Report Leopold Trepper to File Libel Suit Against French Official

The head of the Leopold Trepper Defense Committee reported today that the World War II master spy will file a libel suit against Jean Rochet, director of the French counter-espionage service, who has accused Trepper of collaboration with the Gestapo. In a letter published today in Le Monde, Gilles Perrault said Trepper told him of his intention to sue Rochet in a telephone conversation Friday from Warsaw. Last Thursday Le Monde published Rochet’s charge that Trepper turned over his comrades, many of them Jews, to the Gestapo after the Nazis arrested him in 1942.

Trepper headed the Soviet espionage network in Western Europe during World War II, known as the “Red Orchestra.” He and his wife live in Poland and have been trying, in vain, to get exit visas to go to Israel to join their son, Edgar. Mrs. Elisabeth Trepper, who was given a temporary exit visa earlier this month, was refused entry to France on grounds that her husband was an undesirable foreign agent who could be harmful to Western countries.

NOT A GESTAPO COLLABORATOR

Trepper’s defense here was undertaken by Perrault, the author of a bool on the “Red Orchestra.” In his Le Monde letter, Perrault accused Rochet of using portions of the book out of context to support charges against Trepper. He claimed that the reason Trepper wasn’t tortured by the Gestapo was because they intended to use him to communicate false intelligence to Russia.

Perrault also came to Trepper’s defense in an article published in the current issue of the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. He maintained that had Trepper been a Gestapo collaborator he would not claim the right to go to Israel, a country which is well informed about war crimes and does not pardon them. Perrault also observed that Trepper stood up to the official anti-Semitic campaign in Poland led by former Interior Minister Mieczyslaw Moczar in 1968.