Photo of Jeffrey Schevitz ’62

His Secret Life

Jeffrey Schevitz ’62 was a presence at alumni activities — and a Cold War spy for East Germany

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By Adam Tanner *88

Published April 25, 2022

12 min read

A few days after Christmas in 1976, Jeffrey Schevitz ’62 crossed into East Berlin, met a local contact, and proceeded to a Stasi safehouse, ready to move to Communist East Germany.

One of the stranger episodes of Cold War espionage followed, a tale of shocking betrayal, or — depending on your ideological point of view — of committed embrace of Communist ideals and its infamous secret police. Schevitz, son of a Delaware cobbler, would spy for 13 years for the Stasi — short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, the Ministry for State Security — for which he was later convicted in a German court. 

As the “shield and the sword” of the Communist Party, the Stasi maintained a vast network of domestic and international agents and informants to monitor and curtail any possible subversive activities. From factories to universities, churches to bedrooms, no corner of East German life remained free of Stasi surveillance and intimidation, creating a climate of pervasive angst. The Stasi sought to stifle independent thought and action that might threaten the East German state and stood ready to imprison potential troublemakers. 

Schevitz, who told his story to PAW last summer, began to learn German at Princeton and first visited the East German capital as an undergrad days before the Communist part of Germany built the Berlin Wall in August 1961. In a series of articles for The Daily Princetonian that fall, he described his impressions, recalling how an East German union official allowed him to survey workers for his senior thesis comparing East and West German and U.S. labor unions.

“A fortuitous occurrence on the third day of my stay began a concatenation of events that turned out to be some of the most rewarding of my life,” Schevitz wrote. “I asked this official if I might be permitted to visit a factory and distribute a questionnaire which I was constructing. To my astonishment he asked me no probing questions. He responded with a laconic ‘Why not?’ ” 

Fifteen years later, as Schevitz tells PAW, he was back in Germany as an assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in West Berlin. But by 1976, he had soured on both U.S. academia and capitalism. He began to watch East German television, and as he viewed reports on the central role of workers and the achievements of collective farms, he remembered how East Germany had opened its doors to his undergraduate research. He decided to take a closer look during weekend trips to the other side of the wall.

Before long, Schevitz and his girlfriend, Beatrice Altman, a former SUNY Buffalo student, decided they should experience socialism by living in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). They sought advice from a handful of Westerners residing in East Berlin.

“He asked me lots and lots and lots and lots about the GDR,” says Victor Grossman, 94, a Harvard grad who defected to East Germany in 1952. “It wasn’t always so easy to adjust for an American couple from the States. You had to get used to a different life here, obviously.”

Expats introduced Schevitz to “Lutz Schindler,” a government translator who offered to help facilitate a move to East Germany. In reality, Schevitz learned during his own trial, Schindler was Peter Zaumseil, a part-time Stasi collaborator. He took Schevitz to a safehouse near Alexanderplatz to meet Horst Anders, soon to become head of the Stasi’s foreign-espionage department focused on penetrating the West German government, and his deputy, Wildo Arndt.

The Stasi often needed to blackmail, bribe, coerce, or seduce to recruit agents. But no one had to strong-arm Schevitz, who believed in Communism and says he thought the spying could help prevent nuclear war. “You can help us much more if you stay in the West,” the officials proposed. Intrigued and excited to join the struggle on the Cold War’s front line, Schevitz signed a statement of commitment to the Stasi organization. 

Altman, who would become his second wife a few months later, also joined up. Only a handful of other Americans are known to have worked for the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence service, experts say. By contrast, about 1,500 West Germans worked for the unit near the end of the 1980s, according to Georg Herbstritt, an expert on the Stasi materials in the German Federal Archives.

How does a largely apolitical Princeton grad become a spy for East Germany? Schevitz’s Princeton classmates could never have imagined his embrace of Communism. “Jeff was never strident about anything at that time,” says John Dunn ’62, Schevitz’s roommate for two years and best man at his first wedding, at the end of senior year. “Politics was not what we talked about. We talked about women because it was an all-male school.”

“His interests included the usual undergraduate stuff — parties, girls, etc.,” agrees Bill de Decker, ’62 *67, another of six friends who roomed together in the then-new Gauss Hall. 

