He was born Abraham Meyer Sirkin in Barre, Vt., the only son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who came to the United States after fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. His father died when he was 13, and his mother died four years later. At Columbia College in New York, he worked on the campus newspaper. While getting his master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, his interest in foreign affairs was sparked by lectures from newspaper employees, government officials and foreign affairs specialists. He worked as a publicist until being drafted into the Army in 1941. After the war, he worked for Gen. Douglas MacArthur's press office in Tokyo, where he led the first media tour of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese cities on which the United States dropped atomic bombs. Sirkin once said that one of the toughest assignments during that period was keeping secret sealed indictments of Japanese war leaders. Premature release of the announcement he had written would trigger a mistrial, he was warned. The document was guarded by the U.S. Marines until the indictments were opened in court. Later, while chief of information for the U.S. Marshall Plan mission in London - the beginning of his government public relations career -- Sirkin met Helen Winsor Ball, an economic analyst with the Marshall Plan. They married in 1951 and had four children. In 1953 and still in London, Sirkin joined the U.S. Information Agency. He supervised cultural centers in south India from 1963 to 1966, before becoming USIA's counselor for public affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Athens. Under the military dictatorship there in the late 1960s and early 70s, Sirkin championed a free press by meeting with the opposition press corps, and at one point the ruling dictator, Col. George Papadopoulos, tried to get him removed. Walter Kohl, a USIA colleague of Sirkin's in Greece, recalled that Sirkin took personal risks to reassure Greeks that the United States had not forsaken them.