Meg Bortin changes the names 'to protect the guilty'

Meg Bortin, a former Reuters correspondent in Paris and Moscow, has just published a new book, Desperate to Be a Housewife, that revisits her misadventures as a young reporter on the trail of a story with a happy ending. 

But if you knew her in her Reuter years, not to worry. While the events in the book are true, she changed the names of all the people portrayed - in order, she says, to protect the guilty. 

The story takes her, as Mona Venture, from America during the Vietnam War years to post-May 1968 France and on to Fleet Street and Gorbachev’s Russia as the captive nations of the Soviet empire begin to break free. 

At Reuters, she wrote under the byline Mary Ellen Bortin. Joining the Paris bureau from AFP in 1982, in the early Mitterrand era, she recalls: “Bob Evans was bureau chief and Charles Bremner the chief correspondent - meaning that from the day I first set foot in the bureau, I had little hope of escaping a future posting in Moscow. And so it came to pass. 

“But first I had to prove that I could make it as a Paris correspondent. With me in the bureau, in addition to Bob and Charles, were Donald Forbes, Chris Peterson, Alison Maitland and John Morrison (who arrived later from Moscow), among many other colleagues. 

“My first tough challenge was an assignment to write about the Eiffel Tower getting a facelift. No one else in the bureau wanted to touch that one - not even the trainee, Victor Mallet (now at the FT). By chance I found a good lead - it was taking longer to brush up the tower than it had taken Eiffel to build it - and the story was picked up all over the place. Beginner’s luck, my colleagues assured me. 

“I was less lucky on another occasion. We were being trained on a new computer system and I was asked by the instructor to write a fake dispatch. ‘Make it an urgent,’ he said. So I blithely wrote a couple of lines about Mitterrand’s motorcade being fired at. Before pushing the ‘Send’ button, I asked the instructor whether he was sure we were on a closed circuit. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ he replied. I sent it and started working on a follow-up fake bulletin when Jack Hartzman thundered down the line from London demanding to know why we were unmatched on the other wires with the Mitterrand shooting. The dispatch had somehow made its way to London. Inexplicably, I wasn’t fired.”

After two years in Paris, Bortin spent a year on the World Desk before going on to Moscow, where she worked again with Bremner and Evans, successive bureau chiefs, as well as Tony Barber, Helen Womack, John Kampfner, Tim Heritage, Susan Cornwell, Robin Lodge, and many others. 

Upon leaving Reuters in 1988 she joined the International Herald Tribune, where she was a senior editor for many years.

Bortin still lives in Paris, where she joins Bernard Edinger and fellow Dinosaurs at occasional lunches along the Seine. There is more information about her new book and her current activities on her personal web site. ■