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.
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.
[1] In 1952, Sayle sailed for London in an attempt to save his relationship with singer Shirley Abicair, who had decided to move to Britain.
Working as an assistant to crime reporter Duncan Webb, Sayle was credited with the phrase, "I made my excuses and left.
"[1] 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.
"[3] Sayle first made a name for himself working with The Sunday Times "Insight" team exposing the financial fraud of insurance businessman Emil Savundra.
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.
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.
Sayle claimed to be the publisher's personal representative and demanded that the man turn over funds that had not been remitted due to exchange restrictions.
Jackson recalled, "We left the building with huge packs of Czech crowns stashed in a linen bag rustled up from some cupboard.
[2][16] Sayle became embroiled in controversy over his investigative reporting into Bloody Sunday, a January 1972 incident in Derry, Northern Ireland, in which 26 unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders were shot, and 13 killed, by a regiment of paratroopers from the British Army.
In 1998, The Village Voice obtained a copy of the report and published an article titled "Bloody Sunday Times", accusing the newspaper's editor of helping to "bury compelling evidence that the British military planned in advance the infamous 1972 Londonderry attack.
He remained in Japan for 33 years, living with his second wife and their children (Matthew, Alexander, and Maindi) in a traditional wooden house in the village of Aikawa in Kanagawa Prefecture.
[citation needed] His most noted work during this time includes his reporting on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the 1983 disappearance of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.
In The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg remembered Sayle as follows:"Murray Sayle ... was a wonder—a journalist of Promethean gifts and Brobdingnagian accomplishment, a lightning-fast writer whose witty, energetic prose was flavored with a tasty mixture of brash informality and autodidactic erudition, a fearless adventurer in war zones and on the high seas, an instinctive (but sweet-natured!)
He was a nonstop talker whose verbal stream of consciousness was festooned with unexpected detours, impromptu theories, hilarious asides, and astounding anecdotes, some of them true.
[21] In the same year, he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Queen's Birthday Honours, for service to media and communications, particularly as a foreign and war correspondent.