Clues surfacing in Wallenberg disappearance

So far, no evidence has emerged that Wallenberg worked for the Pond, and Stout said in an interview he had not seen Wallenberg mentioned in any papers he has reviewed.

But their circles of contacts intersected at several points, including members of the Hungarian resistance and possibly the Philips connection.

“The Pond was centered around President Roosevelt’s office and rumors of a special mission, intelligence or otherwise, for Raoul Wallenberg have persisted through the years,” said Berger, who suspects the Soviets knew about the agency.

It may have been just one more reason for Stalin to order his arrest, she said. Regardless of whether Wallenberg was involved, “the Pond’s activities clearly would have served to enhance Soviet paranoia about Allied activities and aims in Hungary.”

Hungarian historian Laszlo Ritter, of the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said the Philips company also was providing cover for Britain’s MI6 intelligence service. One of its crucial agents in the Balkans was Lolle Smit, who was knighted after the war by both Britain and his native Holland.

One month before Wallenberg arrived, Smit fled Budapest for Romania, from where he continued to control his network, Ritter said, but he left his family behind.

Smit’s daughter, Berber Smit, worked with Wallenberg in his rescue efforts — and “had a romance with him,” according to her son, Alan Hogg.

Ritter said Hungarian war files show no direct tie between Wallenberg and Smit, or between the diplomat and British intelligence. At the same time, MI6 used the Swedish legation at least twice to smuggle out information, and helped give false papers to Jews and the anti-fascist resistance, he said.

When the OSS wanted to dispatch a radio to the Hungarian underground leader Geza Soos, it sent the transmitter with a Swedish intelligence officer and told him Wallenberg would know how to contact Soos.

Wallenberg’s very name may have been enough to arouse Russian distrust. Throughout the war, his cousins Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the czars of a banking and industrial empire, had done business in Germany, producing the ball bearings that kept its army on the move.

The Wallenbergs also were involved in discreet, unsuccessful peace efforts between the Allies and Germany, which Stalin feared would leave him excluded — a foretaste of global realignment that would lead to the Cold War.

Orderly recalls 'very special prisoner'
In December 1993, investigator Marvin Makinen of the University of Chicago interviewed Varvara Larina, a retired orderly at Moscow’s Vladimir Prison since 1946. She remembered a foreigner who was kept in solitary confinement on the third floor of Korpus 2, a building used both as a hospital and isolation ward.

Though it was decades earlier, the prisoner stood out in Larina’s memory. He spoke Russian with an accent and “complained about everything,” she said. He repeatedly griped that the soup was cold by the time Larina delivered it. Prison authorities ordered her to serve him first.

“This is very unusual,” Makinen said in an interview. Normally, such complaints would condemn an inmate to a punishment cell. “The fact that he wasn’t means he was a very special prisoner.”

When shown a gallery of photographs, Larina immediately picked out Wallenberg’s — one never published before, Makinen said.

She recalled he was in the opposite cell when another prisoner, Kirill Osmak, died in May 1960.

That was enough for Makinen and Chicago colleague Ari Kaplan to roughly pinpoint the cell of Larina’s foreigner. Creating a database of cell occupancy from the prison’s registration cards, they found two units opposite Osmak’s that were reported empty for 243 and 717 days respectively.

Normally, cells were left vacant for a week at most, Makinen said. The researchers concluded that those two cells likely held special prisoners, namelessly concealed in the gulag.

Mesinai and others reviewed hundreds of accounts over the decades of people who claimed to have seen or heard of someone who could have been Wallenberg. They established a pattern of sightings, even though many individual reports were considered unreliable, uncorroborated, deliberate hoaxes or cases of mistaken identity with other Swedish prisoners.

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