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Chris McGreal of the Guardian told us this morning about working undercover in Zimbabwe for the past month.

He didn't feel he was being hunted even though officials there could obviously tell he was around despite a ban.

He was willing to tell us almost everything, he said, except how he got out - because he might need to use the same route in the future.

I tried to work undercover once, in Kosovo during a period of police repression in the 1990s.

I didn't shave for a few days, then went to neighbouring Macedonia to get the bus, rather than fly in or go in my own car.

I was doing video in those days, and put my camera into an old bag and covered it with clothes.

I thought I was doing rather well - I got in without having my passport checked, because the bus was used by peasants, not Western journalists, so the police just waved it through the border.

I stayed with a friend once I reached the capital, avoiding any hotel or guest house. I did some interviews that would have been uncomfortable doing if I was being followed - or so I thought.

But when at the end of the trip I had to go to the Grand Hotel to make a phone call, the man at the desk spotted me.

"Oh, Mr Damon, we knew you were around, we wondered why you hadn't checked in with us yet!"

(Perhaps you can guess that anyone working in a hotel in a police state is an employee of the security service as well.)

I suppose being 6ft 4ins tall in a country where 6ft is exceptional didn't help.

Afterwards I felt bad that I might have compromised the opposition figures who had agreed to talk to me. But in view of what came later, in 1998, I guess I was the least of their problems.

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