Several months after graduation, Schevitz began working on a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. The school exposed him to radical ideas. De Decker visited him there twice and noticed his roommate’s transformation. During the first visit, over Thanksgiving in 1962, his old pal seemed unchanged. But when de Decker returned the following summer as a young aerospace engineer working at a defense contractor, friends at Schevitz’s apartment greeted him with hostility.

“I was called all sorts of names and told that I was in the business of killing people,” he recalls. “When I tried to explain I was actually working on the Apollo moon program, it got worse, since they started accusing me of taking the food out of poor people’s mouths. … When I asked Jeff what he thought about all of that, he did not disagree and in fact said he agreed with it.”

In 1964, Schevitz joined Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. And as U.S. intervention in Vietnam intensified, Schevitz became a fervent antiwar activist. Eventually even liberal Berkeley appeared constraining. 

His next stop, in 1969, was Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught in a sociology department becoming known as a hotbed of radicals, and agitated alongside students. “My major activities since graduation have involved learning about and struggling against American corporate capitalism, which appears to me the root cause of the war in Indochina, racism, and the great economic and political inequality in the U.S.,” Schevitz wrote in his Princeton 10th-reunion yearbook, in 1972. 

Schevitz’s appointment at Washington University was not renewed. He landed at SUNY Buffalo. When the department there denied him tenure in 1976, he moved to Berlin.

The Stasi told their new West Berlin-based recruit to transform himself from a Berkeley firebrand back into a clean-cut Princetonian. Schevitz trimmed his long hair, bought new clothes, stopped attending public protests, and quit meeting expats in East Berlin. 

Schevitz, code-named “Robert,” aided by his wife Altman-Schevitz, known as “Lares,” started spying in early 1977. As he learned the ropes, he says, he passed on minor items such as his institute’s telephone directory and lists of schedules and events. He took notes on acquaintances, including their personal problems — details the Stasi could use to compromise and blackmail people. He soon felt more valued, with a greater sense of purpose than he’d felt in academia, he says. 

From time to time, Schevitz met Lutz in the West, as well as his Stasi superiors in East Berlin. Every week he and Altman-Schevitz tuned into a Grundig shortwave radio to write down a string of numbers. They subtracted their personal code, then used a cipher to decode the message. To contact Stasi headquarters, Schevitz could telephone one of several numbers dedicated only to him. A call to one line followed by a quick hang-up announced he was ready to drop off documents. Another number signaled that Schevitz and his wife were being followed. 

Only once did the couple believe that a Western agent was closing in on them, Schevitz says. The incident occurred in West Berlin after they returned from East Berlin with the latest codes and a false-bottom bag full of cash. They ducked into a Chinese restaurant. Altman-Schevitz went into the bathroom and inserted the rolled-up wad of paper codes as she might a tampon.

Schevitz’s reporting in West Berlin proved of limited use, his superiors later said, so the spy agency paid for his move to the West German capital, Bonn, in 1978, where he was tasked with finding out what was going on behind closed doors in the West German chancellery and identifying new Stasi agents. With a new job at the German Council on Foreign Relations, he transmitted a telephone list of its employees and his assessments of different people, including a friendly, single-mother librarian, for whom he suggested that the Stasi deploy a “Romeo agent” to seduce and recruit. It is not clear if the Stasi acted on his idea.

His trial revealed that the Stasi rated Schevitz’s usefulness in Bonn as “below average.” He moved again to become a researcher at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center in 1980. There Schevitz devised a better way to penetrate the West German government. Under the guise of moonlighting for an American energy-consulting firm, Schevitz paid two well-connected experts he befriended for reports on energy, technology, and environmental policies.

Photo of Schevitz in his home in Trauchgau, Germany, in 2021

Schevitz in his home in Trauchgau, Germany, in 2021

Photo: Adam Tanner *88

To relay these photographed reports, Schevitz or Altman-Schevitz would board an overnight train traveling between Basel and Berlin. One or the other would hide the film cannisters above a ceiling tile in a train bathroom. Inside the lavatory the spies also collected cash for expenses. Afterward, they would leave a tiny mark outside to signal the drop.

During these years Schevitz also participated in the Princeton Alumni Association of Germany. He organized the alumni group’s first summer event, a sail down the Neckar River, recalls David T. Fisher ’69, a co-founder of the group. He interviewed high school applicants. Schevitz and his wife also raised a son, who was born in 1978. 

