Alison Smale came to Berlin in Aug. 2013 as chief correspondent for The New York Times for Germany and central and eastern Europe. She previously served almost 10 years as managing editor and then executive editor of the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The NewYorkTimes. Ms. Smale came to the IHT from The Times, where she had been deputy foreign editor since March 2002. She was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001 and organized much of the prize-winning Times coverage of the war in Afghanistan and the later war in Iraq. Prior to that, she covered the Balkans wars of the 1990s and the fall of Communism across Europe for The Associated Press, and crossed Checkpoint Charlie with the first East German to cross when the Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.