Back end of October [1989]:
I started reading little snippets, little things called "nibs"--the news in briefs
little 3-4 line pieces--
little nibs coming out, not in The Independent,
in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Financial Times in London
and they were little things that I don't think we were picking up on at The Independent.
And basically it was the fall of Communism, the collapse
And I said to the editor, to Andreas [Whittam Smith],
"Can I just go and sit it out in East Berlin?"
if I could get in...I didn't really know if I could get in and out.
And he said yes, OK.
And I think that was the 5th of November, 1989.
I walked around East Berlin,
and it really was like going back into a working John le Carré novel
It was dark, it was black
The light bulbs were 30 Watts--
in the West they were 150W
The atmosphere was filled with the clag of burning lignite coal
which went round the light bulbs. The whole thing was really spooky
In fact if you'd have designed it as a film set,
it wouldn't have been believable.
And I'm very pleased that Spielberg got it pretty damn right in Bridge of Spies
even though I understand he filmed parts of where they built the [Berlin Wall] in Krakow, in Poland
The irony there of filming a German thing in Krakow, in Poland...anyway, fine.
But '89, sat it out, and on the evening of the 9th
I got a phone call in my hotel
Patricia Clough had come in from Bonn
She was The Independent's German correspondent
And I got a phone call from Andreas, and he said,
"I've just seen a snap wire on the Associated Press,"
--which is basically an urgent wire--
"from Associated Press saying that the Wall is coming down tonight."
And this was all a complete cock-up
in the Volkskammer, in the [East] German Parliament
where [East German leader] Krenz had been kicked out
and one of the parliamentarians made a mistake to a journalist
and said "yes it is, yes it is"
In response to a question--no one really knew what the question was
I even got the address from my editor.
So I rushed down and tried to get my car out of the car pound at the hotel
and the guy who had the keys had gone home for the night
I found a cab outside the hotel
grabbed that, went off to Berner Staße in northern Berlin.
Sure enough, there was a crowd of 3 or 4 journalists,
a couple of TV crews, a couple of radio people, me,
some local people, who really didn't know what the hell was going on
and a dumper truck, with a great big grabber on the front.
And I did use a flash, I did have a flash on the camera
because it was nighttime.
I put the flash on the camera and tried to fire it off, and the batteries were dead
because I hardly ever used it
So I had to get a radio reporter to give me some AA batteries out of her packet
Anyway, I jumped on the dump truck and said, "Please, stop, stop, stop."
"I need to sort my gear out"
And it started to rain
And then they took the top chunk out of the wall
and it was the first bit of the Wall that came down.
and it was about 10 o'clock on the night of the 9th of November.
My driver was still there--I promised to pay him 50 Deutsch Marks, West German Marks,
which was like 3 months salary for him
if he'd stick with me and take me back to the West.
When the Wall started to come down
of course on the other side were the East German border guards, young kids
--they didn't know what the hell was going on
I mean they had guns, but whether they had any bullets
no one was really going to find out.
And I did the pictures, and it was in by 11 o'clock
so that would've been the best part of midnight in London
We only had 2 or 3 editions at that time
and I knew our first edition had probably gone at 10 or 11 o'clock
and I thought, by the time I get to West Berlin, find the Reuters office,
to process my film, and then transmit it's going to be 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.
So I made a decision, an executive decision:
to leave the news event to the agencies
and to cover the story properly.
So I said to my driver, "OK, let's get out of East Berlin"
and we tried to get out on the route he could get out of East Berlin
and he could get through, but I couldn't
because I didn't have the right stamp in my passport.
He couldn't come through Checkpoint Charlie because that was only for Westerners to go out
so he dumped me at Charlie and I walked all the way around the Wall
with my equipment, completely exhausted,
found myself a tree, climbed up a tree overlooking the excitement on the Wall
And the East German border guards at that stage
they weren't sure what the heck was going on either
So they started hosing everybody off the wall.
Here is a picture--I don't know if you can read it--
I'll show it to you in higher resolution
But that is a picture of the border guards on the night at 2 o'clock in the morning
And once I got that in the can
--so it's 3 o'clock London--
I found another driver, another cab, that took me to the airport
The British Airways flight was going out at 7 o'clock in the morning
My stuff was freighted, it was back in London by 11:30
and in the darkroom and in the office at City Road in London
just after lunchtime
and we made the back page--I made the whole of the back page
with a set of photographs of life in East Berlin
plus that picture I've just showed
as the main, eight column frame on the back page
And that was just wonderful
And I stayed in Berlin for another ten days or so
And the whole thing about newspapers is:
stories go dead very, very quickly.
And even something as big as the fall of the Wall died.
