We've come around the back of
the building where the secret police
are holed up, and you can hear them
firing now.
They're firing down, in fact, in
this direction every now and then...
It's said that journalists
write the first draft of history.
John Simpson, BBC News.
As the BBC's World Affairs Editor
and its longest-serving
correspondent,
I've filed many of
those initial reports.
From Tiananmen Square...
Everybody knows that the army
has the power to do
something about this,
to clear this entire place
if it chooses to.
..to both Iraq wars...
ARCHIVE: After the bomb attack,
I carried on to Baghdad.
..I was on the ground covering
world-changing events.
But amongst
these era-defining moments,
one event stands out above
all others.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I think what happened on
November the 9th 1989
was one of the great, great days of
modern human existence.
The fall of the Berlin Wall.
This Brutalist structure was the
fault line of a decades-long
global conflict between
the Soviet bloc in the East
and the Allied powers in the West.
I believed its collapse would change
the world forever.
When you see the ugliest, and most
menacing structure in the world
knocked down in front of your eyes,
anything seemed possible.
Now, 30 years later,
I'm re-examining the story,
viewing the extensive archive
and sitting down with experts
to try to understand
just how accurate
my reporting of history was.
ARCHIVE: It's quite
extraordinary, this...
And to discover why things
didn't quite turn out
how I expected them to.
I grew up in the shadow of the
Cold War.
Back then, the world was
a terrifying place.
I lived through the Cold War
from beginning to end.
I grew up in it,
and I was a young man during it,
and I was a middle-aged man
by the time it came to an end.
Europe was totally unrecognisable
from the Europe we know today.
For a start, Germany was split into
two countries, East and West,
a legacy of the Second World War
that had left the continent divided.
From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended
across the continent.
On either side of this iron curtain,
two hostile superpowers faced off -
the Communist USSR and the
free-market West spearheaded
by the United States.
The world stood on the brink of
nuclear war.
I just assumed there would be
an all-out thermonuclear war
and we'd all be burned to a crisp.
At the epicentre of this seemingly
never-ending crisis was Berlin.
The frontier of freedom here
is our frontier.
It's America's frontier as well as
Germany's frontier.
The Berlin Wall, 28 miles
of slab concrete,
became the physical manifestation
of the global divide.
On either side of it
lay two separate
and vastly different worlds -
East versus West,
Capitalism versus Communism.
Ronald Reagan put it like this...
The focus of evil
in the modern world.
I don't know of anybody who didn't
just assume
that the Berlin Wall would still be
standing in 50 years' time.
Nobody thought that this was going
to change.
It seemed so kind of...
..fixed and powerful and strong.
CAR HORN HONKING
PEOPLE CHEERING
But then, all of a sudden,
the Wall was gone
and the world's never been
the same since.
People were openly weeping.
I find it quite hard to talk about
it now without weeping,
simply because there was so
much joy about.
It was such a good thing
to have happened.
A wonderful,
totally unhoped-for thing.
ARCHIVE: You know, right just
behind where we are...
But for all the joy of the occasion,
it also gave me the most humiliating
moment in my long career.
STATIC BUZZING
Well, I'm sorry we lost John Simpson
rather dramatically there,
I'm afraid.
But despite my own technical
difficulties,
the images of thousands of
formerly imprisoned people
streaming through the checkpoints,
as the once trigger-happy
border guards stood idly by,
were beamed around the world.
It was barely believable.
I just saw these hundreds, thousands
of people so happy.
Witnessing this momentous event
first-hand gave me incredible hope
for what might lie ahead.
You know, "The future's bound
to be good.
"The future's bound to be better
because this is the atmosphere
"in which we're approaching
the new Europe."
But looking back, things didn't turn
out the way I'd hoped they would.
We do have a united
and democratic Germany
and the Iron Curtain has fallen.
But I could never have predicted
that Russia with Vladimir Putin,
a former KGB agent at its head,
would become such a bitter enemy
to the West.
ALL: Hurrah!
Was I wrong to be so optimistic?
And did I miss anything
in my original reporting
that would have helped me see
what was coming next?
MUSIC: Are Friends Electric
by Tubeway Army
The BBC first sent me to West Berlin
in the late 1970s
to cover the increasing build up of
tension in the Cold War.
It was like nowhere else on Earth.
# And the paint's peeling off of my
walls... #
It was kind of a mystery,
and a disturbing mystery.
I mean, all the films and the novels
about the Cold War and East Germany
and West Germany and Berlin -
all true.
All true. I mean, OK, some of them
are ludicrous.
But the most ludicrous thing of the
lot, in many ways,
was this weird city that had just
been chopped
arbitrarily into two sections.
Berlin became the focal point of
East-West tension
in the immediate aftermath of the
Second World War.
The city was 100 miles inside
East Germany,
but given its strategic importance,
the four allied powers had agreed
to share control.
From the outset, however, Berlin was
divided along ideological lines -
the Soviet-controlled Communist East
versus the Capitalist West
controlled by the United States,
Britain, and the French.
