by John Darnton
We were a privileged band, flying off to cover coups and revolutions, helping and competing with one another. One day we’d be trekking to Timbuktu, another ordering from room service at a Paris hotel during a layover to catch a connecting flight between Senegal and Zaire. This was before the great droughts and famine in the Sahel, AIDS, and the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, and the child warriors and slaughters in Kenya, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. All that changed everything and made Africa a dismal place to live in and write about.
The stories I covered weren’t lacking in drama. I watched as Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian dictator who had smashed five vials of red blood to proclaim the revolution’s “red terror,” littered the streets of Addis Ababa with bodies. I chartered a plane to fly into Uganda as Idi Amin was being toppled; I searched his house, looking in his freezer to see if rumors were true that he kept human hearts there (there weren’t any), and I photographed the blood-soaked walls of his prisons. I met illegally with banned poets and writers in Soweto during the protests against South African apartheid. I accompanied guerrilla and rebel movements from the Ogaden to Angola.
One of my most memorable moments came in Eritrea, where I tagged along with a Marxist rebel group. Sleeping under the stars, I was awakened one morning by something tugging at my hair—a monkey. The poor animal, it turned out, had been adopted from the wild by a rebel commander, and now it was adopting me. I was flattered but also a bit nervous—the authoritarian commander, clearly jealous, disliked me heartily and more than once joked about leaving me lifeless in the bush. I told him the monkey would be brokenhearted; he didn’t laugh.
These were high times for foreign correspondents, before the advent of satellite phones and other innovations in communications cut down on independence. We could disappear in the vastness of Africa for weeks at a time and go months without speaking to “the desk.” Because the quandaries of time and space worked in our favor, we could pretty much decide what was worth writing about. It was truly a wonderful deal: Someone handed you a credit card for travel and telex charges, patted you on the back, and sent you off. In return, you had all kinds of adventures and wrote home about them. In this respect my days of foreign reporting were closer to what my father had lived than they were to the experiences of correspondents who arrived only a few years after I did.
We called ourselves “hacks,” a British term intended to deflate the pomposity of those who took the job too seriously. We didn’t engage in high-minded discussions about what we were doing. We must have looked ridiculous, with our safari suits and elephant-hair bracelets and even juju charms. In retrospect, some of our exploits were silly—like getting drunk and climbing out of hotel bathroom windows in Marxist Ethiopia to evade the Ministry of Information’s “babysitters.” Such times remind me of Barney and his crew in Australia and New Guinea—the drunken carousing, the need to blow off steam, and then the serious business of reporting the war.
In the course of these adventures, I didn’t feel that I was immune to danger, nor did I seek it out. I didn’t stop to think if I was consciously or unconsciously trying to replicate Barney’s life. But I recall hearing that one of my colleagues wondered if I had a penchant for risk taking that stemmed from a desire to emulate my father. And I remember sitting down in a hotel room in Khartoum, before a long trip into a contested area of Ethiopia, and writing a note for Nina, thinking she could look to it for comfort in case anything should happen to me. The wording of that note, now that I think back on it, echoed the wording of the letter my father had written to his older brother on the eve of his departure to the Pacific.
But I think it’s true to say that, like my father, I tried to avoid unnecessary risks. I’m reminded of an incident in Uganda when Amin was fleeing. Our small band of correspondents encountered a crazy quilt of contending forces: Libyan troops defending Amin, Tanzanians ousting him, and Ugandans fighting on both sides. It was the kind of anarchic situation old African hands found most perilous. At one point, we ventured into a no-man’s-land. Behind us were the Tanzanians, who offered protection; ahead of us was chaos. There were snipers but also, presumably, civilians to be interviewed. We stopped every three or four blocks to decide whether or not to go on. Finally we halted in a crumbling alley. A correspondent for The Washington Post said we should turn around. A reporter from the BBC said we should go forward. The first said we were courting danger needlessly, the second that we were obligated to find out what was going on up ahead. The deciding vote fell to me. I said, “Let’s go back.”
