The purpose of this letter is to correct an erroneous impression given by my March 28th Publisher's Letter on Robert Low, TIME Inc.'s Eastern European Correspondent. Discussing the growing difficulty of reporting the news behind the Balkans' Iron Curtain, the Letter said: "The Curtain is securely fastened now--except for Communist and fellow-traveling foreign journalists ..." This was unjust to the small, hard-working group of U.S., British and other non-Communist foreign correspondents still doing their jobs in the Balkans' Communist countries. Correspondent Low was one of the first to call it to my attention after it appeared in TIME.

What should have been fully explained is that non-Communist foreign correspondents have encountered so many obstacles to reporting the news in Russia's satellite Balkan countries that their number has been reduced to a handful. Each remaining correspondent wonders whether his next visa will be renewed. A recent departure from their thinning ranks was the New York Herald Tribune's Homer Bigart who, although his visa was in perfect order, was given 24 hours to get out of Hungary for a straightforward piece of reporting that displeased the Communist authorities there.

Low's protest was seconded some days later by a letter from his ex-Balkans traveling companion, the New York Times' William H. Lawrence, now stationed in Washington. Lawrence knows the difficulties confronting a working correspondent in the Balkans, having been refused re-entry to Rumania and Bulgaria a year ago. It was he who took the photograph of Low that ran in my March 28th Letter. Its locale, Slobozia, is in Rumania.

Among the handful of British and American foreign correspondents remaining in the Balkans, all of whom deserve full credit for doing their jobs under the worst possible journalistic conditions, are: the New York Times' Meyer S. Handler, the Associated Press' Alexander Singleton, the New

York Herald Tribune's Gaston Coblentz, all in Belgrade; the London Times' Michael Burn, in Budapest; United Press' Richard S. Clark, in Prague.

Some indication of the restrictions under which these newsmen have to work is given by the fact that they can be expelled for writing anything that the Communist governments do not like. Under the severe laws governing military and economic espionage, that could be as simple a thing as reporting the amount of money in circulation--or a host of other common facts & figures openly published by the Western democratic press. If a correspondent manages to get the Press Ministry's permission to leave the capital of his country, an official guide is usually assigned to see to it that he sees only favorable things. As a result, much of what happens outside of the Balkans' capitals can no longer be told in terms of firsthand reporting.

The correspondents still on duty there rate these Eastern European countries according to the difficulty of getting re-entry visas. At present the rating is as follows: Albania, impossible; Rumania, impossible; Bulgaria, almost impossible; Hungary, very difficult and getting more so; Czechoslovakia, growing more difficult all the time; Yugoslavia, easier by comparison, but not always easy.

To foreign correspondents who learned their trade under the auspices of the free U.S. or British press, the kind of restricted news coverage that the Balkans Communist states now have to offer is, to say the least, frustrating. It is all the more to the credit of those correspondents who remain, therefore, that they are doing a tough job as best they can until the Iron Curtain closes completely or it again becomes possible to report freely what is going on in the Balkans.

Cordially yours,

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