America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

Today's news, it is often said, is used to wrap tomorrow's garbage. But here is a tale with a different twist: an article that long ago ended up on the spike now makes a sidebar to the biggest story of our time.

In late 1972, when I was covering Eastern Europe for TIME, I drove from my office in Belgrade to Sofia to write a story about Bulgaria. The situation was none too exciting in that most docile of all the Soviet satellites, but I did get a glimpse of a new breed of apparatchik. The press department of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry arranged an interview with a 34-year-old Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade named Andrei Lukanov. He spoke idiomatic English, kept the party-line claptrap to a merciful minimum and talked candidly about the "shortcomings" of a command economy and even about the need to look for "a synthesis between Marx and the market."

Some months later, when I was back in Belgrade, my editors asked me for some suggestions for a gallery of bright young faces among European politicians. Lukanov naturally came to mind, and I put his name on the list.

Lukanov learned of the honor we planned to bestow on him when one of our photographers requested a portrait session. The next thing I knew, there was a knock at the door of my apartment. I answered to find a small round man sweating nervously and burbling apologies in Russian. To lubricate what he clearly feared would be a difficult encounter, he had brought along a bottle of Bulgarian brandy. He also had a bouquet of flowers for my wife.

My guest identified himself as a diplomat attached to the Bulgarian embassy in Belgrade, but he had come to see me in an "entirely private and unofficial capacity." He said he was "a personal friend" of Lukanov's, who had apparently contacted him through some sort of Balkan back channel and asked him to prevail on me, "very discreetly," not to run the story.

Through this emissary Lukanov made a disarmingly straightforward case: an article identifying him as up and coming, not to mention reform minded, would be a kiss of death. Jealous, older, more orthodox comrades would accuse him of "trying to start a mini-cult of personality in the bourgeois capitalist press." Lukanov reminded me that he had granted the interview "in good faith," believing I was writing about Bulgaria, not about him personally.

A reporter hates to lose a story, especially at the behest of a Communist diplomat who makes house calls. But journalists also have to be careful about a version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics: sometimes by observing -- and reporting -- a phenomenon, we alter it, perhaps to the detriment of people who have cooperated with us. If, as Lukanov feared, publishing a profile of him were to end a career that was supposedly so promising, then not only would I have burned my source but I would also have misinformed my readers. So I swallowed hard and sent a cable to my editors killing the story.

Earlier this month, after a political knock-down-and-drag-out in which the reformers routed the last of the Old Guard, Lukanov emerged as Prime Minister of Bulgaria. He is a key member of a new, Gorbachevite leadership that is liberalizing the economy, is ready to share power with non-Communists and looks likely to do well in the free, multiparty elections it plans to hold in May. It would be nice to say you read about him here first, in a scouting report 17 years ago. But then maybe you wouldn't be reading about him now.