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.