In the early summer of 1979, over a shaky phone line in Mozambique, I talked to the Times’ foreign editor, who asked me where I wanted to go on my next posting. Anywhere but Eastern Europe, I replied, thinking of the gray weather and the gray landscape and the gray lives under communism. Two weeks later I received my assignment: Warsaw.
We took a ferry across the Baltic to a Polish harbor town whose name we couldn’t pronounce (Świnoujście). On the drive to the capital, we stopped for coffee and had to mime our order. Along the way, fresh from the red flame trees and purple frangipani of East Africa, we passed unspeakably drab villages. In Warsaw, we drove past tracts of soulless government housing, huge buildings rising up like radiator blocks. We checked into the one international hotel, the Victoria. Its lobby was largely deserted except for money changers and prostitutes. We walked to a nearby department store; there was little for sale. We went to a grocery store; its shelves were stacked with bottles of vinegar. Nina was upset. A voice inside me whispered, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to handle this.
But it was in Poland, which I came to appreciate and love, that my journalist’s lucky star provided me with a story that made headlines around the world. Within a year Lech Wałsa, an unemployed electrician with a Pancho Villa mustache, would scale the wall of the Gdańsk shipyard, and the striking workers there would found Solidarity, the free-trade union that pried Poland from the grip of the Soviet Union and breached the monolithic wall of communism.
When I arrived, I was the only American correspondent to cover the six countries of Eastern Europe from Warsaw. I moved the bureau there from Yugoslavia. The Polish authorities seemed of two minds at the prospect of having the Times headquartered there. But I’m sure it appealed to their nationalism and their practicality: Attempts to use me could prove useful in the ever-complicated balancing act between Washington and Moscow. Aside from one or two bizarre anonymous calls that we blamed on the secret police, the government was mostly welcoming. Three days after our arrival, we were given a tour of the capital by a rather stiff young man from Interpress, the government propaganda agency. He showed us the Royal Castle and the Old Town, painstakingly reconstructed after the devastation of the Nazi occupation. We then asked to visit the Jewish ghetto, where Nina’s father had hidden while fleeing from Russia sixty years before. After that, he took us to the statue of Chopin in Lazienki Park. We asked to see the Umschlagplatz, where the trains took Jews to the Treblinka death camp. And so it went, seesawing back and forth, the guide’s defensiveness growing, until finally he ushered us into a small church. Stealthily looking about to see if we were being observed, he pointed to a wall and told us to examine it. There were lists and lists of names—war dead—and after each the word: Katyn. “The dates, look at the dates,” he hissed. They were the same, too: 1940. It took a few minutes for me to understand. The guide was referring to the wartime Katyn massacre, in which some twenty thousand Polish officers and citizens had been executed in an area occupied first by the Russians, then the Germans. The dates signified that, in contradiction to the official line, the atrocity was Stalin’s doing, not Hitler’s. We took away a deeper lesson: He was introducing us to the dark side of Eastern Europe, to states that were slaughterhouses, a place where Germans killed Jews and Russians killed Poles, where the cobblestones were steeped in blood and thousands, even millions, of innocents could slip into graves hardly noticed and barely mourned.
Poland rounded out
my education on governmental repression. Our phone was tapped and our house was bugged (on one occasion, a lightbulb in our entry started flickering and humming; within two hours, unbidden workers arrived to repair it). What the eavesdroppers were interested in, we learned from our friends, was not our thoughts about the Party or our geopolitical views. They couldn’t have cared less about that. What they wanted was scuttlebutt: who was sleeping with whom, who had a drinking problem, who wanted to go abroad. That was useful information.
When we arrived, the press and TV were tightly controlled by the Polish United Workers’ Party. There was an official censor’s office downtown—everyone knew where it was. The media had achieved a sort of negative credibility. During my first week, a cabdriver, learning where I was from, enthused in broken English about New York, which he had never visited, observing among other things that he imagined that there was very little crime there. Taken aback, I asked him where he had gotten his information. Polish radio and TV, he said: “All they say is bad crime in New York.” The driver, like many Poles, had taken what he’d heard from the official airwaves and turned it upside down. A friend of mine, a Polish playwright, half joked that he preferred to get a negative review because that would ensure a larger turnout. In the absence of good information, rumors abounded and jokes conveyed truths.
