4 (Sc 3) Stolasxnaa Sa!m. On Tlm. Sept. 7 Tho Red Twists to Rules Are Trap, . Oatis Finds in Weary Sessions (EDITOR'S NOTE: Her Is another K. Oatis, Associated Press corres pondent, who is telling what hap pened to htm in Czechoslovakia. He returned to this country last Mar two years imprison ment by tho Communists.) By WILLIAM N. OATIS (Copyrttht 153 or Tho Associated Press) A slim man with pouched eyes a man who always reminded me of a lizard! leaned across a desk and said, "This is the best prison in Europe." He belonged to the Communist secret police of Czechoslovakia. They had arrested me six days before on suspicion that I, the Associated Press correspondent in Prague, was also a spy. THfey had questioned me at the police station day after day until finally, weary from 24 hours of steady grilling, I had balked. Then they had brought me here, hand cuffed and blindfolded in the back of a car. Now, with the blindfold off, I found myself in a sparely fur nished office in the dim light of dawn the dawn of Sunday, April 29, 1951. Through the window I saw a courtyard and, beyond, a sew building going up. "How many steps are there on the way up here- the man asked. "Ninety." "You're still a spy," he said, smiling. Sign Here I smiled back. It was sup posed to be a joke.. The men from the police sta tion went on interrogating me all that day. We all staved off hunger with fat slices of bacon sent from downstairs. Many questions concerned an incident of a few weeks earlier: an . Indian diplomat had heard thrift apartments i i his neighbor hood of Prague were being taken over for army officers. I asked Lt Col. George L. Atwood, American military attache, if he had heard this, too. He said he had, and more. And he gave me a list of supposed military sites in and around the city. The police already had my signature on a statement to the effect that, in thus picking up "military information," I had committed espionage. Now they wrote another statement for me to sign. I This would have had me admit that I gave military information to Atwood and in so doing com mitted espionage. I refused to sign it "I want to go to bed," I said. "Just rewrite this for us the way you want- it, and then you can go to bed," said the lizard faced mar. Sleep at Last I rewrote it They brought it back to me, rewritten again, and asked me to sign it I had been up i2 hours, and I It's More Fun (h -.ft. ins ana For Your Youngsters -J WHEN HOME'S NEAR SCHOOL Life's asier and happier for your youngsters when school and home are near each other. More sleep mornings. No travel-time wasted, leaves more for play and study. Home for lunch makes Mom supervisor. Saves money, too. No transportation, avoids crowding, perhaps saves you money.- And with home near school the kids are close by more, so you keep a steady eye on 'em. Today's "the day to start looking for that home of your own in the Classified section! You'll find many splendid buys near in Salem school districts. Start looking! Leisurely home-shopping's best! Oatis Story was desperate for sleep. So I signed. Then I was blindfolded and taken downstairs, and when I took the blindfold off I was in a celL I bad some smelly blankets and a straw mat I made a bed on the floor, tied my handkerchief across my eyes to keep out the electric light and went to sleep. I was awakened only once to get a number: 2091. The next day, the men from headquarters questioned me morning and afternoon in the up stairs office, and I had vegetarian noon and evening meals in my cell. After supper I was taken back upstairs. This time all my old acquaintances were gone except a pudgy little curly-haired inter preter. A Rewrite Job Seated at a desk was a new man. He was a rangy, brown haired young man with a sardonic look squinty yellow eyes, high cheekbones, hollow cheeks and a narrow mouth with the corners turned down. He might have passed for a small-town roughneck, but he was in the red-trimmed olive-drab uniform of a police lieutenant He was taking over my interroga tion. In that prison, every in mate has a "referent" who ques tions him and prepares him for trial. This referent sat bolt up right looking serious. The inter preter translated: "Make no mistake. Your Amer ican citizenship will not help you here." That was how I met Lt Jr-ef Ledl (I learned his name later, from his signature on a paper.) Early next morning, he . called