Last Man In

At the steelworks south of Budapest, a grimy note was slipped surreptitiously last week into the hand of the last American newsman left in Hungary, United Press Correspondent Russell Jones. The note, addressed to a relative in New York, read: "We are all living. Louis." Added Jones, in a telephoned file: "I did not see him, only his hand, but there is his message, and God bless him."

In the past three weeks U.P. Veteran Jones has received "dozens and dozens" of similar messages. They have been slipped under his dinner plate, tucked into his car, pressed into his hand on the street. "Sometimes," he wrote last week, "they want you to get word to relatives in America. Or perhaps it's just a message to everybody in the U.S." To Jones they have become a symbol of his own "continuous feeling of inadequacy, both as an American and a reporter who helplessly watched the murder of an entire people."

Black-Market Beat. Minnesotan Russ Jones, 38, arrived in Budapest six days before Soviet troops and tanks roared in to crush the rebellion, decided to stay on when some 150 Western correspondents pulled out of Budapest. Other Western press representatives who stayed: Associated Press Staffer Endre Marton, a native Hungarian who had recently been released from prison by the Communists; Marlon's wife, U.P. Correspondent Ilona Nyilas (who had also been imprisoned); Reuters Reporter Ronald Farquhar.

After spending two nights in the U.S. legation at the height of the battle, Jones moved back to his unheated fourth-floor room in the shell-pocked Duna Hotel. Phone service was disrupted, but the Western correspondents were able to file brief pooled dispatches on the only Teletype circuit to Vienna left intact. To get out the full, running narrative of Hungary's deathwatch, Jones ran off five carbon copies of his stories, sent them out with acquaintances, passers-by and an Austrian black-marketeer. So effective was their improvisation that the first big convoy of correspondents who arrived in Austria with eyewitness accounts of the Soviet counterattack in Budapest found that Jones, Marton and Reuters' Farquhar had scooped them. Since telephone service was restored, Jones has managed to phone out at least two stories a day in calls to Stockholm, Frankfurt or Vienna.

Russ Jones has been on hot spots before. He was in Prague when A.P. Correspondent William Oatis was jailed on a phony charge of spying (TIME, July 16, 1951 et seq.). After ignoring repeated warnings from the State Department that it would only be a matter of time before he was arrested, Jones was finally inveigled to Frankfurt by the U.P. for a "conference," was not permitted to go back. Said a U.P. colleague: "He's just a guy who likes to stay where things are happening."

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