Kate Adie
Media TribeShaunagh talks to Kate Adie
As BBC's former Chief News Correspondent, Kate reported on both Gulf Wars, four years of war in the Balkans, the SAS lifting of the Iran Embassy Siege in London and the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing in 1989.
Kate reported from Northern Ireland throughout "The Troubles" as well as reporting on the referendum to ratify the Good Friday Agreement. Kate covered the Lockerbie bombing and reported from Libya after the London Embassy siege of 1984. She also covered the Rwandan Genocide and the British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War.
Kate was honoured with a BAFTA Fellowship in 2018. Other awards include:
- Royal Television Society Reporter of the Year 1980, for her coverage of the SAS end to the Iranian Embassy siege.
- Winner, 1981 & 1990, Monte Carlo International Golden Nymph Award.
- The Richard Dimbleby BAFTA Award 1990.
In this episode, Kate talks about her iconic reporting of the Iranian Embassy Siege in London in 1980, witnessing the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and getting the only Western TV footage of the atrocities that took place, how Colonel Gaddafi nearly ran her over with his little Peugeot while she was reporting from Libya and her reporting of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Episode credits
Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.
Episode transcript
Shaunagh Connaire
Welcome To Media Tribe. I'm Shaunagh Connaire, and this is the podcast that tells the story behind the story. It's an opportunity for you and I to step into the shoes of the most extraordinary media folk who covered the issues that matter most.
Kate Adie
I was there the night when the tanks rolled in and I was on the streets for five and a half hours with my camera crew. We got the only Western footage of what happened that night.
Shaunagh Connaire
My guest today is Kate Adie. Kate was the BBCs chief news correspondent for years. She's reported on some really historic stories from witnessing the massacre in Tiananmen Square. She reported on both Gulf Wars, the Rwanda genocide, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I probably don't need to tell you this, but this woman is an icon in our industry. Kate, How are you? Thank you so much for joining me on my podcast.
Kate Adie
Lovely to be with you. I was in New York a short time ago, and now I wonder, I wonder, gosh, when do I next get the, hasn't life changed?
Shaunagh Connaire
I know. Where are you right now, Kate?
Kate Adie
I'm in Dorset in England, one of the lovely counties. I've been, as has most of the world, sort of stuck at home, but no great stress there in the sense that it's a lovely county. We've been able to go walking. We've got beautiful, beautiful countryside round us, and I have a lovely little puppy to keep me occupied as well at the moment.
Shaunagh Connaire
So Kate, you have had the most wonderful career. You're a real inspiration to female journalists. I would say you became a war reporter when not many women were around.
Kate Adie
Well, I never thought of a career at all. When I was growing up in a teenager in the 60's, the idea of career for women was not a common one. If you were kind of brainbox blue stocking, you might be a teacher, but on the whole, most girls were really being encouraged. I was a sort of middle class girl went to a private school. It would be terribly nice if you just learned a bit of shorthand and typing and then you got married and that was it. So I never really dreamed about career. I didn't think about it, maybe a bit scatty, except that my headmistress was determined to get at least one of us wayward young things off to university, and she landed on me, partly, I think, not because of brilliant exam results, certainly not, because my name began with A, so she knew me.
Kate Adie
She sort of started and tried to get us in somewhere and she finally managed to persuade a professor that she had a girl who really do well, and I was sent off to university. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to study. I actually arrived on the first day. I knew it was languages, but I was somewhat surprised, well, I don't know, and rather cheered when this nice man stood in front of me in a three minute interview and said, "Hello, Miss Adie, Under professor blah-blah. You will be studying Swedish." I said, "Oh, thank you very much." It was the next four years sorted for me.
Kate Adie
After that, quite simply, I had to find some sort of a job. I had no idea what I was going to do. I graduated and, of all of the things that happened a good month or so after my final exams, I was mooching around at home in the northeast of England and was wondering what to do. Would you believe there was an ad in my little local newspaper? It said BBC is starting a new venture, local radio, and I thought that sounds fun. So I applied and as they say, the rest is history.
Shaunagh Connaire
Kate, you got the job in local radio. Do you want to fast forward to the historic moment where you find yourself outside the Iranian embassy in London and how I guess your career catapulted from there?
