WHEN WINSTON IMAGINES:

E.U. Critics Can Feel Officials' Wrath: Police Raid on Reporter's Home Seen as Retaliation for Story (Glenn Frankel, August 15, 2004, Washington Post)

The bell rang three times early on a cold Friday morning before a sleepy Hans-Martin Tillack, an investigative reporter for the German newsweekly Stern, answered the door in his T-shirt and boxers. Six Belgian policemen politely filed in, he recalled, handed him a search warrant and went to work.

For the next 10 hours, they combed through his apartment and his separate office, seizing his computer hard drives, his bank records, his Filofax organizer, four cell phones, 18 boxes of files and a copy of "Spaceship Brussels," his exposé of fraud and waste inside the European Union. When Tillack complained, he recalled, one of the officers shrugged. In Burma, the policeman told him, "journalists get treated much worse."

The police were looking for evidence that Tillack had bribed an E.U. official to obtain a confidential memo from the union's anti-fraud unit, known by its French acronym OLAF. But what they were really doing that March morning, he and other critics allege, was retaliating against a reporter whose stories had embarrassed the E.U. by focusing public attention on corruption and secrecy.

A glimpse of their future.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 15, 2004 9:30 AM