Mr. GOULD. I'm sorry, I can't tell you that. Mr. GILMAN. It's been my information that some are as much as 1 year or 2 years old, if not older. Mr. GOULD. Yes; I'm sure that's correct. The reason why it's difficult to speak with certainty about all of these 140,000 is because, No. 1, we don't know how many were actually delivered and received. Of those that were delivered and received, we do not know how many were actually used. The people had to carry them down to an OVIR office. Some of them may be sitting in drawers there. We don't know this. Mr. GILMAN. Well, I appreciate your having clarified that matter. I didn't want the record leaving the impression that there are only about 800 cases who have been refused. We still have about 140,000 individuals that are just awaiting the processing. Mr. GOULD. We don't know the status of those. Mr. GILMAN. Who are in a similar refusenik status, so to speak. Mr. GOULD. They have not received exist visas; that much we know. Mr. GILMAN. Now, I'd like to address a question to the entire panel. Forgive me for interrupting, but our time is running. Mr. GOULD. Yes. Mr. GILMAN. From the information you have obtained, do you believe the Soviet Union is using the interruption of mail as a systematic type of harassment of certain individuals in the Soviet Union? Do you see this as a systematic undertaking by the Government of the Soviet Union or is it just sporadic and left to the discretion of a few Soviet officials? Mr. GOULD. No, I absolutely believe-and I don't say this lightlyit is my absolute conviction that this is part of an overall policy of harassment and an official policy of the Soviet authorities and Soviet Government. Mr. GILMAN. Mr. Ackerman, would you care to respond to that? Mr. ACKERMAN. Excuse me. I agree with Mr. Gould. There may be variation in time and place but, generally speaking, the harassment of postal systems, of correspondence, and other communications, is part of an overall effort to sometimes isolate, other times harass, the refuseniks. Mr. GILMAN. Mrs. Gould, did you wish to comment? Mrs. GOULD. Yes. I completely concur. In the exhibit that you have, there is a statement there by Dr. Goldstein indicating that when he was called into the KGB, one of the KGB officials showed him the Goldsteins' own letters, indicating he had them, in fact they had been delivered to him instead of Dr. Goldstein. Mr. GILMAN. We had some discussion earlier today about the right to receive mail, the right to communicate, as compared to the privilege of communicating. I note that Mr. Ackerman has made a review of Soviet law, relevant provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of other international convenants concerning political rights. Having examined these Soviet statutes and international agreements, what are your thoughts? Does a Soviet citizen have a right to receive this mail or is it a privilege? Mr. ACKERMAN. No, it's a legal right. If you'll look at the Constitution, article 56 states that privacy of citizens and of their correspondence, telephone conversations and telegraph communication is pro tected by law. That's not a privilege which can be given or withheld at someone's whim. That's a right. It's protected by law. The practice, according to Chairman Brezhnev in his introductory speech bringing this Constitution before the Supreme Soviet, he said the Constitution defines the social, economic, and political rights and freedoms of citizens, and has given guarantees of these rights. That's not a privilege to me. It's stated officially in two places it's a right, a legal right. Mr. GILMAN. Do you know whether this proposition regarding this belief that it is a right and the right as being violated has ever been raised in the Soviet courts? Mr. GOULD. With regard to the receipt of mail? Mr. GILMAN. Regarding the interruption of mail to the Soviet Union. Mr. GOULD. The only document in the case I have is the one I presented and that's with regard to the outgoing mail. I don't have any evidence that the legal right to receive mail was raised before any court. It may well have been, but I don't have that at this point. Mr. GILMAN. No one else on the panel has any information regarding the question? Mr. ACKERMAN. No, I don't have it either. Mr. GILMAN. Today, we have discussed validity of the statistical information that's now before the postal authorities and we've talked about the fact that over 2,000 inquiries have been filed with the postal authorities. As all of the panelists have been monitoring mail delivery to the Soviet Union for some time now, what is your opinion concerning the validity of those statistics? Mr. GOULD? Two thousand violations? Is this what we're talking about? Mr. GILMAN. There are over 2,000 inquiries filed each year with the U.S. postal authority concerning the Soviet Union's failure to deliver registered mail. Mr. GOULD. It's my opinion that this would be reflective of the large amount of mail that wasn't documented, that this would be