NBC News anchor suspended for exaggerating helicopter story – but further misgivings have emerged about tales involving the pope and the Berlin Wall

As turmoil at NBC News over the suspension of top anchor Brian Williams continued through a second week, new doubts arose about anecdotes Williams has told over the years, from meeting the pope to watching the Berlin Wall come down to flying into Baghdad with a team of Navy Seals.

The news presenter was suspended for six months earlier this week after it was revealed that he had exaggerated a story about being shot down in a helicopter in Iraq, and as several more of his reports were called into question. NBC has said it is investigating the matter.

If the network wished for the controversy to dissipate quickly, a steady drip of doubt over his clips and claims has kept its star’s scandal alive. Perhaps worse for Williams, he faces prominent skeptics inside NBC, reportedly including his predecessor, Tom Brokaw.

Brokaw, who is consulting on the crisis with NBC Universal chief executive Steve Burke, has been warning colleagues for “at least a year” that Williams’ Iraq helicopter story was bushwa, NPR’s David Folkenflik reported.

NBC did not return a call on Friday for comment, but further digging into Williams’ career continues to turn up suspect nuggets.

One anecdote under examination is his evolving account of having met the pope. Asked in 2002 to recall a visit by Pope John Paul II to Catholic University in 1979, when he was a student there, Williams briefly said he had done some public relations work to help prepare for the pope’s arrival.

But in a commencement address at the university two years later, first flagged by CNN, Williams said he had met the pope in person. Then the story became, in a 2005 interview Williams did with Esquire, that he had plotted to intercept the pope on campus. “During a work-study job at Catholic University, I met Pope John Paul II on his visit to the campus simply by positioning myself at the top of the stairs of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception,” Williams said. “I just figured that’s where he’d be stopping. For me, it’s like some force intervenes. Go forward. Meet that person.”

A similar narrative evolution has been remarked in a story Williams has told about flying into Baghdad with members of Navy Seal Team 6, the group credited with killing Osama bin Laden. After the Bin Laden assassination, Williams said on the air that “I happen to have the great honor of flying into Baghdad with them at the start of the war.”

A year later, in an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, the Huffington Post noted, Williams elaborated the description. “I flew into Baghdad, invasion plus three days, on a blackout mission at night with elements of Seal Team 6, and I was told not to make any eye contact with them or initiate any conversation,” Williams said. But Navy sources told CNN that Team 6 did not accept passengers and such a trip would have been impossible.

Williams has talked about possessing a piece of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of which he witnessed in 1989 as a reporter with WCBS TV in New York. But in a February 2008 appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, flagged by CNN, Williams went further, saying he was there the night the wall “came down.”

“I’ve been so fortunate,” Williams said. “I was at the Brandenburg Gate the night the wall came down. I chipped a piece of my own off of that wall, and it’s framed and hanging in my den with the next day’s newspaper headline.”

It was Brokaw, however, not Williams, who was the sole American anchor to report live from the scene on 9 November, 1989, the night the wall was opened.

In the same speech at the Reagan Library, Williams eerily presaged his current troubles – a full-on scandal of the social-media age, in which every clip of him on YouTube is under close review by his own peers, with a passing observation about how, as a modern news anchor, “your words are dissected in a way that we never dreamed of in the pre-internet era.”

“Now in this job when you walk out onto a sidewalk in New York, everyone is equipped with something that takes a photo, or videotape,” Williams said. “Your words are dissected in a way that we never dreamed of in the pre-Internet era. It’s more wearing, it’s more exposure. I write a blog on the internet every day – it wasn’t like I had an hour of free time kicking around that I wasn’t using at NBC every day. So I can’t begin to guess.

“I would hope that it all ends well.”