Moscow Run-Around

The biggest news of the month was being made in Moscow last week, but what little news came out did not come from there. It was not for lack of trying. The press was not bound by any voluntary censorship, and it was ready & anxious to print any news it could get. In trying to cover the four-power talks on Germany, the foreign press corps in Moscow, now down to a corporal's guard, ran into a new kind of four-power agreement: an unbroken compact of silence. It led to some of the most frustrated reporting--and wildest guessing--since the war's end.

From the moment when U.S. Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith and Britain's Frank Roberts arrived in Moscow, mum was the word. It was even mummer after Reuters' Dallas and the Herald Tribune's Newman cabled a beat: STALIN EXPECTED RECEIVE ENVOYS TOMORROW NIGHT. Furious at the leak, the envoys swore embassy staffs, down to typists and cipher clerks, to secrecy.

Follow That Car. Correspondents got no briefings before the Kremlin visits, and no comment afterwards. They haunted the embassy entrances, set out in hot pursuit whenever a bigwig drove away, trailed the envoys to every lunch and dinner date. Arriving at the British embassy after one tiring encounter with Molotov, Ambassador Smith, usually an even-tempered man, snapped irritably: "You just sit here. I'll tell you everything." Then he told the newsmen nothing.

Smith, Roberts and French Ambassador Yves Chataigneau finally agreed to issue a hold-for-release warning of each Kremlin meeting, and a tipoff on which embassy would be host at the subsequent huddle. This saved legwork in surrounding all three embassies, but produced no real news; correspondents were reduced to cabling analyses (which sometimes disagreed) of the envoys' facial expressions. In five meetings, the press got about 120 noncommittal words out of Smith, less than that out of Roberts, nothing but vague smiles out of Chataigneau, not even a smile out of Molotov.

Block That Rumor. Nevertheless, the commentators had to comment (Drew Pearson confidently began a column: "Here is the inside story . . ."). The London Times's diplomatic correspondent wrote (in London) that "The Moscow talks yesterday advanced a stage nearer their conclusion, which cannot now be much longer delayed." The Manchester Guardian's stay-at-home diplomatic correspondent was also pawing the air: "It has been felt in some quarters that the meeting might prove decisive, but there is nothing to show that it did, in fact, produce any results."

As the newsless fortnight wore on, nameless "experienced Moscow observers," "usually informed sources," reliable diplomats" and "authoritative sources" began rearing their heads in dispatches from all four capitals. Gradually, however, the bare outlines of what was going on did become somewhat clearer (see INTERNATIONAL). In Moscow, where even these outlines were not visible to newsmen, the correspondents took to framing their cables in advance, leaving blanks to be filled in after "meeting ended " and "meeting lasted ." To make sure that it got out such news--or any real news--first, the A.P. booked a long-distance telephone line to London for three hours every meeting night.

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