Christopher S. Wren, a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times who often reported from countries hostile to Westerners, notably the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War and Iran during the hostage crisis, died on Sunday at his home in Thetford, Vt. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Celia Wren.
Mr. Wren, who was also an author, joined The Times as a metropolitan reporter in 1973 after nearly a decade at Look magazine, covering the civil rights struggle in the South and the Vietnam War for part of that time. Within nine months of being hired by The Times, he leveraged the Russian he had begun studying at Dartmouth College to land a posting to the Moscow bureau.
While climbing Lenin Peak in the Soviet Pamirs with American mountaineers in 1974 — alpinism was another skill Mr. Wren had acquired at Dartmouth — his team discovered the bodies of seven members of an all-female expedition of Soviet climbers who had perished in a storm not far from the summit, one of the tallest in Central Asia at 23,400 feet. (One member remained missing.) The Soviet authorities had suppressed the story of the missing climbers, giving Mr. Wren an exclusive on the front page of The Times.
“Chris was the kind of foreign correspondent that every newspaper should have — adventurous, hard-working, relentlessly cheerful and uncomplaining, no matter how formidable and uncomfortable the assignment,” Robert B. Semple Jr., a former foreign editor of the paper in the late 1970s and early ’80s, wrote in an email.
With the possible exception of his stint as bureau chief in Ottawa from 1984 to 1986, Mr. Semple said of Mr. Wren’s foreign postings, “there was not an easy one in the bunch.”
Over a 28-year Times career, Mr. Wren was bureau chief in Moscow from 1974 to 1977, in Cairo from 1977 through 1980, in Beijing from 1981 to 1984, and in Johannesburg from 1988 to 1992.
He covered the Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat’s trip to Israel in 1977, the first by an Arab leader; the Iran hostage crisis in 1979; Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa in 1990; and wars in Africa and the Balkans.
While attempting to reach Muslim guerrillas in a remote corner of the Philippines in 1986, his contact with the insurgents fled because of the danger, and the local police told Mr. Wren that his life was at risk. He waited until the noon call to prayers, when the guerrillas were distracted, and then hid in the back seat of a taxi as he was whisked out of town.
He had learned decades earlier — while in Mississippi reporting on the civil rights struggle for Look — that the hour of religious prayers was an ideal time to exit a dangerous community quietly. Sunday mornings, he had discovered, were when gun-wielding Klansmen were attending church services.
Mr. Wren’s years at Look, from 1961 until the magazine was shuttered in 1971, included several trips to cover the Vietnam War and an assignment to report on the right-wing military junta that seized power in Greece in 1967. His resulting article, under the headline “Greece: Government by Torture,” with its vivid accounts of the junta’s paranoia and brutality, was named best magazine reporting from abroad in 1969 by the Overseas Press Club.
Christopher Sale Wren was born on Feb. 22, 1936, in Hollywood, Calif., to Samuel and Virginia (Sale) Wren. Both parents were actors, his mother under the name Virginia Sale. Chris and his twin sister, Virginia, appeared as adolescents in 1949 in a short-lived ABC-TV comedy, “The Wren’s Nest,” set in New York City and starring their parents.
Mr. Wren graduated in 1953 from Trinity-Pawling School, a boys’ boarding school in Pawling, N.Y., in Dutchess County, and from Dartmouth in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in English. He did graduate work in Russian at the University of Edinburgh on a Rotary fellowship and received a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1961.
In a 2005 interview with Vermont Public Television, he said he ended up in journalism because he had always had a wide curiosity about the world. “I wanted to find a job where I could go out and satisfy my curiosity and have somebody pay for it,” he said.
Between degrees, Mr. Wren was stationed in South Korea with the U.S. Army and trained as a paratrooper with Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, at Fort Bragg, N.C.
After Look folded in 1971, he wrote about national affairs for Newsweek before joining The Times.
While based in New York in the 1990s, he covered the United Nations and the trial of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He was also an assistant foreign editor for a time.
Mr. Wren married Jacqueline Braxton. in 1964. Years later, when he was offered the Times job in Moscow, his children, then 3 and 6, insisted that they would move only if they could take the family cat, a half-Siamese named Henrietta. She became a central character in Mr. Wren’s well-received memoir of his career abroad, “The Cat Who Covered the World” (2000).
His other books included “The End of the Line: The Failure of Communism in the Soviet Union and China” (1990), which the NPR reporter and commentator Daniel Schorr praised for finding “the human reality beneath the ideological façade”; and “Winners Got Scars Too,” a 1971 biography of the country singer Johnny Cash. Mr. Wren wrote two songs that Mr. Cash performed in “The Gospel Road,” a 1973 film about the life of Jesus Christ that Mr. Cash also narrated.
Besides his daughter, Celia, a freelance arts journalist, Mr. Wren is survived by his wife and two granddaughters. His twin sister died in 2020, and his son, Christopher B. Wren, died in 2014.
The week he retired from The Times in 2001, Mr. Wren began a 400-mile solo hike from Times Square to a retirement home that he and his wife owned in central Vermont, near the New Hampshire border, following the Appalachian Trail for part of journey. He published a 2004 book about that trek, “Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains — a Homeward Adventure,” an introspective account of his transition to his new stage in life.
He undertook the journey in part to banish some of the inevitable regrets of moving on from a life of high-profile success.
He wrote, “I didn’t want to sit around my apartment wondering what the next day’s front page would look like and whether my byline could have been on it.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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