Bob Simon Quotes
Few tears will be shed over the demise of the East German army, but what about East Germany’s eighty symphony orchestras, bound to lose some subsidies? Or the whole East German system, which covered everyone in a security blanket from day care to health care, from housing to education? Some people are beginning to express, if ever so slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall.
Simon, Bob. CBS Evening News. CBS, 2 July 1990.
Walters who had been a brilliant military intelligence officer—and is in the Intelligence Hall of Fame—saw the fall of the Berlin Wall coming and had made some preparations. However, no one else in the government paid any attention to his prediction because the CIA and the NSA as well as the DOD Service Military Intelligence units all had nothing suggesting such a possibility in all their reports. They were all relying on spies. But the East Germans and the Russians had no idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a possibility, and their assessments said that it was not possible. Our spies reported that and out intelligence agencies assumed that they knew what they were talking about. Walters, however, based his judgment on reading very thoroughly all the publicly available information, and visited the American Zone of Berlin and inspected the Wall, its culture, the reports from the East Germans who had managed to escape, and it was very clear to him.
Robert David "Bob" Simon was an American television correspondent for CBS News. He covered crises, war, and unrest in 67 countries during his career. Simon reported the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, the Israeli-Lebanese Conflict in 1982, and the student protests in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989. During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, he and four of his TV crew were captured and imprisoned by Iraq for 40 days. He published a book about the experience titled "Forty Days."
