How She Got The World The Story

The coup leaders ordered CNN’s live-feed quashed. Eileen O’Connor had other ideas.

She spoke to people in charge of carrying out those orders at the foreign ministry. She asked them if they could ​“accidentally” keep the feed going live.

“Hmmm,” they responded. ​“Interesting. Possibly.”

Thanks to her request, the world instantly saw generals who supposedly had taken over the Soviet Union with the consent of its deposed leader shaking their hands, fumbling with questions, looking anything but in charge.

The date was Aug. 19, 1991, a watershed moment in the Cold War — and one with resonance today as the world tries to make sense of a resurgent Russian nationalism with imperialistic moves that some say herald the rise of a second Cold War.

Back then, O’Connor (who today is a vice-president at Yale) was a CNN reporter stationed in Moscow. The Soviet Union was crumbling, and the heads of its military and intelligence agencies were making a last stab at maintaining the Communist Party’s grip on not just Russia, but the entire empire.

It was a breathless day of keeping track of a fast-moving story of a lifetime. At each step, O’Connor found a way to bypass official blockades to arm the public with independent facts that could change the course of history — the kind of media watchdogging of authority that she said the world will now need more than ever.

Uh Oh. It’s ​“Swan Lake”

O’Connor recalled that day during an interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

She was asleep — it was 4 or 5 a.m. — when a call came from her CNN bureau chief.

The BBC is reporting that official Soviet radio is playing ​“Swan Lake,” over and over again, she was told.

The ​“Swan Lake” loop ​“traditionally occurred when there was a death in the Politburo, usually the head of Communist Party, when [former premiers Leonid] Brezhnev died or [Yuri] Andropov died,” O’Connor recalled.

“Get in the office immediately,” the bureau chief told her. ​“We need you here right away. Sounds like there’s a coup.”

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had for years been promoting perestroika and glasnost — the gradual opening up of the economy and civil liberties from the grip of a dying totalitarian state. As O’Connor soon learned, a group of party hard-liners had ordered the coup after failing to convince Gorbachev to sign on to a crackdown, with plans for hundreds of thousands of arrests.

She also learned that president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, was opposing the coup. Yeltsin announced a morning press conference at the Russian ​“White House” before a scheduled official announcement by the coup leaders.

“He had to get out there really early and say, ​‘It’s a coup.’ The coup plotters acted as if Gorbachev had gone along with it and he was sick. Yeltsin said, ​‘This is illegal.’ He wanted to get that message out there before Western leaders supported the plotters and considered it a legitimate takeover.”

O’Connor and a camera person rushed to the scene. Russian tanks were in the street. O’Connor sought a nearby spot where her team could set up and use the phone. ​“Can we take over your office?” she asked a Russian legislator across the street. She offered him $500. He said yes.

“I then went to interview the foreign minister of the Russian Federation. All of a sudden Yeltsin and his bodyguard fly by us and out the front door of this building and down these steps.

“My cameraman and I go after him, start backing down the steps. One of his security guard takes us out, knocks us down.”

O’Connor was only slightly bruised. But the CNN camera’s viewfinder had broken off, just as Yeltsin walked right up to the tanks.

“We’re completely freaking out that we’re going to not get this shot,” O’Connor recalled.

Fortunately, ​“even though the viewfinder had broken, the cable to it was still intact and it was still working. We took out electrical tape and put it back together. We always have it. Doesn’t everybody? It fixes everything, gaffer tape.

“We quickly taped the camera back together, ran down the steps, and got a picture of Yeltsin speaking on top of the tank.”

The officer in the tank had turned around, away from the people massed in the street. Yeltsin, like ​“babushkas” in the crowd, appealed to soldiers not to attack the people. CNN’s video of the scene was broadcast around the world. Not just that day, but for months afterward.

Live From Kennebunkport

The story was just beginning. U.S. President George H.W. Bush was preparing to make a statement from his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine.

O’Connor received a call from the Russian foreign minister. ​“Can you put your phone up to your television?” he asked her.

“We were getting the feed from the United States, so we can hear it. They did not have a feed in the Russian White House. We had CNN in our office. We knew it was going to be carried live. They did not have that set up.”

She held up her phone to television so the foreign minister and Yeltsin could hear what President Bush had to say about the reported coup. Then O’Connor took back the phone and asked the Russian officials for their reactions — which she subsequently reported on CNN. Another scoop.

Next O’Connor and her camera person headed to the press conference with the generals and KGB officials in charge of the coup.

“We wanted to put it out live. The generals told the people at the foreign ministry that they couldn’t put it out live. This was the famous press conference where the general’s hand was shaking.

“We asked the foreign ministry officials to accidentally push it out live. I said, ​‘Aren’t the channels automatic?’ They said, ​“Hmm. Interesting. Possibly.’ Basically if the channels were open, we had a fiber optic to the foreign ministry. We used to take their feed. If that feed was connected to our fiber optic, it just went out.

“They’d been told not to have it go live. They sort of acted like they didn’t really know what was happening. I think it was just a lot of just really brave people sort of waffling around. If they ever were confronted would say, ​‘Oops. Oops. Just a mistake.’”

It turned out to be unnecessary. As became clear at the press conference, the coup leaders were not carrying out an efficient plan, were not up on details, were not presenting a convincing case to the world. It was a Wizard of Oz moment: There were no mighty, fearsome powers behind the curtain, after all.

But not everybody knew that. Protests continued in the streets into the night. Breakaway Soviet republics usually had only the official Soviet television to rely on to find out what was really happening. But now CNN’s feed remained on the foreign ministry’s satellite. All scenes captured by CNN — not just the official televised segments, but requests for coffee breaks and chatter among journalists — were beamed to living rooms in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, republics where people were finding out that the tide of history was turning, and their days under Soviet rule were coming to an end.

Accountability Check

Eileen O’Connor remained in Russia after the coup failed and the Soviet Union fell. She returned as a lawyer specializing in human rights and Russian politics.

Today, she thinks back to her last interview with Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as Russia’s leader — and under whose grip authoritarianism and saber-rattling have returned to Russian government.

It was about a dozen years ago, at his dacha, where he met with O’Connor and other journalists.

“We were there for about three hours,” she recalled. ​“I asked him about why he started cracking down on the press. They had started regaining control of news agencies, newspapers.

“He started talking about his philosophy of truth. … That there were really no truths in the world, that all media was corrupt, that U.S. media still was owned by corporate interests. [That] there was no [such] thing as independent media at all. [That] the media was serving neither the people nor the government.

“This really showed me a fundamental shift in his thinking … a fundamental shift in the way the press in Russia was going to [operate]. Much more so than just that it was going to be not free and report what the government said, but it was going to be utilized by Putin to put out what he saw as truth.”

The rest is history. Not only has Russia’s press been gradually censored by Putin; he has, according to U.S. intelligence, spread disinformation around the globe to try to destabilize the West, part of a broader rise of authoritarian leaders in the world and a concomitant rise in viral fake news on the Internet.

O’Connor — who has served as president of the International Center for Journalists and chaired the Center for Justice and Accountability — has watched these developments with concern. This month, in her capacity as Yale’s vice-president for communications, she organized a conference at Yale at which leading American reporters revisited how they covered, and miscovered, the presidential election.

Now more than ever, O’Connor said, ​“the media has to be much more vigilant about fact-checking people and calling people to account when they don’t tell the truth.”

Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full interview with O’Connor on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.