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Kremlin Service. Into GHQ Palgunov's overseas staff pours a daily torrent: full texts of speeches, magazine and newspaper articles, Government handouts, technical and business reports, verbatim pickups from A.P., U.P., the New York Times. They need not bother to slant their stuff; Moscow takes care of that. But neither Moscow's " big-circulation tour-page dailies, like Pravda and Izvestia, nor any other Soviet paper prints much more foreign news than many small-town U.S. dailies.
Nobody believes Tass's excess file is wasted. Being a Government agency, Tass serves the Kremlin as much as it does the press; and the Kremlin's vast intake can move quickly and cheaply by press rates, Tassmen get to see a lot of things Russian diplomats might not.
Double Duty. Tassmen are expected to learn the language of the country where they work, ordinarily go out for three years at a time. In London, bespectacled Buddha-like Tass Chief Alexander Sverlov has a staff of 25 putting out the Soviet Monitor, an English-language paper that is free for all who want it. In Vienna where its news and pictures are also free Tassmen have been a little piqued because Austrian editors prefer to pay for fresher A.P., U.P. or Reuter news.
During the war, some Tass correspondents in France, Italy and Africa never cabled a line; they wore Red Army uniforms, were good mixers, busily gathered military intelligence. And in Ottawa there was Nikolai Zheivinov, who lasted until last September— shortly after Embassy Lode Clerk Igor Gouzenko tattled to the police about the spy ring. Then Zheivinov quietly returned to Russia. Canadian officials found he was hip-deep in espionage, and a member of the NKVD.
Well aware that there government may be others like Zheivinov, government officials in world capitals sometimes bar Tassmen from their off-the-record press conferences. One American undersecretary gave reporters some confidential stuff at 11 a.m. Before 1 p.m. the Russian Ambassador-keeping a date, casually questioned him about it.