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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