a small number of a very significant amount of mail that was not delivered. Mr. ACKERMAN. I agree. In talking with people involved in our correspondence project, both for the past several years and even earlier, many of them expressed frustration and annoyance of the fact that they had written letters; they had paid the registration fee; they had no indication that the letters were delivered. They did not receive a reply back from their correspondence and they were not inclined to spend their time futilely writing letters, paying registration fees and filing the postal documents. Many of them did not want to file tracers. They feel it's a nuisance; it isn't warranted; the mail should go through. The 2,000 or 2,500 violations a year represent only some of the violations which actually occur. It does not represent the many people who do not want to spend the time putting through Mr. GILMAN. Well, I would like to encourage your organizations to try to obtain the documentary evidence that is so necessary to the Postal Service and to be supportive of their arguments. Moreover, if there's any way that you can assist the Postal authorities, I'm sure they would welcome that assistance. I see Mr. Regan is nodding agreement. We also have the assurance of the Postal Service that it is going to try to simplify the inquiry process a bit so that it won't be so difficult for postal patrons to obtain the information they need from their local post office. Mr. ACKERMAN. We certainly look forward to having more simple procedures. Mr. GILMAN. We hope you would try to obtain the information that the Postal Service needs to assist it in this effort. I want to thank the panelists for taking the time to gather this helpful information together and present it to our committee. I'm sure that your statistical information and your legal arguments will assist us in our efforts to resolve this problem. Mr. GOULD. Thank you very much. Mr. HANLEY. Members of the panel, again, I echo what Mr. Gilman has said. Our deep appreciation for your attendance and efforts and certainly your testimony is of great assistance to our deliberations. Thank you. Our next witness is Prof. Owen Chamberlain from the University of California at Berkeley. STATEMENT OF OWEN CHAMBERLAIN Dr. CHAMBERLAIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Congressman Gilman. It's a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to testify before you today. My name is Owen Chamberlain. I am testifying today as an individual citizen. I am a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. I shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1959. I have concerned myself with the human rights of scientists and other intellectuals, especially by serving on the Executive Committee of Scientists for Orlov and Shchransky, a loosley structured group with the plight of dissident scientists, particularly those in prison, in such countries as the Soviet Union. I appreciate the opportunity to testify today. I wish to say at the outset that, whatever difficulties we have in dealing with the Soviet Union on a host of other important matters, I believe we should all support the Strategic Arms Limitation TalksSALT. I regard progress in the area of arms limitation by the major powers as a first priority that is essential for the safety and welfare of all peoples on our planet. It is my intention that nothing I say today will be interpreted to detract from the achievement of an effective arms limitation treaty. I am here to help promote understanding and peaceful coexistence by improving communications between individuals across national boundaries. More specifically, for scientists, international communication is absolutely essential to progress. In science each of us stands on the shoulders of others. Therefore, when communication is foreclosed a scientist finds himself in a scientific vacuum. He must have up-to-date information if he is to make up-to-date contributions. The United States and the Soviet Union are bound by important agreements which encourage and guarantee communication between individuals, for example the International Postal Agreements, the Helsinki accords, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A quotation from the Helsinki accord-the Final Act of the Con ference on Security and Cooperation in Europe can serve as an illustration: It says: The participating States recognize that possibilities exist for further improving scientific and technological co-operation and, to this end, express their intention to remove obstacles to such co-operation, in particular through the improvement of opportunities for the exchange and dissemination of scientific and technological information among the parties interested in scientific and technological research and co-operation *** The accords also include, among the forms and methods of cooperation, reference to "exchange and circulation of books, periodicals and other scientific and technological publications among