The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

70 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The Voice of America Records History William H. Hill Washington, D.C. I n late afternoon onThursday, Nov. 9, 1989, I was at my desk at the Voice of America headquarters on Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C., looking out at the Smithso- nian Air and Space Museum just down the street. As chief of VOA’s European division, I supervised broadcasts in 14 lan- guages to countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including a small German-language service. As usual, while I reviewed late-afternoon news and reports from our correspondents and stringers in the field, I had a large television opposite my desk turned on, with the sound off. My television was most often tuned to CNN, but that day for some reason I had the channel set to NBC News. I glanced at the screen and suddenly turned up the volume, as I saw Tom Brokaw commenting on pictures of German civilians climbing over the Berlin Wall, illuminated in the middle of the night and surrounded by crowds of people. The setting and magnitude of this event was as unmistakable as it was unexpected. Berlin, divided since the airlift of 1948-1949 and construction of the wall in 1961, had come to symbolize the larger division of Europe and the world between the U.S.-led West and the Soviet bloc. The sudden, unexpected opening of the Berlin Wall was perhaps the most dramatic in a long sequence of events during 1989 that marked the end of the Cold War. As a State Department FSO first detailed in August 1987 to VOA (then a part of the U.S. Information Agency), I had a front-row seat to witness and describe many of the historic events that wound down the decades of conflict between the United States and the USSR. I spent 1987 to 1988 as deputy chief of the USSR division, where I helped organize radio bridges between VOA and USSR state radio, oversaw call-in shows for Russian audiences featuring American rock music and covered the beginnings of the Karabakh movement in Soviet Armenia in February 1988. In the summer of 1988, I became chief of VOA’s European division, where I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to arrange and supervise coverage of the historic events in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania that led to the peaceful dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. I was in Poland several times from 1988 to 1989, to negotiate the first permanent VOA news office in a Soviet-bloc country. My Polish service provided live coverage of President George H.W. Bush’s visit to Warsaw in July 1989 and Lech Walesa’s address to a joint session of Congress in November 1989. The summer and fall of 1989 was a period of growing excitement. Hungarian and Czechoslovak authorities declined to impede a growing flow of East Germans fleeing to West Germany through their countries. The communist government in Hungary was quietly replaced during these events, with the People’s Republic formally replaced by the Republic of Hungary on Oct. 23, 1989. Gorbachev’s visit to East Germany in early October put the East German government on notice that the Soviet military would not step in to save it from a rising tide of popular opposi- tion. The opening of the Berlin Wall a month later loosed the JAMESTALALAY A sign still on display at the site of Checkpoint Charlie, offering a warning from the U.S. Army in four languages. Berlin, 2015.