But for those who didn't want
to live under communist rule,
West Berlin
became their escape route.
Throughout the 1950s,
over three million people
like the families you see here,
were estimated to have fled west,
greatly angering
the East German regime.
Determined to stop the flow,
the communist government hastily
built the Berlin Wall
to keep their people in.
ARCHIVE: In 1961, a 28-mile wall was
built by the East German authorities
to cut right across the city centre.
The outer borders of West Berlin
were mined and fortified
to seal it off from East Germany.
By the time I arrived in West
Berlin, the Wall had been standing
for nearly two decades and it
dominated the landscape.
When I caught my first glimpse of
the Berlin Wall,
I was staggered by it.
It was just grey and concrete
and very scary!
DOGS BARKING
The barbed wire, the notices,
the loudspeakers, the guard towers,
that sense that you were somewhere
really, really dangerous.
And you knew that if you got
too close to it,
you could be shot dead.
The Wall itself
was actually two walls,
creating a no man's land in between,
referred to as "the death strip".
Trigger-happy border guards
and trip-wire machine guns
meant anyone trying to escape
to the West faced a daunting task.
It really looked impossible
to get over.
As we know, people did do it.
But over 100 East Germans
died trying.
GUNFIRE
In October 1979, I had to cross
through this daunting structure
into Soviet-controlled East Berlin
to film a report
on the 30th anniversary
of the state.
It may be that Mr Brezhnev has now
given up all hope of getting
anywhere with detente
at least for the time being.
VOICEOVER: The only way into the
East from the West
was via one of the tightly
controlled checkpoints.
I crossed the infamous
Checkpoint Charlie,
one of the most militarised border
crossings in the world.
A long, long walk down
Friedrichstrasse
and then there were huts
at the far end,
and the thing I remember most was in
the hut was the biggest camera lens
you have ever seen in your life -
it must have been about like that.
And went into the hut,
there were customs officials -
really hostile.
"What are you here for? What are
you doing? Why are you here?"
And after a long while
of messing you around
and treating you in
a very hostile way,
then suddenly you open some sort
of rickety door...
..and you were there.
You were on the other side of the
looking glass.
But this was no
Alice In Wonderland fairy tale.
This was real life
for millions of people.
There was just a kind of sense that
this was a strange society
that was just propped up by the guns
of the East German forces
getting their orders directly from
the Russians.
In 1979, there was no doubting who
was in charge of East Germany,
as I witness the Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev
arrive to full military honours.
ARCHIVE: Soviet officials feel that
the Americans are now set on showing
how tough they are in dealing with
the Russians,
but it's given Mr Brezhnev and his
colleagues a lot to worry about.
Enthusiasm for the Russians is
mostly left
to the convinced Party members here.
Other people put out more flags
mostly because
it's expected of them.
But away from the pomp and ceremony,
I found reporting
from such a secretive and closed
society extremely difficult.
I mean, to get a television report
of two and a half minutes on the air
after the kind of controls and
difficulties
that everybody threw in your way,
that was a real achievement
in itself.
ARCHIVE: There's a sense
of style here
that's rare in the rest of
Eastern Europe.
Partly, it's a matter of money.
East Germans are about the richest
people in the Soviet bloc.
At special food shops, people queue
to buy foreign delicacies
with East German money at double or
treble the price in the West.
It's not money that's short,
it's the goods.
How do people live their lives
when there are watchers,
either official watchers or
volunteer watchers, even nastier,
on every staircase, in every block
of flats, in every school,
in every factory, in every office?
As a journalist, I only got to see
what the regime wanted me to see,
so, to try and understand what my
reports were missing,
I'm meeting the historian and author
Professor Timothy Garton Ash,
who was a student in East Berlin
at the time
I was reporting on Brezhnev's visit.
I just could never get
a proper handle
on everyday life in East Germany
because we were always
followed round and...
I mean, what should I have
looked for?
On the one hand, you knew,
we all knew,
this was a secret police state.
It was kind of worse than I think
one imagined
just coming in as a
foreign correspondent.
On the other hand,
and you know this from other places,
there's all the rich normality
of life.
Fantastic music - Bach, Beethoven,
theatre,
and people who were highly cultured,
and had a lot of time.
ARCHIVE: It's now been made a crime
to tell any foreign organisation
anything damaging
to the East German state.
The new law is an attempt to
insulate the country from the West,
just like the Berlin Wall.
I think it is one of the closest,
if not the closest we've got,
to the Orwellian ideal of control
because it actually used very little
physical violence.
I mean, there was some torture,
certainly psychological torture,
but, of course, as Orwell says,
the ideal dictatorship,
totalitarian regime is the one
that doesn't need to use
physical violence
because it controls people already,
and I think the system was about
as close to that as we have got.
And they were quite good at telling
a story about,
"OK, maybe you have democracy
and human rights,
"but we have social rights.
"We look after people's welfare
and their economic wellbeing."
And that had quite a lot of
traction, I think, in the West.
