Word: tass
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Police were in a swivet; accusations flew thick & fast. Screamed the Soviet news agency, Tass: "French fascist groups will stop at nothing." The French Communist press roared that De Gaullists had instigated the bombings...
...representatives of Russia's Tass news agency make a great show of acting like reporters. But last week such members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors as Columnist David Lawrence and Scripps-Howard Editor Walker Stone thought it was time for a showdown on the question: Are Tassmen in the U.S. bona fide reporters or simply Russian agents gathering intelligence material for Russia's vast espionage system...
...editors demanded that the Washington correspondents' Standing Committee bar all Tassmen from the Capitol press galleries. In the Senate, Maryland's Herbert O'Conor went much further. He offered a resolution not only to bar Tass from the galleries, but to deport all non-American Tass representatives...
...Standing Committee made a halfhearted answer: it decided to issue no credentials to any new Tassmen in the future. But it shied away from barring Tass representatives already on the job, because it was afraid it might be construed as a limitation of press freedom...
Special Passports. No newsman who has watched the workings of Tass's representatives around the globe would have much trouble defining their primary job. Tassmen do not travel as newsmen, but on special passports, enter the U.S. and other countries on special visas given only to foreign government officials. British courts have officially ruled that Tassmen have diplomatic immunity, since Tass is an agency of the Soviet state. Time after time, Tassmen have shown that they are not primarily interested in news, but in filing special intelligence reports or engaging in outright espionage. Examples: ¶Under the cover name...