On Dec. 28, 1989, more than six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Schevitz traveled to East Berlin for a last meeting with his two Stasi superiors. Even if he had never produced intelligence blockbusters, he had served loyally for a long time and been decorated with medals for merit and length of service.

With the collapse of East Germany approaching, his superiors told Schevitz they would destroy files related to his work. He had made 161 drops and commissioned 25 reports, making him a top producer among foreign-intelligence agents in terms of sheer quantity, according to a later official study. In early 1990, Schevitz received a final instruction: Destroy your cipher and records. He threw the film cannister that would expose film if opened incorrectly into the Neckar.

Then, in May 1994, German agents — with new insights obtained from 381 CD-ROMs with microfilmed documents from destroyed Stasi records — arrested him at his Karlsruhe home. 

During the trial, Schevitz contended he had been a CIA double agent, asserting he had only sent the Stasi disinformation. The judge did not believe him, and he now concedes it was not true. He was convicted in November 1995 of working as a Stasi spy and sentenced to 18 months in prison; the court suspended the sentence (he spent four months in prison after his arrest) and ordered him to pay more than $10,000 to a charity, saying he had not caused serious harm to West Germany. Altman-Schevitz was convicted and fined $7,000. 

After the trial, the Princeton Alumni Association of Germany declared Schevitz persona non grata. “It was a very emotional thing, because everybody liked Jeffrey,” says Fisher. 

Schevitz expresses pride in his espionage work for the East during the Cold War. He does not express regrets. “I felt that I was helping prevent a war and that I was giving East Germany breathing space.”

Today Schevitz, 81, and Altman-Schevitz live in Trauchgau, a quaint Bavarian village where flowers spill over the balconies of traditional homes. Steps from the town church and clock tower, the couple rent a centuries-old two-story home. Their windows overlook neat piles of logs in neighboring yards and the Allgäu Alps beyond.

For many years, Schevitz did not discuss his Stasi past and maintained the fiction that he had worked for the CIA so that he and his wife could keep their post-espionage jobs, he as a family therapist and representative for a medical-device company. After both retired, they agreed to talk publicly, ahead of the January publication of Altman-Schevitz’s memoir, in German, of her life as a spy. Over two days in conversation with PAW, the two confirmed the details of their espionage documented in German court records. 

Schevitz expresses pride in his espionage work. He does not express regrets. “I felt that I was helping prevent a war and that I was giving East Germany breathing space. I never thought I was responsible for the Easterners using that breathing space,” he says. If East Germans messed it up, he suggests, “I don’t feel responsible; what could I have done?”

He rarely reflects on his impact on the lives of others, like those who suffered under Stasi surveillance. Instead, he focuses on his ideological commitment to socialist ideals. “The intelligence services don’t work in categories of fair and unfair,” he says. “Obviously, as a spy, you’re a little bit devious, or you wouldn’t be successful.” The pursuit of these higher ideals justified any damage he may have caused, he says. 

Nor does he regret betraying friends. “This has always been a difficult question to deal with, deceiving somebody I really felt I liked very much,” he says. How does he reconcile that? “A larger political goal of working to prevent an atomic war may sound highfalutin, but that was the task — provide information that could help reduce the confrontation, or the chance of confrontation, between the two societies.”

He knowingly exploited his Princeton background as a cover. “Well, it’s true. But I used it to pursue the ideals that I felt were worth pursuing. And they were ethically defendable ideas, defensible ideas,” he says. Schevitz bristles at the very word “Stasi,” stressing that he worked for the Hauptverwaltung A (HVA) foreign-intelligence wing of the ministry, not the domestic wing known for repression. He insists that his spying did not make him a Stasi agent. “There is no derogatory word for the HVA. ‘Stasi’ is a term used in the ongoing propaganda war,” he says. “My task was not to steal and/or copy secret documents. My task and my ability was to analyze the overlapping and conflicting developing positions within the chancellor’s office and the other major ministries.” 

At his Bavarian home, Schevitz keeps his Princeton reunion books, as well as albums of University music and other souvenirs. “I never rejected Princeton,” he says. “I think it’s a wonderful institution.” 