Kate Adie
Well, I spent seven years in local radio and I learnt the business. I reckon I could interview a mute stone and get something out of it. I ended up in the most weird circumstances trying to interview people, trying to fend off randy gentleman, et cetera, and all the things that happens to a young ... I was a producer. I was a technician first. I wasn't in the newsroom and I didn't really have a desire for it. I ended up after all of those years, I was very lucky. I had got a massive grounding in what makes broadcasting, what's important, what's my job? It's to get the fascinating, the interesting, the important, the significant, all the things that other people have in them. That was the important thing, and to know how to get that story out to a wider world.
Kate Adie
So for six days, the centre of London almost ground to a halt, extraordinary the area near Hyde Park, Kensington, right in the centre of London. Because six days previously, a group of men had burst into the Iranian embassy, big, tall, terraced house, at about late morning, shot somebody as they went in and taken all the people inside hostage. They were demanding better treatment for people in a regional area of Iran, a very, to us, obscure political demand, but they threatened that if they didn't get the Iranian government to give them concessions and British government was to pressurize them, they would, well, possibly kill people. We had been outside for six days. I tell you not just the BBC, the world's press were there, all sat around on the main road, near the Royal Albert Hall, right in the centre of London. Grand buildings. A lot of people sprawled in Hyde Park next door, right across the road. Six days in the days when we didn't have instant live broadcasting, no mobile phones.
Kate Adie
So life was quite leisurely. We all had about two deadlines at the most per day. For the news people early evening, mid evening, bulletin. So there was no 24 hour news, and there was a sense of, well, you just sat that. We did have one kind of live broadcast. We had the outside broadcast van and so did ITN. So there was a way to go live. But in those days with no 24 hour news, you waited until the bulletin to put anything out. On the sixth day, I was put on shift in the late evening. I've been down there pretty well every day, doing a shift. As a junior, I got the late shift because nothing happened at night.
Shaunagh Connaire
Don't worry. I've done those shifts at the BBC, Kate. Midnight. Don't you worry. I understand.
Kate Adie
I was expected to turn up at 8:00 in the evening to do eight until eight a.m. It was a bank holiday, and therefore the news bulletins were rather thin anyway, rather short. So I got called at about maybe 5:00, 5:30 in the afternoon by someone from the newsroom who said, "We might need you to come in a bit earlier." I was due to do the 8:00 at night till 8:00 the next morning shift, because I was a junior. Nothing happened at night so I got the late shift, and they said bit earlier. I got another call later, which said, "Could you actually? Yes." I said "Why?" They said, "Well, the correspondent says he has a dinner party to go to." So I thought, okay, wasn't doing anything, drove down to central London and got there to find he'd already gone.
Kate Adie
A short time later, it was this huge explosion smoke billowing from the embassy. Pandemonium. Police running everywhere, and we got it all on camera. As it happened, a few seconds into it, we went on air. What happened was that we broke into the program that was on the main BBC1 channel. Now, that's not unusual these days. That had almost never happened before, and certainly not on a live action story when no one knew what was going to happen. I found myself commentating, lying on the ground with a microphone and with no information whatsoever anywhere. I'm talking about the men going in, the sound, distant shots, smoke, the building on fire. That was it happening live in front of us.
Shaunagh Connaire
That really is extraordinary. So you were just telling your audience what exactly you were seeing there and then live in that moment?
Kate Adie
I knew a fair bit about it. We had all the background that we were party to. I'd done one other thing. I'd been taken by a senior officer, the man in charge there, a policeman with whom I done a seminar. What we used to call a hypothetical, which is a whole group of people sitting around the table, very calmly in a country house, discussing what you do in certain situations. We gamed, each of us having to role play, going into a building held by armed terrorists and being asked, because they had demanded a television interview. I was taken day and a half before the end of the siege on a Saturday by that senior officer to the building next door to the embassy, and I saw all the listening devices on the wall.
Shaunagh Connaire
Wow.
Kate Adie
I saw the whole way it was being done. I was asked, was I prepared to go in because they demanded a TV crew? I said, "Yes."
Shaunagh Connaire
Of course you did.
