three months in a cell (at Budapest's notorious Andrassy Ut 60, the secret police headquarters) with two inches of water on the floor; he slept on a board just above the water. A bright light flooded his cell day & night, and when he tried to sleep someone kept banging against the wall. He had neither socks, underclothes, nor shirt; once the chief of the political police, Lieut. General Peter Gabor, told him: "If you cooperate, we will give you back your socks."

Vogeler continued: "There were periods when the diet was not sufficient. If I was to make an appearance before a high officer I was fattened up a little."

Had he been drugged, a reporter wanted to know. Said Vogeler: "That is a difficult thing to determine ... If you are kept awake long enough, you don't know whether you are drugged or whether your mind just ceases to function normally. I was given stimulants to keep awake. Coffee and cigarettes were forced on me." He had not been given any injections.

With Some It Takes Longer. Did Vogeler want to repudiate his confession at the trial? Vogeler slowly crushed his cigarette in an ashtray. Said he: "There was some truth in it." But he added: "It is just a question of time before you confess. With some it takes a little longer than others, but nobody can resist that treatment indefinitely." Reporters took away the impression that they had not yet heard the whole story.

"Oh, what they must have done to him!" Mrs. Vogeler said. "He was such a strong man, and now he is weak as a baby and so nervous." This week, making a statement for TV before flying home to the U.S., Vogeler broke down, weeping, but he managed to deliver his "message to the American people." Said he: "God has given us the mission to destroy the Communist enemies of freedom . . . Every individual American should realize that what happened to me could happen to anybody."

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