His early career as a reporter was with Reuters in London and Paris. He then became press officer with Jean Monnet at the European Coal and Steel Community in Luxembourg from 1954 to 1956. Later he joined Time-Life as Paris correspondent, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s often covered the fighting in the Congo, the civil war in Lebanon as well as the Indo-Chinese border clashes of 1962. He wrote about the unrest in Ulster, the fighting in Angola and the Moroccan attack on Ifni, the Spanish enclave in West Africa.