Roll Out the Carpet

To correspondents in Berlin, the invitation was an eye-popper. The Soviet-dominated Bulgarian government, which has shown little liking for U.S. newsmen, politely invited them to cover Premier Georgi Dimitrov's big Fatherland Front Congress in Sofia. The terms sounded too good to be true: there would be no censorship; the correspondents could go where they pleased, stay as long as they liked, and English-speaking Sofia newsmen would serve as interpreters.

The six Americans who went were joined in Sofia by the New York Times's broad and breezy William H. Lawrence, who had come on from Bucharest. Things went swimmingly at first. A Sofia reporter met the Wall Street Journal's small, quiet Joe Evans over a drink, and was amazed. "We expected to see a bloated capitalist," he said.

But when a LIFE photographer took a picture on a Sofia street, he was arrested--and then released with an embarrassed apology from the Foreign Office. On a side trip to the Pernik coal mines, the Bulgarian general in charge succumbed to habit; he wagged a forbidding finger when the first American camera appeared.

Other officials turned the correspondents down cold, when they asked to visit a camp for political prisoners working in the mines.

By the time the congress convened, the welcome smile was a frozen grin. At a luncheon for the correspondents, Vladimir Topencharov, Assistant Foreign Minister and Press Director, lectured the visiting firemen on their lack of "objectivity." Their sin: they had reported that the inevitable "spontaneous" demonstration hailing the congress appeared to have been pretty well organized beforehand.

Then the Times's Bill Lawrence wrote that Dimitrov's congress made Bulgaria "a one-party state today, her internal and foreign policies openly modeled on and wedded to the Soviet Union." That was too much for the Bulgarians' experiment with freedom of the press. They rolled up the red carpet and clanged down the portcullis.

Bill Lawrence was ordered to leave Bulgaria within 24 hours (he planned to leave anyway) on the charge that he had not registered with the militia. The other correspondents were hustled back to Berlin. Before they left, a Czech Communist reporter wistfully asked a U.S. newsman: "What have you heard from the outside world?"

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