A Warning for Sakharov

It has become almost embarrassingly routine for Soviet officials to attack Andrei Sakharov for criticizing Russian repression. Recently the Soviet physicist changed his target to the Middle East war and, true to form, he ran into trouble for his views. This time, however, he did not get the verbal abuse he receives so often in the Soviet press, but rather 75 minutes of terror at the hands of two Arab activists.

In a brief interview with a Lebanese journalist, Sakharov had called on the Communist powers not to "interfere" in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and had urged the West to "take retaliatory measures" if "one-sided" Soviet intervention continued. Sakharov's remarks fell far short of a pro-Israeli position, but they were still not what the Arabs wanted to hear.

This became clear last week when two men, describing themselves as members of the Black September terrorist organization, personally delivered a stern warning to Sakharov at his Moscow apartment. The two demanded Sakharov's written opinion of the Middle East conflict and ominously informed him: "We'll report your views back to headquarters, and they'll decide what to do with you." The conversation, Sakharov later recounted to friends, got more tense as time went on. At one point, one of the men "jumped like a tiger" to the telephone, where Mrs. Sakharov was standing, and hastily cut the wire. Finally, very agitated, they ordered Sakharov to say nothing more about the Middle East, leaving him with a threat: "We have agents everywhere--in New York, in Moscow, everywhere. We never warn people twice. We can do something worse than killing you."

The intruders did not specify what they meant but, vague as it was. Sakharov had good reason to take their warning seriously. This was the first incident of Arab terrorism known to have taken place in the Soviet Union, and it is probably no accident that it was directed against the Kremlin's most persistent gadfly. The timing was suspicious. A new barrage of anti-Sakharov articles has been appearing in Soviet journals, the first since early September. And there was recently a Soviet counter to a warning issued by the U.S. Academy of Sciences that any punishment of Sakharov would endanger Soviet-American scientific cooperation. Sakharov, charged Mstyslav Keldysh, president of the Soviet Academy, is "politically blind."

Sakharov reported the incident to the police, who sent four men to investigate. But since Sakharov's house is kept under government surveillance anyway, it seems highly unlikely that the intruders could have escaped official notice. While world public opinion probably keeps the Kremlin from persecuting Sakharov more actively, if it had wanted to give him a good fright it would have found the Arab threats extremely convenient.

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