Wallenberg's Fate Still Cloudy

A top Kremlin adviser said Friday that Raoul Wallenberg was killed in 1947 in a vicious turf war between rival branches of the Soviet secret services.

But Swedish investigators studying the fate of the former diplomat concluded Friday that the government should have pressed harder for answers decades ago and now the truth may never be known.

Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said Friday after a 10-year investigation that Moscow had failed to provide decisive evidence that Wallenberg is dead.

Wallenberg, a Swede, helped tens of thousands of Jews escape Nazi-occupied Hungary before he was arrested in 1945 after the Soviets entered that country.

The Russians now claim, without offering proof, that he died in a Soviet prison in 1947.

Alexander Yakovlev, who heads a Russian presidential probe into Soviet repression, said Soviet troops arrested the young Swedish diplomat in 1945 perhaps because they wanted to tap the connections in German and U.S. intelligence that he had used to save thousands of Jews from the Nazis.

"Clearly, there was no definitive order to do it (kill Wallenberg)," Yakovlev said. He said Wallenberg was shot by agents of the future KGB who then tried to hide the crime from their political masters. Their systematic destruction of his files has added to the mystery surrounding the Swede's fate.

"Wallenberg knew an awful lot. It's no joke saving 30,000 from death camps … You had to have very good contacts with German intelligence," Yakovlev said in an interview.

"It was clear that he represented certain Swedish services … and evidently he was connected to Americans of such a high level that, of course, (he) was of interest to us. Clearly they (Soviet intelligence) hoped for more, but they got nothing," Yakovlev added.

Yakovlev, once a member of the former ruling Communist Party Politburo of the Soviet Union, told Reuters he had ordered investigations into "sightings" brought to his attention by Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel prize winner and human rights activist.

Some researchers believe that the Swedish envoy may have been alive as recently as 1989, and that German Chancellor Helmut Kohl urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during a telephone conversation in that year to "let the old man go."

Yakovlev, dubbed the father of the "glasnost" or openness policy pursued by Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, discounted reports that Wallenberg could have languished for decades in the Soviet gulag.

Yakovlev said credible reports of encounters with the Swedish diplomat ceased after 1947, the year Moscow said Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison.

A scion of a wealthy Swedish industrial dynasty, Wallenberg became a legend by saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from Nazi persecution, only to disappear after his detention by Soviet troops in wartime Budapest.

Defying threats from leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Wallenberg shltered Jews in "protected houses" flying the flags of neutral countries and issued Swedish identity documents to thousands of Jews, hauling some off trains even as they left for Nazi extermination camps.

His bravery earned him the title of "righteous gentile," a honor awarded by Israel in instances of courage in helping save Jews from the Holocaust. Wallenberg is believed to have saved as many as 100,000 lives.

After his arrest Wallenberg was taken to Moscow even as the Soviets lied to Sweden over his fate.

Moscow first claimed he was killed during fighting in Budapest, then that he was taken under the protection of Soviet troops. A 1957 memo from then-Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko said Wallenberg died of a heart attack in Soviet custody in 1947.

Critics have accused Sweden of moving too slowly in pursuing Wallenberg by initially accepting Soviet assurances that he was being held for safekeeping, then not insisting on his return for fear of spoiling negotiations on a trade agreement with Russia.

The Swedish panel issued a final report that revealed some new information about Wallenberg, and criticized Sweden's postwar government for missing possible chances to win Wallenberg's freedom in the months after his disappearance.

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