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Topic:
Hybrid War on the West
Country:
Russia
Issue:
Article ID:
39
Title:
Journalist Gareth Jones' 1935 murder examined by BBC Four
Author:
Neil Prior
Date:
July 5, 2012
Source:
BBC News
Reference:
Summary:
Quotes:
Gareth Jones, who was also a personal aide to former prime minister David Lloyd George, helped expose Stalin's "holodomor" policy of deliberate starvation... "he was also one of the first journalists to see that anti-Semitism was at the core of the Nazis, not just a thug fringe, and to recognise the potential damage which this would later cause." It seems as though Jones's attentions always lay in the direction of the Soviet Union. Backed by Lloyd George's credibility, he was able to travel throughout the USSR and met Russian politicians, while his language skills allowed him to speak to peasant farmers. However, his warm Soviet welcome would cool abruptly in March 1933, when Jones called a press conference in Berlin to reveal the findings of his two months undercover in starving Ukraine. The mainstream media poured scorn on Jones' account, and for a time he was reduced to obscurity. By mid-1933 he had returned home to Barry to live with his parents and he worked as a junior reporter on the Western Mail. "Until now all that was known for certain was that Muller was released on a highly spurious pretext about having been freed on parole in order to raise the ransom, and two days later Gareth was shot for no conceivable reason," he said. "Probably we'll never know for certain what happened. However our investigations have shown that the Chinese contact who loaned Jones and Muller a car to travel to Mongolia was definitely an NKVD agent, and there's strong evidence to suggest that Muller might also have been." Gareth Jones died a largely discredited figure, on the eve of his 30th birthday, the truth about Stalin's holodomor only coming to light years later. However, today he is revered as a national hero in the Ukraine..
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