In the Cold War era, Reuters wrote history

A great vignette by my one-time Moscow bureau chief Adam Kellett-Long on his high-grade Soviet contact in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War [Bridge of Spies: what it was really like]. All these years I have known Adam, as well as the two years I worked for him in the Soviet Union, he had never previously breathed a word about Shishkin. Not sure I could have kept quiet about such a coup. If anything, this is just another proof that it was Reuters (very occasionally UPI and AP) that wrote history from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in those years. I wonder how Sidney Weiland, Ronnie Farquhar, Peter Johnson, Vincent Buist and Adam himself would have fared under the Thomson Reuters minimalist regime. ■