Dateline: Middle East

When the army rebels seized power in Iraq fortnight ago, no American foreign correspondent was in the country. For the next week, correspondents swarmed into the Middle East and made sorties on Iraq's sealed borders. The man who reached Baghdad first was no old Middle East hand, but the A.P.'s blond, 34-year-old Stan Carter, assigned to the Beirut bureau only last month. Carter flew into neighboring Syria and began to importune Iraqi officials, finally wangled his way aboard an Iraqi military plane and landed in Baghdad some 60 hours before any competitor showed up.

Last week, as Carter's files describing the outward calm of revolution's aftermath started to flow out of Baghdad, his rivals were still scrambling to get into Iraq as best they could. Correspondent Daniel F. Gilmore and Photographer Dieter Hespe of United Press International, and NBC's Tom Streithorst, hired a Beirut taxi to drive them the 620 miles between Beirut and Baghdad. When their driver quit at the Syrian border, they hitched a ride on a Syrian potato truck, got another taxi in Damascus. They bought off suspicious Lebanese rebels with cigarettes and bottles of a local brew named arak, steered by the North Star when the road disappeared in the desert.

Rebels by Phone. British Newsmen Richard Beeston of the London News Chronicle and John Mossman of the London Daily Herald hung their cab with pictures of Nasser to disarm Iraqi border guards, drove through 130DEG heat from Damascus to Baghdad. (From the Herald's foreign desk to Mossman came the wry plea: "For God's sake, put up the meter flag!") TIME-LIFE'S Correspondent Robert Morse and Photographer Larry Burrows made it along the same route, found Baghdad street peddlers doing a brisk trade hawking pictures of the mutilated bodies of Premier Nuri asSaid and Crown Prince Abdul Illah until midweek, when the new regime suddenly ordered their suppression.

Covering the low-pressure revolt back in Beirut, an army of 200 sport-shirted newsmen found that the Lebanese rebels were accessible through a phone call from the Hotel St. Georges bar. Rebel headquarters was just a short cab ride away and any correspondent could drop past for tea with Rebel Leader Saeb Salam.

Long-Distance Shout. About the only problem was the capricious censorship of Army General Fuad Shehab, who generally cut any mention of himself from written dispatches. Beirut papers appeared with great blank spaces and offending dispatches were scissored out of foreign newspapers. When U.S. Ambassador Robert McClintock pointedly observed that it would be nice to read an uncensored copy of the New York Times, Lebanon's President Chamoun politely offered to let McClintock have his copy when he had finished with it.

But phone calls were unmonitored. and most newsmen dodged the censor by phoning their stories at the top of their lungs to colleagues in London, Paris, Rome or Frankfurt. Said the A.P.'s Relman Morin, a two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner and topflight combat correspondent of World War II and Korea: "If any A.P. man is invalided out of Beirut, it likely will be because he lost his voice."

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