Getting the News from Laos

Before surrendering their copy to the pajama-clad Laotians in Vientiane's flyspecked telegraph office, savvy correspondents pointedly wrapped it around a bottle of cognac. One newsman begged the native telegrapher not to send his stories last page first, finally won his case with smiles. Everyone craftily slugged dispatches "urgent," but the imperturbable telegraphers were unimpressed; crisis or no, they shut up shop every night at 7:30, leaving newsmen to gnash their teeth at 24-hour delays in transmission.

For some two dozen newsmen on the spot in Laos last week, the assignment was a new lesson in frustration. As unprepared for the visitors as it was for Communist invaders, the tiny, remote and primitive Asian kingdom scarcely knew what to do with either. In Samneua province, scene of some of the fiercest skirmishing, a native cable-office employee stopped reporters on the street to inquire: "What should I do with this?" It was a cable handed him a week earlier by CBS Correspondent Peter Kalischer. The surest way to get anything resembling an accurate story was to make a flying circuit of the battle area, and that, as TIME Correspondent Stanley Karnow reported (see FOREIGN NEWS), involved a heart-thumping flight through monsoon storm clouds, hairbreadth nighttime landings on muddy air strips marked only by kerosene pots.

17 Sources, 17 Reports. Government officials were uniformly unhelpful. Not that they did not try--in a land with little or no communications, they were merely uninformed. When one freshly arrived newsman asked Defense Minister Sounthone Pathammavong for a quick briefing on the situation, the minister shot him an injured look, plaintively asked: "Can you tell me?" In Samneua, Brigadier General Amkha Soukhavong blithely informed reporters that "only about 20% of our troops are missing"-only to be just as blithely contradicted by Lieut. General Ouane Rathikone, chief of staff: "All our men were either killed or taken prisoner."

The Associated Press' cigar-chewing Forrest Edwards, rose during one press briefing to complain that 17 different government spokesmen had given him 17 separate reports. "What do you expect?" Minister of Information Sisouk Na Champassak replied accurately. "If you speak to 17 different people, of course you'll get 17 different stories."

Stale Scoop. Quartered in Vientiane's vermin-infested Constellation Hotel, newsmen of necessity pooled their scraps of information. One reporter who did not join the sweaty, sociable circle was Pundit Joe Alsop Jr., who arrived with a copy of Thucydides under one arm, sped off to an air-conditioned room in the residence of U.S. Ambassador Horace H. Smith. Columnist Alsop stealthily cabled what he thought was a scoop on the Laotian appeal to the United Nations. Trouble was that the reporter pool at the Constellation had filed the same story the day before.

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