We accepted the Soviet propaganda.
They said they were there forever
and they were going to beat us.
And we might not have thought
they were going to beat us,
but we certainly never thought at
some stage this whole construct
is just going to collapse in front
of our eyes.
It just seemed too powerful,
too strong for that.
But then in March 1985, I witnessed
the first sign of change
in the hitherto suffocating
Soviet regime.
Good evening. Tonight, the Russians
have a new leader,
their youngest for 60 years.
Mikhail Gorbachev was unanimously
elected today as General Secretary
of the Soviet Communist Party.
Gorbachev's appointment marked
a radical departure
from his predecessors.
He was seen by many, including
myself, as a reformer.
ARCHIVE: Mr Gorbachev,
relaxed as ever, preferred to finish
his coffee before speaking.
He undertook to seek radical
solutions to reducing stocks
of nuclear missiles and showed
once again
how worried his government
was about weapons in space.
But today's talks, like yesterday's
with Mrs Thatcher, went well.
It was starting to look as though
the Russians
would celebrate the 40th anniversary
of the defeat of Hitler with
scarcely a reference
to the part we played in the
whole thing.
Now, a new warmth
is seeping into the way the Russians
see their history, too.
VOICEOVER: But it wasn't just
foreign relations that Gorbachev
was intent on improving.
At home in the Soviet Union, his
policies of glasnost and perestroika
created a culture of free speech
and instigated a restructuring of
the political and economic system.
When I first met Gorbachev, he went
to a state banquet at Hampton Court.
I just saw through -
there was a gents' lavatory -
and there was Gorbachev.
And he was he was ju...
HE CHUCKLES
He was just doing his hair.
And he put his comb through his
mouth to get a bit of spit on it,
to get his hair to lie down,
what was left of his hair.
And he was some sort of a
likely lad.
But he also seemed a lot more open.
Edward Lucas is a veteran Russia
watcher and security policy expert,
an old sparring partner of mine from
Cold War reporting.
His views on Gorbachev
are somewhat different.
I remember very well watching
Gorbachev, and I assumed
that he would be able to liberate
thinking in the Soviet Union,
and keep it as the Soviet Union.
I suspect you never believed that.
I know you and I didn't agree
about a lot of things,
and I've got an uneasy feeling
you got it right.
Well, I think there's a double
misapprehension.
One was that it was possible to
reform communism, which it wasn't,
cos it was based on lies
and mass murder.
And the other, it would be desirable
to do that which is also not true
because it was an imperial system
that kept hundreds of millions of
people in captivity.
And so the sooner it fell apart,
the better.
And if Gorbachev speeded
its demise, that was good.
But we should not have wished him
any success
in trying to hold it together.
The Soviet Union was like a train
hurtling towards a
very rickety bridge.
And once it got to the bridge,
the bridge was going to collapse.
MUSIC: Just Can't Get Enough
by Depeche Mode
By 1989, four years after Gorbachev
first came to power, a populist cry
for freedom was in full swing in
communist regimes across the world.
Our first report from Peking
is from our foreign affairs editor,
John Simpson.
And as the BBC's chief foreign
correspondent, I found myself
reporting on some of the biggest
political upheavals
of the late 20th century.
Everybody knows that the army
has the power to do something
about this, to clear this entire
place if it chooses to.
The only question is,
does it choose to?
# And I just can't seem
to get enough... #
At the time of martial law, there
was intense sympathy in Britain
for Poland and its people.
From Budapest, our foreign affairs
editor John Simpson.
The first real chink in
the Iron Curtain
appeared in the spring of 1989,
when I witnessed Hungarian soldiers
cut the barbed wire fence
on the Austrian border.
The Hungarians themselves no longer
need exit visas
to cross into Austria and the West.
And now the increasingly liberal
leadership in Hungary,
with Imre Pozsgay at its head,
is allowing East German emigres
to use the same loophole.
# I just can't seem to get
enough... #
People in East Germany were driving
through the Eastern Bloc
to Hungary, which they could enter
without a visa,
and then hopping across the border
into Austria, the West,
and then they'd drive around
in those tiny, smelly little
Trabants,
that I spent so much of my time
travelling round in myself,
through from Austria
into southern Germany.
# I just can't get enough... #
But even seeing this first hand,
I wasn't convinced the world
was about to change radically.
I assumed, gradually, East Germany
would liberalise
until the difference between them
and us wasn't all that great.
But it never, never occurred
to me that it would
happen suddenly, quickly.
Was I very wrong?
I mean, how...? Well, it was wrong,
but, I mean, how wrong was I?
The crucial question for me is not
did journalists foresee
what was going to happen next?
Because nobody knows
what was going to happen next.
I don't think anyone foresaw it,
that this was actually an empire,
the Soviet empire, and it was an
empire that was gradually decaying,
and we didn't know how long
that process was would take.
But if people didn't get that,
I think they were missing
something really important.
ARCHIVE: Mr Gorbachev himself has
come back from a month's holiday
to find a lot of problems
confronting him.
