Richard Gott

Richard Willoughby Gott (born 28 October 1938, Aston Tirrold, England) 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, although he admitted taking money from the KGB.

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 a by-election in Kingston upon Hull North 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.

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