Free Republic

Joe Biden wrote to his son Hunter and others close to him using the pseudonym “Peter Henderson” – a fictional Soviet Union-era spy in several Tom Clancy novels who infiltrated the US government, emails show. The messages contained on Hunter’s abandoned laptop appear to indicate the then-VP started using the fictitious mole’s moniker in October 2016 while forwarding a YouTube video to his son Hunter, brother Jim, daughter-in-law Hallie, as well as his sister and longtime political strategist Valerie Biden Owens. Biden sent the message using an email address with a username of “67stingray” — a clear reference to his...

A senior Russian official finally admitted that Stalin's secret police shot dead Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of central European Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945. For decades the Soviet authorities insisted that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in 1947 in a Soviet prison, but speculation about his fate grew into a full-blown mystery as gulag inmates surfaced to report sightings of the Swede in Siberia into the 1950s.

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Russian archivists have published new material from a German officer imprisoned after World War II who shared a cell with Raoul Wallenberg, the missing Swedish diplomat credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Publication of the statements from Willy Roedel came as a surprise since the Russians had previously denied they existed, say two independent scholars who have researched the Wallenberg mystery for decades, in a paper released Monday. That raises suspicions that Moscow may be withholding information which could help solve the 66-year-old puzzle of Wallenberg's arrest and disappearance in the gulag, the vast...

Sixty-four years after his disappearance, here's where the unsolved Raoul Wallenberg mystery stands.Since Raoul Wallenberg disappeared into Soviet prisons in 1945, his fate has remained in dispute. The Kremlin has maintained for more than a half-century that the Swedish humanitarian died of a heart attack soon after his capture. But Moscow has yet to definitively document how or when he met his end. "There is a sort of ambivalence and embarrassment" among Russian leaders regarding Mr. Wallenberg, says former United Nations chief Kofi Annan. Mr. Annan, the husband of Mr. Wallenberg's niece, Nane, says he raised the matter of her...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and scrambles onto the roof of the cattle car. Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus "passports" that extended Sweden's protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on dumfounded. Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and a...

Whether religious or secular, most Israelis are familiar with the Talmudic statement that "He who saves a life is as if he has saved the entire world." Perhaps no one understands this more clearly than a pleasant, soft-spoken, 53-year-old Ra'anana resident who for more than 20 years has waged a relentless and often lonely campaign to determine the whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg, savior of 100,000 Jewish lives. By the spring of 1944 the Nazis had succeeded in wiping out every sizable Jewish community in Europe except for the 700,000 Jews remaining in Budapest, Hungary. By late June, Adolf Eichmann had...

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. - As a Reagan White House lawyer, John Roberts urged the administration to dodge a proposal from the family of Raoul Wallenberg that sought to bring new pressure on the Soviets to disclose what became of the heroic Swedish diplomat. In late 1983, the family's lawyer urged the Reagan administration to invoke a 19th century law that gave the president the power to "use such means ... necessary and proper" to seek the release of citizens seized by foreign governments. At the time some believed that Wallenberg, an honorary U.S. citizen, was languishing in a Soviet prison....

Arab U.N. diplomats decided to visibly snub a reception at U.N. headquarters opening an exhibition to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps. That action contrasted with an earlier session by the U.N. General Assembly where many Arab delegations gave what appeared to be lip service in a GA session to honor those who died and those who survived the campaigns of the Third Reich. In an unusual move, the White House sent deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz to lead the U.S. delegation. Wolfowitz is said to be on a short list of candidates to...