Smuggling News out of Poland

By Janice Castro

The flow of information slows to a trickle after the crackdown

Usually, when a crisis flares, the chief concern of news organizations is getting their reporters and cameramen on the scene. But when the crackdown came in Poland, the Western press faced a different problem. Scores of journalists, including two TIME correspondents, were already inside the country, but they could not get their dispatches out except by subterfuge. Said Los Angeles Times Managing Editor William Thomas: "We've never seen such a complete clampdown on all avenues of information." Added New York Times Foreign News Editor Robert Semple Jr.: "Even in Iran you could always find a telex somewhere. You at least had two-way communications."

Editors lost direct contact with their correspondents last Monday, when the last telex lines were shut down. By that time, telephone communication had been cut off and journalists summoned to Warsaw for reaccreditation. They were told to stay within city limits and not take pictures on the streets.

But if Poland's generals hoped to seal off the country from the outside world, they underestimated the determination of Western journalists. Dispatches and film continued to trickle out of the country, smuggled by departing tourists, sympathetic Poles and the occasional journalist whose visa had expired. The risks were high. Automobile border checks were rigorous; outgoing rail passengers ran a gauntlet of Polish and East German interrogation and baggage checks. Film, camera equipment and video cassettes were confiscated. Anyone suspected of trying to leave with written reports or pictures was threatened with jail.

One of the first to make it through was Sygma Photographer Henri Bureau, 41, who was on assignment for TIME. He had photographed Solidarity's last meeting at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk just before martial law was imposed, then made his way back to Warsaw, taking pictures of troop movements through the window of his car. Leaving all his equipment behind, Bureau stuffed 30 rolls of film in his snow boots and rode an unheated train in subzero weather to Berlin with L'Express Correspondent Jacques Renard. Said Bureau: "The East Germans searched everything. They looked under seats with flashlights and brought in ladders to go over the overhead compartments. Then they checked us one by one." The Solidarity leaflets Renard was carrying were confiscated, but he and Bureau were not detained. After arriving in East Berlin, they promptly flew to Paris.

Other journalists successfully hid rolls of film in their pants, sewed video cassettes into the lining of coats, and photographed notes for easier concealment. Mark Phillips, 33, a London-based correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., smuggled out a videotape containing reports from CBC, CBS, NBC and BBC in the third interior compartment of a zipper bag. At one point, he said, an East German guard was "one zip away" from the tape when Phillips distracted him.

But some newsmen were not so lucky. Bernard Grace, a reporter for NBC affiliate WTCN in Minneapolis-St. Paul, ill-advisedly took his cameras along when he tried to leave Poland with two weeks' worth of reporting on video cassettes. Said he: "When the East German guard saw my gear, I was taken off the train and led into a room where they went through my luggage, piece by piece. Then I was strip-searched." After eight hours of interrogation Grace was released, but his tapes were taken from him. A British reporter got desperate as his train approached the Czech border and stashed a video cassette in the nearest hiding place--which turned out to be an incinerator.

To supplement the sketchy reports coming out of the country, journalists rushed to points where travelers from Poland were disembarking: Vienna, West Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich and several cities on the Baltic coast. At the East station in Vienna, some 50 journalists gathered every day to meet the Chopin Express, "a rolling newspaper with a story in every seat," as ABC's Peter Jennings put it. Trouble was, most of the stories were second-and thirdhand. Said Fritz Ullrich Pack, editor in chief of the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "You hear so many implausible things. I keep telling my staff that we must be cautious."

All Europe became a listening post. At the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, 40 miles west of London, teams of Polish BBC employees, assisted by a bristling array of antennas at a nearby receiving station, worked around the clock recording every word broadcast from inside Poland. The three American networks launched elaborate information-gathering operations at a total cost of about $1 million. CBS News set up a bureau in the Frankfurt-Sheraton, with private telephones, a telex, and even a microwave relay unit on the roof so that information could be beamed rapidly back to the U.S. But ABC, which had set up a courier system in case of an emergency in Poland, was first on the air with a report showing tanks and soldiers in Warsaw on Monday night, a full day ahead of the competition.

By week's end Western reporters in Warsaw found most of their usual sources spouting the government line, languishing in jail or lapsing into terrified silence. Without gas or rental cars, it was difficult to get around the capital, much less venture outside it. But at least one enterprising newsman, Bradley Graham of the Washington Post, did get through the government cordon and filed an eyewitness report from Gdansk, 170 miles to the northwest. Finally, on Friday, Polish military authorities reinstated one telex line. Reporters who wanted to use it, however, were required to submit their dispatches to a government censor and quote only official sources. "The joys of open coverage," said Mark Phillips of the CBC, "are over for a long time."

--By Janice Castro.

Reported by D.L. Coutu/Bonn and Gregory H.

Wierzynski/Warsaw

With reporting by D.L. Coutu, Gregory H. Wierzynski

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.