24 Facts About Anne Garrels

1.

Anne Longworth Garrels was an American broadcast journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, as well as for ABC and NBC, and other media.

2.

Anne Garrels became a war correspondent for ABC, covering Central American conflicts.

3.

Anne Garrels later became NBC's reporter at the US State Department.

4.

Anne Longworth Garrels was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on July 2,1951, the daughter of Valerie and John C Garrels, Jr.

5.

Anne Garrels spent part of her childhood in London, where her father worked as an executive for Monsanto.

6.

Anne Garrels returned to the United States and enrolled at Middlebury College, but later transferred to Harvard University's Radcliffe College, where she studied Russian and graduated in 1972.

7.

Anne Garrels served ABC in the Soviet Union as Moscow bureau chief and correspondent until she was expelled in 1982.

8.

Anne Garrels interviewed prominent Soviet dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev, and Sergei Kovalyov.

9.

Anne Garrels's reporting exposed numerous hardships of Soviet citizens, displeasing the Soviet government, resulting in her 1982 expulsion.

10.

Anne Garrels did not return until 1988, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

11.

Anne Garrels was the NBC News correspondent at the US State Department.

12.

In mid-1988, Anne Garrels hosted Science Journal, a 25-part weekly news series on science, medicine and technology, at WETA-TV, and aired by PBS.

13.

Anne Garrels joined NPR in 1988 and reported on conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, and Iraq.

14.

Anne Garrels reported from China and Saudi Arabia.

15.

Anne Garrels returned to Russia in 1988, as the Soviet Union began to collapse, and from 1993 until 1997 was NPR's Moscow bureau chief.

16.

Anne Garrels survived the April 8,2003, US tank attack on the Palestine Hotel, where she and hundreds of other journalists were living.

17.

Anne Garrels subsequently returned to Iraq several times for NPR.

18.

Anne Garrels was an embedded reporter with the US Marines during the November 2004 attack on Fallujah.

19.

Anne Garrels covered the January 2005 Iraqi national elections for an interim government, as well as constitutional referendum and the December 2005 elections for the first full term Iraqi government.

20.

In 2007 Anne Garrels was criticized by FAIR for using confessions by prisoners who had been tortured, during a story about an Iraqi Shiite militia.

21.

Anne Garrels continued her work with the Committee to Protect Journalists until the end of her life, serving on its board of directors.

22.

Toward the end of her life, Anne Garrels served as a judge for the Overseas Press Club Awards, including the Lowell Thomas Award which she judged in 2021.

23.

In 1986, Garrels married J Vinton Lawrence, one of two CIA paramilitary officers from the Special Activities Division stationed in Laos in the early 1960s, who worked with Hmong tribesmen and the CIA-owned airline Air America.

24.

Anne Garrels lived in Norfolk, Connecticut, where she died from lung cancer on September 7,2022, aged 71.