The Siege at No. 5

Down Schloesslistrasse in Bern, one of the quietest streets in the quietest capital in Europe, walked four masked men. The time was 10 p.m. Coming to No. 5, which is the Rumanian legation, they climbed quietly over a high iron-grille fence. Looming above them in the snowy darkness was the big building presided over by Charge d'Affaires Emeric Stoffel. To their left, in a chalet-type house near the street, was the chancellery, where lived Aurel Setu, nominally the chauffeur, but actually the secret police boss of the Communist legation. The leader of the masked men rang the bell at the chancellery. "Step inside," he said, when Madame Setu opened the door. They trussed Madame Setu in a chair, then began searching the place. In the cellar, as in all Communist secret police outposts, there was a small arsenal.

Four hours later in the big house, Charge d'Affaires Stoffel was awakened by a burst of shots. A few minutes later some masked men with Tommy guns broke into his room. Stoffel dashed for the next room, followed by a burst of gunfire. Leaping through a window, he landed in the garden, and fled to the neighbors. Said he later, explaining why he left his wife and children behind: "I put myself into safety . . . This is not the kind of thing that happens in everyday diplomatic life."

The masked men did not molest the legation women and children, or Stoffel's two attaches, who escaped to the street. To the sound of smashing wood and glass, the masked men began ransacking the big house. When the Swiss police arrived, shivering, pajama-clad Stoffel, pleading diplomatic privilege, refused to let them into the grounds. Floodlights were directed on the legation, and the area encircled with barbed wire. A hundred steel-helmeted police armed with rifles and submachine guns covered the house. Finally, at dawn, with Stoffel's permission, the police broke into the legation grounds. Following a trail of bloodstains in the snow, they found Chauffeur Setu lying unconscious under a bush, bleeding from gunshot wounds. They rushed him to a hospital, where he died.

The Swiss Watch. Still the cops did not try to storm the big house. As one of the masked men tried to leave the legation, he was captured by the cops. He said that he and his accomplices were all members of a Rumanian anti-Communist resistance movement and had planned the action (and others in Stockholm and Copenhagen) as a protest against the imprisonment of prominent resistance leaders in Rumania. His companions were armed with automatic weapons and grenades, he warned, and would resist "until death" because they knew that there was no escape for them. Searching him, cops found papers he had scooped up in the legation. After a prudent interval, the Swiss diplomatically returned the papers to Charge d'Affaires Stoffel.

By now excitement was running high in Bern. As hundreds of citizens converged on the Schloesslistrasse, plainclothesmen cordoned the district. At 7:30 a.m. the Swiss Federal Council met in an extraordinary session. Other Communist legations were demanding protection.

Charge d'Affaires Stoffel, in an official diplomatic note to the Swiss Foreign Office, demanded immediate arrest and extradition of the attackers, accused the Swiss police of "inexcusable tardiness." He said that the attack was an "act of banditry without precedent" by "a gang of Rumanian fascists and other criminal elements, armed with automatic weapons, axes and knives," who had "pillaged" the legation. The Swiss simply replied that they did not like the tone of the Rumanians' protest.

The Undone Oath. Refusing to be provoked by Communist taunts, the police acted cautiously. Commissioner Kurt Kessi called the legation on the telephone, asked to be admitted with an interpreter. Kessi found three tall young men in the legation. For two hours he spoke to the leader, trying to get him to surrender. "I emphasized that we would use the maximum force to capture them," he said. "I made no impression."

Next morning Kessi saw the Rumanians again. The leader told Kessi that the Communists had killed his father in Rumania and that he had taken an oath "to fight to the end." Kessi suggested that a Catholic priest. Father Beat Lorenz Seckinger, could absolve the Rumanian leader of his oath. That afternoon he returned with Father Seckinger. After the leader spent ten minutes with the priest, the Rumanians, still masked, left the legation under police guard. They had held the legation for 42 hours.

While Radio Bucharest filled the air with Charges that the four were paid U.S. agents, the Swiss were more inclined to accept the judgment of Father Seckinger: "They are all ardent Rumanian patriots and idealists. They hoped by their action to draw attention to the awful state of "affairs in Rumania under the Communist regime." Booking the four men for manslaughter (not murder), Swiss police did not make their names public, and categorically refused to hand them over to the Communists for extradition to Rumania. Whether the audacious young masked men had found anything incriminating, Swiss police would not say.

In the Rumanian legation in Copenhagen, the Communists had trouble over another chauffeur. Driver Ion Cimpu, 25, asked the Danes for political asylum for himself and his bride of eight months, Maria, 21. But the Rumanians got wind of his plan, refused to part with Maria, instead produced her at a press conference, where she said she had never heard her husband talk of fleeing to the West. "Had I known, I would have killed him because such a thought is treason against our country," said Maria. "Now I only want to go back to Rumania as fast as possible, [because] I might be kidnaped by the Danish police like my husband." A few days later she was flown back to Bucharest.

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