It's a far cry from the days when people joked that the British Army couldn't start a war until Kate Adie had arrived. The BBC's chief news correspondent from 1989 to 2003, her face and voice are intimately bound with the major conflicts, triumphs and tragedies of that period. Yet she didn't stick around after the BBC declined to send her to the Iraq war last year: instead she retired after 35 years, and announced her intention to freelance.

'Today's reporter is reserved for the role of presenting information, which is coming from a laptop thanks to satellite feeds from London and New York. At least with radio you're forced to take a microphone to the story,' continues a woman who has brought some of humanity's darkest moments into the living room. She has ventured deep into the most notorious trouble spots of our time, including Libya, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Kuwait; she reported on the tragedies of Lockerbie, and from the smouldering remains of the World Trade Centre. She kicked her way through policemen in Tiananmen Square in order to get her footage out of the country. She has been shot three times; her left ankle is held together with pins.

An extraordinary portfolio, especially for someone who never intended to become a reporter. 'It's something I completely fell into,' she says during an earlier interview at the Mandarin Oriental, where she is relaxed, sun-kissed and elegantly dressed in a white jacket and trousers. 'I assumed I'd follow the old pattern of marrying, having children and becoming a housewife.' Adie, at 58, remains childless and unmarried.

A mischievous laugh belies her killer instinct for nailing stories and asking awkward questions - as well as a widely reported impatience when it comes to answering them. Not today, luckily, as she scurries into the lobby and insists on buying the coffees. 'This place changes so fast,' she trills, looking around her, before leaning forward and whispering conspiratorially: 'And what about all these mutterings about patriotism and the Basic Law?' She points her teaspoon northwards. 'What's that lot over the border up to? Fascinating times.'

'That lot over the border' played a pivotal part in Adie's career in June 1989. Hong Kong was her portal to the Tiananmen Square tragedy, where she acquired 'a dodgy visa' to get into China and report on the student protests. Having returned there on numerous occasions, her anger and sense of injustice remain undiminished. 'It's all there - you still see these small men following you around because you're a journalist.'

In her autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, she uses her side of the story to illustrate 'why it's worth being a reporter'.

'The most shocking thing about going back to Beijing is to discover that the next generation of students has been lied to comprehensively,' she says, widening her eyes into a glare. 'They're either unaware of it, or have been told something else. Many think the army came in to help the people, because foreigners had come into the country and were starting to cause trouble. A terrible lie - the rewriting of history. That's immensely depressing. I did a report in order to tell the world that that was bull****.

'Students would say that no one was killed in Tiananmen Square - and that's quite a possibility. All the killings I saw with my own eyes were for miles around the square. The army came in on lorries and tanks along the main boulevard, and was firing most of the length ... soldiers were hammering away. Lots of people were killed sitting in their houses, on their sofas as bullets ripped through the walls. There's that old phrase - 'No Jews were killed in Auschwitz'. And they weren't - they were killed in the gas chambers, on the outskirts. It's a lesson in accuracy.'

Adie shows me her right hand, the fingers of which had to be pried off the videocassette after she ran away from the army that night - a night when a bullet zipped through her shoulder to kill a man standing next to her. 'It's the only time in my life I've seen an army attack its own people. It was crucial to get the evidence back - you couldn't get my fingers off that tape when it came to handing it over. I saw hundreds and hundreds of people shot in cold blood.'

To report from the major front lines of the past quarter-century nevertheless hints at a taste for danger - something Adie is quick to deny. 'You don't go looking for it, you don't go to get killed and you certainly don't go so that you get into danger,' she says. 'The risk is there, but it's a calculated risk. You use your experience and your judgment and you don't go lightly into war zones or conflict areas.

'We saw young journalists do that at the Croat-Serb war at the start of 1991. Young photojournalists just out of media college went off to try their luck, and found themselves in a vicious civil war. A number died through not knowing what they were walking into.'

Her vast experience of being the lone woman on a front line full of men - both in war zones and at the BBC - has led to her latest book, Corsets to Camouflage - Women and War. An expert on the evolution of equality in the armed forces, naturally she is less than pleased with last year's Jessica Lynch scenario, in which the US staged the dramatic 'rescue' of a female soldier. 'A disgraceful piece of old-fashioned, sexist, crude propaganda,' she thunders.

And another example of the way in which she feels the news is choreographed these days. 'Big TV interviews are now almost worthless ... a rehearsal; a practised set of phrases. You can tell. The big interview has lost its power because you go in as a journalist and the PR flannel will cover you.'

Today, Adie may no longer find herself on the front line, but the old guard is still looking to safeguard the truth. As she says in the final line of her autobiography: 'I just stick to the facts.'