The postcards that every policeman fears

Press, 4 March 1978, Page 15

The postcards that every policeman fears

Bv

G. R. LANE

The picture postcard from New York, with a view of the Empire State Building, and bearing the curt message, “Have deposited money as requested,” caused a stir when it was delivered to the bleak grey building in Maxim Gorky Street, Moscow.

It was addressed to a prominent member of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s security squad. In the next few weeks, cards bearing similar incriminating messages arrived in Moscow bearing London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong postmarks. The official. who strenuously denied any malpractice, was suspended from his job, and eventually transferred to an obscure Government office in Izhevsk. The “postcard game” had claimed another victim. in the last five years, the trick of sending falsely incriminating postcards and letters to police and security officials in communist countries has become a major weapon of revenge for journalists and correspondents who claim they have been victimised or ill-treated while on foreign assignments.

For instance, the man in Maxim Gorky Street had been responsible for the expulsion of the Moscow correspondent of a major New York news syndicate. Immediately after the reporter’s plane touched down at Heathrow on his way back to the United States, he sent the first incriminating postcard to his adversary. It simply said: “Manuscript arrived safely.”

“In every communist country all allegations of corruption, however improbable, are investigated with relentless energy,” says an experienced foreign correspondent. “If you have had a rough time at the hands of certain officials, it is

not unnatural to want to get your own back once you have left the country; and this is the best way of getting the man into trouble — if you really want to take things that far.” Recently, a French correspondent expelled from South Africa even went to the trouble of setting in type a fictitious news story which quoted an official as the source of confidential information. A copy of the story was sent to the man’s superiors, who suspended him while an investigation took place. The man, later cleared, had been responsible for the reporter’s departure.

The “postcard game” is said to have been thought up by a British correspondent who was ordered to leave Russia in 1973 in 1973 after a Soviet Foreign Office official suspected — wrongly — that the reporter was having an affair with his wife. Now it is regarded as one of the most effective ways of hitting back at bureaucrats.

Postcards, and other apparently incriminating material, now bombard security services in virtually every country that has ha-

rassed foreign journalists and trade representatives. Another way to put an official under suspicion is to get a package, addressed to him and containing banned books, delivered to a wrong government department. Sometimes such packages are delivered to a post office, marked, “Unable to trace,” or are left at a rail or air terminal. Once a parcel is opened, the offender’s name within is enough to set an official investigation in motion, and invariably the family and friends of the suspect become involved. However far-fetched the allegation, an intensive investigation is always made, as in the case of a Moscow-based Italian journalist who sent a card to a secret policeman who had been harassing him. It read: “Please deposit the 100 roubles gambling debt you owe me in my Moscow bank account.” To help make the mud stick, the writer had a colleague pay 100 roubles into his bank, with the policeman’s name on the paying-in slip. The policeman was eventually cleared after a long and searching inquiry.

The “postcard trick” was also used recently by an American correspondent in Havana who had been harassed by the Cuban secret police, the G2.

On his return to Chicago he bombarded G2 officials with a series of postcards suggesting illegal currency dealing and bribery. Two top officers were later suspended.