This probably isn't one of the...
VOICEOVER: Re-watching my reports
from the time,
I wonder just how close I got
to reaching Tim's conclusion?
ARCHIVE: ..but if we're seeing the
gradual collapse of East Germany
in its present form, Mr Gorbachev
and everyone else, East and West,
will eventually have to decide
whether or not they're happy to see
the two parts of Germany linking up
in some way,
perhaps to form the largest
and richest nation in Europe.
One thing, I'm really quite
proud of it, actually.
I mean, this was in the summer
of 1989,
and it's clear when you watch it,
it is clear that something
really big is going to happen.
I mean, at least I spotted that.
What I did get right was that East
Germany was unlikely to last
in its existing form.
It was very clear that Gorbachev's
policies were resulting
in radical change.
However, most experts agree
he had no intention
of bringing down the Berlin Wall.
I don't think he had any
plan whatsoever.
I don't think he understood
that if he took these steps,
he was actually putting a gun to the
head of the horse that he was riding
and he was going to put a bullet
through the horse's brain.
So if there was no Soviet political
strategy to bring down the Wall,
then just how and why did it happen?
It's always been my belief that the
very thing you're watching now,
a televised press conference, played
a pivotal role in the collapse.
SPEAKING GERMAN
Because, if this event hadn't been
broadcast live
on East German television,
then things might have turned out
very differently.
I think it's fair to say that if
Gunter Schabowski's press conference
hadn't gone out live,
the Wall wouldn't have fallen,
or at least it wouldn't have
fallen then.
From the very first moment
I visited East Germany,
television and its influence
on society, both East and West,
was something that fascinated me.
East Germans know all about the West
and its consumer habits.
Nine out of ten of them could watch
West German television every evening
and most do
in preference to their own.
ON TV: Vietnam. Watergate...
Eventually, the East Germans
decided to compete
by making their own
programmes better.
The result that they now have far
and away the best television
in Eastern Europe.
Sometimes it's a bit hard
to tell which station is east
and which is west...
JAUNTY MUSIC PLAYS
Television's something I know
a little about,
but to find out how it was
weaponised during the Cold War,
I'm meeting
Professor Sabina Mihelj,
who's an expert in mass
communication in the Soviet Union.
If you were to watch television
in the '70s or '80s,
flicking through from East German
to West German channels,
there wasn't that much dramatic
difference in terms
of the structure of programming.
And a lot of the basic missions
and ideas about what television
was for in these societies
were intriguingly actually modelled
on the BBC model, the old Reithian -
to inform, to educate
and to entertain.
So it wasn't a coincidence
that East Germany decided to build
this massive television tower
in the middle of Berlin
to showcase its capacity of
mastering technology into the West.
The TV tower was the tallest
structure in Germany,
the third highest freestanding
building in the world.
The communist government knew all
too well the power it transmitted.
That enormous television tower right
in the centre of East Berlin,
visible from the West,
in particular.
I mean, that was a statement
on the part
of the communist authorities,
wasn't it? Mm-hm.
It definitely was a statement
directed at the West,
but also directed at the
domestic population,
really showing the domestic
population and saying,
"Look, this is what we were able
to produce."
The problem was it worked both ways.
A 28-mile-long wall may have kept
East Berliners from physically
experiencing the West, but a wall,
however high, couldn't stop
Western television from arriving
directly into their living rooms.
I seem to remember being in East
Germany and people saying to me,
of course, it was difficult to hide
the fact that you wanted to watch
West German television,
because in those days
you had the aerials on the roof
and you had to turn them
in a particular direction to get
West German television.
So all anybody had to do
was just drive down the street
and see the aerials on the roof.
Yeah. So it was so extensive
that it would be difficult
to police, really.
So in the end, there was only
one part of East Germany
that couldn't watch Western
television and it was tellingly
referred to in German language -
this is something
that you may have heard -
as the Valley of the Clueless.
Oh, I didn't hear about that.
So, yeah, this was a part of Germany
where you couldn't reach
the signals, essentially.
MUSIC: Master and Servant
by Depeche Mode
Outside of the Valley of
the Clueless,
the East German government
did their best
to divert the gaze of the
population,
particularly when it came
to Western news broadcasts.
From the '70s onwards,
they were really strategically
placing some of the most popular
entertainment programming
that they produced domestically
to coincide with important evening
news programmes in the West.
So there's this one particular
programme that I can remember,
the Kettle of Colour, that was
scheduled to coincide with the main
evening news bulletin on
West German television at the time.
The statue to democracy
has been entirely destroyed.
..ugly symbol of Europe's division.
Polish authorities who finally
clamped down on solidarity...
Dancing showgirls may have worked
in the past,
but by 1989, it was clear
that East Germans were increasingly
aware of the political upheaval
taking place in other parts
of the Soviet bloc.
As Gorbachev arrived to celebrate
the 40-year anniversary
of the state, ordinary East Germans
had started to publicly demand
a change in the status quo.
