Honouring a Truth Teller

By Lubomyr Luciuk

Gareth Jones was born in Barry, Wales and murdered in Mongolia. It was a short life – he was killed on the eve of his 30th birthday – but the span graced to Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones was used well.

In 1929, he secured a degree in French from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, then another in Medieval and Modern Languages from Cambridge. Fluent in French, Welsh, English, German and Russian, he found employment as a private secretary for foreign affairs to the Right Honourable Lloyd George, the First World War leader and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Interested in journalism, Jones moved to the Wall Street offices of Dr Ivy Lee’s public relations firm, in 1931. That year he made his second trip to the USSR. He met many Soviet boosters, from Maurice Hindus to Louis Fischer to Walter Duranty. They even secured an interview with Lenin’s widow.

The Depression forced Jones back home, where he found employment with Lloyd George, later with The Western Mail.  Jones’ curiosity led him to interview Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Frank Lloyd Wright, Sir Bernard Pares, Upton Sinclair, Walter Lippman and William Randolph Hearst, to list but a few. In February, 1933, he was the first non-Nazi journalist invited to fly with the Fuhrer, in Chancellor Hitler’s plane, the Richtoffen.

From Germany he went to “the home of Bolshevism,” arriving in Moscow on March 6, 1933, that evening meeting Malcolm Muggeridge. Then, surreptitiously, he set out for Kharkiv, intent on learning the truth of rumours about a great famine. He tramped through the Ukrainian countryside, finding widespread hunger. In his diary, he recorded a villager saying: “We are dying of hunger. In the old days we fed the world. Now they have taken all we had away from us…They are killing us.”

Jones returned to Berlin in March, filing numerous articles about the famine, provoking a near-immediate riposte from Duranty, in The New York Times on March 31, “Russians Hungry, but Not Starving.” Belittling Jones, Duranty justified the forced collectivization of agriculture with the infamous prescription: “to put it brutally, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Dissimulating further, he wrote” “there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” Duranty never admitted how, on September 26, 1933, he had called in at the British Embassy, stating that “as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.” Nevertheless, he got the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for his “objective reporting” about the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Jones was targeted. The Soviets declared him a persona non grata, and he was placed on the secret police’s watch list. Like Muggeridge, he was censured and scorned. Writing to Jones, Muggeridge agreed that Duranty was, “a plain crook,” and complained of how his own famine articles were censored by the Manchester Guardian. Writing to that newspaper Muggeridge said: “You don’t want to know what is going on in Russia, and you don’t want your readers to know either; if the Metrovick [Metropolitan-Vickers Trial] people had been Jews or Negroes, your righteous indignation would have been unbounded. You’d have published photographs of their lacerated backsides….You refuse to publish the truth about their treatment or the general facts which make that truth significant – and this when the MG is packed with stories of what the Nazis are doing to the Jews and the Poles to the Ukrainian and Silesian minorities.”

Banned from the USSR, Jones turned his attentions to Asia and ended up in Manchukuo where, near Kalgan, he met his end on August 12, 1935, having been kidnapped by Chinese bandits 16 days earlier. Jones died after sustaining one bullet to the head, two to the chest.

Why Jones was murdered remains controversial. Was it because he was an eyewitness to the genocidal Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor? Ubeknownst to him, as he made his way from Japan to Inner Mongolia, he was surrounded by Soviet agents. He shared an apartment in Tokyo with Gunther Stein, not knowing it was used for secret wireless broadcasts to Moscow by the Soviet spy, Richard Sorge. When Jones set out on his last expedition he traveled in a car provided by a Mr. Purpis, who ran a fur trading company, a cover for communist espionage activities. Their driver disappeared after the ambush, while Dr. Herbert Muller, his traveling companion, was released unharmed. The bandits were then tracked down, some killed, the others scattered, the immediate perpetrators thus lost to history.

Perhaps Gareth Jones was just ill-fated. Or maybe he fell victim to assassination, being a man who, as Lloyd George wrote, “knew too much of what was going on.” We may never find out. What is indisputable is that Jones wrote truthfully about the Holodomor, while Duranty did not. For that reason a trilingual Welsh-Ukrainian-English plaque was unveiled at the University of Wales on May 2. It hallows the memory of an honest reporter, who probably paid for his commitment to his calling with his life. Much better, I say, to honour the truth teller than the Prize-winning liar.

Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada