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169 18 BLOCKING BLACKMAIL he sounded insistent, almost pleading. “i must see you,” he said on the phone. “Can we have lunch today?” Perhaps he only wanted to repay my hospitality of a couple of weeks earlier when he first came to Moscow. But there was something more urgent in his voice. I agreed to meet him at the Hotel Nacional for lunch in the second-floor dining room that looked out across Manege Square at the Kremlin. It was one of the few restaurants in Moscow easily accessible to Westerners in the 1960s. He was one of the most prominent journalists in a small West European nation that was a staunch member of NATO. He edited a major newspaper, wrote a popular column, and frequently appeared as a television commentator. Everyone in the country knew him, and he knew everyone, with access to top government circles. Now, in 1966, he was making his first visit to the Soviet Union in order to write a series of articles on the country. His nation’s media had no resident correspondents in the U.S.S.R. He therefore lacked the kind of connections with Western journalists in Moscow that some visiting reporters depend on for guidance and advice on first visits to a new country. So he turned to the Associated Press, the main world agency providing news to his own country, for help in Moscow. Before he arrived, I received a letter from the AP bureau chief in his country introducing the editor and asking me to provide whatever help he needed. It was a normal thing for the AP, something I did for a lot of visiting journalists. When he came to Moscow, he phoned. His English was fluent. I invited him to visit the AP bureau and have lunch in our apartment across the hall. Monica was used to having luncheon guests as part of my job as bureau chief. Our maid, Svetlana Razuvayeva, fixed such lunches, usually with Monica’s help, with our babies sometimes crawling or toddling in from the nursery for cameo appearances. 170 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures The visitor and I had a long talk about Soviet politics and economics and living standards, relations with China and wartime Vietnam and other current foreign policy topics, restrictions on foreign correspondents and how to request interviews through the Foreign Ministry’s press department, which diplomats were worth talking to besides his own country’s ambassador, using the AP’s Telex machine if he wanted to send stories back to his paper, and many other things. He struck me as the good, solid reporter that his reputation indicated, a mature professional. Several times during the next week he came back to see me. He tested various story ideas on me and asked for additional background to put into perspective things he had learned in interviews. Then he set off on a trip to several Soviet cities. He was seeking a feel for the way things worked outside Moscow. Intourist, the official Soviet travel agency that was controlled by the political police, the KGB, had laid out an itinerary for him to travel by himself, with translators and chauffeured cars meeting his plane or train at every stop. Naturally, I warned him that foreigners were carefully programmed by the authorities. We were supposed to meet only those people and see only those things that had been approved in advance to give us impressions that the Communist regime wanted us to have. The only factories or collective farms that foreigners were allowed to visit, for example, were the showcase ones whose production was good by Soviet standards, and people whom they met knew exactly what the official line was and recited it almost by rote. Questions that came too close to awkward facts were answered with half-truths or not answered at all. Trips within the U.S.S.R. were thus made so sterile that I never went on the kind of conducted tours of Soviet provincial areas that the Foreign Ministry organized for Moscow-based foreign correspondents. My trips with other American journalists to Central Asia, to the Caucasus, across the length of the Soviet Union to the Pacific on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and to other places were no more successful in shaking official controls, but at least we were— within severe limits—able to choose which places we wanted to visit instead of having an...

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