Harassment of Sakharov More Open, Kin Say

WESTWOOD, Mass. — KGB intimidation of Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, has become more open since she visited the United States, relatives said today after a telephone conversation with the couple.

Bonner said KGB crews that last year filmed the couple with hidden cameras now take pictures openly in Gorky, the closed city 250 miles west of Moscow where the couple live in internal exile, according to her daughter, Tatiana Yankelevich.

“We’re being filmed everywhere, openly, both still and moving pictures,” Bonner told her son, Alexei Semyonov, today.

The 20-minute phone call from Semyonov’s suburban home had a weak connection that at times faded out.

Call Believed Jammed

“The connection was so poor it seems that it was done on purpose,” Yankelevich said. “The conversation was very jammed and obstructed and we really couldn’t get any details of how they are.”

Yankelevich said her mother, who underwent heart bypass surgery in Boston last December, has suffered two recurrences of the pain her daughter said she suffered five and six times a day before her operation.

She said agents who greeted Bonner at the Gorky train station when she returned from her six-month visit to the West in June prevented the couple from hiring a porter to carry their bags.

In a lighter moment, Bonner asked her daughter to send toilet paper, paper napkins, underwear and a record with the score from “Cats,” a Broadway musical she saw while in the United States.

Bonner had said before leaving the United States that she and her husband would await a telephone call from her children at a phone bank in the Gorky post office on the first Monday of every month. This was the first of those calls.