NEW ORLEANS- Just after sunset on Oct. 24, Joseph Wyman was chatting with his nephew outside his jewelry store in the Louisiana river town of Belle Chasse when a man came “running up, at a full, dead run, right into my nephew’s face and started talking fast.”
The man, almost 6 feet tall and clean shaven, wore brown shorts, a blue T-shirt, black socks and white sneakers and carried a brown, screwlid jar. He was dripping wet.
He appeared to be extremely nervous, Wyman recalled, and kept looking back over his shoulder toward the river “like someone was after him.” In a language Wyman suspected was Russian, the man pleaded repeatedly to be taken to the “Novi Orleans Polizi.”
“Are you Russian?” Wyman said he asked him.
The man beat his chest with his fists. “Ukrainian” he replied. “Ukrainian.”
This was the beginning of the strange odyssey of Miroslav Medvid, a Soviet sailor who jumped from the grain freighter Marshal Konev into the Mississippi River 40 feet below and became the center of a superpower struggle that continues to unfold.
Today, the ship was tied up in Reserve, La., taking on grain as Senate staff members flew to Louisiana to deliver a subpoena Medvid the opportunity to leave the freighter.
For the bewildered seaman, it must have been a mystifying and terrifying journey. During his first hours on American soil, Medvid passed through local authorities, was interviewed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and ordered returned to his ship. Before he got there, he dived back into the river in an apparent effort to escape from his Soviet colleagues. He was tackled, handcuffed and subdued on shore, where he tried to bash his head against the rocks. Finally, six Soviet seaman, including the ship’s captain, carried him up the gangplank onto the Marshal Koney. An eyewitness said Medvid kicked and cried out as he was hauled away.
Four days later, Medvid was turned over to U.S. officials a second time. He was interviewed five times over the next 24 hours, but never alone with American Officials, According to court documents; at least one of his Soviet colleagues was present during the interviews, in which he assured US. Officials that he wanted to return to the Soviet Union. He said he had fallen overboard accidentally while making electrical repairs.
That benign explanation was hardly the story that spilled out with such urgency and anxiety the night of Oct. 24, when Medvid encountered Joseph Wyman and his nephew Wayne in the parking lot near the river in Belle Chasse.
Wyman said he and his nephew immediately concluded that the nervous, fast-talking seaman had jumped ship, and the younger Wyman agreed to drive Medvid to New Orleans. “He drove in that car, he was so happy, he almost landed on my nephew,” Wyman said.
Just after the pair drove off, three men approached Wyman in the parking lot asking if he had seen anyone wandering around. “I asked him why, and he said, “Because one of our comrades has fallen off our ship and may have hurt himself and be looking for assistance.”
Wyman told the man he hadn’t seen anyone and the three headed back in direction of the ship
Meanwhile, Wayne Wyman and his Soviet passenger were about to cross the river into New Orleans. Medvid asked Wyman to pull into a parking lot, according to a sworn affidavit.
On the back of an AT&T phone bill envelope, he wrote, “policia Novi Orleans,” circling the first word and drawing an arrow to the second. He drew a line down the back of the envelope and wrote “USSR” in the upper right hand corner, “and tried to gesture that’s where he’s from,” Wayne Wyman wrote in his affidavit. They Wyman have provided a Xerox of the back of that envelope.
As the pair crossed the bridge into New Orleans, Wyman said, the sailor appeared to relax.
”He apologized for getting the seat of the car all wet.” Wyman said his nephew reported. “As they crossed the bridge, (Mevid) made a little prayer sign with his hands, and little diving motions , to show it was like he had dived off the ship,” Wyman said.
While in the car, Medvid removed his watch from the jar he carried and put it on, Wyman said. He also removed an official looking paper from the jar, and removed a third object, which he threw out the window.
Wayne Wyman took the sailor to the French Quarter substation of the New Orleans Police Department, and let him out. Medvid tried to thank Wyman by shaking his hand and kissing it.
Sometime after 9 p.m., Medvid was delivered to the office of the Harbor Police of the Port of New Orleans. Because no one there could communicate with Medvid, the seaman was taken across the river to Algiers where the Border Patrol, a division of the INS, has its offices. No one there spoke Russian, so officials contacted interpreter Irene Padoch in New York City. The 30to60minute phone conversation between Padoch and Medvid remains at the center of the controversy over the seaman.
It was a three-way conversation: Padoch in New York, Medvid in Algiers and a Border Patrol Agent on an extension. Padoch says now she is convinced Medvid made his desire for asylum clear. The same conversation apparently convinced Border Patrol agents that Medvid was not seeking asylum.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 15, 1985
