Wilfred Burchett
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Wilfred Graham Burchett (September 16, 1911, Melbourne, Australia — September 27, 1983, Sofia, Bulgaria) was a war correspondent and alleged KGB agent. Harrison E. Salisbury, a journalist well-known for being one of the first to protest the Vietnam War, claimed in the introduction to Burchett's autobiography, At The Barricades: "There is probably no other man who was on intimate terms with Ho Chi Minh and Henry Kissinger". After World War II, Burchett spoke out against atomic weapons and against banning the Communist Party of Australia. Burchett himself denied being a member of the Australian Communist Party (or any other party).[1]
Burchett had written over forty books by the time of his death. At The Barricades was published in 1981, and republished in an unexpurgated version in 2005 as "Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist". He died of cancer in 1983 in Sofia, Bulgaria at age 72.
A biographical film about Burchett, entitled Public Enemy Number One, was produced by Academy Award-nominated, documentary film-maker David Bradbury. It shows how Burchett was vilified by the mainstream press and conservative public in Australia for his coverage of “the other side” in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
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[edit] Early life
Burchett was born in Melbourne in 1911 to George and Mary Burchett. He spent his youth in the south Gippsland town of Poowong 25km southwest of Warragul. Poverty forced the young Burchett to drop out of school at an early age and work various odd jobs, including as a vacuum cleaner salesman and an agricultural laborer. In his free time he studied foreign languages, a skill which would prove very useful in his later career as a journalist.
In 1936 Burchett left Australia for London, England, where he found work with a travel agency. According to Australian journalist Denis Warner, Burchett was invited by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador to England, to open the London office of Tourism for the Soviet Union in 1937. A diplomatic quarrel between London and Moscow forced the closure of the office a few months later. Burchett then found work with another travel agency specializing in resettling immigrants from Germany to British Palestine and the United States. It was in this capacity that he met his first wife, Erna Hammer, a German Jewish refugee, in 1938.
[edit] Career
In 1940 Burchett began his career in journalism. His freelance reports of the revolt against the Vichy French in the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia helped him gain accreditation with the London Daily Express newspaper. He spent the remainder of the war in China and Burma and also covered General Douglas MacArthur's island-hopping campaign.
He was the first Westerner into Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped (arriving alone by train from Tokyo on September 2, the day of the formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri) with his Morse code dispatch carried by the British Daily Express newspaper. His article in the Daily Express on September 5, 1945, entitled "The Atomic Plague", was the first public report to mention the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout.
After three years working for the Daily Express in Greece and Berlin, Burchett began reporting for The Times in Eastern Europe. He was given wide access to the show trials conducted by Eastern European Communist governments, including that of Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary. Although most see the charges against the accused as false, Burchett widely endorsed the prosecutor's line in his reports. During the trial of Laszlo Rajk, Burchett wrote that the accused was a "Titoist Spy" and a "tool of American and British intelligence". Burchett also praised the postwar Stalinist purges in Bulgaria, writing that the "Bulgarian conspirators were the left arm of the Hungarian reactionary right arm". In his autobiography he later admitted he began to have doubts about the trials when one of the Bulgarian accused repudiated his signed confession.
In 1951, Burchett traveled to the People's Republic of China as a foreign correspondent for the French Communist newspaper L'Humanité. After six months in China he wrote China's Feet Unbound which was highly critical of the Korean War and sympathetic to the new Chinese Communist government. In July of 1951, he and fellow journalist Alan Winnington made their way to North Korea to cover the Panmunjon Peace Talks. While there, Burchett covered the Korean War from the point of view of the Communist north. He had a Chinese press credential and reported details of alleged atrocities by United Nations forces in Korea. He was one of a small handful of western correspondents to operate in this manner. Burchett also was responsible for the now discredited story that the United States and its allies had used germ warfare on the North Koreans.
Burchett visited several POW camps in China and North Korea, describing them as "holiday resorts in Switzerland". His actions during these visits, including allegations that he had personally been involved in interrogations of POWs, would cause a great deal of grief for him in the future.
The U.S. government claimed that U.S. General William F. Dean had been killed by the North Koreans. In fact, Dean was a prisoner of war. Burchett organized a propaganda film of POWs (thought dead) in which Dean was seen to be alive and well. Burchett was never forgiven by the Australian Government for this, even though the U.S. government continued to deal with him.[citation needed]Dean's autobiography later included a chapter titled "My Friend Wilfred Burchett" in which he expressed his gratitude for Burchett communicating his status to his family.
In 1956 Burchett arrived in Moscow as a correspondent with the National Guardian Newspaper, an American Communist weekly. During the next six years, he reported on Soviet advances in science and the rebuilding of the Soviet economy in the aftermath of the Second World War. Burchett wrote in a dispatch that "a new humanism is at work in the Soviet Union which makes that peddled in the West look shabby; its all-embracing sweep leaves behind no underprivileged". His work in the Soviet Union also gained him notoriety in Britain, with many of his stories being reprinted in the Daily Express and Financial Times.
Although 60 years old during the Vietnam War, he traveled hundreds of miles, huddling in tunnels with NVA and Viet Cong soldiers while being attacked by US forces. Burchett's special relationship with the North Vietnamese gave him unprecedented access, and Hanoi consulted him several times to verify the sympathies of journalists seeking visas from Hanoi.
In 1975 and 1976, Burchett made a number of dispatches from Cambodia praising the government of Pol Pot. In an October 14, 1976, article for the Guardian, he wrote that that "Cambodia had become a worker-peasant-soldier state" and that because its new constitution "guarantees that everyone has the right to work and a fair standard of living, it is one of the most democratic and revolutionary constitutions in existence anywhere". After the Vietnamese declared war on Cambodia in 1979, he quickly changed his opinion of Pol Pot's government.
