Hack in the USSR; taking dictation, clipping Kissinger's columns, feigning allegiance, and other noble pursuits of one of Gorbachev's ace reporters.

• Author: Kniazkov, Maxim
• Position: Soviet news agency TASS

Taking dictation, clipping Kissinger's columns, feigning allegiance, and other noble pursuits of one of Gorbacbev's ace reporters he editor shook his head in disappointment. "No, it won't work. We are not in the business of writing diaries here. The story should be more politically aggressive, more pathetic, if you wish."

He fished his pen out from under the pile of Reuters and Agence-France dispatches and newspaper clippings, bent over my neatly typed story, and started to write between the lines. "In his speech the head of the Rhodesian racist regime, Ian Smith, called upon his military to kill everyone who would be suspected of sympathy toward the patriotic guerrilla fighters. "

I looked at him in surprise. "Wait a minute-Smith didn't say that. He said he would be firm in defending law and order in Rhodesia, but there was nothing in his speech about killing civilians."

The boss looked at me the way a corporal inspects a virgin draftee. "That's what he had in mind," he said impatiently. "Always try to remember: We are engaged in an ideological war. We cannot work with white gloves on."

It was my first lesson in journalism, and I was learning from a master: Vladimir Alekseevich Korochantsev, chief of the African Desk of the Soviet news agency TASS. I had prepared myself for harsh criticism of my phraseology and word choice; I didn't know a thing about white gloves. But over the next 10 years, from Africa to Paris to Washington and back to Moscow, I would learn the craft from the best journalists in the Soviet Union-men whose skills had nothing to do with curiosity or resourcefulness and everything to do with the subtleties of making propaganda. Like that of his peers, Korochantsev's talent was knowing exactly how to navigate the stormy and treacherous waters of Soviet journalism, where a single mistake could sink your career without a trace.

Every young college or university graduate who goes to work for TASS is first taught to correctly answer one question: "Is the general public supposed to know about that?" It's a difficult science to learn, because it depends so heavily on one's political intuition. Yet decades of practical work had helped Korochantsev develop a perfect sense of what his bosses would like to see in his stories; he never disappointed them. Under his tutelage, I, too, honed that special sense. For a long time, it served me well.

In recent months, glasnost and perestroika haven't had the same ring to them. But as a journalist under four Soviet leaders-Gorbachev, Chernenko, Andropov, and Brezhnev-I never quite bought the idea of a new, improved Soviet Union. A nation's journalism is, obviously, a bellwether of that nation's freedom. And despite the democratic talk, knowledge in the Soviet Union today is still an exclusive privilege of the Moscow elite-just so much caviar and sturgeon. My job as a journalist for TASS? To make sure that privilege stayed exclusive.

It's 11 p.m. in Washington, D.C., and 15th Street is virtually deserted, save the unmarked car of a Soviet official parked outside the entrance of The Washington Post. Suddenly, a man steps out of the car, grabs tomorrow's paper, and rushes away. He will be back-same place, same time-tomorrow.

This is reporting, Soviet-style, and the driver is a TASS correspondent. Paper in hand, he will hurry back to his warren at the National Press Building to begin his night of work. One of the chief priorities of any young Soviet journalist is to learn which Post news items are supposed to run on the TASS wire and which are to be delivered in sealed envelopes to certain Soviet officials.

He clips out the most important articles and sends them by fax to Moscow. Next, he summarizes the contents of the paper in a three- or four-page review, in Russian, and attaches the report to his clippings. Tomorrow, you will not find this summary in any newspaper in the USSR. Instead, it will appear in a classified TASS news bulletin, "cleaned" by editors of all quotations judged to be anti-Soviet and then circulated by couriers around Moscow and certain other parts of the country. The Post's editorials and front-page articles will be parsed at the Communist party headquarters, the foreign and defense ministries, the KGB, and in dozens of other government institutions. The man on the street, of course, won't be informed enough to know what he's missing.

What is done by TASS in Washington is repeated on a daily basis in New York, London, Paris, Bonn, Tokyo, and other foreign capitals. Newspaper and magazine articles sent overnight to Moscow are followed by parliamentary reports and transcripts of speeches by heads of state and foreign ministers. The motto of TASS's intricate system for the dissemination of information could be: Let the right people know what they need to know. And only that.

I spent from 1983 to 1987 at the New York and D.C. TASS bureaus, a cog in a complicated system of political information that's at least as old as Stalin. Although its foundation was probably laid in the final years of Lenin's life, the rationale for such elaborate secrecy is timeless. Knowledge and ignorance have always been important factors in the politics of any country; the well-informed always have a significant advantage over the less-informed. Presidents and high-level officials intuitively understand this-which is why, even with glasnost, Soviet information is so jealously and nervously guarded.

As all young journalists are carefully instructed, how a Post or Times article is to be published or summarized depends wholly on the sensitivity of the information to the Soviet Union. The clipping of every article involves an act of political judgment. Into the "A" bulletin-the paper with the largest circulation-goes the harmless information: generalized stories about world events that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Soviet Union, or at least nothing unflattering or political. A newsman knows that anything remotely critical of Soviet policies could never go into the A, because among the institutions allowed to receive it, one could find middle-level government offices, research institutes, and even the embassies of countries that, at least until recently, were regarded as "fraternal."

What those midlevel bureaucrats and researchers miss aren't critical military documents and KGB staff lists. They're the op-eds of Richard Perle and the writings of Marshall Goldman and other Sovietologists" who criticize the Soviet leadership. For these hot properties, there is a special bulletin called, at least until this year, "AD." AD is a compendium of articles and documents either criticizing Soviet policies or containing facts perceived to be detrimental to Soviet prestige-a category that includes virtually everything by Henry Kissinger, whose analyses are especially despised by the Kremlin; all the evil-empire rhetoric of former president Ronald Reagan; and columns by Jack Anderson, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, and George Will. More recently, those regular authors were joined by Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of the Baltic and other rebellious republics, who, in their interviews with the foreign press, do not sweeten their characterizations of Moscow's policies.

But some of the most closely monitored writers in the USSR are not the Kissingers and Perles. In my last months of work for TASS, many articles by Bill Gertz, The Washington Times's national security correspondent, turned up solely in the AD. The Soviet leaders...