By Michael Dobbs

When I arrived in Poland at the beginning of August 1980 on a two-week reporting assignment for The Washington Post, I had been covering eastern Europe for three years. I was based in Belgrade, and was a freelancer, meaning that I sold or tried to sell the same story to as many outlets as I could, including the Post, the London Guardian, the BBC, and the Sunday Times. In those days, covering the Communist world was a rather frustrating occupation. We usually never heard of protests until they were long over. Apart from the odd dissident, we had very few real sources of information. Our basic technique was to take a tiny scrap of information, and elaborate or speculate on it. We spent hours reading Pravda and Trybuna Ludu, looking for miniscule hints about internal Politburo debates.

All that changed dramatically on August 15, 1980. The previous day, I had heard about a big strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, the latest in a series of sporadic worker protests across Poland that summer. Although there did not seem much chance of actually getting into the shipyard-up until that time, no Polish strike leader had dared give an interview to foreign journalists-I decided to take a chance and fly up to Gdansk to see if I could gather any information. My visa was about to expire, and I had nothing to lose. I talked Chris Niedenthal, a freelance photographer for Newsweek, into going with me, and we flew up together in the morning on one of those rickety propeller planes that resembled the ones you see in World War II movies.

Of course, there were no taxis available when we arrived at Gdansk airport. As seasoned foreign correspondents, we knew exactly what to do in this situation: a single dollar bill waved in the air brought the first car that passed us screeching to a halt. "Where to?" asked the driver. "To the Lenin Shipyard," we replied. Within twenty minutes, we were standing outside the shipyard gate, already decorated with flowers and a portrait of Pope John Paul II. We asked the guards if we could enter. They went away to talk to their leader and a few minutes later came back smiling. But of course, prosze panstwa. We learned that we were the first Western journalists to enter the shipyard. A man from Tribuna Ludu had got there before us, but he did not seem to be doing much reporting.