The Treacherous Lure of a Story

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

On a Honduran border road, two U.S. journalists are killed

The gravel road from Cifuentes to Las Trojes is a pleasant, ordinary scribble between mountains at roadside and a green valley. Peasants pick their way as rickety trucks rumble by. The main thing to interest a foreign visitor on the stretch, a four-hour drive southeast of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, is that the border with Nicaragua is as little as 20 or 30 yards away. There is a sporadic, undeclared war between the two countries; the proximity can mean "action"--gunfire. Last week that promise of a story drew Reporter Dial Torgerson, 55, of the Los Angeles Times, and Freelance Photographer Richard Cross, 33, on assignment for U.S. News & World Report, to their deaths.

Tuesday midafternoon the journalists headed back to Tegucigalpa from Las Trojes, where they had been checking on firing by Nicaraguan troops into Honduras to harass contra insurgents. Just after the two men's rented car, a white Toyota, passed Honduran Truckdriver Jose Cruz Espinal, he saw a grenade split the car almost in half; then machine-gun fire spattered the road. The shots came from terrain held by Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The killings could hardly have been an accident: the men were almost certainly identifiable as civilians; the attackers probably shot from no more than 150 to 300 yards away. An American journalist who had been in Sandinista encampments in recent weeks had witnessed a soldier firing a cannon at the same stretch of road. When asked why, the soldier said, "A vehicle was passing by."

The deaths--the eleventh and twelfth of foreign journalists in Central America since 1979, but the first in more than a year--sent alternating eddies of lament and reminiscence through the men's colleagues. At the Hotel Maya in Tegucigalpa, and at the Hotel Camino Real in El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, some reporters halfheartedly second-guessed the fatal venture, as if to suggest it need not have happened. The road was known to be dangerous, they argued: two British journalists had been fired on in separate incidents in the previous few days; in his final week Cross had twice survived gunfire along the same stretch. But the critics soon acknowledged that they too would probably have headed along the road in any circumstance short of pitched battle and that men with cameras would take the utmost risks to get close to the action. Said Miami Herald Photographer Murry Sill: "It is like being in a meteor shower--you stand in it and gaze up in awe and try to stay out of its way." Added CBS Correspondent George Natanson: "If you do not want to take chances, you go into public relations."

Fifty foreign correspondents in Mexico City held a vigil of commemoration and rather wistfully urged greater safety for reporters. But journalists conceded that in battle, caution may matter less than fate. The war-hardened correspondents' judgment on their slain peers: Torgerson and Cross had run out of luck. (Indeed, only chance limited the deaths to two: Stringers Susan Morgan of London's Economist and Marcia Johnson of ABC and the Los Angeles Times, dropped out of the trip.)

The deaths hit fellow reporters hard. Cross was young and earnest, and Torgerson was a popular veteran, married to another member of the Central America press corps, Lynda Schuster of the Wall Street Journal. Torgerson, a North Carolina native, had been a newsman since his teens; his foreign assignments included Nairobi and Jerusalem. Renowned for quick wit and warmth, he was unflappable; when a plane he was aboard had a harrowing landing last year, Torgerson buried any fears he may have had in a hearty laugh. Cross, a Kansan who worked in Central America for years under the pseudonym R. Cruz, was a loner, but passionate about his work: once, when he missed a flight to Honduras, he banged on an airline counter so hard he broke bones in his hand. Cross had been among the journalists who admired the Sandinistas in their early days; he contributed photographs to a book celebrating the revolution.

There was no evidence that Cross and Torgerson were killed specifically because they were newsmen. The grim news certainly did not long deflect reporters whose luck was still holding. The day after Cross and Torgerson were killed, a Honduran official pleaded with some journalists to stay out of the area. But Juan Tamayo of the Herald and Photographer Sill talked their way past military checkpoints and ignored bursts of nearby gunfire. They turned back only when they saw that the road ahead had been newly mined.

Until last week, when reporters assigned to Central America have talked of trouble and danger, they have nearly always meant El Salvador. Said Peter Eisner, the Central America news editor for Associated Press: "The focus of fighting has been there." In San Salvador, reporters sometimes face searches of their apartments, sloppy telephone taps and occasional death threats made in anonymous calls or leaflets. On the Honduras-Nicaragua border, which some leading correspondents last week labeled the new most hazardous spot in an increasingly strife-torn region, there is an emerging hint of precaution. Said Tamayo regretfully: "In El Salvador, journalists use towels as white flags and label cars with the words for 'press.' Here it had not seemed necessary because here there was no war." It may be necessary now.

--By William A. Henry III.

Reported by James Willwerth/Tegucigalpa

With reporting by James Willwerth This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.