Anne Garrels

Career

Garrels began working for ABC in 1975, holding several positions over ten years, including producer, and was one of the few women broadcast journalists at the time. She served as ABC's Moscow bureau chief and correspondent until expelled in 1982; speaking Russian, she conducted in-depth reporting, interviewing dissidents Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev, and Sergei Kovalyov, and exposing hardships of Soviet citizens. From 1984 to 1985 she was ABC's Central American bureau chief, covering wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

She then reported for NBC News as its State Department correspondent from 1985 to 1988. In mid-1988 she hosted Science Journal, a 25-part weekly PBS series on science, medicine, and technology, but withdrew that November due to her NPR workload and a family illness. Garrels joined NPR in 1988 and reported on conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, and Iraq, as well as from China during the Tiananmen Square Protests and Saudi Arabia.

She returned to Russia in 1988 as the Soviet Union collapsed, serving as NPR's Moscow bureau chief from 1993 to 1997. She was the Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1996 and served on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists from 1999 until her death, as well as on the board of Oxfam America. After the 9/11 attacks, she spent months in northern Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance and in Kabul, also traveling to Pakistan and Israel in early 2002.

Awards and recognition

Garrels received numerous awards for her journalism. In 1992 she was part of an NPR team that won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for coverage of the Gulf War. She earned the Overseas Press Club's Madeline Dane Ross Award in 1994 for her NPR work Russia: The Human Cost of Reform. She was the Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1996 to 1997.

In 1997 she shared a Silver Baton from the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award with NPR for coverage of the former Soviet Union. She received the Whitman Bassow Award from the Overseas Press Club in 1998 with Loren Jenkins for an NPR series on global water issues. In 2003 she won the George Polk Award for Radio Reporting for her Iraq war coverage from Baghdad, and the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation.

In 2004 she was cited in NPR's Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award and Peabody Award for Iraq war coverage, and received the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 2012.

Did You Know?

• Garrels studied Russian at Harvard University's Radcliffe College, graduating in 1972.
• She married J. Vinton Lawrence in 1986; he was a CIA paramilitary officer who worked with Hmong tribesmen and Air America in Laos.
• She died from lung cancer at age 71 in Norfolk, Connecticut.