Comrade Burchett was a party hack
Peter Kelly
January 07, 2006
theaustralian.news.com.au^28737,00.html
FOLLOWING the collapse 16 years ago of the Soviet Union and of the communist world it led, Western communist parties eventually disbanded and former party members and supporters were left high and dry.
The enormous human cost of communism has scarcely registered in Western consciousness, including in Australia.
The estimated victims in each country are mind-boggling: USSR, 20 million deaths; China, 65 million; Vietnam, one million; North Korea, two million; Cambodia, two million; Eastern Europe, one million; Latin America, 150,000; Africa, 1.7 million; Afghanistan, 1.5 million. The international communist movement and parties not in power: about 10,000.
But there is an emerging nostalgia among former party members and supporters, apparent in recent efforts to rehabilitate communism. This is also happening in Australia and is reflected in the enthusiastic and nostalgic reception of a recently published book: Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett. Co-editor of this "unabridged" book is son George Burchett.
Burchett was not a rebel journalist -- he was a faithful, conformist communist who never went against the party line despite claiming to be independent. He was one of the most famous and controversial Australian journalists of the Cold War, whose writing supported regimes which are notorious for killing. He spent the greater part of his life reporting from communist countries. During two wars in which Australian troops fought and were killed - Korea and Vietnam - Burchett worked on the other side and reported from behind the enemy's lines with its support and agreement. In both of these wars he was paid by those enemies, China and North Vietnam respectively. He died in then communist Bulgaria in 1983 at the age of 72.
As with the regimes he supported, the truth about Burchett has to be told and remembered. This is how Australian war correspondent, the late Pat Burgess, described the recollections of captured UN soldier Derek Kinne about Comrade Wilfred Burchett during the Korean war in his book Warco: Australian Reporters At War:
"We'd been in the Chongsam South camp, and were told Wilfred Burchett was going to give us a lecture in the football field. We all marched up, the British in front and the Americans behind. There were about 600 Brits and 800 Americans. A lot of the British carried little nooses and about 60 called out when he started his lecture, 'You'll hang, you bastard'. And then others took up the chorus and there were hundreds singing out, 'You'll hang, you bastard'. And then some of the Americans took off their webbing belts and made nooses of them and began swinging them, too.
"Burchett said the peace talks had broken down and we were just the lackeys of the Wall Street warmongers. And the more he talked, the angrier the people got and the more nooses came out. Then he really got pissed off and he said, 'OK, so you think that when the Americans come this way you'll be liberated. But I've got news for you, you won't, you'll go that way'. He meant into Manchuria.
"Then he started to put his papers together. I was in the front row and I was pretty furious, myself. I went around to him and asked him if he was biased. And he said he wasn't. Then I asked him why his side didn't bring in some dental treatment; prisoners were having their teeth extracted with ordinary pliers. 'And another thing,' I said, 'the POWs are dying like flies. The first day I was in this camp 39men went to Boot Hill'."
Later, Kinne said, he had been taken to company headquarters and the Chinese interrogators told him he had been very hostile to Burchett: "They took me into a room with my hands handcuffed behind my back. They tied a rope around the wrists at the back and pulled it down tight until just my toes were on the ground. Then they started to beat me all over with planks and rifle butts. They put a noose around my neck and the other end in a noose around my leg. So that if I put my leg down, the rope pulled down from the beam and strangled me. They said, 'Now, you wanted to hang Comrade Burchett, so now, if you let your leg go, you hang and it is your own fault'.
"So I said to myself: 'If I'm going to hang I'm going to hang all at once, not little by little'. So I pulled my leg down real fast, figuring to strangle myself. But they must have been watching because they rushed in and said, 'Confess'. So I said, 'Alright, I confess'."
Kinne was a British Northumberland Fusilier. He was later awarded the George Cross, ranking second only to the Victoria Cross, for bravery displayed as a POW in Korea. His torture, on Burchett's behalf, occurred in June 1952 in a prisoner-of-war camp where captured UN troops were imprisoned. UN troops were defending South Korea after an invasion by 90,000 North Korean troops and 150 Soviet T34 tanks on June 1950.
Burchett described the POW prisons as being like "Swiss holiday camps". In Korea, 58 per cent of allied POWs died in captivity. "The Korean and Chinese POW camps were no holiday resorts," Burgess said. "In World War II, of the American Army reported missing in action, 70 per cent came back as former prisoners of war, and 3 per cent died in captivity. In Korea, 30 per cent survived as prisoners of war and 60 per cent died behind enemy lines." Australian troops, as part of the UN force in Korea, suffered 339 dead, 1216 wounded and 29 were captured and became POWs, one dying in captivity, according to the Australian War Memorial.
