[1] He returned to Sydney in 1952 joining the city's Daily Mirror as a crime reporter and covered Elizabeth II's visit to Australia in 1953/54.
[1] He left for London in November 1954 as foreign correspondent for the Daily Mirror, and then went to India as managing editor of the Bombay (Mumbai) literary magazine, Imprint.
[1] Over a three-year period from 1968 to 1971, Knightley prepared an investigative report about the development of thalidomide in Germany and its manufacture under licence by The Distillers Company in the UK without adequate testing.
In more than 30 years of writing about espionage, he met most of the spy chiefs of all the major intelligence services in the world, and interviewed numerous officers and agents from all sides during the Cold War and since.
In December 2010, he received media coverage for acting as a bail sureties provider for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
[citation needed] In 1997, Knightley was a judge for Canada's Lionel Gelber Prize, which honours the world's best book on international relations.