CBS’ Roth Freed, Back on China Front Lines

CBS correspondent Richard Roth was freed Sunday after nearly 20 hours in captivity in Beijing, during which time he said he was kicked and punched by the Chinese troops who had arrested him and his cameraman. He immediately resumed reporting from Beijing.

His release and news reports came as the three major TV networks and CNN aired graphic photographs and videotape footage--the latter flown out by couriers--of the pre-dawn carnage in Tian An Men Square, where army troops late Saturday and early Sunday crushed the long student demonstration.

The networks’ first video footage of the bloodshed, broadcast before dawn Sunday and later that morning, included scenes of bloodied bodies lying on the ground, a tent being crushed by a tank and dramatic shots on ABC of a stalled armored personnel carrier exploding after being set afire by student-thrown Molotov cocktails.

Under martial law imposed May 20, live TV and taped video transmissions from Beijing are banned. Network correspondents largely have ignored the taping prohibition, however, and have been flying their news footage from Beijing to Hong Kong, Tokyo and other points. They also have continued to file live telephone reports from Beijing.

In a phone conversation with CBS anchor Dan Rather that was broadcast live Sunday morning, Roth said that he and cameraman Derek Williams “were well treated” following the initial encounter with Chinese troops the day before during another live phone call to CBS. That report from a vantage point near Tian An Men Square abruptly halted amid sounds of a scuffle and Roth’s cries of “oh, no!” when he was seized.

Williams and eight other Westerners, including an unidentified Italian journalist whom Roth said had been badly beaten, also were released Sunday with Roth, a 17-year veteran with CBS News.

Roth’s release came after CBS News President David Burke sought help from Secretary of State James Baker. Burke had written Baker that Roth’s violent seizure “represents the worst form of interference with our obligation to report on the events in China and gives us great concern for the safety of our newsmen.”

CBS on Sunday said it was indebted to Baker, the United States Information Agency and Sen. Brock Adams (D-Wash.), who has ties with top Chinese officials, for their efforts to secure the release of its two staffers. Exactly what role they played was not disclosed.

Roth reported that shortly before his release, civilian authorities asked him to “sign a waiver saying that ‘you recognize that it (his reporting) was a risky thing to do and you’re responsible for your own security.” He did not indicate whether he complied.

Roth said he suffered “a small cut” under one eye and a gash on his head when seized by a small group of Chinese troops shortly before dawn Saturday in Beijing. He said he offered no resistance when the armed soldiers grabbed him.

“I was pulled along . . . and stumbled a bit and tried to get myself up,” he told Rather. “And in the course of . . . righting myself, (I) was then kicked down by one of the soldiers. As I picked myself up, he threw a left hook at me . . . and I didn’t duck.”

He said the cut under his eye later was “treated gently and, it seemed, capably by a Chinese army medic.”

The troops held Roth and Williams, a New Zealand national who was not hurt, for about 40 minutes in the Great Hall of the People near the square, Roth reported.

“We couldn’t see what was going on but we could hear the assault (by the army against the demonstrators) that had just begun,” he said. “The sounds we heard were ferocious sounds.”

The troops later took Roth, Williams and a Chinese-speaking American music student who also had been arrested on a Jeep trip through the then-empty Tian An Men Square to a military encampment at the Forbidden City enclosure in Beijing, he said.

Roth described the scene as one that seemed “out of a movie,” with torn and ripped tents that had housed the protesting students, troops sitting around and several armored personnel carriers, six to eight light tanks and truck-drawn heavy artillery in the square.

Turned over to civilian authorities, “we were treated quiet well,” he reported, adding that while the holding facility was uncomfortable, his captors “were all essentially courteous to us. . . .”

Others held with him included a couple from Long Island, N.Y.; three Swiss tourists; the son of Pakistan’s ambassador to China; the Italian journalist, and the Chinese-speaking American music student who had acted as an interpreter for the CBS staffers. All apparently had been watching the demonstrations when arrested. Roth didn’t identify the Americans in the group.

When they got word that they were being released and prepared to leave the Forbidden City by one exit, he said, a group of soldiers noting that the area outside was ringed by angry students “came to us and said we were crazy to leave through there, it’s too dangerous.”

They walked to a government visa office and were driven away in a government car.

During Saturday’s pre-dawn violence, network correspondents had been able to report from the scene live by portable telephones and walkie-talkies patched into network offices at Beijing hotels, and relayed both live and on tape by commercial phone lines to network headquarters in the United States.

ABC correspondent Kyle Gibson reported that she came under fire three times, but was not hit.

NBC feared for the safety of one of its two-member camera crews when it was out of contact for several hours. But staffers Tony Wasserman and Maurice Odell, who’d been separated from correspondent Arthur Kent, showed up safe later Saturday, said Jerry Lamprecht, NBC vice president for news coverage.