Kate Adie
It so happened that it never came to pass, partly because tensions rose in the next 24 hours, and of course it culminated in the SAS going in on the Monday evening, in front of what turned out to be one of the great record audiences of over 20 million viewers and me talking.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's such an amazing story, Kate. I want to ask you, is there a moment you're most proud of? Maybe it's a story that had serious impact?
Kate Adie
Oh, the only story I feel that's still has impact, and should, and I feel strongly about it. I was talking about it again this year on several outlets, particularly those headed to Hong Kong and China. I was in Beijing towards the end of the student protests, which had been going on for three and a half months in 1989, with thousands and thousands of young people, not just students, gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and asking for change, asking for reform, protesting against corruption. They were very serious minded students. They weren't rowdy or difficult. It wasn't like a student demo that I'd been in when I was a student. They were serious, academic, they were committed. They were thoughtful. They spent the days debating and talking, sitting on the ground planning. There were no threat to anyone, except of course, to the old beasts who ran the Communist party, who hated the idea of being challenged, of the Communist party being challenged, of any talk of democracy.
Kate Adie
I was there the night when the tanks rolled in and I was on the streets for five and a half hours with my camera crew. We got the only Western footage, TV footage, of what happened that night of people being shot at random, of gunfire raking across crowds, of bullets thudding into the little traditional houses in the center of Beijing, which have now been cleared away, the hutong's, and bullets going through the walls of houses and hitting people who were watching television or people who came out into the street wondering what the noise was of all of these trucks, soldiers. People died in front of us and eventually they moved into the Square. One of three homies, which were sent in and they were sent in. They had been told to quell a possible insurrection organized by foreigners. The kind of lies that only a very powerful, in control Communist Party can tell.
Kate Adie
It was dreadful. We thought at the time about two and a half thousand people had been killed and many more injured. People were dragged from the hospitals. We saw secret police coming into the hospitals, taking away the injured. Afterwards, we were told they were thrown into crematoria. Brutality, callousness, young people. Right in the end, when we were at quarter to five in the morning, I was standing and I did a piece to camera in the Square with that army behind me, the students and young people were still standing there. The reason was they could not conceive, having been told from the tiniest tot upwards, that the army loves the people. They could not conceive that their own army was shooting them.
Shaunagh Connaire
Kate, I don't think we can overstate the fact that you essentially prevented the Chinese government from rewriting a very, very dark and brutal spot in their history.
Kate Adie
Lots and lots of people have written books, many more were there, students survived, eye witnesses, people who were there in the Square with the rest of the organizers, also who saw what happened afterwards. But at least we got the pictures and we got into a small hospital. It's the only time in my life I've seen the floor running in blood. We waded through blood. Every single person who came in had huge bullet marks made by high velocity rifles and high powered rifles.
Kate Adie
It was proof. It is proof that they sent the army to kill their own people, and they have rewritten history, of course. They too talk about some troubles for fermented by foreigners and a few people were injured, but what they have done very successfully is suppressed it within their own country. It didn't happen. Google Tiananmen on the internet, not only will you find nothing, Google student uprising, 1989, nothing. Not only that, the people who supervise the internet in China will find you and there'll be trouble. It still matters. It still matters.
Shaunagh Connaire
Of course it does.
Kate Adie
To see the people in Hong Kong. They know what kind of regime it is. Democracy is worth fighting for.
Shaunagh Connaire
What you saw in Beijing in 1989, did that ever have an effect on you personally? Did it ever take a mental toll? I know your answer nearly before I asked the question. No journalist wants to become the story. It's not about us. It's about reporting what we see and getting other people's voices out there, but honestly now, Kate, did it ever take a toll?
Kate Adie
It didn't take a toll. It has hardened my resolve that you, as a journalist, should show what you see, that when people try and prevent you ... People physically attacked us that evening, the secret police, and we were defended by total strangers who got us to keep camera and our footage and stopped them arresting us. It really gave me the most enormous resolve. I never claimed that a television news story can change history. I think that's grandiose, but you are a witness to history. The history is there. We got the pictures, we got the testimony, it's there and a great number of people have seen it. That has always given me the most tremendous sense that it's a worthwhile job. Yes, there's the gossip stuff, there's the light stuff. Fine. Right.
