The Tragedy of Newcomb Mott, Who Thought He Could Walk Into Soviet Russia
Young and naive, he just wanted his passport stamped.
He had a confidence characteristic of young, educated, American white men in the 1960s—a feeling that everything would probably work out, because, the great majority of the time, everything did.
.. The first Soviet authorities to question Mott asked him repeatedly: Do you belong to the CIA? Do you know anyone who does? But they seem to have given up the idea rather quickly that he might be a spy.
.. Instead, they were interested in trading him for one.
.. From the government’s perspective, trading Ivanov for Mott would give the Soviet government an opening: every time they wanted one of their imprisoned spies shipped back to the USSR, they would only have to arrest an American on some pretense and threaten to punish them harshly.
.. The punishment for illegal border crossing was one to three years in prison; Mott was sentenced to 18 months in a corrective labor camp.
.. But two autopsies, one after his parents were able to recover his body, showed more than 60 wounds on his body. He’d been stabbed to death.