Word: tass
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Canada has had Russian spy trouble before. The most notorious case was that of Igor Gouzenko in 1945, a Soviet code clerk who defected to the West. His confessions shattered a Russian spy ring. Among the Russians who fled Canada in advance of exposure were two men from Tass, the Soviet news agency...
...read jolted him down to his half soles. TODAY, LATE IN AFTERNOON, announced Telex No. 2, FIRST MINISTER OF U.S.S.R. KHRUSHCHEV DIED SURPRISINGLY AT 20:19 CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME OF HEPHOCAPALYTIROSISES. The message was signed TASS/ASAHI BONN-an unusual signature apparently signifying that the information had come from Tass, the Russian news agency, and had been picked up by a Bonn correspondent for Tokyo's daily Asahi Shimbun. Within minutes, Khrushchev's premature obituary flashed around the world...
Nikita Khrushchev, of course, was not dead. Nor had Tass said he was. What, then, had happened...
...rumor was laid to rest when it finally reached Tass General Director Dimitri Goryunov in Moscow, who called it "foolish nonsense." Within 15 minutes, D.P.A. was backtracking: ACHTUNG EDITORS: PLEASE DO NOT USE. Next morning the report made nothing but anticlimactic headlines, such as the London Daily Herald's: KHRUSHCHEV DEAD? NO, HE'S SIPPING VODKA...
Booted. The most prevalent explanation was that Asahi Shimbun's Moscow correspondent, Takeo Kuba, had imperfectly translated Russian cablese KHRUSHCHEV ZAKONCHIL (has ended it), with which Tass had wound up its transmission of a Khrushchev speech. According to this theory, Kuba misread it as KHRUSHCHEV SKONCHALSIA (Khrushchev dead) and cabled the news forthwith. However, at week's end this explanation was exploded by a report from a German TV network that its Hamburg office had received a similar bogus message, save that it was signed "Britinform," cablese for the British Information Service in Bonn...