Last summer, Schevitz was planning to attend his 60th reunion this year, and his former roommate John Dunn was looking forward to catching up. He had visited Schevitz in Germany during his Stasi years, learning of his friend’s past only in 2021. “I was so surprised,” says Dunn. “That’s really strange.”

Adds former roommate de Decker: “Jeff is probably one of the most puzzling people I’ve ever known.”

The upcoming Princeton gathering wasn’t the only reunion Schevitz planned to attend: Gatherings of former East German spies are usually held every two years — and when the next one takes place, he expects to be there. 

Adam Tanner *88 is the author of Our Bodies, Our Data and What Stays in Vegas.

10 Responses

Archibald Hovanesian Jr. ’62

1 Year Ago

Schevitz ’62’s Astonishing Hypocrisy

I read and re-read Jeff Schevitz’s attempt at an apologia in PAW’s May 2022 profile of him. He showed up at our 60th Reunion. He and I spoke briefly, to no particular effect. He apparently fully expects to be accepted, despite his admitted spying on behalf of the East German Communist government, specifically in the “employ” of an element of the Stasi, their brutal secret police. His hypocrisy is astonishing: 1. When later confronted by the legitimate German government he falsely claimed to have been a CIA agent; 2. At his well-deserved trial in Germany he claimed to have been a “double agent,” and later admitted that it wasn’t true; that he had lied, presumably under oath; 3. He freely admits to having “no regrets” in having betrayed friends; 4. He evidences absolutely no regret or concern for people who were persecuted, tortured, jailed, or otherwise were subjected to humiliation, injury, or death by his employer, the Stasi; 5. He brazenly says that he “never rejected Princeton.” How noble. He admits that he used its reputation and stature to further his squalid activities. It would, at least in my view, be more than appropriate for Princeton to reject him.

As a footnote, perhaps to explain the temperature of my comments, I was a serving naval officer in-country in Vietnam, after USMC SERE training. My work sometimes involved being on the receiving end of munitions supplied by Jeff’s “friends.” I have friends who did not make it back, whose names are on the Wall of the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. I cannot abide his arrogant cheek in floating back and expecting to be forgiven and accepted.

Norman Ravitch *62

2 Years Ago

Comments on the Cold War

I have lived through the Cold War. My first year in high school occurred during the outbreak of the Korean War. My college days saw the Army McCarthy hearings. My graduate years at Princeton saw the visit of much admired Fidel Castro to campus, as well as Konrad Adenauer. And my years of university teaching in California brought home the various attempts of several European countries to break the ties they themselves had not forged with the Soviet Union. Then came the collapse of Communism in the Soviet state, the apparent beginnings of democracy there, cut short quickly enough by the same Vladimir Putin who is now engaged in the murder of the Ukrainian people and the destruction of their heritage which was not part of Muscovy at all.

So what should be said about Mr. Schevitz? The alumni who commented show the influence of the Cold War upon themselves, both those defending the Princeton spy and those denigrating him. They have done a good job, both sets of antagonists. I conclude that the Cold Was not as noble as American politicians pretended nor the noble defense of the Worker’s Motherland as the Soviet leaders never failed to claim.

Dorina Amendola ’02

2 Years Ago

On Communism and Capitalism

Aren’t those who deny the evil they are involved with known as sociopaths? I commend PAW for printing this excellent piece. Like poor Mr. Schevitz, many among Princeton academic luminaries are closet or open Communists, rapt in a gross embrace with a romanticized ideology whose success requires forced compliance of the populace by a superior ruling class. This letter is not a blanket approval of unfettered establishment capitalism. Nor yet of the new trending global corporate benevolence entwined to the media, entertainment, and academic industries in flagrante that looks curiously like a new brand of Communism. There continue to grow, among the young, educated and uninformed, fantasies that “it just wasn’t done right,” or “Scandinavia does it right,” simply a total failure of education on the 20th and 21st century Communist mass murders and socialist social failures. Lenin himself considered socialism a vital gateway drug.  There is no need for me to go into depth here on its evils. Enough American-emigre alumni have first-hand experience with the #CommunistLife that a whole course can be taught. And perhaps coursework is necessary, for all, as we applaud ourselves for divesting from clean regulated American fossil fuels thus impoverishing our middle/working class, while supporting rare-earth and other investments with a certain totalitarian global power vying for the world record in human rights atrocities. 