Kate Adie
But there's also the serious stuff, and we live in an age at the moment where people scorn the media, they do it down. They don't value it, and these are often powerful people and they're in democratic countries. Shame on them, shame on them. The press is one of the pillars of democracy and it should ... The phrases speak truth to power. You can hear, I am on my soap box. I feel immensely strongly about it. I think it matters. Matters for ordinary people, every party, because otherwise they lose their voice and the media acts as a voice for them at times.
Shaunagh Connaire
Are you worried, Kate, then about the current state of journalism?
Kate Adie
I worry about a lot of things in it. I worry about the people who would smear it and who's ignorance seems to encompass the fact they've no idea about how real democracy works and what people's rights are. I worry though, in the sense that it takes money. Strangely journalists have to eat and therefore you need to be paid. Therefore, you need to have somebody who's got the money to pay you in the faith that you bring in something which other people will read about, see, or hear. I worry that not much money comes into journalism these days. Newspapers everywhere are having a tough time, particularly in North America and in UK. On top of that, there seems to be less appreciation that we need hard facts in a complex world. We need hard facts.
Kate Adie
What I'm very optimistic about is there's vast numbers of young people who want to come into journalism. So many young people, I meet them, want to make documentary films. They want to go and do report whether there is trouble, they want to do something about the state of the world and people in poverty, all of these things. There are so many young people who want to do it. What we need is a concerted effort to find the economic base for it, and so therefore it's a matter of finding the right vehicles in a modern world, which maybe finds maybe newspaper's not as trendy. They're not bothered to buy one. Why? You look online. Well, you can't have it all for free.
Shaunagh Connaire
Exactly.
Kate Adie
Decent stuff, you need to pay for it.
Shaunagh Connaire
Exactly. I'm hoping the world is realizing that as well. I think things are shifting. Kate, this is going to be a hard question because, as the old adage goes, if you see Kate getting on a plane, you should probably get off the plane because you know you're not going to be safe. So is there a moment in your career that you could pinpoint as being the most crazy, let's say?
Kate Adie
Oh, I've got so many. I can't actually list them. I once had a conversation of a most weird sort, most of them were weird, with Col. Gaddafi. There were lots of other people around, but we seemed to be in a corner of the room at 3:00 in the morning, which is when he used to give press conferences. There's a lot of weird things about him, unpleasant as well. But I thought this is the point, is this, as every journalist thinks, where you sort of say, "I need to tell you. I need to ask you about the serious allegations about funding terrorism." Gaddafi said, "Do you think we should have beaches with little, little bikini bikini?" What? It turned out that he was thinking of actually starting tourism. I was having a conversation with whether bikinis should be allowed on beached.
Kate Adie
We got on the subject of alcohol, and he said, "You think it's good to have the drink? The beer?" I said, "Otherwise," I said, "Well, I think tourists are unlikely to come, a lot of them."
Shaunagh Connaire
If there's no alcohol.
Kate Adie
Okay, I said, "But will that be allowed?" He said, "For tourists, yes. I must keep Libyans away from it. Otherwise, they will never do any bloody work."
Shaunagh Connaire
That's hilarious. I'm really glad, Kate, you brought up Libya and Colonel Gaddafi because I believe Colonel Gaddafi once nearly ran you down in his little Peugeot.
Kate Adie
I have to tell you that that Libya was one of the most bizarre and dangerous places to work because nasty things happened. People disappeared and there was a brutal police and he himself was none too pleasant and his family, some of them, but I was standing outside the big hotel in which all of the foreign journalists were corralled in, just wondering when we would get anything, because everything was controlled and it was bizarre. Whenever they counselled a press conference, we'd get taken on an enforced picnic. It was a very strange place. I was just standing, looking at these bedraggled plants in this parched, I can still see it in front, of a sort of non garden in front of the hotel, when a car came erratically, dusty, small Peugeot, arrived and mounted the pavement somewhat, lumpity lump, and then came to bonk, [inaudible 00:23:47] stop in front of me.