[edit] Controversies
[edit] Accusations of Japanese bias
Burchett's reporting on radiation sickness, then not adequately understood, and the massive destruction of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombs in the British Daily Express caused a "public relations fiasco" among the ranks in the U.S. military. U.S. censors killed a supporting story submitted for publication by Pulitzer Prize winner George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, and Burchett was accused of being under the sway of Japanese propaganda; under General MacArthur's orders, Burchett was for a time barred entrance to Japan. In addition, his camera documenting the persisting illness mysteriously disappeared while at a Tokyo hospital.
To further undermine the creditibility of Burchett's "The Atomic Plague", Manhattan Project war correspondent and soon-to-be Pulitzer Prize winner William L. Laurence of the New York Times dismissed the reports on radiation sickness as Japanese efforts to undermine American morale about the victory in the Pacific. As a result, the integrity of Laurence's reporting, likely compromised by his intimate relationship with the War Department, is called into question by some who question whether he deserved the Pulitzer Prize the following year. [2]
[edit] Allegations of British Intelligence Service involvement
During Burchett's visits to Bulgaria in 1948-1949, allegations were made of his supposed involvement with the British Intelligence Service, which Burchett himself completey denied and later attributed in his "Memoires of a Rebel Journalist" to "spy psychosis at its height in Bulgaria, following Traicho Kostov's trial and execution". The Bulgarian authorities were manifestly displeased with Burchett's relationship and eventual marriage to Bulgarian citizen Vesselina Ossikovska. Following the marriage, Burchett's visa was cancelled, He was not allowed to return to Bulgaria from a trip to Budapest, while his wife was denied an exit visa. The couple were only reunited two years later, in China and Korea.
[edit] Allegations of KGB Involvement
KGB defector Yuri Krotkov testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in November of 1969 that Burchett had supplied information to the KGB and that he worked for Hanoi and Beijing as an agent. Krotkov, Burchett's alleged KGB control officer, also reported that Burchett was a secret member of the Communist Party of Australia. Krotkov testified that Burchett had proposed a "special relationship" with the Soviets at their first meeting in Berlin in 1947 . Krotkov's testimony on Burchett was corroborated by North Vietnamese defectors Bui Cong Tuong and Ming Trung. Trung and Tuong disappeared a short time later, believed murdered on order from Hanoi.[citation needed]
[edit] Jack Kane libel trial
Burchett had always been defensive towards his critics' charges that he was a "communist propagandist" or "communist agent", and in November 1974 he filed a libel suit against Australian politician Jack Kane. The one-million-dollar suit was filed, in part, over an article Kane had written in his political newsletter detailing Yuri Krotkov's testimony in front of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security.
During the trial, Kane's defense team not only presented the testimony Krotkov gave in the United States in 1969, but also gathered thirty former Korean War era POWs to testify during the trial. Three Australian POWs testified that they had met Burchett in a Chinese POW camp, and they had seen Burchett wearing a uniform bearing the insignia of a Chinese colonel. One of these prisoners, Thomas Hollis, claimed that Burchett told him he could get better treatment by swearing allegiance to the Chinese and collaborating with them during the interrogations of other prisoners. Walter Mahurin, a former colonel in the USAF, claimed to have met Burchett twice during his sixteen months of captivity. Mahurin also made the charge that on both occasions he saw Burchett wearing a uniform bearing the insignia of a Chinese colonel, and that Burchett had presented him with a confession statement personally drafted by Burchett. Paul Kniss, another USAF POW, testified that he had seen a handwritten letter from Burchett containing the exact same questions his Chinese interrogators had asked him.
Some of the more damaging testimony came from Derek Kinne, a British pilot who was awarded the George Cross for his actions prior to his capture. Kinne alleged that he had several interviews with Burchett. Kinne told the court that he had complained to Burchett that the POWs were being beaten, tortured and starved to death. When Burchett asked Kinne what he could do about it, Kinne testified that he told Burchett that he could describe this to officials at Panmunjon. Burchett allegedly responded that "it would be a good thing if he (Burchett) had him (Kinne) for his lies". After hearing this, according to Kinne's testimony, he had grabbed Burchett's throat, kneeing him in the chest in an attempt to strangle Burchett to death, before the Chinese guards removed him and severely beat him. Kinne then spent thirteen months in solitary confinement. In a letter of confession presented to Kinne, one of the statements on it described punishment he received for his "hostile attitude towards comrade Burchett", but he refused to sign it.
Burchett denied all the allegations made against him, as well as the testimony of KGB defector Krotkov. Although the jury did not rule on the factual nature of the content of the trial, it did render a decision against Burchett's libel charge, deciding that Kane's article was an accurate representation of Krotkov's statements.
Burchett appealed that decision. On May 20, 1976, the Australian Appeals Court in Melbourne ruled that Burchett had been seriously defamed, that there had been a serious miscarriage of justice, and that a retrial would be warranted were it not for Kane's inability to retrieve his witnesses from overseas.
[edit] Notes
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[edit] References
- Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett, edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin, (UNSW Press, 2005) ISBN 0-86840-842-5
- Passport : an autobiography. Buchett, W. Thomas Nelson (Australia), 1969.
[edit] External links
- The contrasting stories of the first journalists to visit Hiroshima (Burchett) and Nagasaki (Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller).
- Radio National's Media Report discussing Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist.
- Comrade Burchett was a party hack, The Australian, January 7, 2006
- Stuart Macintyre and Ben Kiernan, "Wilfred Burchett's Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: Lessons from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Iraq"
- Wilfred Burchett's Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: Lessons from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Iraq
- Vesselina Ossikovska-Burchett – 1919-2007
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