"Cambodia has become a worker-peasant-soldier state" Wilfred Burchett

Wilfred Burchett
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Burchett visited several POW camps in China and North Korea, describing them as "holiday resorts in Switzerland". His actions during these visits, including allegations that he had personally been involved in interrogations of POWs, caused a great deal of trouble for him in later years.
In 1956, Burchett arrived in Moscow as a correspondent with the National Guardian Newspaper, an American Communist weekly.
Burchett's special relationship with the government of North Vietnam gave him unprecedented access, and Hanoi consulted him several times to verify the sympathies of journalists seeking visas from Hanoi.
In 1975 and 1976, Burchett made a number of dispatches from Cambodia praising the government of Pol Pot. In an October 14th 1976 article for the Guardian, he wrote that "Cambodia has become a worker-peasant-soldier state" whose new constitution "guarantees that everyone has the right to work and a fair standard of living, it is one of the most democratic and revolutionary constitutions in existence anywhere". After the Vietnamese declared war on Cambodia in 1979, he quickly changed his opinion on Pol Pot's government.
KGB defector Yuri Krotkov testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in November 1969 that Burchett had supplied information to the KGB, and that he worked for Hanoi and Beijing as an agent. Krotkov, Burchett's KGB control officer, also reported that Burchett was a secret member of the Communist Party of Australia. Krotkov testified that Burchett had proposed a "special relationship" with the Soviets at their first meeting in Berlin in 1947. Krotkov's testimony on Burchett was corroborated by two defectors from North Vietnam, Bui Cong Tuong and Ming Trung. Trung and Tuong disappeared a short time later, believed murdered on orders from Hanoi.