Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery

The Swedish report said: “There is no fully reliable proof of what happened to Raoul Wallenberg.”

The Russians concluded that “Wallenberg died, or most likely was killed, on July 17, 1947,” and said they considered the case “resolved.”

With the knowledge of his government, Wallenberg’s task as first secretary to the Swedish diplomatic legation in Budapest was a cover for his true mission as secret emissary of the U.S. War Refugee Board, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a belated attempt to stem the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.

Some time around 1994, Susan Mesinai, who had by then been researching the case for five years, visited Lucette Colvin Kelsey, Wallenberg’s cousin, at her home in Connecticut. Kelsey told her: “Raoul was working for the highest levels of government.”

“So I said to her: ‘How high? Do you mean the president?’ And she nodded her head,” Mesinai said, disclosing to AP a conversation she had kept confidential for 14 years.

In the 1930s, while he was a student at the University of Michigan, Wallenberg spent vacations at his cousin’s home in Washington, where Kelsey’s father was a well-connected former military officer and envoy to Sweden. Kelsey died in 1996.

Wallenberg’s rescue mission put him in a vortex of intrigue involving the Hungarian resistance, the Jewish underground, communists working for the Soviets, and British, U.S. and Swedish intelligence operations. He also had regular contact with Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis running the deportation of Jews.

Whether or not he himself was passing on intelligence, Russia had plenty of reason to suspect him of spying, either for the Allies or Germany — or both.

“Wallenberg had ties to all the major actors in Hungary,” says Susanne Berger, a German researcher who collaborated with the Swedish-Russian research project.

The Stockholm chief of the War Refugee Board, Iver C. Olsen, was also a key member of the 35-man OSS station in the Swedish capital, and it was he who recruited Wallenberg.

In 1955, Olsen denied to the CIA that Wallenberg ever spied for the OSS. Mesinai and Berger offer a different likelihood: that the Swede was a source for the Pond, which was known only to Roosevelt and a few insiders in the War and State departments.

The Pond relied on hand-picked embassy personnel and contacts in private companies, particularly the Dutch electronics firm NV Philips, which had its own corporate intelligence network, said former CIA analyst Mark Stout, who wrote a brief unofficial history of the Pond.

So far, no evidence has emerged Wallenberg worked for the Pond, and Stout said in an interview that Wallenberg isn’t mentioned in any papers he has reviewed.

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