Read Online The Lights of Skaro by David Dodge - Free Book Online

relief, surprise, and jealousy among foreign press correspondents in Western Europe when A.P. sent her into the People’s Free Federal Republic. It was immediately after the Big Switch. The Party line had changed overnight from consistent international enmity to ‘mutually profitable trade with other countries irrespective of differences in political systems’, ‘peaceful co-existence’, ‘realistic approaches to a resumption of normal relations between East and West’, all the rest of the strategic shell game. No Western reporter had been allowed inside the Republic since late 1946, and the only news that came out was either official propaganda or underground counter-propaganda, both unreliable. Now, with a new menu to be served, a few reporters were allowed.
    It was a feather in anybody’s cap to get an assignment to an important listening-post behind the Curtain. Cora, partly because she had wheedled advance information out of somebody in the know and had gone right to work studying the language, was one of the lucky ones, the only woman press correspondent for the West to get a post behind the Curtain until that time.
    I was offered a similar assignment myself. A.N.A. was one of the few press services invited to set up a bureau in the Republic. Other services got into Rumania and Hungary and East Germany, where A.N.A. was barred, by the peculiar logic of the Party mind, as most of its competitors were barred from the Republic. Assignments were parceledaround like a deck of cards. Because the cards fell that way and I spoke the language, I could have gone into the Republic at the same time as Cora did. But I had been two years in Warsaw before they froze the foreign press out, then another year in Moscow, a total of thirty-six consecutive months with my own private crew of goons keeping an eye on me night and day, waiting for my foot to slip over the narrow line that divided reporting from espionage in the Party vocabulary. I had had enough of it. I felt that I was entitled to the six months of semi-vacation. I had been promised, full pay and a free hand to go where I wanted and write the stories I felt like writing, without worrying about spot news or my neck. I told the home office that if they could find somebody else I would decline the honor.
    They gave the job to Jim Oliver, a good man who had spent some time in Czechoslovakia and knew, or should have known, the Party mentality. Oliver, with Cora for A.P., Heinz Gruber of the Ullstein chain in Western Germany,Léon Rébillard of Agence France-Presse and Graham Dill of Reuters, went into the Republic to report whatever they were allowed to report.
    Oliver was the first man to get himself kicked out, six months later. Direct censorship of news had been lifted for dispatches to the foreign press, but there was a tight retroactive censorship. It meant that a reporter could file one, and only one, story the Party didn’t like before they cancelled his visa and gave him twenty-four hours notice to get out of the country. It had all been made crystal clear from the beginning. Oliver’s mistake, if it was a mistake, was one of judgment, not ignorance. He forgot to be ‘objective’ about the Gorza escape.
    A few days after the Gorzas got out, when Ed Cleary’s story quoting Gorza about conditions inside the Republic was still making headlines, and I was in Istanbul unsuccessfully trying to get another angle on the same story from Madame Gorza, the Minister of Internal Affairs for the Republic, Milo Yoreska, issued a press release about the escape. Yoreska was top man in the government, chairman of the Party Presidium and the real head of everything. Radovič, the elected president, was a tame sheep they kept in office because he was a revolutionary hero, had once been a genuine democrat and still commanded strong popular support even though he was so old and broken that he spoke the speeches they put in his mouth without