Richard Gott, who Thursday resigned from his post as literary editor of The Guardian, denied a report in The Spectator that he had regularly accepted cash from KGB officials in the 1980s, but admitted traveling at the expense of the Soviet Union, Reuters reported.
Gott is not the first reporter accused of spying or receiving KGB money, but he is the first publicly to admit accepting Soviet sponsorship.
The Spectator, citing unidentified British and KGB intelligence officials, said Gott was recruited in 1983 and met regularly with Soviet spies in 1984. The weekly alleged that Gott accepted ?300 ($468) at each of his meetings with Soviet officials.
Gott, who gained fame for finding the body of revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara in 1967, wrote mostly about Latin America and had little access to secret information. But The Spectator said the KGB had plans to use him to recruit one of his relatives, a civil servant.
In his resignation letter, published Friday in The Guardian, Gott wrote that he only accepted free flights to Vienna, Athens and Nicosia to meet Soviet contacts. "I took red gold, even if it was only in the form of expenses for myself and my partner. That, in the circumstances, was culpable stupidity though at the time it seemed more like an enjoyable joke," he wrote.
Gott, 56, denied, however, that he had rendered a service to the Soviets: "I absolutely deny any suggestions that I gave the KGB any names of Guardian colleagues who might be recruited. Nor do I regard myself as having been recruited," Reuters cited him as writing.
The reporter said he regretted keeping his paper in the dark about the trips even after they had been discovered by British intelligence agents.
According to Chapman Pincher, a former Daily Express reporter who wrote a book about KGB infiltration in Britain, Gott may have been useful for the KGB even if he had no secrets to offer, just by being a conduit to other reporters and by publicizing the Soviet cause in his leftwing columns.
But Gott was far from the only, or most useful, journalist contacted by the KGB, Pincher said in a telephone interview.
"They cast their net very far," Pincher said. "They were interested in anyone who might help them in any way.
"Their standard practice was to try and get people to accept money," Pincher said, adding that the Soviets had a practice of using even such small donations as admitted by Gott to blackmail recipients later on.
Pincher said he had been approached as well, and had agreed to go along at the request of the British secret service. But he added that his editor intervened for fear that the newspaper's bureau in Moscow would run into trouble if the KGB found out.
Pincher said he knew of one journalist, who he described as "much more prominent" than Gott, who was forced to resign in the early 1970s when the British secret service revealed to his editor that he had worked actively for the KGB. At least two other British journalists were similarly exposed but not fired, he added.
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