Inside the National Archives in Washington are two large gray boxes holding 21 folders containing one damaging fact: For half a century, America abandoned Raoul Wallenberg, a hero of the Holocaust.

These boxes and folders contain 1,500 documents from the Central Intelligence Agency--which reveal that, through its inaction and subversion, the U.S. government let Wallenberg languish in the camps of silence, known as the Gulag Archipelago. These documents, released in 1994, show that America, which sent Wallenberg on one of World War II´s most hazardous missions, betrayed this man who achieved the unachievable to rescue 100,000 Jews.

A joint Swedish-Russian group--after more than nine years of study--released two reports on January 12, 2001. The Russian version said Wallenberg was killed in 1947, but the Swedish version raised many theories and came to no conclusions. A lot of this material was covered in the CIA files.

During his years of imprisonment, many have tried and all have failed to free Wallenberg. His family made impassioned pleas to the highest levels of American government, only to be ignored five times.

All attempts to free Wallenberg, perpetually bungled, included proposed spy swaps and a legal effort that initially won, but ultimately lost an unusual lawsuit against the Soviet Union.

Through the prism of contemporary interviews along with the CIA documents as well as examination of 500 State Department documents in Washington and another 500 at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, as well as the Swedish and Russian reports, one sees new details and insights into a basic conflict.

All the new information provides the backbone of a book, the first to specify American culpability in deserting Raoul Wallenberg.