Murray Sayle

Murray William Sayle (1 January 1926 – 19 September 2010) was an Australian journalist, novelist and adventurer.

Born in Earlwood, a Sydney suburb, in 1926, Sayle was the son of a railway executive.

He attended the Canterbury Boys' High School before enrolling at the University of Sydney.

At university, Sayle studied psychology and worked for the student magazine, Honi Soit.

After leaving without taking a degree, Sayle worked as a newspaper reporter for The Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Cairns Post, and The Daily Mirror.

He also worked for six years as a radio reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Sayle recalled, "After a few days, I forget how many exactly, I saw a man looking like an intellectual of the 1930s, all leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. I walked up to him and said, 'Mr Philby?'" He then secured the first and only interview of Philby after his 1963 defection.

Sayle reported that he found Philby to be "a charming, entertaining man with a great sense of humor."

Sayle also described Philby as a man with an "iron head" for drink who appeared to be enjoying his new life and who denied being a traitor.

Philby told Sayle, "To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged."

A native of Sydney, Sayle moved to London in 1952.

In 1952, Sayle sailed for London in an attempt to save his relationship with singer Shirley Abicair, who had decided to move to Britain.

Sayle became a reporter for the tabloid, The People.

Working as an assistant to crime reporter Duncan Webb, Sayle was credited with the phrase, "I made my excuses and left."

Sayle left journalism in 1956 and supported himself by selling encyclopaedias in Germany while writing a novel about his experiences on Fleet Street titled A Crooked Sixpence. The novel was pulled from publication after threats of litigation by an individual upon whom one of the characters was based.

The novel was finally published more than 50 years later.

He was a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

During his long career he covered wars in Vietnam, Pakistan and the Middle East, accompanied an expedition on its climb of Mount Everest, sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean, was the first reporter to interview double agent Kim Philby after his defection to Russia, and trekked through the Bolivian jungle in search for Che Guevara.

Sayle worked in the early 1960s for Agence France Presse and returned to London in 1964 to work for The Sunday Times.

There, he developed a reputation as "the most forceful of Fleet Street's finest."

British reporter Godfrey Hodgson described Sayle as follows: "Large, shrewd and with many of the characteristics of an armoured vehicle, Murray had plenty of the 'rat-like cunning' advocated by his colleague Nick Tomalin when it came to that basic reportorial talent of getting oneself in the right place at the right time."

Sayle first made a name for himself working with The Sunday Times "Insight" team exposing the financial fraud of insurance businessman Emil Savundra.

Sayle reported that the "reserves" of Savundra's insurance company included securities that were forgeries.

Savundra's company collapsed in 1966, and he fled to his native Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka).

Also in 1966, Sayle gained attention when he chartered a plane to find the noted sailor Sir Francis Chichester, who had gone missing in a storm off Cape Horn during an attempt to become the first person to sail non-stop solo around the world.

Sayle became the newspaper's chief foreign correspondent, reporting on the Vietnam War, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, He received the Journalist of the Year award in the Grenada Press Awards for his reports from Vietnam.

In 1967, Sayle accompanied the Bolivian army as it tracked down Che Guevara in the South American jungle.

Although they did not meet up with Che, they found what Sayle described as "a strongly fortified base of Castro-type Communist guerrillas."

Sayle searched through the rubbish left behind at the base and found documentary evidence, including a photograph and asthma prescriptions, that enabled Sayle to report that Che had left Cuba and was fomenting Communist insurrection in South America.

Forty years later Sayle wrote for the first time about his Bolivian journey and the circumstances leading to Che's execution by the Bolivian army.

He made headlines again in late 1967 when he tracked down British double agent, Kim Philby, in Moscow.

After several days of staking out Moscow's foreign post office, he spotted Philby.

In 1968, he opened an eye-witness account of an all-night Viet Cong attack as follows:"'I was sound asleep in the guest hut of the province chief's compound when I was awakened by an exchange of automatic small arms fire. I picked out the pop-pop-pop of a Browning automatic rifle followed by the steady bang of American 30-calibre machine guns and then the unmistakable three-second bursts like silk being loudly torn of Chinese AK 47s. Fumbling out of a mosquito net I dragged my boots on. Then the plop and whistle of outgoing mortars started. A glance at my watch showed it was exactly 1 a m. There was an earsplitting crack and roar and a ram of debris—a 122 rocket going off. ...'"

In August 1968, Sayle was sent to Prague to cover the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Fellow journalist Harold Jackson has written of Sayle's ingenuity in getting their stories out of the country.

International telephone calls were blocked, and the Russians had seized the Prague telex exchange.

Sayle and Jackson discovered that not all of the telex connections were blocked and spent 13 hours dialling "the 10,000 possibilities" to find a working telex code.

He resigned from The Sunday Times in 1972 after the newspaper refused to publish an investigative piece he wrote about the Bloody Sunday shootings of 26 unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland.

Sayle moved to Hong Kong in 1972 and to Japan in 1975.

Altogether he remained in Japan for nearly 30 years, writing about that country for various publications, principally The Independent Magazine, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.