Two-Way Street

Keenly aware that Western Europe was shaken by the defection of West German Intelligence Chief Otto John to Communist East Germany (see FOREIGN NEWS), the U.S. last week reminded the world that defection is a two-way street--with the heaviest traffic running freedom's way. At a specially summoned press conference, the State Department produced Yuri Rastvorov, 33, the six-footer who was a high-ranking MVD spy in Japan before he fled from the Soviet embassy* and asked U.S. authorities for protection last winter (TIME, Feb. 15).

Rastvorov phlegmatically faced some 200 correspondents in the State Department auditorium, talked innocuously about his background in fluent but heavily accented English. His mother, he said, secretly had him baptized when he was a baby, but was too fearful even to tell his father. His grandfather was turned off a small farm by the government because he once hired a man to help him get in the crops; the grandfather subsequently starved to death. His uncle was an army doctor who was taken prisoner by the Germans, was put through a three-year "quarantine camp" on his return to Russia because he had seen the outside world, and after that constantly was held under suspicion.

"I tried hard all my life to believe in this [Communist] system," Rastvorov related, "but I could not . . . After I saw with my own eyes how people live their own lives and how they get along with each other in free countries [I decided] to leave forever a fatherland which [was] a concentration camp."

The Justice Department announced that Rastvorov would be granted asylum in the U.S. The State Department added that Soviet Ambassador Georgy Zarubin --who had been demanding to know Rast-vorov's whereabouts--had been invited to talk to Rastvorov in the State Department, but the embassy replied that the ambassador was indisposed, and so were all of his assistants.

* Among other Soviet agents who had fled: General Walter G. Krivitsky, who escaped to the West in 1937, and was found shot to death in a Washington hotel room in 1941; Captain Victor (I Chose Freedom) Kravchenko, 1944; Soviet Cipher Clerk Igor Gouzenko, whose defection broke up a Canadian spy ring, 1945; Captain Nikolai Khokhlov, assigned to assassinate an anti-Communist Russian in West Germany, last February; and Vladimir Petrov, Soviet spy planted in the Russian embassy in Australia, last April.

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