Retired brigadier Phillip Greville, of Helensvale in Queensland, himself a POW in Korea for "12 months and seven days", says: "Burchett's aim was to undermine the morale of UN prisoners, hoping to persuade Australian servicemen and their allies, already under great pressure from their captors, to betray their nation's trust. Soldiers who fought in Korea, particularly those who were prisoners of war, see Burchett as a man who threw his lot in with the Chinese communist forces. Chinese publications at the time made it quite clear that Burchett was an important figure in presenting the so-called confessions of US fliers to an international scientific commission set up by the Soviet Bloc to investigate the evidence on which germ warfare allegations [against the US] were based. Those fliers have separately described in detail how Burchett edited their forced confessions."
In Korea, he was paid by the Chinese and was under their control and direction. His job was to manage the Western media for the Chinese. In the Vietnam war, he was employed by the North Vietnamese government. He was in Hanoi from 1954-1956 and then went to Moscow until the early 1960s. He returned to North Vietnam in 1962. According to the War Memorial, Australia had 49,301 defence personnel engaged in the war against North Vietnam. Of these, 520 were killed (including four missing) and 2398 troops were wounded.
Burchett, in the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe, represented the London Daily Express in Berlin. He also worked for The Times of London. Later, when he was working for, and being paid by, communist governments, he represented and wrote for communist newspapers such as the London Daily Worker and so-called left-wing papers such as the French Ce Soir and L'Humanite. They did not pay him because he was already being paid. While working for the Daily Express, he became famous due to being credited as the first Western journalist to visit and report on the devastation of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Ironically, although he displayed great enterprise, courage and daring in getting to Hiroshima before any other Western journalist, none of the report published in the Daily Express was written by him, but he shared the by-line by agreement with another generous Express journalist, Henry Keys. This is recounted in Burgess's book.
Burchett masqueraded, and was regarded by many Australians, as an independent radical journalist, denying he was attached to any organisation. He lived this lie throughout his career. There seems to have been a 50-year conspiracy of silence surrounding the fact that Burchett was a member of the former Communist Party of Australia, since disbanded. Burchett himself had always publicly denied his party membership.
The theme of Burchett as a radical idealist and socialist has been cultivated by party officials, their sympathisers and compliant and complicit journalists, along with some ALP members, including MPs. Within communist parties around the world, secret members deceived people that their views were their own. Burchett told the NSW Supreme Court in 1974 during his failed defamation case against senator Jack Kane, under oath: "My feeling is, it is reprehensible for a journalist to work for any organisation, not only reprehensible, but it is suicide, if it is political. Any principle would be gone immediately." Also under oath, he testified: "Were you ever a member of the Australian Communist Party?"
"No." And later: "During that period [of the Korean War] were you getting paid by the Chinese Government?"
"Certainly not."
"Were you doing any work for the Chinese Government?"
"Certainly not."
He had perjured himself three times at least.
In The Age on March 16, 1970, Burchett is quoted as saying: "There is no one in the wide world that can tell me where to go and what to write, no editor or publisher, no political organisation, no government."
On October 12, 1969, in a letter to his brother, Burchett wrote: "Thank goodness I have been able to maintain my independence throughout all these years, awfully difficult from all viewpoints though it was. To be able to speak to Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Cambodians as a friend but completely independent, enables me to do and say things others may not. But now and again this yields positive results."
Former Australian ambassador to the US and the Soviet Union, and later secretary of Australia's then department of external affairs, Keith Waller, told a famous Australian correspondent, Denis Warner: "Traitor? Communist? Rubbish. He's a woolly minded idealist. He's too muddled-headed to be a communist." Warner himself writes of Burchett in his 1997 memoirs, Not Always On Horseback: "Certainly, he was not a Soviet spy in the accepted sense of the word. He did not traffic in state secrets like Philby, Burgess and Maclean. My own guess is that especially for the part he played in the germ warfare campaign [in Korea], he will be remembered by many as one of the more remarkable agents of influence of the times but by his Australian and other admirers as a folk hero."
According to the Ben Kiernan-edited book Burchett: Reporting The Other Side of the World 1939-1983: "When interviewed about Burchett by security officers in November 1953, Warner was full of praise for Burchett's courage and journalistic ability, but thought he had been a communist 'since at least 1944'."
Harrison E. Salisbury, The New York Times's famous correspondent, wrote in his introduction to Burchett's autobiography At the Barricades, published in 1981, two years before Burchett died: "Wilfred Burchett is a man who defies classification. Burchett, thus, can be seen as sui generis [in a class by itself, or unique], a radical who moves through a changing milieu, lending his sympathy to one cause after another, not because of some Marxist doctrine but because he believes in the underdog whatever the continent, whatever the colour, whatever the creed. He is, in short, the iconoclast of contemporary radicalism."
