Andrei Berezhkov's non-defection

I've just finished riffling through, or scrutinising, a whole flock of papers and magazines, domestic and foreign, and I gather that the second great question now plaguing the Western world – the first being when and how the Americans and the Russians can really begin to dismantle their nuclear weapons – the next great question is, can yoghurt and honey help you live to be 159?

Well, before we get down to the main business of our correspondence, I'd like to notice a fascinating couple of items, a hand-written letter out of Washington and a mouth-spoken announcement out of Switzerland which bring into focus a political game that surfaces about once a year, though it must be being played underground like a floating crap game all the time.

The Washington letter was written or – as we cagey reporters like to say (dreaming of a lawyer with a light-brown attaché case) – the letter was 'allegedly' written by a 16-year-old Russian boy, the son of a Soviet diplomat assigned to Washington. It said with refreshing directness, 'I hate my country and its rules and I love your country. I want to stay here.' The boy, one Andrei Berezhkov, also reportedly wrote – 'reportedly' is another good word – 'I know you are a free press not like ours and I hope you'll help me.' He addressed it to, 'Dear News,' though it was sent to the Washington bureau of the New York Times and he signed it, 'Andy'.

The second item was a statement from a Czech exile, a dissident writer living in Switzerland announcing that Ivan Lendl who, until he regularly massacres John McEnroe, the dissident American, will have to be known as the Communist world's leading tennis player, well, the man says that Lendl has been given permission by the Czech government to live in America but he is not defecting. This report, in its quieter way, is just as intriguing as the one about the rebellious – allegedly rebellious – Russian boy.

First for Andy's heart-rending letter. The Washington Post which did, after all, force Richard Nixon to lift the covers from the Watergate tapes is America's number one newspaper sleuth and it doesn't appear to have done much preliminary digging before it released the letter in photostat. Young Berezhkov was not quite on the verge of becoming a national, an American national, hero when three American reporters, one from the New York Times, one from the Hearst newspaper chain and one television anchorman, were invited to the Soviet embassy to talk with the boy and his father.

In his letter, the boy had said he proposed, without his parents' knowledge, to drive up to New York and present himself to what he called 'the US mission' – this has to mean the United States mission to the United Nations. Well, at his troika press conference, it came out from him and his father that he had, indeed, gone off with the family car, without telling his parents and had been missing for about ten hours. Then he came home again. All he wanted to do, he said, was to drive around the city. Not a weird ambition for an inquisitive boy, though ten hours seems a little over thorough.

Anyway, he dismissed the three American reporters by saying he never thought this little trip would be interpreted as a way of showing he wanted to stay in America. He hadn't written any letter. Both he and his father said it never would have been signed 'Andy', his name was Andrei. In simple words, the father and son said what the Soviet embassy had said from the beginning – that the letter was a forgery.

Now, if the letter had not yet appeared in the Washington Post, why did the State Department and the FBI and the Washington police all get busy looking for Andrei? Why did they assume they had a case of a willing defector? Because the writer of the note mentioned in it that he'd also written for help to the President and the State Department announced, on the evening of the letter's publication, that that was so. Mr Reagan had had it.

The following day, the State Department went way out on a slender limb by saying they would insist on interviewing the boy before he could be taken back to the Soviet Union. The Russians said, 'Nonsense', or 'No dice', or whatever is the brisk Russian equivalent. A few days later came the invitation to the three reporters.

Lovers of John Le Carré will be eager to know about the demeanour of the boy at the press conference. Well, one reporter – the only one we heard from – said that while the boy's mother sat weeping in the background, the boy looked totally exhausted and had red eyes. Whatever the truth, certainly the presence in the room of 18 Soviet officials would not have contributed to making him look chirpy. At any rate, from the latest reports, it would seem that the letter was a pretty crude forgery, something that anyone with an itch for mischief could do to embarrass either the State Department or the Soviet embassy or both of them.

By the way, I can't find that the boy or anyone else has denied that it was his handwriting. We just have to assume it couldn't have been.

This incident led a couple of reporters to tap some other parents of the diplomatic establishment in Washington and elaborate on the life, the American life, of children of diplomats and the temptations, if any, that they're exposed to. There are 2,000 foreign diplomatic families in Washington and it comes out that many of them have a steadily anxious time watching their children being, or keeping them from becoming, Americanised in ways that are horrendous to their patriotic parents.

