In the account William White was told, the Americans had freely given up their passports and voluntarily acquired Soviet citizenship. In a wartime memoir, White wrote, “Under any interpretation of international law they were indistinguishable from any other Soviet citizen, bound to their assigned jobs and with no hope of leaving.” White discovered how the emigrants had once clamored at the doors of the American embassy begging for help. As the Soviet Union’s foreigners were transported into the Gulag, “all trace of them was lost and no longer could they plead with their embassies in Moscow.”
