Diplomat Wallenberg Also Spy, Magazine Says Declassified Papers Add Angle To Swede’s World War Ii Heroics

World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg spied for an agency that was a predecessor of the CIA, U.S. News & World Report reported Saturday.

A U.S. News investigation of recently declassified CIA documents revealed that while the Swedish diplomat worked to save Hungarian Jews from the Nazis, he also was helping the Office of Strategic Services make contact with anti-Nazi resistance leaders in Hungary, the magazine said.

Wallenberg “maintained a steady flow of information between war-torn Hungary and Washington via Stockholm,” the magazine said in an issue that will go on newsstands Monday. “For the Office of Strategic Services - precursor to the CIA Wallenberg was probably the only reliable man in wartime Budapest.”

Despite Russia’s insistence that Wallenberg died in a Soviet prison in July 1947, eyewitnesses have reported seeing him in the Soviet Union decades later, U.S. News said.

Retired Swedish Ambassador Per Anger said he thinks Wallenberg, who is believed to have saved at least 20,000 Jews from the Nazis, remained alive as late as 1989 and may be alive today.

Anger told U.S. News that he appealed to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to release Wallenberg after German Chancellor Helmut Kohl intervened in 1989.

“He showed no interest” and “implied that he had no control over the KGB,” Anger said.

After the war, U.S. intelligence remained silent on Wallenberg’s fate “lest it confirm that he had been an American spy,” U.S. News said.

Jan Eliasson, the current Swedish undersecretary of state, said U.S. News overinterpreted previously known information when it called Wallenberg an American spy.

“As a matter of fact, it’s only in the headline that the magazine says that Wallenberg was a spy. The article correctly says that Wallenberg was an asset to the United States during his stay in Budapest,” the Swedish news agency TT quoted Eliasson as saying.

Eliasson said that Ivar Olsen, Office of Strategic Services’ representative in Stockholm during the war, was questioned by the CIA in 1955 and denied rumors that Wallenberg was a spy. Olsen emphasized that his contacts with the Swedish diplomat were limited to issues concerning saving Hungarian Jews, Eliasson said.