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I can understand, possibly, being arrested (assaulted, insulted) for being a journalist in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there were other journalists there, all Russian, all talking to the same people and photographing the same things as me. What appalled the KGB man was the idea of me, an unaccompanied foreigner, freewheeling around Chechnya with no escort, no army press officer and -- horror or horrors -- no "permission" to be there.

An atavistic paranoia, strongly reminiscent of Soviet-era spy mania, has swept Russian officialdom since the beginning of this latest Chechen campaign last September. The concept behind it is that foreigners -- with Russians working for foreign media thrown in -- are spies, traitors, engaged in an organized campaign of "dezinformatsia" directed against Russia. Therefore, the logic goes, they must not be allowed anywhere near Chechnya itself except in carefully herded groups so they don't get a chance to see for themselves the, er, excellent discipline of the Russian troops and the triumphal advance of the Russian military, happy Chechens liberated from the tyranny of fundamentalist Islamic rule, and so on. But if everything is so great in Chechnya, why can't we see it?

Just for the record, this is what the Russian government does not want you to know about its latest war to crush "terrorists" in the breakaway republic: Its troops are being killed at a dramatically higher rate than Moscow admits. The Russian assault on Grozny is turning into a bloody stalemate. Russia's campaign is being crippled by bad leadership, bad morale, bad communications and bad coordination. Russians soldiers routinely loot Chechen villages and kill Chechen civilians.

Do we expect the Russians to admit this? No, of course not. Nor do we expect the Russians to make it easy for us to uncover their lies. No self-respecting government would be stupid enough to tell the truth about its own military disasters. The U.S. authorities in Vietnam didn't exactly bend over backwards to help Seymour Hirsh investigate My Lai. On the contrary, we expect governments to lie when they are waging war. So whats the difference between Chechnya and every other war in history that governments have lied about?

The difference is this: The Russian authorities have stepped beyond the bounds of propaganda and back into the familiar territory of totalitarian control over what we, as foreign journalists, get to see, where we get to go and who we get to speak to. What we are witnessing in Chechnya is a concerted attempt by a supposedly democratic government to criminalize the coverage of a major world news story. A decade and a half ago, pre-Glasnost, this would not be surprising.

But now the heirs of Russia's first democratic president -- specifically, acting president Vladimir Putin -- are actively attacking the very basis of freedom of speech, without which the Soviet regime would not have fallen and Putin would have remained a mediocre KGB spy in East Germany.

I spoke last week to Sergei Yastrzhembsky, former Kremlin spokesman and recently appointed spinmeister for Russia's Chechen campaign. He told me the following things: that "foreign journalists enjoy equal rights to report in Chechnya as Russians," that "censorship is illegal in Russia." Fine -- prizes from George Soros all round. But a day later Newsweek received a call from British Airways Cargo at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, informing us that our weekly package of photos and bureau correspondence had been "arrested" by Russian customs. Why? They had an order from the "special services" (read: FSB, the modern incarnation of the KGB) to stop and examine any material from Chechnya. After some haranguing, the pouch was de-arrested and sent on its way -- but we were warned by BA Cargo that in the future, Chechnya-related photos could be held up indefinitely "for investigation."

We could transmit the photos, of course, by e-mail. But the FSB, citing "anti-terrorist measures", has in recent months moved to enforce a 5-year-old statute requiring all Russian Internet service providers to build -- at their own and their customers' expense -- fiber-optic links to FSB headquarters so that the spooks at the Lyubyanka can read all e-mail correspondence in real time, without a warrant of any kind.

Our experience at Newsweek is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, Russian correspondents working for Western media run a much higher risk, largely because they are more vulnerable and less protected by the collective clannishness of the foreign journalists' community in Moscow.

Andrei Babitsky, for instance, a veteran reporter for Radio Liberty and probably one of the most outstanding journalists working in Chechnya today, disappeared 12 days ago. Late last week it emerged, through unnamed sources quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax, that Babitsky had been taken into custody by pro-Moscow Chechens while crossing the front lines on the way out of Grozny. He was being "questioned," said the source, by the "special services" and may be tried for "participating in illegal armed bands." There has yet to be any official confirmation of the story. But needless to say, Babitsky's first-class reports from behind Chechen lines blatantly contradicted the official Russian line. Radio Liberty's millions of listeners across Russia tuned in to Babitsky in order to get objective news which is banned from the airwaves of the two main state-owned TV channels. Just like in the good old days.

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