Adie to hang up her flak jacket after 30 years on the front line

After three decades reporting the horror of the world's battlefields, the BBC's veteran war correspondent Kate Adie announced yesterday she was hanging up her flak jacket. She said she was quitting her £150,000-a-year post for the life of a freelance.

The BBC confirmed that Ms Adie, its chief news correspondent, would play no role in its frontline war reporting. "People are inevitably going to be wondering if Kate Adie is going to be the face of our war coverage, but she's not been an on-screen face for quite some time now," a spokeswoman said yesterday.

"It was agreed at the end of last year. She's well thought of, well respected and hugely talented. We don't want to lose sight of that talent. But it was decided by mutual agreement that she wouldn't be deployed to war zones and that she would move from being on staff to being a freelance, which will give her more flexibility."

Ms Adie, 57, has not been seen on BBC television's main services since the Queen's jubilee celebrations last summer when she reported from Portsmouth. Her last appearance covering a live conflict was in autumn 2001 during the Afghanistan crisis, reporting from the relative safety of HMS Illustrious

Ms Adie's disappearance from mainstream news coverage is likely to resurrect the often heated debate over whether experienced hands are being sidelined on British television at the expense of younger faces. Asked about such claims, she said in an interview last year: "That's not something I'm prepared to talk about at the moment. I don't like slagging people off. I am quite happy." But she added: "I know there are a lot of people in the BBC who would be happy to think they had me in a corner, that I had been shunted aside."

She said she suspected that the abrasive manner that made her sound authoritative in a conflict was less winning with BBC management. Faced with accusations that she could be difficult, she said: "That's been the BBC line on me for yonks. For men read interesting, for women difficult. Just means I'm not biddable, that's all."

Kate Adie's career began at Radio Durham, proceeded through local television until her first high-profile report came when the SAS stormed the Iranian embassy in 1980.

She has been shot four times, including during the Tiananmen Square massacre when another bullet killed the man next to her.

A veteran of the Middle East, Balkans and Africa, only at the school shooting in Dunblane did her sureness of touch falter, when she faced criticism for seeming too cold and clinical in the face of the appalling child slaughter.

Yet her autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, published last year, prompted reviewers and interviewers to comment on her strong sense of humour and a human touch.

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC news, said yesterday that he had discussed with Ms Adie last year how she might work on a wider range of BBC programmes and agreed the move to a freelance contract.

She will continue to present From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4, will report for BBC World and is presenting a documentary for BBC4 on the American journalist and author Martha Gellhorn. "I am delighted that she will continue to appear regularly on the BBC," Mr Sambrook said. "Kate Adie is one of the greatest correspondents of our time."