TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022690/0226008.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 76 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 22

AMERICA ABROAD

The Case of the Shy Bulgarian


By Strobe Talbott


    Today's news, it is often said, is used to wrap tomorrow's
garbage. But here is a tale with a different twist: an article
that long ago ended up on the spike now makes a sidebar to the
biggest story of our time.

    In late 1972, when I was covering Eastern Europe for TIME,
I drove from my office in Belgrade to Sofia to write a story
about Bulgaria. The situation was none too exciting in that most
docile of all the Soviet satellites, but I did get a glimpse of
a new breed of apparatchik. The press department of the
Bulgarian Foreign Ministry arranged an interview with a
34-year-old Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade named Andrei
Lukanov. He spoke idiomatic English, kept the party-line
claptrap to a merciful minimum and talked candidly about the
"shortcomings" of a command economy and even about the need to
look for "a synthesis between Marx and the market."

    Some months later, when I was back in Belgrade, my editors
asked me for some suggestions for a gallery of bright young
faces among European politicians. Lukanov naturally came to
mind, and I put his name on the list.

    Lukanov learned of the honor we planned to bestow on him
when one of our photographers requested a portrait session. The
next thing I knew, there was a knock at the door of my
apartment. I answered to find a small round man sweating
nervously and burbling apologies in Russian. To lubricate wht
he clearly feared would be a difficult encounter, he had brought
along a bottle of Bulgarian brandy. He also had a bouquet of
flowers for my wife.

    My guest identified himself as a diplomat attached to the
Bulgarian embassy in Belgrade, but he had come to see me in an
"entirely private and unofficial capacity." He said he was "a
personal friend" of Lukanov's, who had apparently contacted him
through some sort of Balkan back channel and asked him to
prevail on me, "very discreetly," not to run the story.

    Through this emissary Lukanov made a disarmingly
straightforward case: an article identifying him as up and
coming, not to mention reform minded, would be a kiss of death.
Jealous, older, more orthodox comrades would accuse him of
"trying to start a mini-cult of personality in the bourgeois
capitalist press." Lukanov reminded me that he had granted the
interview "in good faith," believing I was writing about
Bulgaria, not about him personally.

    A reporter hates to lose a story, especially at the behest
of a Communist diplomat who makes house calls. But journalists
also have to be careful about a version of the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle in physics: sometimes by observing -- and
reporting -- a phenomenon, we alter it, perhaps to the detriment
of people who have cooperated with us. If, as Lukanov feared,
publishing a profile of him were to end a career that was
supposedly so promising, then not only would I have burned my
source but I would have misinformed my readers. So I swallowed
hard and sent a cable to my editors killing the story.

    Earlier this month, after a political
knock-down-and-drag-out in which the reformers routed the last
of the Old Guard, Lukanov emerged as Prime Minister of Bulgaria.
He is a key member of a new, Gorbachevite leadership that is
liberalizing the economy, is ready to share power with
non-Communists and looks likely to do well in the free,
multiparty elections it plans to hold in May. It would be nice
to say you read about him here first, in a scouting report 17
years ago. But then maybe you wouldn't be reading about him now.