me from my cell and began put ting my testimony in writing. The document wa called a protocol. From time to time, I was presented with finished pages and asked to write on each, "I have read this. I have approved it I have signed it William Nathan Oatis." I did so readily as long as the protocol kept near the facts. Then the referent and Inter preter began to rewrite my ac count Ont in 10 Weeks? "This is not right," I said one day, pointing to an inaccuracy. "What difference doe it make?" The referent showed ex asperation. Such arguments became more and more frequent Gradually it became apparent he wanted not the facts as I knew them, but as he would have liked them to be. Meanwhile, I was trying to find out what was likely to hap pen to me. Four people now were at work on my interrogation tie referent and three inter preters in turns. One interpreter, 1 t ft ... My 2 m EE . 1 a young woman, asked me, "How would you like to go home on the Fourth of July?" Another, a dapper little man named Vilda, said, "You wont be here 10 weeks." "I don't believe you," I told him. A Letter Home He insisted he knew what he was talking about The referent said a foreigner could be punished with "a sen tence, or expulsion." I knew that my wife in St Paul, Minn., must be worried about me. I asked the lieutenant to let me write her. He put me off. One night Vilda suggested I try again. The referent asked me what I wanted to say in the let ter. I told him, and he left the room. Pretty soon he came back with something written in Czech. The interpreter put it in English and handed it to me. The referent had written my letter for me. It was fantastic. It made me say that I had been "caught in espionage," that I had told all and that I wanted to live "a clean, new life." "Keep your hopes high, it i wound up, "and trust in the jus- j tice of the Czechoslovak people, who are working for peace." The Captain Takes Over I said "When my wife reads this, she'll think I've gone crazy." But Vilda reminded me, "Your wife is clever shell under stand." The referent insisted the letter would go out that way or not at alL So I copied it in my own handwriting, and he sent it That was the first statement I signed that was quite out of char acter and patently phony. Once they had got me to sign that one, it was easier for them. That talk about high hopes and a clean, new life was encourag ing. So was Vilda. He said "Don't worry about a trial" a lew mgnu later, about a month after my arrest, a police staff captain sat down at the desk and I sat down in my chair facing him. He smiled and began to talk. smoothly and courteously. He asked me what connections The AP had with the United States government I said it had none. "Oh, Oatis," he said, dubi ously. My referent standing by, must have felt he had muffed the case, since his commander, the cap tain, had had to intervene. He now exploded. He twitched, frowned and screeched at me something inter preted as "You dirty bastard! He accused me of backtracking on testimony. In due course the captain asked me about a card found in my ef- mr -t . jr i . rr ts i u f r LSI ? 1 feet. It was aa eff-dnty pus from the Military Intelligence Service Japanese language school at Ft' Spelling. Minn.- : I had been there briefly in 1944 enroute to a year's study at a similar school at the University of Michigan. At Michigan. I con tinued training in Japanese that I had begun in the Army Special ized Training Program at the Uni versity of Minnesota. Though Military Intelligence ran the Michigan schooL I was never- in that branch. At the school I was a corporal on the de tached, enlisted men's list And I never got into it for after I finished the course I was dis charged from the Army. Sign Again But the commander told me to write about the school and the men I had known there, and put me back in my cell with a type writer and cigarettes. I wrote several pages, sent them to hint and went to bed. The next night's questioning brought out that CoL Atwood had been in the language school while I was there but that we had not met there. Some 24 hours later, the com mander laid a long document be fore me and said, "Sign this and you don't need to worry." The first part was a garbled version of my account about the language school. The second part was something new. It introduced Atwood as an old fellow student It had me saying that he was a spy and that I gave him informa tion because "I knew he was In terested in espionage reports of all kinds." Tt Wl an U)ni.1 T - J - - " myg TW HI u X B1UI1CU. 1 thought, "This looks as if it were all aimed at Atwood. If I sign it they'll expel him but maybe WE OFFER YOU THIS LUXURIOUS i;- 4 dSIIS"dBvL( is v I " I fjj? ' . "c m J" J edits kmmmmmm "RESTF0AM" PILLOW As you will readily uodcmaod, ic is our busiooM4o "comb" tbo market coostaody for outstanding- value. 