After being commissioned, he served in France, the Western Desert, Burma and the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) raising to the rank of major.
He initially believed that he and other British troops had arrived in Surabaya to restore order and return the city to normalcry, but after learning that Brigadier AWS Mallaby had been murdered by Indonesian militants, he "took no chances.
He made his mark covering Indian independence in 1947, creating a furore in Britain and India with graphic eyewitness accounts of communal massacres in the Punjab.
He was close to Johnson, sometimes staying up late, drinking whisky in the Oval Office, and he was a guest at the president's Texas ranch.
Shaken awake, he described his vivid dream in which he fought back a hostile mob with his portable typewriter, desperately trying to protect presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
Despite the difficulties of running a newspaper in the 1970s, he nurtured many notable talents, including Robert Fisk, Peter Hennessy and Paul Vallely.
In 1979, he oversaw the joint interviews, in The Times boardroom, with Sir Anthony Blunt after he was unmasked as the Fifth Man in the Cambridge Soviet spy ring.
When Rupert Murdoch acquired the paper, Heren was the staff choice as Rees-Mogg's successor, but was passed over in favour of Harold Evans.
[2] Heren was one of a dwindling number of true foreign correspondents, able to spend years at their posts, embedded in the local cultures, and rarely able to return 'home'.
Although, as the man from The Times, he was able to relay the ideas and actions of the powerful to the world, his heart was really in reporting how the news affected ordinary people.