Holes in the Curtain

As part of their peace offensive, the Communists have begun to lift the Iron Curtain that has kept almost all newsmen out of Russia and its satellites since the start of the cold war.

P:In Berlin, United Press Correspondent Kenneth Brodney expects to leave for Moscow next month on a Russian visa. Correspondent John Gordon of Lord Beaverbrook's London Sunday Express left this week for Moscow. Other agencies and newspapers also have been told unofficially that their correspondents are likely to get visas for Russia.

P: In Moscow last week, the Russians announced that they were easing up on restrictions within their borders, giving correspondents more freedom to travel.

P:In Vienna, where correspondents from the Russian news agency Tass have always steered clear of Western newsmen, Tass-men have started wining & dining U.S. reporters in nightclubs, sending them gifts of caviar and vodka.

Last week one of the first contingents of correspondents to go behind the Iron Curtain in three years returned from a five-day visit to Hungary, where they covered the Communist Peace Council. In Budapest, the eight correspondents were offered cars and English-speaking secretaries and allowed to file or phone out their stories without censorship. Some ducked out of the tours, tried to dodge security police who trailed them, but even when they succeeded were wary of talking to Hungarians, who would suffer reprisals from the police if they were caught speaking to Westerners. New York Times Correspondent Cy Sulzberger filed a candid impression of the country: "Millions of intelligent beings living within the Soviet bloc have been . . . mesmerized by their monolithic propaganda machine . . . The average political leader . . . pretends to regard our statements ... as what the Russians call Klyukva ... in connotation . . . 'boloney.' 'Boloney' to date is regrettably what a good deal of the phraseology here sounds like to Western ears."

Nevertheless, the slight lifting of the curtain raised a problem for Western newsmen. "Why did they let us in?" asked U.P. Paris Bureau Chief Ed Korry. "The Communists stand to win either way. If we report their peace congress, we quote them saying they want peace ... If you write about them in a nasty way, they say 'We're willing to be nice; it's the Western correspondents who are warmongers.' . . .

The danger is that correspondents who don't know Hungary from before will report just the obvious things the Russians want them to see."

There was a further danger. If the Communists continue to permit non-Communist reporters to take carefully controlled trips behind the Iron Curtain, the Western press may be fooled into believing that they are being allowed to see through the Iron Curtain, while, in fact, the curtain still shuts out almost as much real news as it ever did.

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