Undercoverage

In Russian Tass stands for Telegraf-noye agentsvo SSSR--Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. But to the long-suffering West it has come to spell espionage. Since the end of World War II Tass correspondents have been exposed as Russian secret agents in Canada, Sweden, The Netherlands and Australia. In Washington last week a onetime Russian military intelligence officer told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee how much of the Tass iceberg lies beneath the surface: he estimated that 80% to 85% of the 200 Tassmen based in 40 bureaus around the world are spies.

False Identity. The witness: short, swarthy Ismael Ege (real name: Ismael Gusseynovich Akhmedov), who joined the Red army in 1925 and served until he broke with the Russians in June 1942. When the Red army sent him on an intelligence mission to Germany in May 1941. Ege testified, it gave him a false identity and named him deputy chief of the Tass Berlin bureau. At the time, said Ege, the bureau chief was working for the Soviet secret police. For the other four Tassmen in Berlin the agency was merely a cover for gathering military, technical and political information on Germany, e.g., war plans, troop organization, and details of the power struggle at top levels of the Nazi Party.

Ege, later Soviet press attache in Turkey, testified that Tass is used "more extensively" in the U.S. for espionage because correspondents enjoy more freedom than in other countries and the American people "could not comprehend" that Tassmen are spies.

Refuge. When the Senate investigators brought three U.S. citizens, all employees of Tass, to the witness stand, the testimony was less cooperative. Headed by Harry Freeman, 50, Tass deputy chief for the U.S., the three testified that they had complied with a Tass order of August 1941 to quit Communist Party membership and activity. But to questions on party membership before that--and on Soviet espionage contacts before or since --all three leaned on the Fifth Amendment. When Freeman refused to say whether he knew Whittaker Chambers, a subcommittee investigator read a long passage from Chambers' book, Witness, describing the Tassman and concluding: "More adroitly and more completely than any other Communist I knew, Harry Freeman possessed the conviction that the party line is always right."

In his questioning--over Freeman's denials--Subcommittee Counsel Robert Morris brought out a charge by John Rudy, public relations director of the National Federation of American Shipping. A Tass representative, said Rudy, had hounded him soon after the outbreak of the Korean war for classified information on U.S. shipping in Far Eastern waters. Other reporters, he added, rarely asked for such information, and always stopped asking when told it was classified.

The Tass bureau in the U.S. is the largest of the agency's foreign bureaus. It sends Moscow 5,000 to 6,000 words daily, according to Freeman. To get this and other information, Tass's 23 staffers have virtually all the privileges of U.S. newsmen. Tass covers White House press conferences and occasional congressional hearings. In Washington it concentrates on the State Department. The agency no longer holds membership in the department's Correspondents Association, but it meticulously covers the department's press conferences and official briefings.

Passports & Pouch. In addition to these privileges Tassmen have an official status that no other newsmen enjoy. In London, where Lord Vansittart once called the agency "a nest of guttersnipes," a libel suit against Tass was dismissed when the court ruled that the agency is an arm of the government and thereby entitled to immunity from legal action. Everywhere, Russian Tassmen travel on special passports, seldom fraternize with other correspondents, perform all manners of extra journalistic tasks. In Tokyo, during the Communist-inspired turbulence of the immediate postwar period, a Tass correspondent kept turning up--with huge sums in yen--at scenes of industrial strife. During the Korean war his successor submitted nothing to the U.N. censors in Tokyo; the Tass copy apparently left Japan by diplomatic pouch. In Pakistan a rare extraverted Tassman confided that one of his assignments was to find out the names and jobs of everyone in the U.S. embassy.

All the pipelines lead to an old seven-story building on Pushkin Boulevard in downtown Moscow. The entrance is guarded by armed troops, who require a pass of all who enter. Inside, Tass separates chaff from grain, adds propaganda, and dispenses all the news that's fit to print by Teletype and dictation-speed radio broadcasts to its captive clients, 4,500 Russian newspapers. Tass will not sell its service to any foreign paper, though it swaps its news reports with foreign press services. Boss of Tass is thick-spectacled ex-Paris Correspondent Nikolai Grigorievich Palgunov, who holds official status just below Cabinet rank. Last week he did not have to depend on the A.P. for news of Washington's latest glimpse into the work of his agency. Under the noses of the Senators and their witnesses a Tass reporter scribbled diligently at the press table.

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