Mini-Siege

A strange defection in Kabul

Brandishing his AK-47 assault rifle, a 21-year-old Soviet soldier alighted from a taxi at the gate of the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul one morning last week, and was met by an American official who took him inside. Then, speaking only Russian laced with a smattering of German, he managed to tell surprised embassy officers that he wanted to defect. It was the first such move by any of the estimated 85,000 Soviet military personnel who have occupied the country since last winter's invasion. Before long, the mysterious enlisted man had become the most prominent Soviet military defector since Lieut. Viktor Belenko flew his MiG-25 to Japan in 1976. The defection sparked off an international row and added an unpredictable new irritant to already testy U.S.-Soviet relations.

Both the State Department and the Pentagon chose to play the issue down, partly because of lack of hard information. Although they believe that the soldier wants to defect to avoid punishment for insubordination, they are not certain. Strangely, no one on the 16-member staff of the Kabul embassy speaks either Russian or German and the would-be defector thus has not yet been fully interrogated. For their part, the Soviets insist that he is a common criminal escaping from military justice. They charge that he was lured into the compound.

Three days later, the State Department had finally managed to get a Russian-speaking American official into Kabul to debrief the defector, though it released no details. The embassy, meanwhile, had come under a mini-siege. First, the phone communications were cut off. Then squads of Afghan troops surrounded the compound. The apparent campaign of harassment spread to other Western embassies, where diplomats were searched and followed as they came and went.

Though U.S. diplomats were concerned that ultimately the Soviets just might arrest an American to set up a possible trade, or even that Afghan troops might storm the embassy, the matter seemed, so far, a standoff. It was obviously impossible to spirit the soldier out to the West. On the other hand, particularly in the midst of an election campaign, the Carter Administration was in no position to hand him back. One way out of the impasse seemed to be up to the Soviets: if they were to prove eager to clear the air for this week's meeting between Secretary of State Edmund Muskie and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, for example, it was thought they might allow the hapless defector to go abroad--though not to the U.S. Otherwise, he was likely to remain in the embassy as an uninvited guest for the foreseeable future.

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