Word: bigart
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What George Polk (see above) and every other Balkan correspondent yearned to do, the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart up & did. He found and interviewed Greek guerrilla General Markos in his Grammos Mountain stronghold. This week, after sitting on it for more than a fortnight (presumably to avoid competing with convention news), the Trib ran his interview as a four-part series. It tingled with some of the cloak-&-dagger thrills of an Eric Ambler novel...
...score his beat, Reporter Bigart had to "disappear" for two weeks. He was in Belgrade, and had told his office he was going to Rome to buy clothes. The first the Trib knew of his perilous mission was when the visit was broadcast over the rebel radio. (The U.S. Embassy at Athens, still nervous after Folk's murder, passed the word to the Trib that it would not be responsible for Bigart's safety...
Konspiratsia. At 11 p.m. the night of June 13, wrote Bigart, there was a knock at the door of his room in Belgrade's Hotel Moskva. "A young man of perhaps 20 ... pushed past me ... fell into a chair . . . 'Comrade,' he began, 'you had planned to return to Athens via Rome. Instead you will go via free Greece and interview General Markos. Is that agreeable?' Very tentatively, I said...
...Bigart was warned to employ the strictest konspiratsia, "that favorite Balkan term for secrecy." Next day the stranger brought a guide, a stocky, studious youth named John. He told Bigart to buy a ticket to Rome and get an Italian visa, to make things look legitimate, then...
...first team are some of the Trib's top reporters. Walter B. Kerr, who "has been living with Byrnes, Molotov and Bevin for months," will trail diplomats. Lanky A. T. Steele, a veteran of Far East coverage, will stick to what he knows best. Pulitzer Prizewinning Homer Bigart's assignment: trouble. As a war correspondent he got schooling for covering riots, revolutions, and world violence, lately has been doing post-graduate work in Palestine and Poland. Says Joe Barnes: "We can't use men who have been stuck in one capital for 20 years as modern reporters...