BURMA: No Escape

A Chinese Communist Ilyushin-14 airliner swept off a Rangoon runway last week and wheeled toward Russia with a drugged, closely guarded wreck of a man as cargo. The man aboard: Soviet Colonel Mikhail I. Stryguine. whose bizarre experience resembled Mrs. Oksana Kasenkina's "jump to freedom" from the Russian consulate in Manhattan almost eleven years ago—except that Colonel Stryguine did not make it.

To Westerners in Burma who knew him, Stryguine bore a remarkable physical resemblance to Frank Sinatra. He was small, thin, sunken-faced. Quick and aggressive, he could also be charming and gregarious. Mikhail Stryguine entered the Russian army at...

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