ARCHIVE: Waiting to meet him was the
East German leader, Erich Honecker,
a small, dapper dinosaur trying
to avoid extinction
in a fast-changing communist world.
VOICEOVER: As official state
television
covered the celebrations...
..Western news reporters, like
my late colleague Brian Hanrahan,
were focused on the unrest
that was building in the streets.
It began when the police sealed
off the railway station,
but it's become a much wider
protest.
CROWD CHANTS: Freiheit! Freiheit!
People have been shouting
"Freedom, freedom"
and attempts to stop them
have made things worse.
INTENSE BANG, PEOPLE SHOUT
Acutely aware of the power these
images would have within the state,
the communist authorities banned
Western cameras from filming.
The people are throwing away
their fears,
but the organisers
of the new political opposition
are appealing for calm.
Mark McCauley is a news cameraman
who's captured iconic moments
from war zones around the world.
In June 1989,
he was with me in Tiananmen Square
and in October of that year,
he found himself with Brian Hanrahan
in East Berlin.
The secret police had said under
all circumstances,
we must stop foreign media
getting this information out.
CROWD CHANTS
As protests spread challenging
communist authority,
Brian knew that despite
the secret police,
he had to report
on what was happening.
Mark was sent undercover
with a concealed camera.
I mean, you as a cameraman know,
just as I do, that they love
to smash cameras, don't they?
They love to put their hand
in the lens.
You had it in a bag or a satchel
or something?
Yeah, it was just in a little
black bag and it had a little hole
cut out for the lens
and a little pop up eyepiece.
So every now and again I'd walk
along and have a little look down,
have a look around
and then look up again.
Western reports are agreed, however,
that the 80,000 who swept through
the centre of Leipzig were exuberant
but entirely peaceful.
From Leipzig, Brian Hanrahan.
The demonstration began in the
narrow cobbled streets
in the centre of the city,
where people seemed unworried
by the menacing presence
of large numbers
of plainclothes security men.
The secret footage that Mark
was able to smuggle out
allowed Brian Hanrahan to create one
of the most extraordinary reports
ever filed
from behind the Iron Curtain.
I've seen your pictures,
and although I'm sure it must have
been terribly frustrating for you
because you want to get good
close-ups of faces and everything,
but that business of the half
darkness is extremely atmospheric.
It was a barometer. Leipzig was
a barometer of what was happening
because it started in September
with 20,000.
And by the time we'd reached
the end of October,
I think there were over 300,000
people there.
They'd report it on East German
media with just a still photograph,
no moving footage.
And it was very much portrayed
as a troublesome event.
Signs are that there's a struggle
going on inside the Communist Party
about East Germany's future policy.
Brian Hanrahan, BBC News, Leipzig.
One of the nights I brought
it up to Brian and Brian was a man
of few words. I remember he just
looked at the footage
and just turned to me
and said, "This is history."
Ah! You know?
Well, Leipzig was what made it.
I mean, yes,
I mean, you were watching history
as it was being made.
Brian was entirely right.
Despite this unprecedented coverage
of unrest behind the Wall,
little did any of us think
that only a few weeks later
the Wall itself
would cease to exist.
It was obvious all the way
along that something
was going to happen.
I don't think it occurred to me
that the Wall would come down
and that Marxism, Leninism itself
was just about to kind
of dissolve in front of our eyes.
On the morning of
the 9th of November 1989,
biggest date in history
from the end
of the Second World War onwards,
the head of the CIA, the head
of SIS,
the head of the British
Foreign Office,
the head of German intelligence,
all woke up thinking
this is just another day.
And not one of them realised
that that night was going to change
everything in their lives
and our lives.
And the BBC definitely
didn't know...
From Warsaw, our foreign affairs
editor John Simpson.
..because I'd been sent to Poland,
a country that had just ousted
its communist leaders,
to cover the visit of the
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
ARCHIVE: A West German Chancellor
came to make
a new beginning with Poland.
And Poland itself with
its Solidarity Prime Minister,
Mr Mazowiecki,
has made a new beginning, too.
VOICEOVER: I mean, you wouldn't go
to Poland
on the day of the most important
event in your country's
modern history, would you?
I mean, you'd, you'd say,
"No. I think perhaps
I'll stay at home today."
ARCHIVE: The Polish government
spokesman announced
that Chancellor Kohl's visit
to Auschwitz
on Saturday would be rescheduled.
No-one seems to have remembered
it was the Jewish Sabbath.
VOICEOVER: I'm a great one for
always trying to give the impression
that I was everywhere where
it happened,
but this, I promise you,
is absolutely, literally true.
I was quite close to
the German officials around Kohl,
and don't think I didn't play
on that.
ARCHIVE: All the same when
Chancellor Kohl arrived tonight...
VOICEOVER: And I stood on the edge
of the group around him
and this guy was just whispering
something into Kohl's ear.
But inevitably I heard one or two
words, and one of the words
was "die Mauer", the Wall.
