Sergeants on Trial (Contd.)

For two months, a smoke screen of evasion, misstatement and carefully calculated confusion had been thrown over the case of four U.S. sergeants on trial in Turkey for black-market dealings in currency (TIME, Aug. 24 et seq.). Last week despite officialdom's best efforts, the smoke screen began to lift.

At the fifth session of the sergeants' slow-motion trial, the prosecution, after a month of stalling, finally produced its star witness, Mrs. Sukran Gall, Turkish-born wife of a U.S. electrician. Admitting that she had been employed by the Turkish treasury to entrap the Americans, Mrs. Gall testified that she had bought nearly 5,000 illicit dollars from three of the sergeants. But under questioning she admitted she had never, in fact, received any money directly from the sergeants, instead had dealt through the Turkish manager of the N.C.O. club maintained by U.S. forces assigned to NATO's southeastern headquarters in Izmir.

After hearing Mrs. Gall out, Judge Resat Soysal ordered one of the Americans, Sergeant Giacomo Recevuto of Brooklyn, released on bail. Then ignoring a prosecution offer to agree to the bailing of two more of the sergeants, the judge set the next session of the trial some 25 days off--the longest interval yet.

Kicks or Instruments. The smoke screen lifted even further at the companion trial of three Turkish cops accused of beating Sergeants Dale McCuistion and James King in an attempt to make them confess to dealings with Mrs. Gall. Air Force Colonel Robert N. Wilkinson, the first U.S. officer to see the sergeants after their arrest, told the court he had not been permitted to talk to them until they had been in prison about 30 hours. When he did, "King was shaking nervously, could hardly speak, and had difficulty standing up . . . He had a secretion at the corner of his mouth which appeared to be dried blood." McCuistion, testified Wilkinson, was in worse shape: "He was crying and weeping and saying, 'Colonel, they beat me within an inch of my life.'

The other U.S. witness was Lieut. Colonel Charles N. Moss, medical officer and commander of the Air Force hospital in Izmir. He told the court he was unable to get in to see the sergeants for some 36 hours. When he did, he found McCuistion severely bruised in five places on his chest, shoulders and back. Asked by the judge if the bruises could have been caused resisting arrest, Moss replied: "It is unlikely that all were sustained resisting arrest. Some seem to have come from severe kicks or an instrument."

The Heart of the Matter. For their pains, Colonels Wilkinson and Moss were rewarded last week with orders transferring them back to the U.S. on two weeks' notice. U.S. military officials in Turkey would say only that the transfers were "for the good of the Air Force." But Colonel Moss made things a bit more explicit. Though his Air Force career was at stake, he said, he felt he had to testify in the brutality trial "to retain my self-respect."

His dander up, Moss also fired off a five-page report on the sergeants' case to Air Force headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, and in Washington, requesting an investigation "of the highest order." i.e., by Congress. Noted the report flatly: "It is against American law, both military and civilian, to obtain confessions by force, brutality or torture . . ." Then, driving to the heart of the matter, Moss wrote that before the sergeants' arrest, the morale of U.S. forces in Izmir was high, but now "service men here [feel] that they are being let down by their own civilian national representatives in high places. I have personal knowledge of one officer who has already submitted his resignation from the service and of three others who are seriously contemplating resigning because of ... the drastic curtailment of their inalienable rights as Americans by American governmental officials in Turkey."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.