Word: tassmen
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...Izvestia's Tarasov joins a far-ranging company. Since World War II, Soviet correspondents have been expelled on spy charges from Sweden, The Netherlands, Australia. Testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1956, a former Russian intelligence officer who defected that year estimated that some 80% of the Tassmen scattered around the world serve the Russian government as spies. Vasily Tarasov is reputedly the first Izvestia reporter to be unmasked-a distinction that may or may not earn him credit points with Izvestia Editor Aleksei Adzhubei -Khrushchev...
...Macy's, it announced that it had kept strictly within the $5,000 retail limit for furniture set by the U.S. Information Agency. It offered to let one of the awestruck Tassmen come in and buy the same thing for $5,000-after first comparing prices at Gimbels, of course...
Double Life. For Tassmen the Australian operation was routine, but for Western newsmen it was added proof of the fact that Tass correspondents are Red agents rather than legitimate reporters. In The Netherlands and Canada, Tass correspondents have actually been found spying (TIME, Jan. 5, 1953). All Tass correspondents, in every country of the world, Petrov testified, act as MVD agents...
...Tass representative was not a permanent MVD worker," he added, "he was invariably called in to do that work." Petrov explained that only the secret police chief in each country knows what actual rank each Tass correspondent holds. Petrov's description of Tassmen's MVD mission: to pass themselves off as working newspapermen while they gather information for the Russian secret police...
Correspondents for Tass, the official Russian news agency, often behave more like Communist agents than reporters. But, though some U.S. newsmen suspect Tassmen, many of whom have little journalistic training, of being spies, they are rarely caught at it. (In Canada, one Tassman skipped home in 1945, just before he was named as a member of the Canadian spy ring.) Last week in The Netherlands, a Tassman was jailed on espionage charges...