The Reds Remove a Thorn

Early one morning last week a man approached a taxi driver in West Berlin and asked to be driven to the Senefelder Platz in the Soviet sector. The driver demurred, until the man offered a bonus of 20 marks ($4.76); then he consented. On the way, the passenger leaned forward and dropped a carton of U.S. cigarettes on the front seat. No sooner had the car stopped at the Senefelder Platz than two other men jumped in and seized the passenger, shouting: "At last we've nabbed you, you American cigarette racketeer." Driver and passenger were hustled off to jail.

By this stratagem, the Communist authorities came into possession of a taxi with West-sector markings and plates, which would attract no attention anywhere in free Berlin. Shortly after the fake pounce on the "cigarette racketeer," the taxi recrossed into the U.S. sector and stopped on the Gerichtstrasse, a quiet, linden-shaded street in a shabbily genteel neighborhood. The hour was still early. Punctually at 7:20, Dr. Walter Linse, 48, economic expert and No. 2 man of the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists, emerged from No. 12 Gerichtstrasse, on his way to work, and started briskly toward the El station, six blocks away. Two men got out of the taxi. One drove a powerful fist into Dr. Linse's jaw; the other seized the lawyer and bundled him into the taxi, which drove off at high speed in the direction of the Soviet sector.

A woman on the street screamed; the driver of a light delivery truck started in pursuit. The thugs in the taxi fired several shots at the truck and sprinkled in their wake tetrahedrons (sharp-pointed military devices for puncturing enemy tires). As the kidnap car careened around the last curve before reaching the sector line, the Communist Volkspolizei, alerted and waiting, lifted their barrier, and the taxi sped through without stopping, bearing Dr. Linse into the sinister maw of East Berlin.

Thick Dossiers. Of several hundred Communist kidnapings in West Berlin, this was the most flagrant, and it raised the angriest protests. Dr. Linse had been a painful thorn in the Red flank. The Investigating Committee of Free Jurists (TIME, Dec. 18, 1950) compiles thick dossiers on the crimes of East German officials, on information obtained from refugees and from well-concealed underground sources in the Soviet zone. Three weeks ago Linse gave the West German newspapers his latest data on East zone rearmament. The secret Communist price on Linse's head was believed to be comparable to that on Dr. Theo Friedenau, founder of the Free Jurists, who has escaped several abduction attempts himself.

Major General Lemuel Mathewson, U.S. commander in Berlin, fired off a protest to the Soviet authorities, citing the collusion by Communist police. In Bonn, all members of the Bundestag except the Communists and the presiding officers (who have to stay) walked out on a speech by Max Reimann, the Communist leader in West Germany. Radio station RIAS cut Reimann's speech off the air, substituted music; and another station that carried Reimann's remarks in full was snowed under by complaints. West Berlin officials began installing street barriers of their own along the sector line.

At a mass meeting of 25,000 angry Berliners, West Berlin's Mayor Ernst Reuter cried: "Now our patience must have an end. We appeal to the whole world for help to this man." Said Dr. Friedenau: "Such violations . . . cannot be undone by mere protests." When a handful of Communist hecklers raised their voices, they were set upon and beaten by the angry crowd.

Bland Promise. The driver of the taxi was turned loose a few hours after the coup, but Walter Linse was still unheard from. For several days the East Berlin press ignored the fury on the other side of the line. Then, in an editorial headed "An American Agent Is Lost," the Communist Neues Deutschland trumpeted: "No war agent will be safe, whether he is in West Berlin, Bonn, Paris or Washington." U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy, who is leaving next week after three years at his post, used his farewell call on Chairman Vasily Chuikov of the Soviet Control Commission to protest the kidnaping. Chairman Chuikov promised to look into the matter, but added blandly that he hoped McCloy did not really think that the Soviet authorities were in any way involved.

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