Have Camera, Will Travel

The two tourists seemed innocuous enough when they turned up at the Russian border on July 26. Mark I. Kaminsky, 28, of Edwardsburg, Mich, and Harvey Bennett. 26. of Bath. Me. had hired a Russian-made Volga sedan in Helsinki, and their papers stated that they planned a 30-day motor trip through Russia to brush up on their Russian. Kaminsky and Bennett had met in the Air Force in 1953; both took Russian in college. Kaminsky had landed a job as an instructor at Purdue this fall, and Bennett, fresh out of U.C.L.A., was still looking for a job.

After driving 2,000 miles across Russia from Leningrad to Uzhgorod, they tried to cross the border into Czechoslovakia at Chop. There, Russian border police told them that they were in an area closed to tourists. After spotting a camera, guards seized Kaminsky's films and had them developed. They showed pictures of radar installations, military work gangs, radio antennas, railroad stations, airfields and heavy industrial installations, along with a notebook and map minutely keying the location of each picture. Kaminsky's explanation: he planned to write a book on the theme, "How Russians talk about peace but plan for war."

Strictly Educational. Since the Russian press in May began warning the Russian people to beware of American spies traveling in tourists' clothing, several earnest young Americans have been picked up and expelled for such sinister activities as distributing the Holy Bible and copies of the U.S. Information Service's picture magazine Amerika. But the Russians had never before had a case like this and they made the most of it. Kaminsky admitted he had no publisher, only a $2,000 grant from the "strictly educational" Northcraft Foundation of Philadelphia, to which he was to submit a written report when he got back home.

For days, while Bennett was detained in a Kiev hotel, Kaminsky was kept in solitary confinement and grilled up to eight hours a day. Last month the Russians put Kaminsky on trial for spying, invoking the same article of the Soviet constitution under which U-2 Pilot Francis Powers was convicted. (The Russian press called him "a Powers of the ground.") Advised by the prosecution that the government did not intend to go hard on him. Kaminsky entered a plea of guilty. Bennett appeared as a witness for the state, conceding that Kaminsky's photographs were hardly "usual" for a tourist. The military court sentenced Kaminsky to seven years' corrective labor. On appeal, the sentence was commuted to banishment.

Unwanted Publicity. Last week Kaminsky and Bennett were allowed to fly home. In marked contrast to the Powers case, Washington authorities refused all comment, insisted that the two were bona fide tourists. Though the Northcraft Foundation is not on the list of some 12,000 tax-exempt foundations recognized by the Internal Revenue Service, the State Department blandly insisted that it is an organization giving scholarships to worthy students for foreign travel, referred further queries to the foundation's Philadelphia Lawyer Alex Adelman. Adelman in turn explained that he was only the agent for a group of unnamable "Midwest" businessmen "who don't want any publicity."

The last word came from the Russians. Moscow asked the State Department to kindly use its influence to see that in the future tourism is kept separate and apart from intelligence activities.

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