From the S&S archives:
Headline roundup: Schine case hearing top news

SEN. JOSEPH R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) became locked with Army officials in a showdown battle at Washington last week.

Elsewhere, top world news developments included two Soviet cloak-and-dagger incidents. One was an Australian rescue of the wife of a defecting Russian spy, leading to severance of Moscow-Canberra diplomatic relations. The other involved a Soviet terror agent who surrendered to U.S. authorities in Germany and asked asylum.

The Washington controversy involves charges by the Army that McCarthy and Roy M. Cohn, chief counsel of the Senator's Senate investigating subcommittee, sought preferential treatment for Pvt G. David Schine. McCarthy accused the Army of trying to "blackmail" him into dropping his probe of Communists in the Army.

Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens, testifying Thursday at opening of the subcommittee's hearing into the case, charged that McCarthy had made false statements concerning the accusations against the Army and in connection with Schine.

He charged McCarthy and Cohn with "perversion of power" in trying to get the Army to grant Schine — an unpaid consultant to the subcommittee before his induction — special favors.

Maj Gen Miles Reber, Western Area Comd CG, was the first to testify as the hearing got under way. In 10 years as Army liaison officer with Congress, Reber asserted, he never had known "greater pressure" than was exerted for an officer's commission for Schine by the Senator and especially by Cohn.

On Friday, Stevens began telling of a monitored Nov. 7 telephone call he had with McCarthy. McCarthy called the monitoring "completely improper, indecent, and illegal."

The hearing, televised and broadcast throughout the U.S., resumes today. Meanwhile, Senate Investigators are in a legal quandary over making public transcripts of recorded telephone conversations in the case.

At the other end of the world, a full-scale diplomatic row followed the defection of Vladimir Petrov, 45, third secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. Petrov, who brought along what was described as important Soviet espionage data, was granted asylum by Australia.

Last Monday, Soviet guards forced his wife, Evdokia, 35, aboard a plane bound for Europe. They were taking her back to Moscow. At the plane's first stop, Darwin, Mrs. Petrov also asked for asylum and Australian police had to fight off her Soviet guards to rescue her. She has since been reunited with her husband.

Moscow, charging that Australia refused to surrender "embezzler" Petrov and "kidnaped" his wife, severed diplomatic relations Friday.

In Bonn, HICOG revealed that Soviet MVD officer Capt Nikolai E. Khokhlov and two East German assistants had surrendered to U.S. authorities and asked asylum.

Khokhlov said he had been ordered to assassinate Georgi S. Okolovich, Russian anti-Communist emigre leader in Frankfurt, with specially designed weapons firing steel or poison bullets.

A U.S. note protesting such action was handed to Soviet High Commissioner Vladimir S. Semenov.

As French forces continued losing ground in the Indo-China war, delegates to the Big Four conference due to open today began arriving in Geneva. The Western Big Three stood firm in their stand that Red China will not be accepted as an equal at the Far East parley.