Richard Willoughby Gott is a British journalist and historian. A former Latin America correspondent and features editor for the British newspaper The Guardian, he is known for his radical politics and a connection to Che Guevara. He resigned from The Guardian in 1994 after claims that he had been a Soviet 'agent of influence', a tag Gott denied.
Media career
Gott studied history at Oxford University and worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In the 1960s he worked at the University of Chile, where he wrote Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. In January 1966, Gott was a candidate in the 1966 Kingston upon Hull North by-election for the 'Radical Alliance', running on a platform which stressed opposition to the Vietnam War; he polled only 253 votes. In November 1963, working as a freelance journalist for The Guardian in Cuba, Gott was invited to a celebration of the revolution party at the Soviet Union embassy in Havana. During the evening, a group of invited journalists who were chatting in the garden were joined by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara for a few hours, who answered their questions. In Bolivia in 1967, Gott identified Guevara's dead body after the failure of Guevara's Bolivian campaign. He was the only one in the country who had met Guevara. In 1981 the BBC's Alasdair Milne and Aubrey Singer sought to appoint Gott to the position of editor of its cultural magazine, The Listener, but Gott failed to obtain security clearance from MI5 and Russell Twisk was appointed instead. Gott was then appointed features editor for The Guardian.
In 1994, Gott admitted KGB contacts beginning in 1964, and to having taken Soviet gifts, which he called "red gold". One of his controllers was Igor Titov, who was expelled by the UK in 1983 for "activities incompatible with his diplomatic status", but left while he denied being a spy.
Resignation
After his period as features editor, Gott became literary editor of The Guardian, but resigned from the latter post in December 1994 after it was alleged in The Spectator that he had been an "agent of influence" for the KGB, claims which he rejected, arguing that "Like many other journalists, diplomats and politicians, I lunched with Russians during the cold war". He asserted that his resignation was "a debt of honour to my paper, not an admission of guilt", because his failure to inform his editor of three trips abroad to meet with KGB officials at their expense had caused embarrassment to the paper during its investigation of Jonathan Aitken. The source of the allegation that he had been an agent was KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky. In his resignation letter Gott admitted: "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". One issue was whether during the 1980s, the KGB, would have thought Gott's information worth £10,000. Phillip Knightley, biographer of the KGB agent Kim Philby, highlighted the limited value of outsider Gott as compared to insider Aldrich Ames concluding that Gott would have been lucky to get his bus fare back. Rupert Allason pointed out valuable activities such as talent-spotting and finding people who did have highly classified access.
