23 Captured, One Dead

The toll of correspondents continues to rise in Cambodia. Last week eight more--three American, one Japanese --were added to the 15 already missing or captured. Another U.S. reporter, CBS's George Syvertsen, was killed.

Pursuing a rumor that "something is up down south," NBC Correspondent Welles Hangen and a camera crew left Phnom-Penh one morning last week, close behind a Jeep and a Mercedes carrying Syvertsen, CBS Reporter-Producer Gerald Miller and their crew. Unlike Viet Nam, where intelligence information is relatively good, the situation in Cambodia is fluid and newsmen are virtually on their own. When the two groups came to the last roadblock of Cambodian soldiers, they presumably flashed their press cards and headed on, unaware that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops had moved into the area. The convoy had gone only a mile or so when the soldiers at the checkpoint heard an explosion and bursts of small-arms fire. Two days later, when Cambodian troops moved forward, they found the burned-out Jeep and five fresh-graves. The body of Syvertsen was in one of them; the other four were not identified. Fortunately, the driver of Hangen's car escaped his captors to report back in Phnom-Penh that the NBC correspondent and his crew were alive.

Syvertsen, tall, bespectacled and assured, had worked seven years with the Associated Press in New York, Poland and Moscow before joining CBS in 1966. Lately, as a correspondent in the network's Tokyo bureau, he had been spending one month out of every three in the war zone. Not reluctantly: Syvertsen had a reputation for spunk. TIME'S Rome bureau chief, James Bell, particularly remembers a time in 1963 when Nikita Khrushchev was meeting with Dean Rusk in Pitsunda on the Black Sea. "The Soviet security people tried to throw us out," Bell recalls. "We were rescued by Nikita himself, who dressed down the guards, said we were his personal guests and could do anything we liked. So George calmly walked over to one of the hot lines to the Kremlin, and while the security men gasped, gave the operator the A.P. number in Moscow. In 15 seconds he was dictating his story. 'Good communications here,' he observed as he hung up. Then he stripped, borrowed a pair of Nikita's enormous swimming trunks, and went for a swim."

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