That decision followed on an earlier pact—“a gentlemen’s agreement” it was called—that Clay had made with his Soviet counterpart to promptly hand over to the Soviets any of their “delinquent” citizens found in the American zone. With the Stalin regime already in the process of executing or sending to the gulags many of the hundreds of thousands of its citizens who had been repatriated at the end of the war, the Clay-Sokolovsky agreement was obviously a virtual death sentence for any Soviet deserter handed over. Peter Sichel and his team flouted the edict whenever they could, hiding Soviet
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