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