The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

56 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Watching from Behind the Iron Curtain Timothy C. Lawson Moscow, USSR l ate one afternoon I received a call from Ambassador Jack Mat- lock, who said he needed to see me urgently. As information resources management chief in Moscow, I was frequently called to the executive office. The ambassador explained that he had just returned from a lunch with the British ambassador, who had casually asked Amb. Matlock if he was impressed with CNN’s reporting. The query left Matlock fumbling for a response. He never watched CNN reporting since it was not available in our embassy—so what was the Brit’s secret? It was my job to find out. Our embassy had been asking for almost a decade for cable television access like the “Moscow Channel 1” access we had provided to the Soviet embassy complex in Washington via cable. The answer was always a confused nyet. There was a good reason for the confusion from the Soviets: as it turned out, the Soviet Union did not have a cable TV system like the U.S. did. CNN was actually freely broadcast through Soviet airwaves across the capital. All you needed was a 10-ruble VHF antenna, readily available at the official GUM department store adjacent to Red Square. Well, we purchased a bunch of those antennas, and our resident telephone/radio technician installed a broadband UHF antenna on the embassy rooftop. And just in time! As the first chunks of concrete began to crack and crumble from that all-meaningful Berlin Wall—with Gorbachev’s acquiescence—the CNN signal was distributed via our own cable system, allowing all mission employees to watch it on live television. Timothy C. Lawson is a retired Senior Foreign Service officer who was serving in Moscow in 1989. He lives in Hua Hin, Thailand. The Wall, Delivered Judy Chidester Kigali, Rwanda w hen the Berlin Wall came down, I was working as the information management officer in Kigali. It was a quiet town, and except for the announcement of its fall, little was said of the wall. I did have a wonderful experience related to it, though, that is pure Foreign Service. When our diplomatic couriers came to town, they normally spent their time at my home. A few months after the fall of the wall, one of the couriers brought me a broken piece of it. It still is one of my most treasured mementos, not only because of what it is but because it reminds me of what wonderful friends the couriers were. Judy Chidester joined the Foreign Service in 1960 as a cryptographer and retired in 1996 as an information management officer. She lives in Las Cruces, NewMexico. An old Soviet TV tower still stands beside a church in what used to be East Berlin. Berlin, 2015. JAMESTALALAY