In a nutshell, it appears that what the parents have to put up with or contend with is not so much the risk of their offspring's being converted to such exotic things as a free press or a passion for the Supreme Court, as the danger of succumbing to five specific American lures – fat hamburgers, American beer bashes, the availability of dad's car, punk rock and designer jeans. These, according to one harassed diplomat, are 'the apples of Eden dangling before the children'.

The reporters interviewed Latin American diplomats, a Kenyan, an Algerian and a Frenchman. They all agreed that the initial temptation which could lead to the children's emotional defection was the fact that Americans are very warm and friendly at first, no matter where you come from, but that after a while they cool off.

Incidentally, there is one authenticated case of a teenager's defection three years ago – a Russian boy aged 12. Asked for asylum in the United States, he jumped ship, so to speak, by leaving his parents' home and moved in with an immigrant relative in Chicago. This case is still before the courts.

The only diplomat who seemed undisturbed by the brouhaha that has surrounded the case of Andrei, or Andy, was the Frenchman. 'They live', he said, talking of his own children, 'they live in this milieu. I neither approve nor disapprove. My children watch television, they approve of some shows, they disapprove of others. They are discriminating.' So... not to worry!

The Russians, I guess, could wish that their children, too, need no protection from the ever-present capitalist seductions of hamburgers, beer bashes, dad's car, punk rock and designer jeans. Young Andrei got as far as swiping dad's car. Could be the thin end of the wedge.

The case of Ivan Lendl is not so much shrouded in mystery as in, so far, a very wispy veil. Who is a dissident writer living in exile to say what the Prague government has done? Why should Lendl be permitted to live from now on in America, but not be considered a defector? Maybe by the time you hear this, three other reporters will have been called in to the Czech embassy to assure us that the great tennis player is immune to hamburgers and punk rock and has a car all his own.

If it's true, I suppose the point is that Lendl, or somebody on his behalf, has made a deal with Prague whereby in exchange for being allowed to live in America and positively assert, some time or other, that he has no intention of defecting, his parents and other relatives will not be harshly dealt with.

We didn't seem to get around, did we, to the great topic A? How to live to be 159! Like the holy man from Pakistan, Sayed Abdul Mabood, who came through or into London airport last week, showed a valid passport carrying his birth date as December 13, 1823. He swears it's so. His travelling companion swears it's so and that, furthermore, unlike the very aged people we know, the holy man has grown in wisdom through the years.

Well, there's been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between immigration and medical experts since and they have issued or agreed on a crisp report – rubbish. Only the Russians seem unamazed by old Mabood. They say they have just under 600 mountain men over 120 years old who live on yoghurt and honey.

There's always a magic diet involved in these preposterous claims. They're preposterous because even 80 years ago and not only in the mountains of Eastern Europe, there was no official registration of births. Village people, especially, behaved with old codgers the way we behave with the movie stars of our youth. When 20 years go by and we've forgotten them, we hear they're alive and only 20 years older and we say, 'Ridiculous! Irene Dunne and Fred MacMurray must be 102 by now!'

I, myself, was a close friend of an old Russian immigrant into the United States who not only had to guess at his own age – he died at 76 or 7 or 8 – but said he hadn't the faintest idea of the age of his parents. His father, he said, in their village, was greatly respected as a kind and, as he got older, an increasingly wise man. By the time the boy left for the United States the father, who stayed on to earn enough money to join his wife and children, a common routine, the father was taken to be 60. If he'd stayed in Russia, my friend said, there's no doubt in my mind but that by the time he died, at about 70, he would have been practically revered for his 100 years.

As for the diet, all very old men, I mean, gaffers around 85, 90, get baited into attributing their longevity to diet. Ten, fifteen years ago, I forget, a former vice president of the United States, John Nance Garner, died in Texas. A wily, deadpan cove, when he was asked, he put it all down to 'ten snorts of Bourbon a day'.

And when the famous black baseball pitcher, Satchel Paige, pitched his last game at the incredible age of 59, he was asked the same question. Without a hint of a smile, he said, 'I puts it all down to my diet. I eat nothing but strictly fried foods.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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