Muffled in Moscow

In 1956, after long decades during which the number of U.S. correspondents in Moscow was severely limited, a large group was once again admitted. Since then, about a dozen of them have been thrown out for a variety of offenses. Last week the Washington Post's Stephen Rosenfeld, 33, became the third to be ejected this year (after ABC's Sam A. Jaffe and the Baltimore Sun's Adam Clymer). Rosenfeld himself had done nothing to wear out his welcome. But the Post had published The Penkovsky Papers*--and out went Rosenfeld. His departure was one more reminder that whether the cold war thaws or freezes, a Moscow assignment remains perhaps the most perplexing a reporter can draw.

The first impression they get in Moscow, say newsmen who have served there, is a sense of utter isolation. They live in a foreign ghetto; they see mostly fellow reporters; they make the rounds of embassy receptions that yield little information. They prefer not to use their tapped telephones for interviews. And they would be better advised to write a letter to anyone they want to see. They may not leave Moscow without permission. After trying various ploys, one reporter explained that he wanted to visit Odessa to see the sunrise. In due course, the reply came back: "The sunrise in Odessa is just like the sunrise in Moscow."

On Probation. Though they are isolated, Western reporters are paradoxically never alone when they cover a story. Whether they speak Russian or not (and many of them do not speak it very well), they are accompanied by an official translator. Reporters suspect that the translator is instructed to omit from translation any details that might damage the Soviet image.

During their first days in Moscow, reporters have the eerie feeling that they are being followed. They are. Ostentatiously so. The Russians want them to know they are on probation. "I was tailed the first two weeks, day and night," says Sam Jaffe, who arrived in Moscow in 1961. "After a while they dropped the tails. There are only so many places you can go."

The Moscow press corps, in fact, does better by not going anywhere. When its members are not posing in front of onion-domed Russian churches, they find it most rewarding to sit in the office reading Soviet newspapers, magazines and wire-service copy--or to have the translator read them. Some 80% of reporters' stories are culled from these publications, which divulge big news by small innuendo. "If you're any good at all," says Joseph Michaels, who covered Moscow for NBC, "you get to be a weather vane. You catch a scent, like a dog."

Dubious Tips. Moscow is painfully aware of all the words cabled by Western correspondents. Copy is not regularly censored, but each cable is sent to various bureaus that scrutinize stories for offending passages. Punishment by banishing comes later. "You've got to say to yourself every time you write a story, is it worth being expelled for?" says David Miller, the New York Herald Tribune's Moscow man from 1962 to 1964. Says Jaffe: "No journalist can really be honest in Moscow."

But the reporter who plays ball reaps some rewards. Tips come to him from Russian journalists, who have usually been put up to it by their editors. In this way, Jaffe was the first Western correspondent to learn of Khrushchev's ouster. The leaks are often dubious. In the spring of 1964, word went out from a West German wire service that Khrushchev was dead. The story was picked up by papers around the world. Later, the Germans explained that the leak had originated with the Russian news service, Tass. Suspicious correspondents decided that the Central Committee, already scheming to depose Khrushchev, had sent out the news to test world reaction ahead of time.

* The memoirs of Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a colonel in Russian military intelligence, who was executed as a spy in 1963 after being found guilty of furnishing the U.S. with information on Soviet strategy and rocketry.

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