THE case of Chen Guangcheng, the dissident who escaped house arrest and sought refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing, attracted global attention not only because Mr. Chen bravely stood up for human rights in China but also because American officials seemed to stumble when he sought our help. But these cases are never simple.  As a State Department lawyer in the 1970s and ’80s, I negotiated a number of spy trades with our cold war adversaries; I also dealt with cases involving defectors and political dissidents. Each case was unique and required us to deal with complex human situations in the course of very tense bilateral relationships.  On the personal level, we should not be surprised that Mr. Chen was torn between staying in China or coming to the United States. Becoming a dissident takes courage, and dissidents are often complicated individuals under enormous stress.  They may be facing death at home and must make a decision whether to leave their country forever. If they do, they are turning on their homeland, a decision that can give rise to second thoughts later on. Reverse defections during the cold war were not uncommon: in 1985 Vitaly Yurchenko, a K.G.B. officer, defected to the United States but later walked out of a Georgetown restaurant and into the Soviet Embassy.  American officials must also balance our support for a particular dissident with other national interests at stake. This adds additional layers of complexity — layers that, to many, may make the officials’ actions seem incoherent.  For example, the Soviets and their Eastern allies often sought to include dissidents in their spy trades. We consistently resisted those efforts, because doing so would put all dissidents at greater risk by legitimizing the Soviet claim that they were all spies.  But we also had to be strategic about our objectives. Anatoly Shcharansky, a world-renowned Soviet dissident (who later changed his name to Natan Sharansky), was imprisoned by the Soviets on trumped-up charges of espionage. But he was such a symbol of resistance and so widely supported in the West that President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz decided he should be included in a larger prisoner exchange. And, in February of 1986, Mr. Shcharansky walked across the Glienicke Bridge in Berlin to freedom.  Others were given refuge in American Embassies. Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, a Hungarian dissident, lived in our embassy in Budapest for 15 years, while six Russian Pentecostalists lived in the embassy in Moscow for nearly five years.  But that doesn’t mean American Embassies were, or are, “American soil.” Under international law they are inviolate, but for very practical reasons, they cannot be the first station on an underground railroad for escape to the United States.  In some cases, there was yet another level of difficulty, namely the intense glare of public scrutiny. In August 1979, Aleksandr Godunov, the lead dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet, defected in New York City. He told American authorities that his wife, Lyudmila Vlasova, wanted to join him but was not allowed to leave their hotel. Then her Soviet handlers insisted that she wanted to go back to the Soviet Union.  American officials, led by Donald McHenry, the deputy representative to the United Nations Security Council, with me as his lawyer, attempted to interview Ms. Vlasova. Her handlers agreed that we had the right to interview her, but they refused to make her available. Instead, they spirited her onto an Aeroflot flight as it was about to depart Kennedy Airport.  We had anticipated such a move and blocked the airplane from leaving. Over the next 72 hours, in the glare of television cameras at a gate in the old Pan Am terminal, we tried to determine whether Ms. Vlasova wanted to leave voluntarily, but the Soviets insisted that she was too frightened to leave the airplane.  Eventually Mr. McHenry, accompanied by a doctor, interviewed her in a mobile lounge brought to the plane. Armed federal agents were standing by in case she did, in fact, want to stay and the Soviets tried to drag her back on the plane. In the end, Mr. McHenry determined that she did in fact want to return to Russia voluntarily, and the standoff ended peacefully.  Both then and today, American officials must make difficult decisions quickly, often under intense public pressure and with incomplete information. It’s hard to get it right every time. In the Chen case, the administration may have made some missteps, but the solution — to let him enter the United States as a student — seems a good one.  Our consistent support of dissidents during the cold war played a key role in the collapse of Communism, and American officials must keep this history and our values in mind as they struggle with each case. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got it right when she sought a solution to the Chen incident “that reflected his choices and our values.” That must never change.  Jeffrey H. Smith is a former assistant legal adviser to the State Department and was general counsel for the C.I.A. from 1995 to 1996.
Deciding whether, and how, to provide asylum for dissidents is a complicated issue, and each case is different.