The Press: Communist at Bay

In Korea Correspondent Alan Winning-ton, 44, of the Communist London Daily Worker, insisted that in covering the war from the Chinese side he was just like any other newsman on an assignment. But Winnington's actions made this claim absurd. He was one of the Communists used by the Chinese Reds to help squeeze "confessions" out of prisoners, according to such returned prisoners as U.S. Air Force Ace Colonel Walker M. Mahurin ('TIME, Sept. 21). The Communists, charged Colonel Mahurin, "continued to press me for several days, even going so far as to have a British newspaperman, Alan Winnington, interrogate me for one whole day." During the Korean war, Winnington freely circulated behind Communist lines, wrote long stories about the "germ warfare" U.N. forces were supposedly carrying on, got lists of U.N. prisoners for publication by Communist newspapers when even the International Red Cross could get no such information. He also angered Far Eastern Commander Matthew B.

Ridgway during the truce negotiations by "leaking" out Red propaganda-loaded stories to U.S. newsmen.

Last week Winnington's status finally got official recognition from the British Foreign Office. When he applied at the British consulate in Peking for a renewal of his passport so that he could cover the Geneva Far Eastern Conference (see FOREIGN NEWS), he was summarily turned down. The consulate informed him that he could only get a "traveler's permit" that would allow him to return to Brit ain, but no place else. It was the first such turndown for a Communist, although people such as Britain's Fascist Oswald Mosley have also been turned down. Winnington, a Communist Party member since 1934, thus faces the choice of staying behind the Iron Curtain or going back to Britain and staying there. Though the London Worker screamed in Page One headlines that the refusal to give Winnington a passport is "a flagrant violation of the liberties of the press," other British papers did not protest. They apparently felt that no question of freedom of the press was involved; Winnington was being recognized at last not as the bona fide correspondent he claims to be but as a Communist agent, which he is.