And there could be more intriguing trades in the works
To the rest of the passengers who had boarded Pan Am's Flight 688 in Frankfurt, West Germany, one morning ast week, there seemed nothing remarkable about the bearded man and his three neatly dressed companions. But as soon as the jet landed at West Berlin's Tegel Airport, the foursome rushed into a U.S.
Government sedan, which promptly sped off to the U.S. mission in the verdant Dahlem quarter of the divided city. There, the three escorts — an East German attorney, a U.S. State Department official and an Israeli parliamentary aide— delivered their charge, winding up one of the most intricate East-West spy swaps in years: the exchange of a convicted Soviet agent who had been held in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania for an American student who had been imprisoned by the East Germans. As part of the same deal, a young Israeli had already been freed by the Marxist regime in Mozambique.
The central figure in the swap was the prisoner from Lewisburg: Robert Thompson, 43, a onetime U.S. Air Force clerk who had served 13 years of a 30-year sentence after confessing, in 1965, that he had passed hundreds of photos of secret documents to the Soviets while he was based in West Berlin. After the exchange, Thompson hurried off into East Berlin, leaving behind several lingering puzzles about his true identity. Although U.S. investigators remained persuaded that he was a Detroit-born American, Thompson maintained that he was actually born in Leipzig (now in East Germany) of a Russian father and a German mother. If given another opportunity to spy for the Soviets, he said, he would "do it again." In any case, Moscow was so eager to obtain Thompson that it arranged for other Communist regimes to give up two prisoners:
> Miron Marcus, 24, an Israeli who holds a passport from Rhodesia, and works there in his father-in-law's radio-manufacturing business. In late April, Marcus was allowed to walk to freedom into Swaziland from Mozambique, where he had been held since September 1976, when bad weather forced his private plane to land during a flight to South Africa. Mozambican troops surrounded the craft and opened fire, wounding Marcus and killing his brother-in-law. Although he has insisted that his flight was strictly for business purposes, diplomats in West Germany have speculated that Marcus might have been surveying Cuban and Soviet activity in Mozambique for the CIA and Israeli intelligence.
>Alan van Norman, 22, a biology student at Minnesota's Concordia College. He flew home last week after being delivered to the U.S. mission in West Berlin by the East Germans. They sentenced him to a 2½-year prison term last January, after he had been caught five months earlier attempting to smuggle a family out of East Germany. After his release, Van Norman told newsmen that he had "only wanted to help people. It was not a question of money." He appeared in good health, although he complained of "very rough interrogation" during his first three months of confinement.
The triple prisoner play was the result of several months of negotiations.