The Spy Who Skipped

Air France's Flight 136 from Paris landed at Tel Aviv's Lydda International Airport and discharged a dozen passen gers. One of them, a balding man in dark glasses, made straight for the arrival hut, displayed a Canadian passport, No. 4-328384. Name: Beras Goble. Age: 72. Occupation: Engineer. Permanent Residence: Montreal. The police and customs passed him on quickly.

The passport was not his. It had be longed to a brother who had committed suicide five years before. The traveler was, in fact, Dr. Robert Soblen, 61, a psychiatrist, who last July was convicted in a New York federal court for spying for Russia. Appeals to higher courts, including the Supreme Court, had failed, and Soblen, weary, dying of leukemia, had jumped $100,000 bail and fled to Israel.

At the Tel Aviv airport, Soblen hailed a taxi, went to the seaside Savoy Hotel, showed the passport, got a room, and began making phone calls to cousins and childhood friends from his birthplace in Lithuania. When he tried one number--41614--he was told that it had been disconnected, and he shouted angrily at the hotel operator: "It's impossible! That's one number I must get!" Throughout the next day, he strolled the nearby streets, conferred with an attorney friend, and read the newspapers. Then, next morning, alerted by newspaper stories, three Israeli policemen knocked on his door and arrested him for entering the country illegally. "Leave me alone," he wailed. "I am a sick man." Bailed Out. Thus Robert Soblen neared the end of a long, deeply rutted road.

In his New York espionage trial, testimony was given that Robert and his younger brother Jack (who spells his name Soble) had arrived in the U.S. in the early '40s, after promising Russian Spy Boss Lavrenty Beria that they would spy for the Communists in exchange for exit visas for some 15 relatives. The brothers became American citizens. Robert and his wife Dina, also a psychiatrist, took positions at an institution near New York City. Throughout World War II and into the '50s, Robert Soblen and Jack Soble turned over to the Soviets secret U.S. information; much of it dealt with the activities of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime U.S. counterespionage system. Jack was nabbed first and given a seven-year sentence. Then Robert was picked up, and his brother was the chief witness against him in his trial.

Robert was sentenced to life imprisonment (at that time, a year ago, doctors gave him about a year to live).

Soblen immediately appealed--and began scouting around for money to pay his bail, set at $100,000. Bonding agencies refused to lend anything, so his wife scraped up $40,000 out of savings and life insurance policies. An acquaintance, George Kirstein, publisher of the liberal weekly, the Nation, rounded up the remaining $60,000. He called Mrs. Helen Lehman Buttenwieser, wealthy wife of an investment banker, niece of New York's ex-Senator Herbert H. Lehman, and herself a sometime attorney for Alger Hiss.

Mrs. Buttenwieser did not know Soblen, but she put up the money (of which Kirstein promised to underwrite half) because, she said, she was shocked over the refusal of the bonding agencies to deal with a convicted spy.

Red Faces. Last Monday, after hearing on the radio that the U.S. Supreme Court had denied his final appeal, Soblen wrote identical letters to several Manhattan daily newspapers and the Nation. Headed "Why Am I Leaving America?," the letters claimed that he had been railroaded by the FBI and by a prosecuting attorney and a "hanging judge" who had "bullied the jury into a verdict of guilty." Soblen added a postscript ("How strange are the roads of justice") in which he maintained that his brother Jack had testified as chief accuser, even though he had been "certified insane." That night he bought his ticket and flew off.

Deeply chagrined by Soblen's flight was the FBI, which maintained lamely that it had not bothered to keep him under watch because he was a dying man and because nobody expected that he would leave his wife and well-wishers in the hole. (The FBI had not bothered to tail Convicted Communists Gus Hall or Gerhart Eisler either--and both skipped.) Just as shocked were the people who had stood up for Soblen in the face of public rejection. Benefactress Buttenwieser said that it "never occurred to me he'd run out." Snapped Soblen's attorney: "I think this was an indecent, dishonest thing for him to have done." At week's end Israel deported Soblen and sent him on his way back to the U.S.

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