Pundit with a Punch

At midafternoon, Reuters agency announced that its Moscow correspondent had been cut off as he was telephoning his account of the rioting mobs before the West German embassy (see FOREIGN NEWS). Most Fleet Street editors sighed resignedly and sat back to wait until the Russian censor lifted the blackout. But in a cluttered, dingy office in the Manchester Guardian's London bureau, rumpled, high-domed Victor Zorza grabbed a street map of Moscow, picked out the police stations nearest the German embassy. Minutes later, a desk man in Moscow's police station 88 picked up his telephone, was astounded to find himself talking to a British newspaper man who grilled him in perfect Russian. Moscow's cops chatted amiably but guardedly with Zorza --particularly after he confided piously that his capitalist boss might dock him for wasting a call. But from their very nonchalance, Zorza deduced that the police were far from alarmed at this mob's violence and had no intention of stopping it. Zorza promptly said so in a front-page story in the next day's Guardian.

Supreme Compliment. With such typically forthright guile and gall, 32-year-old Victor Zorza (rhymes with Georgia) has become a pundit with a punch among the experts on Communism who too often do all their legwork in the library. During the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Zorza roamed the streets of Budapest to cover the fighting, brought out some of the most vivid reporting on the revolt. But Zorza can also slog through the dull duty of culling, collecting and collating material from the Russian press, reads six dailies that reach him within 36 hours of publication, has 50 filing drawers crammed full of significant data. "When you do your research yourself," says he, "you combine it all in your own mind and come to conclusions that a staff of twelve people could not possibly reach."

Both as reporter and researcher, Zorza is highly regarded by Western diplomats, who frequently cable home his conclusions or his quotation of significant Communist pronouncements that he often spots in the Russian press before they are released to the world. At the few parties he attends, Zorza is often backed into corners by officials and fellow newsmen who unabashedly pick his brain. The highest compliment to his skill comes from the Russian news agency Tass, which picks up his every word and relays it promptly to Moscow.

Red Mentality. For the Guardian, Zorza writes what he likes, travels where he likes. He tries to avoid making predictions: "I attempt to explain what is happening rather than what is going to happen." Still, while explaining what is happening behind the Iron Curtain, Zorza has often found patterns foreshadowing later events. In November 1955, after studying the identities and associations of security officials purged in some trials in Tvilisi, Zorza concluded that onetime Premier Malenkov was in trouble--a full 16 months before he was relieved as Minister of Electric Power Stations and relegated to a job in remote Kazakhstan. In April 1957, one year before the Russians announced their unilateral suspension of A-bomb tests, Zorza ran a story from a Communist diplomatic source, reporting that Moscow was consulting its satellites about its plans to try this gambit.

Born in Kolomyja in southeastern Poland, Victor Zorza was displaced from his home during Germany's swift invasion of his country early in World War II, landed deep inside Russia, an orphan at 15. Later, when Germany attacked Russia, he was allowed to join the Free Polish Army air force, flew from Britain and Italy throughout the war. After the war, he got a job monitoring Russian broadcasts for the British Broadcasting Corp.--"the finest basic training for a Russian expert in the world." After marrying an English co-monitor, Zorza began free-lancing for the Guardian, became a staffer in 1956.

Not so scholarly as the New York Times's Harry Schwartz, nor so lucidly literate as the Observer's Edward Crankshaw, Zorza has notably better Communist sources than either. As a result of his frequent forays along both sides of the Iron Curtain, he now has contacts throughout the Communist world that he can reach by lifting a telephone. He never bothers to attend Foreign Office briefings, since he finds that he seldom would learn anything he did not already know. "I practically live in the same mental context as a Communist," says Zorza. "In my own way, I know more about a Communist's ideology and motivations than he does."

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