Moscow 1991: A coup that seemed doomed from the start
The Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, was relaxing at his villa in the Crimea, the Soviet parliament was in recess and I had booked a game of tennis. London, calling for some obscure story, was an inconvenience I could do without.
Immediately, though, it was clear this was not a trivial story.
Down the line, the duty editor read out the statement from Tass, the Soviet state news agency. It sounded ominous - the vice-president had declared a state of emergency and Gorbachev, still in the Crimea, had allegedly been taken ill.
I pulled on a tracksuit and grabbed a pair of sneakers - there was no time to get dressed properly - and rushed to our BBC radio office, less than a minute away.
Inside, the wire copy machines were clattering. We had no computers in those days. The Tass machine was spewing out the coup leaders' decree in full and an endorsement from the chairman of the Soviet parliament.
I remember wondering if it was a coup on paper only. The increasingly weak central authorities of that late Soviet era were always making announcements that turned out to be make-believe.
In my first report I carefully said, "This has all the hallmarks of a classic Soviet coup," without confirming that it was true.
I got on our one direct-dial telephone to call Lithuania - all the other telephones in the office were restricted to local numbers and this was before the days of cell phones or email.
I reasoned that if this really was a coup, either communications to the rebellious Baltic republics would be cut off, or Soviet tanks and troops would already be on the streets there. After all, there had already been one abortive attempt to use Soviet military force to bring Lithuania back into line in January. Perhaps this time there was a real crackdown?
But a sleepy voice in Vilnius answered my phone call in puzzlement. No, all was quiet in Lithuania.
Then I turned on the television. Scheduled programmes had been replaced by the ballet Swan Lake, interspersed with news flashes, read out by a man in spectacles, awkwardly reading off a piece of paper without autocue.
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