A tribute: John Rettie

John Rettie, who has died aged 83, was among the last of those gentleman foreign reporters who deployed their linguistic skills and historical understanding to illuminate the countries in which they were stationed.

Writing for nearly half a century, mostly for the Guardian and Reuters, and broadcasting for the BBC World Service, Rettie was a radical, fiercely independent correspondent in several parts of the world - notably the Soviet Union and Latin America, but also Finland, Mexico, Sri Lanka and India. In 1954, he became one of the handful of foreign correspondents in Moscow.

Two years later, he brought from the Soviet capital the details of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin, a scoop of which he remained justly proud. Rettie had been approached by a Soviet contact, Kostya Orlov, who gave him a full account of what had been said. One detail dealt with the unrest the speech had caused, particularly in Georgia. Another gave Khrushchev's description of how Stalin used to humiliate his circle. "Once he turned to me," Khrushchev had declared, "and said: 'Oi, you, khokhol, dance the gopak.' So I danced." Khokhol is a derogatory term for a Ukrainian, while the gopak is an intricate dance, in the execution of which the portly Khrushchev would have looked ridiculous.

Was Orlov an agent provocateur, as some of Rettie's colleagues believed, or controlled by the KGB? Could Reuters put out a story that had a single, rather dubious, source? Rettie and his Reuters boss, Sidney Weiland, concluded that they had to believe the story. Rettie left for Stockholm the next day with his notebooks, and Reuters published his anonymous story with a Bonn dateline. It was worldwide front-page news. Years later, he concluded that Khrushchev had authorised the leak, a probability vouched for by Sergo Mikoyan, son of the formidable Anastas Mikoyan and Khrushchev's son, Sergei. Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where his father and grandfather had owned and managed tea estates, Rettie went to the Yorkshire Dales aged four: his mother's family owned farms in Coverdale. He was educated at Rugby school, and went to Canada to train as an RAF flier, but this was cut short by the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, so he enrolled in the services' Cambridge Russian language course, as the cold war got under way.

He then took a degree in Russian and Spanish at Peterhouse, Cambridge, beginning a lifelong fascination with language and linguistics.

They were wrong. Rettie lived alone and rarely ventured south, but recruited a legion of new friends among Yorkshire's farmers, publicans, journalists, gamekeepers, beaters and breadmakers, and organised regular Yorkshire visits for Ukrainian children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. His deep pessimism about the approaching environmental crisis was reflected in his perennial remark (inherited from his friend the late Harry Riley) that "t'human race has outlived its usefulness", yet this invariably led on to another, much-favoured request to "open another bottle!"

He remained on friendly terms with his two wives, and is survived by them, his son and daughter from his second marriage, and his beloved sister.

(John Rettie: Foreign correspondent who broke the news of Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin)

- The Guardian, UK