Earlier that day in Berlin, the East
German government had decided
to address the unrest
within the country
by holding a press conference
to update its citizens
on rule changes
to travel to the West.
You have to remember that the thing
that was most irksome to people
in Eastern Europe was the lack
of freedom of movement.
You were a prisoner.
That was the essence of it.
If they could have an orderly system
whereby people could just simply go
across and be free to come back
again, then I think they thought
they'll get rid of the worst
of the complaints that East Germans
had about their system.
Gunter Schabowski, a largely
unknown government official,
was tasked with relaying
these minor changes
to the assembled journalists.
The viewing public tuned in live.
No-one knew it,
but the world was about to change
in an instant.
I feel really a bit sorry
for Schabowski.
I mean, although he was
the spokesman for the Politburo
they kind of shoved him off to one
side and didn't explain anything
to him and then said,
"Go on," you know.
"Now, tell the press.
Tell the world's press."
And he told the world's press
and he got it spectacularly wrong.
SPEAKING GERMAN
What Gunter Schabowski was meant
to announce was a phased relaxation
of travel restrictions to the West.
But the fine detail got lost.
It was somebody saying to him,
"So, when exactly does this
have a... Take effect?"
And he said, "Unverzuglich."
"Right away."
And that meant, to the people
that were watching this live,
right now.
The communist government had only
agreed to allow people to apply
for travel permits, but out
on the streets,
East Berliners were already
heading for the Wall.
I think live television
really brought the Berlin Wall down.
Probably if Gunter Schabowski's
press conference
hadn't been broadcast live,
the Wall would have survived.
But Sabina Mihelj believes
this is only part of the story.
I've always assumed it was
because people in East Berlin
were able to watch the press
conference for themselves
that caused the whole Wall
to disappear.
But do you think I'm right?
Only partially so.
The fact that this was live coverage
on television was important,
but it wasn't so much
that the audiences in East Germany
were actually watching
Gunter Schabowski
and then heard him say that,
you know, the regulation
is valid from now.
What was more important
was the way in which
this particular press conference was
reported by Western journalists
on Western German television
and beamed back into East Germany,
because this is where this crucial
bit of interpretation happened.
So they hardened it up.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
They've simplified it.
They've misinterpreted it
a little bit, yeah,
what Gunter Schabowski
has actually said.
And then East German audiences
have picked up this misinterpreted
bit of the story and acted upon it.
Until now, I hadn't fully
understood how misinformation
or, as some might term it, fake news
transmitted from the West
played such a crucial role
on the 9th of November 1989.
But it seems the television
technology that East Germany
had so desperately tried to compete
with and then censor
was now a Trojan horse attacking
the Berlin Wall from within.
There was actually a banner
going across the screen saying
"East Germany opens border,"
or something to this effect
and then even more so a couple of
hours later, when the crowds started
gathering at the border.
But without the interpretation,
without simplification
by the West German reporters,
none of this would have happened.
Yeah, exactly.
My late colleague Brian Hanrahan
and his cameraman Mark McCauley
were in East Berlin at the very
moment the world began to shift
on its axis.
We were in the hotel and then
someone came into the lobby
of the hotel and said,
"By the way, people are gathering
at the crossing points."
We just, all of us, piled into
the car and headed off
down to all the checkpoints.
The gates to the West were first
opened just after nine last night.
What followed were some of the most
remarkable scenes of euphoria
and disbelief Europe has witnessed
since the war
as East Berliners took advantage
of their new freedom
to cross the Wall.
Brian Hanrahan was there to see it.
CHEERING
Within hours of the government's
announcement,
people started turning up
at Checkpoint Charlie,
the best known crossing
point to the West.
At first, they were told,
"Go away, come back tomorrow
"and bring all the right documents
with you."
But the crowds weren't satisfied
with this
and they've learned that if they
push hard enough,
they can have their way.
They pushed on into the guard posts,
arguing, demanding, insistent
and suddenly the way West
was opened.
PEOPLE EXCLAIM
WITH DELIGHT AND SURPRISE
Checkpoint Charlie was open
and they were through, called on
by the delighted West Berliners
waiting on the other side.
This did not look like a planned
move from the communist authorities,
but rather another panicked response
by a government
giving way to the
parliament of the streets.
I find it terribly affecting
for various reasons.
I mean, one, because the whole
business of people
just simply climbing over the Wall
and going through the gates
is such a moving thing for me.
But also because of Brian's
reporting,
Brian Hanrahan's reporting,
so lovely, so clear.
Of course, he died later.
A very good friend of mine
and I'm...
So it's quite sort of bittersweet
to watch this.
Beyond the fortifications,
a crowd of West Berliners waited,
and two nations, one people
merged into a joyful reunion.
Standing on top of the Berlin Wall,
which for years has been the most
potent symbol of the division
of Europe,
and there can be few better
illustrations of the changes
which are sweeping across
this continent than the party
which is taking place here
on top of it tonight.
As Brian Hanrahan was standing
on top of the Wall and giving
that by now legendary piece
to camera, I was still in Poland.