interested organizations, scientific and technological institutions, enterprises and scientists and technologists." It appears that the Soviet Union has failed to fulfill its side of the Helsinki accords in this regard. For example, there has for several years been a history of nondelivery of scientific journals to certain individuals. During the period November 1974, to August 1976, 90 issues of Physical Review Letters-one of the journals of the American Physical Soviety-were sent as registered mail to the well known dissident Soviet physicist Mark Azbel. Only 36 of the 90 were apparently delivered. Details of those facts are contained in a letter of March 9, 1977, from George Carroll of the American Physical Society to the Helsinki Commission. Unfortunately, at this time I do not have a copy of that letter. I wish now to present factual material about a more recent case of mail nondelivery. It is the text of a May 14, 1979, letter from the publication manager of the same Physical Review Letters, Reid Terwilliger, to W. W. Havens, Jr., the executive secretary of the American Physical Society. The text reads: As of the end of April 1979 we have mailed (registered air mail) the August 1, 1977 to April 30, 1979 issues to Dr. Victor Brailovsky, Ap. 128, Bldg. 1, 99 Vernadsky prospekt, Moscow, U.S.S.R., one issue per week. Of these 92 issues, we have received confirmation of delivery, i.e., return receipt or USPS response to a postal inquiry, for all but 5. A copy of the actual letter is attached. This means that over this period of nearly 2 years, 94 percent of the issues yielded a Postal report that delivery had been made to the addressee. But, the facts cited must now be compared with the report of two physicists, Dr. John Parmentola of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Prof. Bernard Cooper of West Virginia University, who visited the Soviet Union in February 1979. They spoke directly to Dr. Victor Brailovsky and have relayed to me Dr. Brailovsky's statement that since July 1978 no copies of the Physical Review Letters have been received by him. This is in direct contradiction to the Postal Service reports claiming all but five copies had been delivered. In the period in question, July to February, over 25 issues should have been received, but instead he received no issues at all. The conclusion seems inescapable that falsified Postal receipts are being received from the Soviet postal system. Dr. Parmentola and Professor Cooper also emphasized the urgency for the group of refusenik scientists, Dr. Brailovsky, Dr. Yuri Golfand, Dr. Solomon Alber, and Jacob Al'pert, to receive up-to-date reports on present-day science. Without contact with this current work these men cannot function as able and productive scientists since they are presently denied access to scientific literature within their own country. Part of the Parmentola-Cooper report to me has been in the forın of a mailgram, a copy of which is included with this testimony. As another example of nondelivery of mail I cite a letter from Prof. Boyce McDaniel, director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell University, and Prof. Thomas Gold, director of the center for radiophysics and space research, Cornell University, to the Soviet physicist Yuri Orlov, inviting him to join their faculty. The letter was mailed to Mrs. Orlov at her Moscow address-since Yuri Orlov is in prison-and this letter has been returned to the senders undelivered. Copies of the front and back of the returned envelope are included with this testimony. In conclusion, we seem to encounter repeated difficulties when we send scientific journals to dissident Soviet scientists, either in terms of nondelivery of material or in terms of claimed delivery which is denied by the intended recipient. I welcome the chance to bring these matters to your attention with the suggestion that a protest be conveyed to the appropriate Soviet authorities. As an American physicist who had the rare privilege of studying with Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segre, both Italian physicists, and who later had the rarer honor of receiving the Swedish Nobel Prize, I am always mindful of the international nature of science and the need for open and reliable communications between scientists, wherever they may be. The Postal Service should provide one important means to this end. Thank you. [Attachments to the statement follow :] PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, COMPOSITION FACILITY, Brookhaven, N.Y., May 14, 1979. W. W. HAVENS, Jr., American Physical Society, New York, N.Y. DEAR BILL: As of the end of April 1979 we have mailed (registered air mail) the 1 August 1977-30 April 1979 issues to Dr. Victor Brailovsky, Ap. 128, Bldg. 1, 99 Vernadsky prospekt, Moscow, U.S.S.R., one issue per week. Of these 92 issues, we have received confirmation of delivery (i.e., return receipt or USPS response to a postal inquiry) for all but 5. Sincerely yours, REID TERWILLIGER, |