Soviet Jewish Activists Denounce Charge They Are Aiding the Cia

Seven Soviet Jewish emigration activists who were accused by the newspaper Izvestia Friday of acting in the service of the U.S. Central Intelligency Agency (CIA) have denounced the charges against them as a “mass of slanderous inventions” that are “reminiscent of the anti-Jewish trials of the early 1950s.” Their statement was read by telephone from Moscow to the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews here.

Izvestia, the Soviet government organ, made its allegations in the form of an open letter, purportedly written by a former Jewish dissident. Dr. Sanya Lipavsky, a physician. In an accompanying article. Izvestia also charged that two American diplomats assigned to monitor dissident activity in the USSR, Melvin Levitsky and Joseph A. Presel, attempted to persuade dissidents to provide defense-related information to the CIA. The State Department called the charges preposterous.

The statement by the Jewish activists, who described their activities as legal under Soviet law and completely open with no attempts at concealment, was signed by Alexander Lerner, Vladimir Slepak, Anatoly Sharansky. Ida Nudel, Boris Chernobilsky. Dina Beilina and Michael Kremer. All have been seeking emigration visas without success.

FIVE-POINT STATEMENT OF DEFENSE

Their statement said that coincidental with the publication of the allegations in Izvestia, a series of searches was made of the Moscow apartments of the accused. They noted that the Lipavsky letter included “accusations of spying and treason reminiscent of the anti-Jewish trials of the early 1950s, particularly the notorious so-called ‘doctors’ plot.’ “In that regard, they listed five points:

1. “All of our activities over the past years have been directed solely toward obtaining for ourselves the possibility of emigrating from the USSR to Israel; 2) We have strictly limited our activity so that everything we have done has been entirely within the framework of Soviet law; 3) We have always informed Western public opinion and the Western press about our condition and sufferings in open letters and declarations and open telephone calls; 4) We have never hidden from the Soviet authorities that we have kept the Western world aware of what we have been trying to achieve in open conversations and letters through the mail.

5) “What we have been doing quite openly has been not only in the interests of those Jews who wish to emigrate to Israel but has been in the interests of the Soviet people as a whole and is in the interest of improving relations between the Soviet peoples and government and the governments and peoples of the Western world. With this new prospect of fresh anti-Jewish trials based on completely false evidence or, in fact, no evidence at all except lies, we can only regret that the Soviet Union is returning to the days of the worst excesses of Stalin’s time.”

The Izvestia attack seems to be directed against an unofficial group of dissident, including Jews and non-Jews, who are attempting to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki accords. Two of this group are already in jail. They are Yuri Orlov and Aleksandr Ginzburg, a close friend of exiled writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Vitaly Rubin, a former Soviet activist now teaching Chinese philosophy at Hebrew University, said today in Jerusalem that the Soviet accusations were “a tissue of lies.” (See related story P. 2)