U.S. ‘sold-out’ dissidents

Press, 3 February 1987, Page 6

U.S. ‘sold-out’ dissidents

NZPA-AFP New York The United States betrayed two Russian dissident writers to Soviet authorities in the 1960 s with a view to making a propaganda score when they were arrested, “Time” magazine reports in its latest issue.

The weekly quoted a Soviet poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, as saying he had learned from Senator Robert Kennedy that Washington had told Moscow that the dissidents, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were publishing anti-totalitarian works in the West under pseudonyms. Both later were sentenced to prison camps.

The poet was quoted as

saying that, when he met Mr Kennedy in 1966, “to my surprise he invited me into his bathroom, turned on the shower, and in a lowered voice he said, ‘I would like you to tell your Government that the names of Sinyavsky and Daniel were given to your agents by our agents’.” Mr Kennedy was said to have explained that because of setbacks in Vietnam “our standing had begun to diminish both at home and abroad” and Washington “needed a propaganda counterweight.”

Mr Yevtushenko said he found “the cynical logic of this was shattering,” but that he could not yet reveal the full story.