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Ex-BBC war reporter Kate Adie to visit UAE

She first came onto the scene in 1980, covering the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London, which the SAS ended by dramatically storming the building.

It was, though, her regular dispatches from the Libyan capital Tripoli at the time of the American bombing that propelled her into the British national consciousness. Her broadcasts from Beijing during the Chinese government's brutal crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 firmly embedded her position as a national figure. She also reported on many of the major wars of the 1990s — including the first Gulf War of 1991 when a US-led force evicted Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops from Kuwait, and the Balkans conflict of the early nineties. An oft-repeated joke in the British army was that when Adie turned up, the soldiers knew they were in trouble.

Yet Adie never set out to be a war correspondent. "I never desired to go to war zones," she says in her autobiography 'The Kindness of Strangers'. "I never had any thought about it. It sort of just happened as part of the job."

In fact, she read Scandinavian studies at university and originally joined the BBC in 1968 as a studio technician in local radio. It was 11 years before she reached BBC TV News in London where she was to become known as one of a handful of female journalists around the world to be sent onto the battlefield.

Her first book has been a bestseller, while she wrote another, 'Corsets to Camouflage', a year later in 2003 on women's roles in wars.

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