An American television celebrity will meet with Moscow officials this week seeking answers to a 17-year-old mystery concerning her first husband's disappearance in a restricted, politically volatile area.


Janice Pennington, a hostess on the television game show "The Price is Right", hopes to learn what happened to her first husband, Frederic "Fritz" Stammberger.


A world-class German mountain climber and skier, Stammberger may have been a spy when he disappeared in Chitral, Pakistan, in September 1975 at the age of 35, Pennington said.


She said that Stammberger was last seen Sept. 27, 1975, in a Pakistani village near Tirich Mir, in the Hindu Kush mountain range, which divides Pakistan from Afghanistan.


In October 1975, a search party found the climber's daypack containing books and writing paper in a hut near the village, Pennington said. No other equipment or remains were found on the route of his climb.


The head of a second search party six months later saw a file on Stammberger in the village police station, but officials refused to let him look at it, she said. For several years, Stammberger's fate remained a mystery.


"Then I started getting anonymous phone calls from someone who asked if I knew anything about Fritz's whereabouts or his visit to Pakistan", she said. Pennington hired a private detective who traced the calls to a safe house in California, Pennington said.


"That was all. He told me he didn't know what happened to Fritz, but if he did, it would be better for me not to know", she said. He would not elaborate on the comment.


In the fall of 1982, Pennington decided to have Stammberger declared legally dead so she could marry her present husband, Carlos de Arbue. She changed plans abruptly when the second search party leader called and said that he had found Stammberger in a prison in Chitral, Pakistan. "He said he would bring Fritz home for Christmas", she said.


But Christmas came and went, and she never heard from the man again. She went ahead with the legal action and remarried. But in recent years, using the Freedom of Information Act, Pennington requested U. S. intelligence documents.


Interpol released an Oct. 28, 1983, report of an interview with a source who said that a mummified body had been seen on Tirich Mir by Polish and Canadian climbers in the late 1970s.


The informant said he "does not believe the body to be Stammberger, but has no proof", the report states. He "believes that Stammberger is alive and in prison in Pakistan and may have been involved in some sort of covert operation in the restricted area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border", the document states.


When President Boris Yeltsin opened archives that may shed light on prisoners of war held in the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan, Pennington decided to come to Moscow.


"We have three reports that he was arrested. I just want to know once and for all what happened to him". she said.