The U.S. press found little exciting in the espionage trial of Russian Lieut. Nikolai Redin. Most papers carried a casual paragraph or two each day of the trial. But one reporter at the press table in Seattle filed a thumping 1,500 to 2,500 words a night to New York, and got no squawks from his employer. He was greying, 41-year-old William E. Dodd Jr., son of the late U.S. Ambassador to Germany. His employer: Tass, short for Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union.
No Russian paper out of the 8,639 dailies and weeklies served by the Tass monopoly was likely to use much of Dodd's voluminous copy. But his between-jobs assignment as a Tass stringer in Seattle last week (he was about to become Harry Bridges' publicity man) was typical of the way the world's least-known big news agency operates. It feeds vastly more wordage (an estimated 200,000 words a day) into its six-floor Moscow nerve center than Russian editors ever see.
"Truth" & Co. Redin's trial and acquittal, like all Tass news from the U.S., was relayed through its bureau in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. Except for four Washington correspondents, headed by earnest, well-liked Larry Todd, its U.S. staff of 18 reporters is based in New York. (The Russians limit each U.S. news organization in Moscow to one or two correspondents.) Only five of Tass's 18 U.S. men are Russians.
The agency's U.S. boss is black-haired Vladimir Pravdin (translation: "Man of Truth"), veteran Tassman now vacationing in the U.S.S.R. with his family. Acting director for the summer is slim handsome, secretive Alexander Alexandrov 32 who has spent three of his nine Tass years in the U.S., says he is not a Party member.
No. 2 man is small, twinkly Harry Freeman, a 40-year-old native New Yorker who has broken in a brace of imported bosses since joining Tass in 1929 He speaks little Russian, cables his stories in English. Tass sends 7,000 to 8,000 words a day about the U.S. to Moscow; its report is light on crime, scandal and feature news, heavy on production figures, U.S. culture, high-level politics, anything critical of the Kremlin.
News by Air. Tass's ancestral predecessor was the Czarist Russian Telegraph Agency, which worked hand-in-glove with the tight world news cartel promoted by England's Julius Reuter. In early Bolshevik days it was revived as Rosta; Tass, born in 1925, took over Rosta ten years later.
The job of rebuilding the agency fell in 1921 to a dynamic, Polish-born Old Bolshevik named Jacob Doletsky. Doletsky worked out news-exchange deals with A.P Boss Kent Cooper and U.P. President Karl Bickel. (A.P. and U.P. give Tass their own U.S. news reports in return for Tass coverage of Russia.)
In 1937 Doletsky and his head staffers were suddenly purged as "Trotskyist bandits." Since June 1943 the "Chief Responsible Leader" of Tass has been one Nikolai Palgunov.