Was Wilfred Burchett – famous, or notorious, Australian journalist – in the pay of the KGB? I don’t know. But Robert Manne lays out what he takes to be sound evidence that Burchett was. He (Manne) starts by providing the context of earlier controversy on the question:
Among Australian journalists there has been no individual more lionised or demonised than Wilfred Burchett.
Burchett’s supporters include some of Australia’s more prominent left-wing journalists, academics and filmmakers, such as John Pilger, Phillip Knightley, Ben Kiernan, Gavan McCormack and David Bradbury. They regard Burchett as one of the most brilliant and independent 20th-century reporters, whose greatness is found in his unfailing humanity and, in McCormack’s words, “uncommon moral passion”, and in the courage it took to report world affairs during the Cold War from what is customarily called “the other side”. They regard Burchett’s famous report of the conditions in Hiroshima after the dropping of the first atomic bomb and his ten or more years of reporting the Vietnam War from behind communist lines as his greatest achievements. And they regard the fact that Burchett was stripped of his Australian passport by the Menzies government after the Korean War as one of the most shameful abuses of human rights in the history of Australia.
Burchett’s enemies include (or included) some of Australia’s most influential postwar anti-communist or conservative activists, journalists and intellectuals – BA Santamaria, Denis Warner, Frank Knopfelmacher and Peter Coleman, editor of Quadrant. In the 1980s I was associated with this group. We regarded Burchett as a lifelong communist propagandist, who shamed himself in particular by his defence of the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe; by his work on the enemy side during the Korean War where his journalism was directed and paid for by the Chinese government, where he visited prisoner-of-war camps holding Australian soldiers under atrocious conditions and where he was involved in the process of producing forced confessions from captured US air pilots on trumped-up charges of germ warfare; by his support for the Soviet Army’s brutal crushing of the anti-communist Hungarian uprising of 1956; and by his breathless enthusiasm for Maoist China in general and for the Great Leap Forward in particular, in which, it is now estimated, up to 40 million Chinese starved to death.
Manne then presents the evidence for Burchett’s involvement with the KGB, and concludes so:
The new documentary evidence about Burchett’s relations with the KGB places [his] supporters in an awkward position. They might resume their attack on the messenger of unpleasant tidings. They might claim that the document in the Bukovsky archive is a forgery. They might assert that there is nothing untoward in being a paid agent of a secret police force responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. They might simply try to ignore the evidence that has been presented in this article. Or they might, instead, re-think their position on the Burchett question.
(A version of the same column is also here.)