Only yesterday, Chancellor Kohl said
there were fewer reasons than ever
against the long term reunification
of Germany.
Tonight, that prospect seems
a great deal closer.
John Simpson, BBC News, Warsaw.
Although Brian Hanrahan was doing
a brilliant job on the ground,
as the BBC's chief
foreign correspondent,
I simply had to get to Berlin.
I knew that Brian would do the kind
of what happened during the day
and I'd be expected to stand there
in front of the camera
and do a sort of
"what does this all mean?
"Where are we in the scale
of things?"
But getting there wasn't
going to be easy.
I was absolutely panic stricken
at being so kind of out of things,
even though in terms of miles
I probably was only about,
I don't know, 300 or 400 miles away.
And after, oh, I think about
three different hops,
I arrived there,
and a young and very sweet
and charming young man, a BBC guy,
was given the job of driving me.
He was not a great driver
and we had more than one very,
very near miss.
I was getting more and more tense
because I was going to do just
simply a live
piece to camera on this,
the most important day
in modern history.
Good evening.
East Germany has agreed to do
what the West has been demanding
it should do for more than
a generation.
And the purpose of my function
was to say that the world
is a different place tonight.
So there was nothing really
in my career up to that point
that had been more important.
Well, joining us now live
from the Brandenburg Gate
is our foreign affairs editor
John Simpson.
John, there seems to be a lot
of activity behind you.
What's going on there?
It's quite extraordinary.
There's chanting, there's singing,
there's fireworks going off.
I can hear every now and then
somebody having a crack
at the Wall with a hammer.
They're trying to batter it down
with their bare hands almost.
It's that sort of atmosphere.
It actually reminds me a little bit
of being back in
Tiananmen Square last May.
A lot of happiness.
Any concern, though?
Are they nervous about what may
lie ahead?
Oh, no, I don't think so at all.
I don't suppose anybody
even worries about what's
going to happen by tomorrow.
You know, right
just behind where we are,
there are guards with guns.
But, of course, there's no question
of anybody using those guns.
In fact, every now and then,
perhaps you just heard it there...
STATIC
Well, I'm sorry we lost John Simpson
rather dramatically there,
I'm afraid.
It's very painful for me to watch.
This was, as far as I know,
the biggest television audience
the BBC has ever had
for a news programme
and I disappear in a fizzle
on the screen.
It was absolutely crushing.
..lost John Simpson rather
dramatically there, I'm afraid.
The difference between that and
being sentenced to death in court
or something
seems very, very slight.
I was in absolute horror and anger
and depression and gloom...
..and I wandered away.
I think as I've wandered off,
I thought, that's it.
I ought to jack this game in.
I mean, you know, it's no...
It's no fun any more.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
CAR HORNS BLARE
And then I just saw these hundreds,
thousands of people so happy.
I just thought...
..you know, what happened
to me is nothing.
I mean, it's a little speck
of total irrelevance.
This is one of the great,
great days of modern...
..modern human existence.
WOMAN SCREAMS IN DELIGHT
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
And I thought about the young kid
that had driven me there
and I had been thinking,
"The little so and so, you know,
"he should have known better."
And, you know,
"I'll mark his card for him."
And I thought, oh, God,
how could anybody want to damage
somebody's interests on a day
like this?
Which always made me feel
quite good,
because he became my boss
afterwards.
I mean, I've seen a lot
of wonderful things in my life,
a lot of happy things
as well as a lot of bad things.
But I don't think I've ever seen
anything quite as happy
as that...as that night.
People were openly weeping.
I find it quite hard to talk
about it now without...
..without weeping.
And then after that,
all the rules were off.
So later on, I danced on top
of the Wall.
I mean, if somebody had said to me,
you know, name the most wonderful
thing that could ever happen to you.
I'd never thought I'll dance
on the Berlin Wall
with a beautiful
young German blonde girl.
I never would have thought that.
The demolition of the Wall
began immediately.
First, individuals hammered
away at it.
They were soon followed by
construction teams
that ripped out entire sections.
Danke schon.
As the days passed, the realisation
that the Wall was gone forever
began to hit home.
28 years of a country's
imprisonment
were dumped unceremoniously
in a battered old truck.
But what did all this mean
for the rest of Europe
and indeed the world?
When you see the ugliest and most
menacing structure in the world
knocked down in front of your eyes,
anything seemed possible.
MUSIC: Get Ready For This
by 2 Unlimited
At first, events appeared
to prove my optimism was right.
The fall of the Wall precipitated
a domino effect
throughout Eastern Europe.
In Hungary, the old Communist Party
has effectively disappeared.
Free elections are now promised
in East Germany
and changes too in Bulgaria.
The political map of Eastern Europe
has altered beyond recognition.
And within a year,
the two Germanys would reunite.
It wasn't yet the end of
the Cold War
and yet it was the end
of the Cold War.
It wasn't the end of communism
and yet it was really the start
of the end of communism.
