(2 of 2)
"I was a free man on Soviet territory for only five minutes," Towers said ruefully. Arrested and sentenced to three years' imprisonment for illegal entry, he "saw Russia through the bars and barbed wire of prisons and labor camps."
This view of life behind the Iron Curtain changed the freedomist's convictions a little. "There is no freedom in the Soviet Union," he said at last week's press conference. "Russian Communism is com plete chaos." But not all the Red had rubbed off, it appeared. Towers referred to the reporters as "members of the capitalist press," and announced that "quite a few changes should be made in the capitalist countries." When a reporter noted that Towers had remarkably uncallused hands for a man who had worked in Soviet labor camps. Towers said blandly: "I wore cotton gloves." None of the thousands of returning captives the newsmen had met had ever before said anything about gloves in a Russian labor camp.
Asked about his plans, Towers said that he wanted to visit Spain and Yugoslavia and then return to the U.S., "if that's possible." But before Leland Towers set put on any more travels, geographical or ideological, U.S. intelligence services wanted to ask him a lot of questions.
*He listed Army Privates William Marchuk of Brackenridge, Pa. and William Verdine of Starks, La., Civilians Jack Hural of Beverly Hills, Calif., George Green of Hollywood, and Leah Green, George's sister. He also said that he had heard about six other American prisoners whose names he did not know.