DEFECTION TO SOVIET

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29291, 24 August 1960, Page 13

DEFECTION TO SOVIET

Intelligence Sergeant MOSCOW, August 22. Sergeant Vladimir Sloboda, described as a member of the United States intelligence service in West Germany, had asked for political asylum in Russia, Tass said tonight. In a statement published in tonight’s issue of the Government newspaper. “Izvestia,” Sloboda reported on the activities of the United States intelligence service in West Germany, Tass said. He said he was deputy commander of one of the sections of Intelligence Group 513, at Oberursel. near Frankfurt. Tass quoted Sloboda as saying that a Colonel Ross, chief of Intelligence Group 513, had said at an operational meeting tha* the United States insisted on holding on to West Berlin because it was a “convenient bridgehead” for smuggling in spies. Sloboda’s statement, headed “I Break with the Enemies of Peace,” was said to have been made on August 5 when he called on the Soviet Embassy in East Germany. He had crossed the border on August 2. In his application for asylum he said that every day of service in the United States intelligence had led him to the conviction that the “official course of the policy of the United States Government was total espionage, deception and blackmail, provocation and hypocrisy.” Tass reported that his application for asylum also said that in the event of the American army and its allies having to withdraw behind the Rhine, the United States intelligence had been preparing plans to demolish important objects and whole towns in West Germany. The Americans had prepared a plan for flooding the Rhine Valley to be put into effect when it was deemed expedient.

According to information in his possession, Sloboda wrote, the United States military was engaged in subversive activities against neutral States as well. Official American military documents said that in the event of war, the neutrality of such countries as Austria and Switzerland should not be considered. It was planned to destroy, in emergency, “strategic objects” in Denmark and Norway. A Bonn report on August 6 said Sloboda had been missing since August 3 and quoted a United States Army announcement which said Sloboda had been employed as a linguist and clerk, with the Military Intelligence Group. Sloboda "had only very limited access to any security information . . . no documents are missing,” the announcement 'aid.