Word: tass
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Most Fascinating Dictator. For outsiders, the next clue to Nikita's fate came three days later, when home-bound Moscow workers queued up before newspaper kiosks and were greeted with hastily scribbled signs: "There will be no Izvestia tonight." Something was definitely in the works. Shortly after midnight, Tass tersely announced it. Nikita Khrushchev had been "released" from all his duties "at his own request" for reasons of "age and deteriorating health." His successors were named and congratulated: Leonid Brezhnev, 57, Secretary of the Central Committee, and Aleksei Kosygin, 60, who had served as First Deputy Premier...
...boat. A thorough search of the area next day turned up none of the debris-life jackets, cans, splintered wood or bodies-that would be expected to mark a sunken vessel. The only ones who seemed to be sure of what had happened were the Russians. Tass, with barely disguised glee, reported helpfully that three ships had been sunk by the U.S. gunfire, but its statement was nowhere confirmed...
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...
...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...