No Escape

A Chinese Communist Ilyushin-14 airliner swept off a Rangoon runway last week and wheeled toward Russia with a drugged, closely guarded wreck of a man as cargo. The man aboard: Soviet Colonel Mikhail I. Stryguine. whose bizarre experience resembled Mrs. Oksana Kasenkina's "jump to freedom" from the Russian consulate in Manhattan almost eleven years ago--except that Colonel Stryguine did not make it.

To Westerners in Burma who knew him, Stryguine bore a remarkable physical resemblance to Frank Sinatra. He was small, thin, sunken-faced. Quick and aggressive, he could also be charming and gregarious. Mikhail Stryguine entered the Russian army at 17, fought in the infantry in World War II, became a full colonel at 31, and seemed destined for big things in the Red army. A 1953-55 tour of duty as a liaison officer with U.S. forces in Frankfurt gave him his first look at another kind of life. Assigned as military attache to Rangoon in 1957, Stryguine seemed anxious to make friends with Westerners in Burma. He did; but his new friends noticed that a certain tenseness gnawed at his easy affability. Said one: "I felt from the first this man was not the usual Soviet conformist. He had eyes and a brain; he saw things and understood them."

He sometimes expressed a wish to be able to talk to fellow soldiers "away from all these people"--gesturing to Russians near by--but when he got the opportunity, he gave no hint of defecting. Once he remarked bitterly that his daughter had not been allowed to leave Russia with him and his wife.

Freedom Leap. Fortnight ago two Burmese physicians were excitedly summoned by a Russian woman embassy doctor to Stryguine's fashionable 42 Inya Road address. They found Stryguine in a deep coma from an overdose of sleeping pills. He was surrounded by Russians who only reluctantly let the critically sick man be moved to Rangoon General Hospital. Two Soviet toughs went along to watch him.

When Stryguine awoke the next day, he began cursing his guards and the Soviet Union. As his guards tried to silence him, he cried out in English, "I'm not the traitor. It's you fellows who are. Talk in English so everyone here can understand what you are saying!" He screamed to bewildered nurses to call the Burmese police and army, that he needed protection, begged them to "call War Office 130," the telephone of Burmese army intelligence.

Intimidated by the Russian hoods and not sure whether, because of his diplomatic status, they could do something to help him, the nurses did nothing. Finally, exhausted, Stryguine turned to the nurses with pleading eyes and said, "I have a 14-year-old daughter back in Russia."

That night, while his guards dozed, Stryguine jumped out of bed as if heading for the bathroom, but leaped instead through a first-floor window. He fell twelve feet to the ground, got up unsteadily, lurched across the courtyard to a guardroom, crying, "Help, Burma army! Help, Burma army!" but the watching

Burmese guards understood no English, and let the Russian goons overpower him. The Russians carried him back to his hospital bed, had him shot full of dope, and then, despite hospital protests, insisted on removing him to the Soviet embassy.

It was two days before Burmese newspapers got wind of the story, and splashed it across their front pages. Their news instinct now aroused, the Burmese journalists were intrigued by the arrival of a Chinese commercial plane from Kunming, carrying a full crew and one passenger. Four newsmen and two photographers kept an all-night vigil at the airport. At 6 a.m. a row of Soviet limousines drew up. Forty burly Soviet toughs clambered out, and in groups of five surrounded each newsman and photographer. Ninety minutes later Colonel Stryguine arrived, so doped he could barely walk. As Stryguine emerged from an embassy car, TIME Correspondent Max McGrath asked him if he wanted to say anything.

Tomatoes with Effect. As Stryguine turned lusterless, uncomprehending eyes on McGrath, the Russian thugs swung into action. Four men picked up McGrath and slammed him against a wall. Stryguine was lifted off his feet and paddle-wheeled into the terminal. Other Russian agents smashed cameras, threw one photographer face down onto the pavement, slugged a reporter. Moments later Stryguine appeared and walked woodenly between two guards across the tarmac to the Ilyushin, turned once as if considering a last try for escape, then, prodded by the Russians, meekly entered into the plane.

Next day, after writing .their angry front-page stories, 40 members of the Burma Reporters Association, carrying placards reading CLOSE DOWN THE RUSSIAN EMBASSY, piled in Jeeps and drove out to the red-tiled embassy on Prom Road, across the street from the Burmese Foreign Office. They brought along baskets of tomatoes and began throwing them with effect at Russian guards. The guards, enraged, broke up chairs to use as weapons, hurled the pieces at newsmen. Several photographers who ventured into the Russian compound were set upon and beaten by the goons, while in the garden near by, shirtsleeved Russian Ambassador Aleksei Shchiborin looked on calmly.

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