War correspondent and so-called radical journalist John Pilger loyally joined the choir in the preface to Kiernan's book, where he writes: "It was against such a background [of thuggish employers] that his radicalism was born; I prefer the word radicalism to socialism, for I believe Wilfred was, above all, a peculiarly Australian radical."
David McKnight, teacher in journalism, former Fairfax journalist, spokesman for the former CPA and one-time journalist on the communist Tribune, in his 1994 book, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, describes Burchett as "the left-wing journalist".
He was much more than that. I interviewed Hungarian writer Tibor Meray in Paris in 1997 when Brisbane's The Courier-Mail was investigating former communist-government historical archives involving Australian history during the Cold War. Meray, who was awarded the Legion D'Honneur by the French government, was a communist who turned against the Soviet Union during the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Meray previously worked as the cultural writer on the main communist party Hungarian newspaper, Szabad Nep. He was in Korea reporting on the war for his paper. He has written an unpublished manuscript of his experiences with Burchett in North Korea with the Chinese and North Korean armies.
Meray believes there is no difference between journalist and propagandist in communist ideology and practice. Journalists have a duty to propagate the message of the party. Communist governments place their press units in propaganda departments. To communists, Meray says non-communist journalists are also propagandists of the "bourgeois ideologies", whether they like it or not.
Burchett over-reached when he sued Kane for $1 million for defamation, apparently in the hope of obtaining big sums from newspapers for defamation after knocking over Kane. But Kane, although not rich, was resolved. He had published a short article on Burchett in the Democratic Labor Party magazine Focus, summarising a speech read into the Senate Hansard recounting evidence to US senators about Burchett given by a KGB "co-opted" agent who had defected from the Soviet Union after serving it for 17 years.
The agent, Yuri Krotkov, had defected to the British in 1963. He said he first met Burchett in 1947. He told how Burchett had telephoned him in 1956 and they had met in a Moscow restaurant. "[Burchett] openly told me he is a member of the Australian Communist Party but for the benefit of the party he is on the illegal underground position," he said. Burchett had claimed close relationships with Ho Chi Minh and Chou [Zhou] En-Lai and told Krotkov he wanted a job in Moscow. Eventually the KGB gave him "the good flat and, well, I guess necessary money", Krotkov said. "I know that Burchett had a close relation with the boss of the KGB special department which is responsible for the whole foreign correspondents in Moscow."
With the involvement of Australian troops in the war in South Vietnam, Burchett's proselytising on behalf of the North Vietnamese government became more acceptable to those who opposed Australia's intervention. The uneasy and long-running anti-communist "coalition" between the non-Communist Left and the political Right "was broken for the first time", it's been said, in Australia by the involvement of Australian troops in the war in Vietnam. His portrayal of the war as a people's liberation and "civil war" became fashionable, especially among journalists.
In A Nation at War: The official history of Australia's involvement in Southeast Asian conflicts during 1948-1975, published by the Australian War Memorial, Peter Edwards writes of Burchett: "Although he always denied that he was a communist, he was an extraordinarily effective propagandist for their cause. In that sense he may have had more influence over the course of the war than any other Australian, except perhaps [prime minister] Robert Menzies."
In late 1996, The Courier-Mail asked Peter Hruby, then of Curtin University, through me to mine the former Czechoslovak Republic's communist government's archives in Prague. In them, Hruby found several documents which, taken together, prove conclusively that Burchett was an "illegal," or secret, member of the CPA. It is this writer's estimate that he probably had been since at least 1936, when he accepted a job with the Soviet Union's travel bureau in London, Intourist. His job didn't last for long because, as Kane wrote in his memoirs, the British government suspected Intourist was being used for espionage purposes and curtailed travel to the Soviet Union.
One document found by Hruby in the State Central Archive in Prague was a letter written by Burchett to Ernie Thornton, former general secretary of the Federated Ironworkers' Association (union) of Australia, who was stationed in Beijing at the time as the Australian representative of the Soviet-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions. In Soviet and communist party terms, it was a very important position. It was a detailed and fluent letter, reproduced here in full, in which Burchett sought help in clearing his name against accusations against him in the communist world:
"Room 314,
Peking Hotel,
13/7/51.
"Dear Comrade Thornton,
"If you have a chance during your forthcoming visit to Europe to clear up the following points for me, I would be very glad.
"(a) Former chief of Telepress in Prague, Jaks circulated reports to all Telepress correspondents in Europe and in America that I was a British agent.
"(b) Dr Popper of the Press Dept Ministry of Information in Prague informed John Rogers [sic, Rodgers] of the Australian-Soviet Friendship Association that I was an American agent.
"(c) In Sofia reports emanating from Prague said that I had (1) been expelled from the Australian Communist Party in 1939 for opposing the Soviet-German non-aggression pact. (b) I was expelled by the Soviet authorities from Berlin. (c) I was a British agent.