Karl Brehmer *85

2 Years Ago

In Defense of an Idealist

Kudos to Adam Tanner *88 for his surprisingly even-handed article on Jeffrey Schevitz ’62. I spent a month hitchhiking around the GDR as a student in the 1970s and then lived there for the last four years of its existence as a more-or-less normal member of society despite the passport in my pocket (I was still a U.S. citizen at the time). I had a full-time job teaching at a university and met and befriended people from all walks of life and political persuasion all around the country. By the end, I had an East German wife and a 1-year-old child, as well as wonderful in-laws who were loyal party members. As a socialist of the anarchist variety, I myself was never an adherent of Soviet-style communism, though I managed to keep an open mind about those who were and remained hopeful that “top-down” East Bloc socialism could eventually grow grass roots, as it were, making the Stasi and the Wall wither away one day in some faraway future — without being bulldozed over by Western corporate capitalism. 

I sympathize entirely with Jeffrey’s original motivation to contribute to peace and coexistence between East and West in any way possible, even if it entailed disloyalty to “his own side.” The fear of nuclear war was very real, particularly in the East, as the nuclear balance was being seriously threatened, especially under Reagan. Remember his SDI, aka “Star Wars,” and the neutron bomb, which was meant to destroy life while leaving structures/cities more or less intact?

But there was also serious progress achieved in the Reagan-Gorbachev summits, and that required nuclear parity, something Jeffrey presumably wished to help maintain. (How sad that the U.S. withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2018 and that the threat of nuclear war is now greater than ever — and the prospect of eventual nuclear disarmament nothing more than a pipe dream.)

I was courted by the Ministry for State Security in the person of a highly charismatic HVA officer I met with regularly over a fairly long period of time for fascinating and open discussions of world developments with no taboos. I was dangerously close to making a formal commitment to “promoting world peace,” as it was officially called, that might have eventually turned into forced spying on U.S. institutions in West Berlin, but I turned to the U.S. embassy in East Berlin in the nick of time to get help in extricating myself from the web I had started to weave with my potential future “agent handler.”

Thanks for your article, Adam. Jeffrey sounds like an interesting guy, and we certainly don’t have the whole story here. Once an organization such as the HVA of the Stasi or the CIA has got their hooks into you, the noblest idealism can quickly be misused. I very much look forward to reading his wife’s book.

A few additional comments addressing some of the points my fellow responders raised:

• One need not look far to see politicians arguing for the ends justifying the means — even when those means fly in the face of international law. To take two particularly crass examples: Bush’s gang justifying the use of torture and Madeleine Albright’s infamous defense of the Clinton-Albright sanctions, which led to the deaths of at least half a million Iraqi children in the 1990s: “We think the price is worth it.”

• No question about it: We must never forget the victims of Communism (millions and millions), but how can one not mention in the same breath the millions of victims of U.S. imperialism around the globe?

• Regarding the dissatisfaction of East Germans: True, but I’d be willing to bet that the degree of dissatisfaction with and distrust of the system is greater among average citizens in today’s United States. Granted, there are major differences in the nature of the dissatisfaction. In East Germany, it was being walled in and constantly in fear of being under surveillance. In today’s U.S., it ranges from off-the-wall fascistic Trumpian paranoia to legitimate frustration about the fact that, for example, immensely popular ideas such as single-payer health care for all or a green New Deal are off the agenda as a matter of principle because the two corporate parties are beholden to their Wall Street (and Pentagon) masters.

• Referring to the Stasi, the Cheka, and Felix Dzerzhinsky in the context of socialist ideals is like referring to, say, Hiroshima, My Lai, or chattel slavery followed by Jim Crow in the context of American ideals.

James A. Gordon Jr. ’58 (Captain, U.S. Navy, retired)

2 Years Ago

Princeton in the Nation’s Service?

Princeton’s demise: Merely as an arbitrary benchmark I have chosen Fidel Castro’s Princeton visit, April 20-21, 1959, at the behest of  his adulating admirers even then, amongst the faculty and staff of the University. Subsequently we saw a significant modification in the requisites required for even an A.B. degree. Elimination of even a basic course in political science, civics, or economics. This was accompanied by the elimination of limited religious attendance for the freshman year. Possibly a precursor of an evolving trend?