When discontent reached the boiling point in the summer of 1980, we were on home leave. On a flight from Phoenix to New York, I was paged by a stewardess, who told me someone would be waiting for me at the airport runway. A messenger was there with an instruction from the Times: Proceed to Poland on the next available flight. I did, while my family stayed in New York. A day later, when I approached the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, a worker examined my credentials, opened the front gate, and said, “Welcome to Free Poland.” In the cavernous hall where the strikers were assembled, the names of companies going out on strike were read over a public-address system to loud applause. Minutes later, I was surprised to hear “The New York Times has joined our strike!” The hall erupted in thunderous cheers.
One of my first interviews was with Anna Walentynowicz, the fifty-year-old crane operator and grandmother who had set off the strike when she had been fired for political activism and refused to leave.* I asked her what were the workers’ strongest grievances. She fixed me with a stare that was anything but grandmotherly, saying, “It’s not so bad that the government screwed up. I mean, anyone can screw up. What’s galling is that they refuse to admit it. The papers tell us over and over that our lives are getting better and better. And we can see that they’re getting worse. That’s what really gets to you—the lies.” One of the first things the workers did was to start their own newspaper, churning out a two-page leaflet on an old mimeograph machine. They named the paper Solidarność and gave it the famous red logo under the Polish flag.
As I looked around, the workers with transistor radios glued to their ears, listening to the Polish-language broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America, seemed stunned. They actually could do something—say vote on a new list of demands—and hear about it over the air within minutes. The speed was confounding. To them, government broadcasts had always come with a substantial delay to allow for censoring. Who knew that news could be fast and accurate? This was something totally different and exciting, and it had a radicalizing effect. The outside world was paying attention to what they were doing. As I watched all this, I realized that the hunger for a free flow of honest information is something deep and natural, almost a visceral need to a healthy society, like food and water to the human body.
Covering the strike was difficult because the government had cut off all communications in the north of the country. That meant that I had to fly from Warsaw to Gdańsk, hitchhike five miles into the city (the taxis were on strike), do my reporting, and then return to Warsaw to file. But there was an upside to this. The episodic nature of my visits highlighted changes in the workers’ mood and attitudes as the protests spread. At first when I spoke to them, they were shy and awkward, usually refusing to provide their names. But by my third visit, I noticed a sea change. Now the strikers approached me. They demanded to be interviewed and insisted that I take down their names and addresses, spelling them out laboriously, and they readily posed for photographs. Decades of fear of reprisals from the authorities had melted away.
The upshot of the strikes, of course, was capitulation by the state and the establishment of Solidarity, the first non-Party workers’ organization in any Communist regime. Over a period of sixteen months, it operated aboveground and attracted some ten million members, turning into a revolutionary force for expanding the boundaries of freedom. The process was anything but smooth—there were strikes, police raids, firings of Party leaders, threats from Moscow, and maneuvers by Soviet troops. For me, it was a roller-coaster ride on an endless stream of stories. Where once it had been impossible to obtain any information, now there was a glut—people were consumed with democracy, exciting conversations went deep into the night, and the whole country seemed to have turned into one big university coffee house brimming with ideas and cigarette smoke.
Then came December 13, 1981, when Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law, shutting everything down in the space of a single snowy night. As an exercise in raw power, it was awe-inspiring. Solidarity leaders, meeting in Gdańsk, were brought from their hotel rooms in handcuffs. Lech Wałsa was put on a plane and taken to a distant villa, where he was placed under house arrest. Overnight, all communications with the outside world were severed. A country in the middle of Europe, at the end of the twentieth century, simply dropped out of sight, as if it had been sucked into a black hole. It wasn’t so much a matter of putting Poland into one big concentration camp, as some commentators said at the time; it was more like putting each and every person into an isolation cell.
