Charles Tasnadi, 82; Photographed Presidents for AP

After a snowstorm in January 1951, Mr. Tasnadi told his mother he was going on a skiing trip. He and his girlfriend paid a smuggler to help them escape. They crawled across a snow-covered minefield and under barbed-wire fences when they reached the border.

"It was so miserably cold," Mr. Tasnadi said in 1989. "Twice I fell through the ice up to my chest."

A border guard saw Mr. Tasnadi and the six other people in his group but turned and walked away. Mr. Tasnadi and his girlfriend eventually reached a safe house in Austria and were married in a refugee camp.

After being denied entrance to the United States, Mr. Tasnadi went to Venezuela, walked into an English-language paper and found a job as a photographer.

Life in the Americas took some adjustment. At his first baseball game, he noticed that much of the action took place at second base. He found a prime spot behind the base until the umpire asked him to leave the field. It was one of the last times in his career that Mr. Tasnadi found himself on the sidelines.

In 1989, while covering President George Bush's visit to Hungary, Mr. Tasnadi made a belated return to his homeland. Bush invited him to the front of Air Force One to watch the landing in Budapest.

On the ground, Mr. Tasnadi's colleagues greeted him with a simple "Welcome home, Charlie."

Survivors include his wife, Maria Tasnadi, and daughter, Diana Tasnadi, both of Washington.