[1] He was the European Community and Brussels correspondent for both The Washington Post and Newsweek between 1967 and 1975, while also contributing to The Economist and the Financial Times.
In 1988, he made an extended appearance on the TV discussion programme After Dark, alongside (among others) Harold Musgrove, Hilary Wainwright and George Brumwell, discussing his book Blacklist: The Inside Story of Political Vetting, co-written with Mark Hollingsworth.
That same year he was prevented initially by a court injunction from reporting the contents of Spycatcher (1987), the memoirs of Peter Wright, a former MI5 agent.
His play, Half the Picture, based on the inquiry, received a 1994 Time Out Drama, Comedy and Dance award for its "brave initiative".
In 2010, with fellow Guardian journalist Ian Cobain, he was awarded a Human Rights Campaign of the Year Award from Liberty for their "investigation into Britain's complicity in the use of torture" by the United States against detainees at their facility at Guantanamo Bay and at black sites.