Like everyone else, I had no idea martial law was coming. At 10:00 p.m., I wrote a new lead on a story, and when I went to file it shortly after 11:00 p.m., my telex was dead. I picked up my phone. That line was dead, too. Still, I didn’t think anything drastic had happened—fluctuations in service weren’t all that uncommon. In a heavy snowfall, I drove to Pikna Street, where the foreign wire services had their offices. When I arrived, everything was in an uproar. Phones and telexes weren’t working, people were rushing up and down the halls, and rumors were flying. A small band of us trudged through the snow to the local Solidarity office, where we saw police carting files away. A young man huddling in a doorway told me they had arrested half a dozen activists there. I filed through Reuters—the only agency with a computer line—and then made forays around the city for updates as the army took over and set up roadblocks. At 6:00 a.m. General Jaruzelski announced martial law. The Reuters line died. So here I was, at the center of the biggest story in the world, with no surefire way to get it out.
Nina had left for London only hours before to help a Polish friend whose play was opening there. We had a housekeeper who lived in, so Kyra and Liza were not alone. But in the morning I left them at the homes of close friends, diplomats whose children were the same ages as ours. I finally managed to file through the secret communications system of the American embassy, sending my story as classified material through Washington. But the next day when I went to file, I ran into a snag. Other reporters had asked for the same privilege, and so the embassy had decided to allow a single dispatch each day; we could all contribute to it and it would go to all of our papers. This was a good solution for the embassy, since it wouldn’t overload its line, and it was good for Poland, since it would get the story out, but it wasn’t ideal for the half dozen American reporters, since we were competitors.
We had no choice but to go along. For days and then weeks, we convened in the embassy at 3:00 p.m. to write a communal story we referred to as “the camel” (a horse designed by committee). We had no idea whether the stories were being used or even received, since our papers had no way of contacting us. We later learned that our camel was feeding
every media outlet in the United States.
At the outset, the authorities announced that we would have to submit our reports to the censors. The censors were men in military uniform presiding over two telexes in the office of Interpress. I didn’t even consider it and took no small delight in evading the authorities to get my copy out. I used “pigeons”—that is, people—as couriers. For the most part, they were Westerners who had been stranded in Poland and were now able to leave. I met them at the airport or in the lobby of the Victoria Hotel and handed over my stories with the phone number of the Times’ foreign desk at the top of the first page. Because I wasn’t sure of the risk to the courier, I camouflaged my first story as a letter to Robert Semple, the foreign editor, meaning that I put a salutation at the beginning, “Dear Bob,” and ended it with “Yours truly.” It wasn’t much of a disguise, I thought as I handed it over to a Swedish businessman who was taking a ferry to Stockholm, but it might slip past a hurried Polish border guard who wasn’t fluent in English. The story, I later learned, got through. Confused by the format, Semple reached Nina in London and asked her questions. Would I be expelled if it were published under my byline? She replied sensibly: Since I had written it as a letter, why not print it as a letter? And so the paper did, salutation and all, boxed on the front page. That made it seem even more dramatic, like a message that had been passed through a tiny crack in a wall—which, in a sense, it was.
To ensure that my stories arrived, I made two carbon copies, sending a total of three copies of each one. I named each story after a woman, beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, and wrote the name on the copy, instructing the Times to notify me by telegram—the only communication system still standing—when the story arrived. Soon the messages began pouring in: “Abigail says hello.” “Betsy sends her regards.” “Carol has recovered.” I became adept at enlisting pigeons. One was an American secretary taking the Chopin Express train through Czechoslovakia to Vienna. Another was a businessman who carried the story in a hollowed-out Marlboro box. A third was a West Coast hippie, who nonchalantly stuffed it into the bottom of his boot. A fourth story went out aboard a private plane that was medevacing the British ambassador, who had suffered a heart attack. What amazed me was that I asked dozens of people to act as pigeons and not one, not a single one, declined.