Kate Adie
I thought, Oh God, an incident, and I woke up a bit and I walked away. The door opened and Col Gaddafi got out of the Peugeot car, sort of crash parked it. He recognized me. He knew I was one of the journalists from the hotel, you see. So I stood there and his English was never good, but I said, "This is your car?" Because normally there was a cavalcade and there was huge outriders and there were people behind him. So he said, "Yes." I said, "It's a Peugeot." I think it was a 303. It's a tiny, bent, bent, and distinctly rusty Peugeot. I said, "Yes." He said, "People's Libya, this is people's car. I drive people's car."
Shaunagh Connaire
That's hilarious. So he actually, he wasn't trying to intentionally run you over?
Kate Adie
Which is not a thing to ask.
Shaunagh Connaire
Sure. Brilliant. Well, Kate, this is a slightly self indulgent question, I guess. Northern Ireland. You spent a lot of time reporting on the Troubles, and I wondered if you tell us about a particular story you covered. You basically came across a body by a Christmas tree. I read about a years ago actually, and it really, it stuck with me. If you wouldn't mind.
Kate Adie
It's desperate. It was one of those killings which happened late at night in an area where there were burnt out buildings because people had been driven out of their houses and it turned out that it was a little family and we got got a tip off, as you did. We shot off to this address in a rather deserted street. Some of the houses were not lived in and the door was open. We got there just before the army and the police. I paused, and the door to the house was open. I turned out that the wife was a nurse and doing a night shift and I just turned left into the living room. Under the Christmas tree was a body. Was shot. There was a small boy standing there and he said, "My Da. My Da. He won't get up."
Kate Adie
That's when you feel very inadequate as a journalist, you're the wrong person to be there. A few, absolutely just a few seconds afterwards, a soldier came in, a young soldier, British soldier, and I said, "Could you take him outside?" There was some neighbors had gathered. I could see them through the window. I said, "Take him outside, take him outside." He did. As a journalist, what can you do? What can you do? You're on the scene. It's that thing that's quite a bit of journalism is intrusive, and there's nothing you can do. You have to be a realist about being a journalist. You have to know that you can't change the world entirely. All you can do is share a story, write it, record it. You can do what you can, but it doesn't really convey what goes on at times. There are huge limits to the job.
Shaunagh Connaire
So that boy's father had been shot by the IRA. He was a wee Protestant boy. Kate, it must've been, I would say, very difficult working in Northern Ireland with a British accent, working for an institution that's kind of deemed by the Protestant side as being traitors to the unionist calls. On the Catholic side, you were kind of seen as enemies of republicanism.
Kate Adie
I have to say that made it actually, in a sense, slightly easier, because everybody's disliked you in one way. Well, not all the people, but the people absolutely involved in the violence, et cetera, neither end of it thought that you were any good really. What was very rare was to have violence shown to us. Very rare. I would say this, and I used to love ... Except for there were some terrible, terrible incidents, but I have to say, and I characterize, and I've said this time and again to people in Northern Ireland. I've said, "Northern Ireland's the only place in the world where, in the middle of a major riot, somebody will tell you a joke. I really find it the most extraordinary place. I love the place. I go back to it time and again. I love it. I love it. I just used to find it wonderful in so many ways. Of course the Troubles were grim, but the spirit and people, I mean fantastic.
Shaunagh Connaire
I love Belfast. I lived in Belfast, worked for BBC Northern Ireland for a while. It's epic. I did wonder what they referred to you as, Kate. Where you wee Kate or were you-
Kate Adie
My first week in Northern Ireland where I turned up, and this is in the mid 70's. I remember I was going to interview somebody on the political side and a voice said, "A wee woman is here." A wee woman? I suddenly learned that women's lib had not got to Northern Ireland.
Shaunagh Connaire
That's brilliant. Yeah. It's a whole new vernacular up there. I love it. I absolutely love it. Kate, thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. You are iconic in our industry. You've paved the way for so many women, so we're so grateful that you came on the podcast today. Thank you so much.
Kate Adie
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Shaunagh Connaire
If you liked what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, tune in next week, as I'll be dropping new shows every week with all sorts of legendary folk from the industry. If you could leave me a review and rating, that would be really appreciated. Also, get in touch on social media, @shaunagh on Twitter or @shaunahconnaire on Instagram and feel free to suggest new guests. Right, that's it. Until next week, see you then. This episode is edited by Ryan Ferguson.
