To correspondents in Berlin, the invitation was an eye-popper. The Soviet-dominated Bulgarian government, which has shown little liking for U.S. newsmen, politely invited them to cover Premier Georgi Dimitrov's big Fatherland Front Congress in Sofia. The terms sounded too good to be true: there would be no censorship; the correspondents could go where they pleased, stay as long as they liked, and English-speaking Sofia newsmen would serve as interpreters.
The six Americans who went were joined in Sofia by the New York Times's broad and breezy William H. Lawrence, who had come on from Bucharest. Things went swimmingly at first. A...