| Biography | Kate Adie is an English journalist. She was Chief News Correspondent for BBC News between 1989 and 2003, during which time she reported from war zones around the world.
Her career with the BBC began as a station assistant at BBC Radio Durham. By 1976, she was a regional TV news reporter in Plymouth and Southampton, before a move to BBC national television news in 1979. She was the duty reporter in 1980 and first on the scene when the Special Air Service went in to break up the Iranian Embassy siege. Adie reported live and unscripted to one of the largest news audiences ever while crouched behind a car door. Adie reported extensively for BBC News, including from the north London crime scenes of serial killer Dennis Nilsen, in 1983.
Adie was regularly dispatched to report on disasters and conflicts throughout the 1980s, including The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986 and the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. She was promoted to Chief News Correspondent in 1989 and held the role for fourteen years.
One of her most significant assignments was to report the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. During her reporting, she was injured after being grazed by a bullet. Major assignments followed in the Gulf War, the war in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the war in Sierra Leone in 2000. In Libya she met Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. She was also shot by a drunk and irate Libyan army commander after refusing, as a journalist, to act as an intermediary between the British and Libyan governments. |