Rather than a chronicle of subsequent events from the SDS forming on campus during the Vietnam conflict through the current woke “enlightenment,” I would rather cite your magazine’s laudatory article last year, commending two recent alumnus entrepreneurs on their highly successful cannabis business endeavors. Unbelievably that nadir has now been exceeded by this even more arduous effort lauding an alumnus (Class of 1962) of this formerly esteemed institution, who was tried and found guilty by due Western judicial process of  being  an agent for the Stasi, secret police of the former East German “Republic,” and who is totally unrepentant. In case of the fact that you are unaware the Stasi were seamless with the KGB of the now collapsed USSR, replaced by the FSB (Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti) of the Russian Federation, who just happens to be engaged in a “special military operation” with Ukraine.

I was a late bloomer, blossoming well after my four years at Princeton, with multiple commands in U.S. Naval Intelligence. 

Thomas Peff ’71

2 Years Ago

No Remorse?

I worked in West Berlin in 1968 and 1974 and interacted with many East Berliners who were terrified by Stasi and risked their lives trying to escape to the West.

Mr. Schevitz, who apparently was radicalized during his time in Berkeley and spent years as Stasi spy, now chooses to enjoy life in a free democratic society in Germany. How truly ironic!

Tom Swift ’76

2 Years Ago

A Visit to the Stasi Museum

I found “His Secret Life” (May 2022 issue) a fascinating tale. For those who might have sympathy for someone having an “ideological commitment to socialist ideals,” I recommend a visit to Stasi headquarters in Berlin, now a museum. Upon entering the main lobby, there is a bust occupying a position of honor. Marx? Engels? Lenin? No. “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka and architect of mass executions. 

In the gift shop, I sought to buy an old commemorative medal of Iron Felix, for a fierce cold warrior friend. The elderly woman tending shop was appalled, asking in German if I had any idea who Dzerzhinsky was and discouraging the purchase. Not wanting to leave her with a poor impression of Americans, I returned the medallion.  

Lawrence G. Kelley ’68

2 Years Ago

Spies Among Us

That Jeffrey Schevitz ’62 (“His Secret Life,” May issue) could not see (or perhaps “accept” is the better word) the obvious ideological and physical rot that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) represented reflects willful blindness. From 1983 to 1986, I served in a U.S. military unit that performed liaison with and reconnaissance of Soviet forces in that country. In those years I continuously traveled through the country, communicating not just with Soviets but also with rank-and-file East Germans encountered in the field. If Schevitz did not detect the discontent of the population outside the Socialist Party ranks or the antipathy toward the 350,000-man Soviet force that occupied its country — the GDR was the USSR’s pet child — he must have permanently engaged in selective listening and self-delusion. It appears that, remorseless, he still does. The Germans have an appropriate term for such individuals that Schevitz, no doubt, knows well: betonköpfer (those with heads made of concrete).

Regrettably, Schevitz is not the only modern Princeton alumnus/a accused of taking the path of espionage for a country ruled by an inimical regime. Marta Rita Velazquez ’79, who was accused of spying for Cuba and fled the U.S. to avoid prosecution, is another (her indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice was unsealed in 2013). She appears to be residing in Sweden, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S. for the crimes that she allegedly committed.

 

Paul Mendelson ’62

2 Years Ago

A Spy’s Motivations

I didn’t know Jeffrey Schevitz ’62 at Princeton nor after (“His Secret Life,” May issue). I cannot comment on his character then or now.

However, I find his explanation of trying to avert an atomic war a bit disingenuous. He could have done much from the West. Being a communist and living in a communist society seem to be his real driving force. Spying, perhaps, was more glamorous and possibly heroic. Yet, Stasi described his work as mediocre.

Most distasteful to me about this saga is his assertion that the end justifies the means.

Richard Golden ’91

2 Years Ago

A Rather Disturbing Set of Circumstances

I went into this article expecting to read a tale of contrition or remorse from Jeffrey Schevitz ’62, especially given the destruction wrought upon thousands of innocent people by the Communist dictators of East Germany and other Soviet bloc nations.

Instead, we are met with dissembling, obfuscation, and post hoc rationalization. Mr. Schevitz’s current justifications for his behavior seem as bad or worse than the original actions. It is a bit ironic that Mr. Schevitz chooses to live out his dotage in what is now a free, democratic society that he actively worked to undermine.

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