The TIME bureaus which rim the Iron Curtain are, of course, a major source of news from that half of the world which is cloistered by Communist sentries. Eric Gibbs, chief of our bureau at Bonn, Germany, is now starting back after a four-week visit in New York, in which he described some of the new skills in reportage required to out such an assignment.

Free Europe has a heavy traffic in enters""strolling who charac have stories to tell, says Gibbs. Some are genuine refugees; others are semiprofessional liars who have learned that "the best way to turn a fast buck is to spin a fast story." Because any one of them may have the clue to some important news development, every one of them is important to the correspondent. His first b is to screen the storytellers-some-,,_Qmes a near impossible task. Many a tipster has no more identification to 'offer than a face, a voice and a doubt ful name.

Says Gibbs : "They may be refugees from all kinds of things -from a nag ging wife, for instance." The tales they tell must be checked thoroughly. In some cases, dozens of news tips are put together, then matched up for points of common ground and disagreement.

If the mosaic begins to show a pat tern, the bureau feels it has a firm bit of background for its news coverage.

To keep up with the activities of the East German police, for instance, Cor respondent Robert Lubar talked to Berliners, ex-policemen from the force, refugees who had seen maneuvers.

Such painstaking investigations, along with whispered conversations and furtive trips to informants in Berlin's Soviet sector, are only a small part of the continuing job of the Bonn bureau. Its more important task, difficult in itself, is the solid reporting of what is now happening in Germany.

This, as anywhere, demands thousands of phone calls, tedious interviews with hundreds of slow-talking, hard-to-draw-out officials, hours of checking directories and his tories, reports and papers. In a country in transition, the agencies of government are split and scattered. Besides half a dozen occupation headquarters, there are the German government at Bonn, special agencies like the Allied Security Board at Coblenz, various provincial governments, and the separate officials at Berlin. Gibbs describes Germany as hydra-like, with "the political head at Bonn, the cultural head at Munich, the indus trial head at Diissel-dorf, and the traditional head at Berlin." The bureau is also responsible for news from Austria and Yugoslavia. Just as Berlin serves as the listening post for Poland and East Germany, so Vienna is the siphoning spot for information from Czechoslovakia and Hun gary. Belgrade has its sights fixed on Bulgaria and Rumania.

Shortly after joining the German bureau at the start of this year, Gibbs toured the free side of the Iron Curtain in Europe for a story on the border patrol. He joined TIME'S staff in 1946, later became chief of our London bureau, and helped cover the wars in Palestine and Indo-China. Born in Edmonton, Canada, Gibbs, 40, worked as a reporter, editorial writer, features editor and caricaturist for Canadian and British papers and served in the Canadian Army for more than six years.

Europe's many tongues are a problem he tries to solve quickly. On his first trip into Yugoslavia last March, he picked up hitchhikers in Slovenia, learned from them such words as right, left, stop and go. Flaunting his newYugoslavian vocabulary later in Serbia, he was told by a Serb: "Very fine, but you speak with a Slovenian accent." Gibbs's trilingual son, "Boucher"-who is six, has his own Ianguage problems. He speaks "German with a Rhineland accent, French with an English accent and English with an Oxford accent," says his father. One day Gibbs heard him making some queer sounds, asked what he was doing. "I'm practicing my American," said Boucher, who had been teased by some new American playmates about his English accent.

Cordially yours,

-His Christian name: Roderick. Called "Butch" before he was born, his name was later Gallicized by Gibbs.

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