WALLENBERG disappeared in Budapest in January, 1945, on his way to meet the commanders of the Soviet troops occupying the Hungarian capital. Even today, his fate remains a mystery. Although Russian authorities finally acknowledged last December that their forces had arrested the Swede on espionage charges and held him until he died in a Soviet prison two-and-a-half years later, a joint Russian-Swedish team reported on Jan. 12 that it could not agree on whether Wallenberg is dead or alive.

Officially, the Russians say Wallenberg died of a heart attack in 1947. But Yakovlev, the chairman of Russia???s Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, believes Wallenberg was executed as a spy that same year.

Yakovlev spoke with Leonid Velekhov of Itogi, (the Russian magazine published in collaboration with Newsweek) about the latest developments in the Wallenberg epic. Excerpts:

ITOGI: Are you sure Wallenberg was executed in 1947, and didn???t remain confined in the camps for many years, as some eyewitnesses have attested?

Yakovlev: I have no grounds to disbelieve [former KGB chief Vladimir] Kryuchkov, from whom I heard for the first time that Wallenberg had been executed. This all occurred at a Politburo meeting: we were discussing the Wallenberg case, and I said to Kryuchkov, with whom I had a quite normal relationship at the time, that it???s not altogether clear what actually happened to him, when he died, and under what circumstances. What do you mean, Aleksandr Nikolayevich, Kryuchkov says to me-what???s not clear? He was executed. First of all, he knew too much, and second, he refused to cooperate with our people.

Do you think Wallenberg worked for any of the intelligence services-Swedish, German, American?

Was he an agent for Swedish intelligence? I think he was. And I don???t see anything wrong with that. I will even say more: if he hadn???t been an agent for special services, he could not have carried out the mission that was entrusted to him. He could not have, first of all, penetrated into the high circles of the German command in which he alone could reach agreement on getting people out of the death camps. This was an extremely difficult job that Wallenberg could not have managed on his own. Could he have saved 30,000 people if he had just been the ordinary diplomat that he was passing himself off as?

What is your opinion of Wallenberg as an individual?

He was a very courageous, outstanding person. People should kneel down before him. What was done to him here has, for a long time, personally made me want to apologize to Sweden. I have said this both at the prosecutor???s office and at the Foreign Ministry-that it is essential to issue an official apology, to repent. But all those places, alas, are still dominated by a Soviet way of thinking and acting…

Incidentally, in November [the Russian news agency] Interfax reported that [President Vladimir] Putin had agreed to your proposal to personally sign a decree rehabilitating Wallenberg. This would have already looked like an apology. But literally a few days later, in early December, Interfax issued another report, in which a middle-level official at the prosecutor???s office, in effect, repudiated your proposal, saying Wallenberg should be rehabilitated without special treatment. What actually happened?

I did indeed report to Putin on Wallenberg. Actually, on two people-Wallenberg and chief marshal of the air force Novikov-based on the fact that they were uncommon people and their rehabilitation cases demanded an uncommon approach. He questioned me about Wallenberg: it seemed to me that he was not especially well-versed on the case. But he reacted with approval to the idea itself of rehabilitation, saying that it should be done. I assembled a commission and informed it about what had been reported to the president. The commission adopted a decision to rehabilitate, after which I wrote two letters reporting this decision-to the president and to the prosecutor???s office. I think someone in his office talked Putin out of taking a personal part in Wallenberg???s rehabilitation. I even know that in one of the departments of his administration a decree on Wallenberg was already being prepared… But what are you going to do-there are too many different advisers there.