EDITOR SAYS SAKHAROV KIN TO GET $42,000 FOR PAPERS

Author: By Steven Erlanger, Globe Staff

Date: Monday, February 10, 1986
Page: 4
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN

Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner, is staying in Newton with her daughter, Tatiana, and son-in-law, Efrem Yankelevich, as she recuperates from a coronary bypass operation. The Soviets allowed her to come to the United States to have the surgery. Soviet authorities forced Sakharov and Bonner to move to Gorky in May 1984, to try to cut them off from the Western press. The Soviets have regularly said the couple was living normally in Gorky, but the Observer says the documents describe "one of the most vivid testimonies of human suffering ever to have emerged from the Soviet Union."

The Observer, a Sunday newspaper, published a short extract from the documents yesterday. The story provided a few details of what the paper called the "ill-treatment," "intermittent but systematic torture," ''force-feeding, mental torture and physical violence" the 65-year-old Nobel Prize recipient says he suffered at the hands of the KGB. The newspaper
plans to print edited translations of the documents in two excerpts over the next two Sundays, editor Donald Trelford said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Trelford said Sakharov's family had contacted Nicholas Bethell, a journalist and member of the House of Lords and the European Parliament, and asked him to handle the documents and place them with a quality newspaper. Bethell, 47, chairman of the European Parliament's Human Rights Group, went to Magnus Linklater, the Observer's managing editor. "The family felt they wanted a newspaper that would give them a suitable platform for this very important message from Sakharov, and felt the Observer was the right paper," Linklater said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Linklater said Bethell had come to him about 10 days ago and flew to Boston last Thursday, after which he gave the paper a verbal briefing on the documents and wrote yesterday's article. Trelford said the family had asked Bethell to serve as their agent; the Observer worked out a contract securing British rights and, as selling agents for world rights, a portion of overseas sales. Negotiating with Bethell and "a representative of the family," Trelford said, "we provided an initial guarantee of 30,000 pounds sterling and a portion of world rights."

He said first North American rights had been purchased by US News and World Report, the Washington-based newsweekly, but neither he nor Kathy Bushkin, speaking for the magazine yesterday, would disclose how much US News paid.

"A lot of the material needs editing and stitching together, with explanatory notes and the like," Trelford said. "Bethell is doing that with the family over there."

Bethell said last night before leaving Boston for London that he was taking ''several dozen sheets" of Sakharov's papers back with him, for delivery to The Observer. The papers include personal letters, petitions and official complaints to Soviet authorities, Bethell said in an interview.

"I verified the authenticity with the family by talking with them, making sure the handwriting was checked and the facts checked with what they know of Dr. Sakharov's activities," Bethell said. "The family is sure they are authentic."

He stressed that Bonner was not involved in the process because of her promise to Soviet authorities not to speak out publicly while in the United States. The past few days, he said, he has met with Bonner's daughter, son-in- law, son and daughter-in-law in their Newton home.

Bethell said the family asked him to serve as their agent in the matter
because of his position as vice chairman of the European Parliament's human rights subcommittee. Bethell, who calls himself "an occasional writer," speaks fluent Russian and has written on Soviet affairs. He said he will write the introductions to the excerpts and any explanatory material.

Yesterday's Observer article quotes Bonner's son-in-law, Yankelevich, as saying: "The papers arrived here very recently in two batches, in plain envelopes and through the ordinary mail, sent from a Western country. How they were got out of the Soviet Union I cannot say, but I know the source and the source is reliable. They have been carefully examined by the whole family and we are convinced of their authenticity."

The main document, according to the Observer, is a 20-page letter written by Sakharov in October 1984 to Dr. Anatoly Alexandrov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to which Sakharov still belongs, appealing for Bonner to be allowed to travel abroad for medical treatment.

The description in the letter of how Sakharov was maltreated in Ward 310, the cardiac section of Gorky's Semashko hospital, is put forward, Bethell writes, "to prove the point that Yelena Bonner had no reason to expect proper treatment in any Soviet hospital, since the KGB would be involved in any medical decisions. Semashko, it is clear, was used in Dr. Sakharov's case more as a prison than as a clinic."

The only quotation printed from the Sakharov letter is as follows: "On 7 May 1984, while accompanying my wife to the prosecutor's office for her next bout of questioning, I was seized by KGB men disguised in doctors' white coats. They took me by force to Gorky regional hospital, kept me there by force, and tormented me for four months. My attempts to flee the hospital were always blocked by KGB men, who were on duty around the clock to bar all means of escape."

The newspaper says the documents "unmask a careful plan of KGB disinformation, including postcards and telegrams forged over Mrs. Bonner's name, which have for nearly two years confused the truth, suggesting Dr. Sakharov was well and living without problems." Bonner promised Soviet authorities that she would say nothing to the press while abroad as a condition for being allowed to leave -- the explanation, according to the Observer, of why the family decided to release the documents.

"The disinformation campaign has been remarkably successful," Yankelevich told Bethell. "These papers will reveal it for what it is -- a complete tissue of lies."

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Saturday -- a few days before tomorrow's anticipated East-West prisoner exchange, which may include another noted dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky -- that Sakharov, a physicist known as ''the father" of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, would not be allowed to emigrate because he knows "state secrets." Gorbachev repeated that Sakharov was living in Gorky "in normal conditions."

erlang;02/09,13:52 CAPPUC;02/11,10:59 SAKHAR10