The Day Khrushchev Died

At 9:30 one night last week, Teleprinter No. 2 chattered abruptly into life in the newsroom of West Deutsche Rundfunk, a radio station in Cologne. This meant fresh copy from the telegraph office, and the late-shift operator dutifully bestirred himself to see what was coming in. The message he read jolted him down to his half soles. TODAY, LATE IN AFTERNOON, announced Telex No. 2, FIRST MINISTER OF U.S.S.R. KHRUSHCHEV DIED SURPRISINGLY AT 20:19 CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME OF HEPHOCAPALYTIROSISES. The message was signed TASS/ASAHI BONN--an unusual signature apparently signifying that the information had come from Tass, the Russian news agency, and had been picked up by a Bonn correspondent for Tokyo's daily Asahi Shimbun. Within minutes, Khrushchev's premature obituary flashed around the world.

Nikita Khrushchev, of course, was not dead. Nor had Tass said he was. What, then, had happened?

Achtung! By week's end the only clear fact was that the main role in the farce was played by the West German wire service, Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Immediately after getting the flash, the radio station employee checked it on the Teletype with all the wire services who have offices in Bonn. "Following message was received by WDR tonight," he tapped out, then transmitted verbatim the report of K.'s death. In each case he asked: "Can you confirm this?" But somehow the crucial question got dropped from his transmission to D.P.A. in Bonn.

Within minutes, D.P.A. flashed a blitz message--KHRUSHCHEV DEAD--to its 1,290 newspaper and radio-TV clients, chased that five minutes later with the brief text--now embellished with a Moscow dateline--that it had received from the radio station. The A.P., U.P.I., and most other wire services feverishly started checking Moscow, leaving Reuters as the only major agency that relayed the heavily qualified bulletin: KHRUSHCHEV REPORTED DEAD BUT REPORTS UNCONFIRMED.

The rumor was laid to rest when it finally reached Tass General Director Dimitri Goryunov in Moscow, who called it "foolish nonsense." Within 15 minutes, D.P.A. was backtracking: ACHTUNG EDITORS: PLEASE DO NOT USE. Next morning the report made nothing but anticlimactic headlines, such as the London Daily Herald's: KHRUSHCHEV DEAD? NO, HE'S SIPPING VODKA.

Booted. The most prevalent explanation was that Asahi Shimbun's Moscow correspondent, Takeo Kuba, had imperfectly translated Russian cablese KHRUSHCHEV ZAKONCHIL (has ended it), with which Tass had wound up its transmission of a Khrushchev speech. According to this theory, Kuba misread it as KHRUSHCHEV SKONCHALSIA (Khrushchev dead) and cabled the news forthwith. However, at week's end this explanation was exploded by a report from a German TV network that its Hamburg office had received a similar bogus message, save that it was signed "Britinform," cablese for the British Information Service in Bonn.

Most likely, the whole thing was a silly practical joke perpetrated by some unidentified West German journalist who had the witting or unwitting help of the innocent or gullible D.P.A. In any event, the whys and wherefores of the case clearly did not intrigue the Russians. Despite D.P.A.'s apologies, the Soviet government closed the agency's Moscow bureau and expelled its single correspondent.

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