And for the first time in my life,
it looked as though Russia
was about to come in from the cold.
Here was a golden opportunity
for East and West
to finally work together.
I never thought that a couple
of years later I'd be on hand
to watch the end of Marxism,
Leninism in Russia itself.
That I thought was an impossibility.
CHEERING
Even given all the extraordinary
changes here in the last few years,
I don't think anybody expected
to see scenes like this
in the middle of Moscow.
After the fall of Russian communism
and with it the Soviet Union,
I genuinely believed the world
would now be a better place.
The key thing was that anything
seemed possible to happen,
any good thing.
I don't think anybody thought
there's anything
bad about this whatsoever.
However, my idealism didn't last.
Our foreign affairs editor
John Simpson reports
from the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
HIGH SPEED AIRCRAFT PASS BY,
EXPLOSIONS
And then, you know, three years
later, I found myself in Sarajevo,
besieged by the Bosnian Serbs
in a way that seemed like something
out of the Middle Ages.
EXPLOSIONS AND RAPID GUN FIRE
If, on the other hand, the Muslims
don't accept the notion
of a confederation, then the Serbs
will declare independence
and anything could happen
to Sarajevo.
The rapid pace of change
across Europe had left
Yugoslavia politically unstable.
The loosening of the hold of
communism set free centuries-old
ethnic divisions that ultimately
descended into a barbaric genocide.
This was far from the peaceful
vision of Europe
I'd so desperately hoped for
on the night the Wall fell.
There was a savagery about it,
which was quite appalling
and which made you feel ashamed,
a bit ashamed
to be human, actually.
John Simpson, BBC News, Sarajevo.
Before the fall of the Wall,
we couldn't imagine that things
would go so well.
And after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, it was almost
as if we couldn't imagine
that things would go so badly
as they did in Bosnia and
former Yugoslavia.
I think that the success of 1989,
the most sort of magical
and hope-inspiring experience
of our lives, probably did give us
a bit of sort of
historical euphoria.
But we were quite rapidly
sobered up.
And if Yugoslavia was a sobering
experience, then the hangover
from the break-up
of the Soviet Union is something
we're still suffering today.
The West has always been wary
of Russia, but in recent years,
as Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent,
has tightened his grip on power,
there's been talk
of a new Cold War developing.
State sponsored murder, chemical
weapons attacks
and election interference means
Russia feels
as far away as it ever has been.
I think we underestimated the role
of corruption and money.
And I think that when communism
collapsed, there was a feeling
in the West that now, yeah,
we can just get on and make money
and money's neutral.
And I remember the first time
I heard the Russian word offshorka,
meaning an offshore bank account,
and a kind of tingle went
down my spine.
And I thought, this is not good.
Now we see the way in which this
dirty money sloshes around the world
and both finances dictatorships,
but also corrodes our democracy.
And I think that's the biggest
thing that we missed,
or at least that I missed.
Back when I was reporting
from the Soviet Union,
I had my frustrations
with the regime.
Here in Moscow, Mr Ecevit has
been playing it very carefully...
VOICEOVER: But at least the rules of
the game were clear.
Nobody was going to come over to me
and put a bullet through my skull.
Nobody, in those days, was going
to come and smear the door knob
of my front door
with some noxious substance.
In those days,
the rules were the rules.
Now there are no rules.
And when it comes
to the technological subterfuge
that brought the Wall down...
MESSAGE ALERTS PINGING
..well, the tables have turned.
One of the interesting things
is how Russia's reinvented itself.
And it's been extremely clever
at getting into all sorts
of cyber issues
that you wouldn't I think have
expected if you'd just looked at it
from the perspective
of, say, the 1980s.
I think we've been quite slow
off the mark, sort of recognising
what's happening, working out
how to stop Putin's information
monopoly inside Russia, so you can
run a global disinformation campaign
from a phone.
And the Russians
have been very quick on that.
They've also been able to get
in through Facebook and social media
and peer-to-peer encrypted messaging
like WhatsApp.
And they've had quite an impact,
as we saw in America and maybe even
here in the Brexit referendum.
With the uncertainty that exists
across the world today,
I have to admit I've got a certain
nostalgia for the way things
used to be, when one wall in
Berlin...
..divided the world.
I don't want to irritate, you,
but there are moments
when I think the world was a lot
easier to understand
and get on with in the Cold War.
Well, it was certainly simpler
because it was a bipolar world.
There were these two halves -
divided Berlin, divided Germany
divided Europe, divided world.
But you don't want to
get back to that?
And I don't know many people
in Eastern Europe who would
like to go back to it.
Tim's right, of course.
Despite my perhaps misplaced
nostalgia for a simpler world,
I don't think anyone wants a return
to life before the Wall came down.
What happened
on the 9th of November 1989
changed the world for the better.
We didn't know a month before it
happened and we didn't know even
a few hours before it happened
that this was how the world was
going to change.
And forever after that,
I realised that trying to predict
the future is a mug's game.
MUSIC: All Together Now
by The Farm
