Asylum-seekers taken to West

Press, 24 January 1984, Page 10

Asylum-seekers taken to West

NZPA-Reuter W. Berlin Six East Germans who sought sanctuary in the United States Embassy in East Berlin have arrived in the West after intervention by a man known as “the spy-swap lawyer” and said to be a confidant of the East German leader, Erich Honecker.

The group walked into the embassy on the city’s Unter den Linden Boulevard on Friday and said that they wanted President Ronald Reagan to give them asylum in the United States because they could not en-

dure a lack of freedom in Communist East Germany. After nearly 2% days in the embassy they had been driven safely through a border point out of East Berlin into the West yesterday, the embassy said.

In a terse statement it said that the group had left East Germany after negotiations with an East Berlin lawyer, Wolfgang Vogel, believed by Bonn officials to be a confidant of Mr Honecker’s, and popularly known as the “spyswap lawyer.” Mr Vogel has for years

been at the centre of a shadowy trade in political prisoners between East and West Germany. Bonn has paid huge sums to East Berlin for the prisoners, buying the freedom of about 1000 a year. Mr Vogel has also been a key intermediary in exchanges of non-German prisoners, including the swap in 1962 of the American U2 spy plane pilot, Gary Powers, for the Soviet master spy, Rudolf Abel. The United States Embassy would not give details of the terms of the release

of the six. The five men and a woman, aged between 19 and 43, came from East Berlin and Potsdam. They had said that they would go on hunger strike in the embassy until they were granted exit visas. They said that they had repeatedly been refused permission to leave the country legally and that two had served jail terms for trying to flee. East Germans applying to go to the West often have to wait for years and many are refused permission.