FOREIGN RELATIONS: Out of the Night

Austrian prisoners of war coming home from Soviet captivity last October reported that two Americans, named Homer Cox and Leland Towers, were among the inmates in a camp northeast of Moscow.The State Department checked up, learned that 1) a Private Homer Cox, 33, from Oklahoma City, had been missing from his U.S. Army unit in Berlin since September 1949, and 2) a Leland Towers, 28, from San Francisco, had dropped out of sight in Finland in October 1951. U.S. Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen protested to the Kremlin. Last week, at Soviet military headquarters in East Berlin, the Russians handed the two men over to U.S. officials. For holding Cox and Towers prisoner (Cox for 51 months and Towers for 27) the stone-faced Russians offered no apology, no explanation.

Boy Meets Girl. The day after their release, Cox and Towers told their stories to the press. Cox said that he blacked out while drinking in a West Berlin café, woke up the next morning in an East Berlin police station. He spent the next 32 months in East Berlin’s Lichtenberg Prison. His Russian captors accused him of being an intelligence agent, interrogated him “eight, ten, twelve hours daily . . . They beat and starved me. They stripped me and put handcuffs on me and strapped my legs to the chair . . . They would beat me until I passed out, then throw ice water on me.”

Sentenced to 53 years’ hard labor for espionage, sabotage and subversion, Cox was shipped to an Arctic prison camp, put to work in a coal mine. On a diet of two bowls of watery cabbage soup a day, he shriveled to 117 lbs. from his normal 180. “Every day someone died,” he recalled. When prisoners rioted, he said, guards sprayed machine-gun fire into the crowd.

In slave-labor camps, Cox met several other American prisoners.* But the prisoner that interested him most of all was an Austrian girl named Inge Brenner, whom the Russians released last October. After his liberation last week, Cox and Inge exchanged fervent telegrams, and Inge told reporters in Vienna that she expected to marry Cox.

Cox’s story seemed “straightforward,” an Army spokesman said. A court-martial lay ahead, but it would probably be just a formality to clear his record of desertion charges. Dark as the past four years had been for Homer Cox, the future, all in all, looked bright. He showed no signs of mental or physical crippling, he stood to collect more than four years’ back pay, and he had found romance in a most unlikely place.

The Freedomist. Much less straightforward than Cox’s was the story told by Leland Towers, a complicated type who described himself as “an adventurous character” and “a freedomist.” Towers told of joining the American Communist Party in 1947, then setting out on foreign travels, working as a seaman and laborer. He wanted very much to see the Soviet Union because, as he still said last week, “the capitalist world is sick.” Failing to get a visa from the Soviet embassy in Stockholm, he went to Finland, bought a pair of wirecutters, an ax and a compass, and cut his way through a barbed-wire barricade at the Finnish-Soviet border.

“I was a free man on Soviet territory for only five minutes,” Towers said ruefully. Arrested and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for illegal entry, he “saw Russia through the bars and barbed wire of prisons and labor camps.”

This view of life behind the Iron Curtain changed the freedomist’s convictions a little. “There is no freedom in the Soviet Union,” he said at last week’s press conference. “Russian Communism is com plete chaos.” But not all the Red had rubbed off, it appeared. Towers referred to the reporters as “members of the capitalist press,” and announced that “quite a few changes should be made in the capitalist countries.” When a reporter noted that Towers had remarkably uncallused hands for a man who had worked in Soviet labor camps. Towers said blandly: “I wore cotton gloves.” None of the thousands of returning captives the newsmen had met had ever before said anything about gloves in a Russian labor camp.

Asked about his plans, Towers said that he wanted to visit Spain and Yugoslavia and then return to the U.S., “if that’s possible.” But before Leland Towers set put on any more travels, geographical or ideological, U.S. intelligence services wanted to ask him a lot of questions.

*He listed Army Privates William Marchuk of Brackenridge, Pa. and William Verdine of Starks, La., Civilians Jack Hural of Beverly Hills, Calif., George Green of Hollywood, and Leah Green, George’s sister. He also said that he had heard about six other American prisoners whose names he did not know.