"(d) As a result of the above, when I married in Sofia, my wife [Vessa, a Bulgarian] was suspended from the Bulgarian Communist Party. She was refused permission to accompany me abroad.
"Jaks had personal reasons for wishing to discredit me as he owed me some money, for service rendered to Telepress and also for material handled by him from Kosmos Feature Service. There may have been political reasons also as a number of Telepress agents protected by Jaks were later proven to be Titoists and Trostkyites.
"What Dr Popper's motives could be I don't know. I helped him in his work in Berlin as far as I could. Certainly he knows I mixed with the highest British and American officials in Berlin as was inevitable in my job as a Daily Express correspondent. I had the added incentive of wanting to win their confidence as I was then collecting material for my book Cold War in Germany, (published in Berlin, Budapest, by the Communist Party publishing house in Paris, being translated for publication in Sofia, Peking and Prague).
"All the charges except those of being an American or British agent have been clearly disproven. Far from opposing the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, I even managed to get an article in the bourgeois press in Australia supporting it. I have never been expelled nor even disciplined by the ACP. I was not, nor could have been, expelled by the Russians from Berlin. And, in fact, long after the report reached Sofia, I was actually in Berlin and had the closest relations with Soviet colleagues in the Sovinform Buro. It was the latter who arranged the publication of my book Sonnenaufgang Uber Asien in the Soviet Sector of Berlin, after the time I was supposed to have been expelled.
"There remains the charge that I was [presumably still am] a British or American agent. I cannot disprove such a general charge, but would like some evidence to be produced. I lived in Budapest for 18 months and was asked to stay longer. I visited Sofia four times for about two months each visit. In those two capitals it has been made clear to me that there is not one bad fact known about me.
"What is it that Dr Popper had up his sleeve which is unknown to responsible authorities in other countries? I lived for 3 1/2 years in Berlin and apparently I am not in disgrace there as they publish my books and just recently have asked me to become a regular contributor to the official ADN [East German news agency] feature service. Only in Prague, where I have never worked, did these most harmful rumours originate. I think it is time for a clarification. If the Czech authorities have such information about me, it should be put at the disposal of the Chinese authorities and the Australian party. I can be dealt with, extradited to Prague and charged. This could have been done also while I was 1 1/2 years in Budapest. But instead of that a whispering campaign without one solid fact has upset my life and that of my wife, who has been a loyal worker in the Bulgarian CP or the illegal youth league since the age of 16.
"Needless to say our only wish on getting married was to serve the party together by combining our talents and using them where-ever they were needed.
"With comradely greetings,
"W.G. Burchett"
Thornton soon after wrote, in part:
"Hotel Pariz, Prague, 6.8.1951.
"To the international department of CPCZ [Czechoslovakian communist party].
"Esteemed comrades, [in Czech]
"Please, kindly send to the Communist Party of Bulgaria the enclosed confirmation, that we just received from the Australian party.
"I talked about this with one of your comrades in Hotel Pariz and I think that by mistake I mentioned the Rumanian party. However, it is the Bulgarian party that requests this confirmation.
"Comradely yours,
"E. Thornton"
Another document reads: [in Czech]
"The Communist Party of Australia, Central Committee,
"40 Market Street, Sydney,
"18.6.1951.
"Dear Comrade,
"We obtained a request to confirm the status of comrade Wilfred Burchette [sic]. The party does not issue recommendations except in extraordinary circumstances and does not possess any form of a recommendation nor a seal that it could [be attached] to documents of that kind. In the case in question, comrade Burchette [sic] has the trust of the Australian party. His work is considered to be satisfactory and [we] have no reason to doubt his loyalty. The situation of his wife is known to us and we would be grateful for any help that would be offered to him in this connection. Since the entry into the party she has been its member without interruption.
"R. Dixon, chairman.
L.L. Sharkey, secretary-general.
Lance Sharkey was convicted of sedition and served about a year of a three-year sentence after being prosecuted by the Chifley government in the 1940s.
In 1955, Burchett lost his Australian passport, or it was stolen, in North Vietnam. In spite of support for his being issued with a new one from among many other respectable and influential people, including Waller, the then Australian Coalition government refused to issue him with a new one. In one of its first acts, the Whitlam Labor government eagerly restored his passport in 1972.
However, not having a passport did not in itself prevent him from returning to Australia. Burchett could not be prosecuted for treason for his actions in Korea under the existing Australian laws. Greville blames successive coalition governments for not altering the laws after the war in Korea so that Burchett's similar duplicitous behaviour in working for the North Vietnamese government could have been dealt with appropriately.
Peter Kelly is a freelance journalist based in NSW. He went with Jack Kane to the US in 1974 to help him with research and the location of US former prisoners of war in Korea during Burchett's unsuccessful defamation case against Kane. |
