He enlisted in the British Indian Army on leaving school, serving in Intelligence in the North-West Frontier from 1944 to 1948 and rising to acting brigade major in the Royal Garhwal Rifles at the age of 22.

Later he joined Time-Life as Paris correspondent, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s often covered the fighting in the Congo, the civil war in Lebanon as well as the Indo-Chinese border clashes of 1962.

Operating from Hong Kong as Asia bureau chief, Behr wrote on China's Cultural Revolution, secured an interview with Mao Zedong and reported from Vietnam.

Behr turned gradually from a career in war reporting to writing books and making television documentaries, including award-winning programmes on India, Ireland and the Kennedy family.

In his book Hirohito: Behind the Myth Behr went into the debate about what the emperor knew about war preparations, about the rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march, the Burma railway and Changi prison.

Behr's case was that Hirohito knew as long ago as 1931 - when his troops took control of Manchuria in the putsch that became known as the Mukden Incident - what his military chiefs were doing; that he encouraged it; and that he was fully aware of their preparations for the Second World War.

He was the author (with Sydney Liu) of The Thirty-Sixth Way: A Personal Account of Imprisonment and Escape from Red China (1969), wrote a book on the musical Les Misèrables and collaborated on another about the making of Miss Saigon.