Flight of the Gypsy Baron

Newspaper boys were still delivering Sunday morning papers when the door of the fashionable ten-room house on Gelfert Strasse opened and two people walked out into the sunlight. The man was tall and burly, his mane of dark wavy hair streaked with grey. His wife was plain and wore her dark blonde hair brushed back over her ears in a severe boyish bob. Absorbed in quiet argument, they walked along the tree-lined street to a neighborhood park, where they talked some more. Then, arm in arm, they returned to the house, and the man bade his wife farewell.

A few minutes later, Wladyslaw Tykocinski, 44, approached a U.S. Army sergeant outside the snack bar of the nearby American-sector PX, identified himself as the chief of the Polish Military Mission to West Berlin, and asked for political asylum.

Tykocinski, who for eight years had been the ranking Polish diplomat in West Berlin, was the most important Communist to defect to the West in years. He was also one of the most puzzling. Known to fellow diplomats as "the Gypsy Baron," Tykocinski is a gregarious bear of a man who liked to claim he was "a socialist but not a Communist." Nevertheless, he enjoyed the full confidence of his government, for the Berlin post was obviously a major intelligence center, and last year he was awarded Poland's Commander Cross for outstanding services. Outside the PX last week, he gave up his wife, his 17-month-old son, and the comforts and prestige of a successful diplomatic career for the uncertain life of an exile in the free world.

To compound the mystery came news that another unhappy Pole had made his way to the West earlier in the month. Using a diplomatic passport to pass through East German border guards, 19-year-old Marek Radomski appeared at West Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie on May 5, told the American MPs on duty that he was "sick of the miserable life under Communism." The young defector's father is an attache in Poland's embassy in East Berlin and is rumored to be chief of Polish intelligence in all East Germany.

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