was assigned to cover major stories in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, including the Algerian War of independence from France. Also in 1961, he was the only Western correspondent in East Berlin at the time the Communists began building the Berlin Wall. In 1964, CBS hired Safer as a London-based correspondent. He worked from the same desk that had once been used by Edward R. Murrow. The following year, in 1965, he became the first full-time staff reporter of the CBS News bureau in Saigon to cover the growing military conflict in Vietnam. By 1967 he was made the CBS bureau chief in London where his news stories covered numerous global conflicts, including the Nigerian Civil War, the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. With the help of some clandestine skills, Safer and his news team became the first United States-based journalists to report from inside Communist China, broadcast in 1967 as a Special CBS News Report, "Morley Safer's Red China Diary". Safer's August 1965 Vietnam report, "The Burning of Cam Ne," was notable and controversial because he had accompanied a company of Marines to the village for what was described as a "search and destroy" mission. When the Marines arrived, they were fired on by snipers. They told the inhabitants to evacuate the village, which the Marines then burned down. Safer's report was among the earliest to paint a bleak picture of the Vietnam War, showing apparently innocent civilians as victims. However, many American military and political leaders judged the story to be harmful to United States interests and criticized CBS News for showing it. United States President Lyndon Johnson reacted to this report angrily, calling CBS's president and accusing Safer and his colleagues of having undermined America's role there. Some ex-Marines who saw Safer's story on television during the war shared President Johnson's opinion. They claim that Safer never had time to be properly briefed on the operation, and was therefore not aware that four Marines had already been killed there and twenty-seven wounded. Ex-Marine Larry Engelmann, author of a story on the Vietnam War, claimed Safer's story was "highly sensational". Justifying collective punishment, he alleged: "The fact is that this village had been a pretty tough village and these people had been warned repeatedly that the village would be torched if they continued to shoot at Marines... But