Marvin William Makinen was a bright boy. The son of a laboratory technician, he grew up in Ashburnham, Mass., where his father had a job in a paper mill, showed an early precocity in mathematics, won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Last year he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study as an exchange student at West Berlin's Free University. One of his professors characterized the 22-year-old Makinen as "the most serious and hard-working young American we have seen in Berlin in a long time." Makinen spoke fluent German and Finnish (which he had learned from his family), took private lessons in Russian. Short, slight, with corn-silk blond hair cropped close, he was not a big hit with the girls at the university because, as one put it: "You always got the feeling that he would rather be alone."
When summer vacation came, Makinen set out in a rented green sunroof Volkswagen for a trip through East Germany and Poland to Moscow. Nothing more was heard from Student Makinen until last week, when Moscow announced that he had been arrested as a spy.
Plain Vigilance. According to the Russians, Makinen had been approached in Berlin by two mysterious sponsors whom he knew only as "Jim" and "Dwyer," and provided with Intourist food and lodging vouchers, camera, film and dagger—everything but the traditional cloak. They told him what places to visit and what military installations he should photograph. The Russian press boasted that his downfall had been due to the vigilance of "plain Soviet workers" who had become suspicious of Makinen's choice of such unsightly picture subjects as airfields, army trucks and soldiers.
In Kiev on July 27, said the Russians, he had parked his Volkswagen in an "inconspicuous spot" and flagged a taxi to take him to a military installation near the city. There he had been seized by security agents and a Soviet army officer, as "with trembling hands the spy aimed his camera and clicked away rapidly." Tucked into a body belt, they found eight rolls of film, road maps and other impedimenta, including some notebooks. Sample entries: "Near city I ate three sandwiches ... At 156 kilometers, it started raining . . . Encountered peasants." These seemingly innocent notations, explained the Russians, were really cunning cryptograms—"three sandwiches" meant "three military installations"; "156" was the license of an army truck; "peasants" meant "soldiers."
Crisis Victim. The military tribunal at Kiev sentenced Marvin Makinen to eight years' detention—just two years less than the punishment dished out to Francis Gary Powers for flying his U-2 thousands of miles into Soviet hinterland. In all probability, Makinen was a victim of the Berlin crisis. He came from West Berlin, just at the moment the Russians were charging that it was a center for imperialist plotters. Crowed Izvestia: "It becomes still clearer that the government of East Germany acted just in time in closing loopholes for all kinds of filth which tried to penetrate in our direction."