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A- ( "I AP Artist Ed Gunior skat Hours wfthowt sloop, proparod to they'll expel me, too, without a trail." I signed that statement and hooked myself properlyBecause, as I saw with chagrin later, they were not trying to get Atwood out of the country; they were trying to keep me in prison- Resistance Lowered By now, I had signed so many papers that it had become a habit I went on signing them almost au vvuimi fREE TRIAL! $213$ SA UlISI'PKEJCTHA: DOUUS.'s t.t.Mtt. . .- 7 till! Illillll l.llltll . . t . ... ........... . ..v Regularly TO YOU ! i as William N. Ootls, afUr 42 sign a "eonftsslon" In Praaua jo.IL tomatically, seldom questioning even the wildest departures from fact I had come to the conclusion that many prisoners I daresay most prisoners come to in that plaee: You are in the hands of the secret police. You will never get away from them until you give them what they want Once my will had faded away in that fashion, the referment had plain sailing.. He rewrote all my nwYiumv mm mm dsq -vo- 5) wmifc z gp air. m m qt&. Rich, heavy OaiMsk licking for k Trim, matching Damask border i meets, practical btatr-foll style Tightly-sown taped stams extra raiaf at tooaonjf, da it prainrriao) Firm-coil inntrspring unit , far ceaplafe, ftttfal fcWy sapporf Stitched fiber insalatiosj far saMltlaael flrai sapped swality m mm 'mm mm mm m m . m m m mm mv m m - t f protocols from the beginning. In troducing changes. Finally I was ushered into an office of the prison where a fidgety woman interpreter sat with a baldheaded, crosseyed man in shirtsleeves and a bow tie. "I am Judge Novak, the chair man of the Senate of the State Court in Prague," he told me. "Your behavior here has been good. If you behave well before the court also, you don't need to worry," How often had I heard that line! The Indictment The judge read what he said was the indictment Nowhere was there any mention of the para graphs of the law under which I was indicted. I stood accused formally of espionage for the U. S. government Words that the ref erment had put into my mouth, by putting them into my protocol, were used to show that I had sent news stories on the arrests of former Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis and Otto Sling, deposed Brno Communist leader, with in tent to advise "the American es pionage net" which of its strong- points in Czechoslovakia had fall en, so that it could regroup. For Proper Fitting CHILDREN'S SHOES iUY THE JUuIOR DOOTERY 2t4 N. Big Opea Friday Til 5 tfu sr&m' or: mw k v 1 1 r v a AT NO ADD 3D COST TO YOU WHEN YOU ORDER . , MATTRESS & DOXSPMUG . . - ' CHOICff OF FULL-SIZE Oft TWIN $2.00 DOWN-EASY TEIiHS- k Ample kea Judge tho Benefits of Thcso Usual $59.50 Features! Wv : Judge Novak said a lawyer had been assigned ane. "The function of a lawyer," he said, "is not to help the defend ent escape sentence. It is to help him get a lighter sentence." (This seemed to mean that 1 stood convicted even before I went to trail. And it was ths presiding judge that was giving me the news.) Four days later, I met a rab bity, poker-faced man who his in terpreter introduced as "your lawyer, Drf Bartoa." Dr. Bartos told me, I think you have a good chance to go home this year." He advised m to testify according to the pro tocol and said his defense would be that I did not go into espion age deliberately but "just fell into it" That week the ref erment had me in his office almost daily, and we rehearsed the protocol: He asked the questions and 1 gave the answers more or less ai written. At length, I got it down pat And on Monday, July 2. thres of my employes and I went on trial before Judge Novak's court at Pankrac Prison. (Tomorrow: Prison Like Tomb.) fP.IL geaatar Hotel KUg. iUIIA .. tt ...11. ' EACH : MATTRESS or BOX SPRING vviairi o v, i- J M.. i 'II If 111 . . 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