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'The higher you fly the harder you fall' is a term that fate will mockingly whisper in the ears of the intelligent and forward thinking. Every so often fate is right. Gareth Jones was a Welsh journalist and his sense of adventure left no room for cowardice. But his life was cut short. Far from home and travelling along life's journey to the Orient Gareth's spirit of youthful exuberance crossed paths with the hands of merciless Chinese bandits. A promising British writing talent was brutally and regrettably laid to rest in a prematurely prepared grave. Nigel Colley, Gareth's great nephew and editor of Gareth Jones' Website explained to UAnews "He was very forward with those that he met, and he used his relationship as Foreign Affairs Advisor to Lloyd George to open doors to meetings with some of the twentieth Century's biggest names, ranging from Mussolini to architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Jones was the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler after he was made Chancellor in February 1933; just four days before the burning-down of the Reichstag. Jones wrote definitive articles in the early thirties on the rise of Nazism, even predicting an eventual outbreak of war with Poland over the Danzig Corridor. However, it was only one month after that meeting with Adolf Hitler, that Gareth Jones would expose the reality of genocide in Ukraine. On his travels to Kharkiv he manifested both his sense of adventure and his determined quest for the truth. The wheels of Stalin's death machine had moved into gear. Any hint of a resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism was being methodically quashed. Private small holders were having their food and lands stolen in the collectivisation process, and although collectivisation was the term understood to mean 'to communally produce, collect and redistribute food' Stalin was busy producing and collecting his Ukrainian quota of human corpses that had died through his enforced starvation. Travel was restricted in Ukraine and strictly controlled by Stalin and his secret police - the OGPU (NKVD). Gareth Jones sensed that something was disastrously wrong, and eventually witnessed the truth of Stalin's dealings with Ukraine's peasantry. He travelled to Kharkiv and saw what really happened, but he did so without the neccessary travel permits. In the villages outside of Kharkiv he saw the effects of the famine gradually moving towards the most painful days. At it's peak Stalin's murder campaign by famine was to claim 25 000 victims a day. Nigel Colley confirmed: "Gareth 'got away' with flaunting the Soviet Secret Police ban on private travel within Ukraine in March 1933. Gareth Jones was extremely lucky that in one instance two of their local officials chose merely to personally escort him out of their area by train, simply because of the lack of any directive of what to do with a westerner, who shouldn’t have been there in the first place!" In the process of his observations Gareth took hand-written notes and recorded the testaments of starving Ukrainian villagers. One perfectly preserved hand-written document is on display at the Gareth Jones website. Nevertheless, due to Jones’ newspaper articles on the famine, which embarrassed Stalin's regime, Soviet Foreign Commissar Litvinov (whom Jones had just recently interviewed in Moscow) in a personal letter to Lloyd George, banned Jones from ever returning to the U.S.S.R. Therefore, Jones was now forced to look for new investigative horizons on the world political stage. Having decided to turn his attentions to the Orient, his direct, but somewhat naively Imperial approach, in a later interview in Tokyo, in 1935, with the Japanese War Minister, General Hayashi Senjuro, where he asked: ‘Some Chinese fear that Japan will attack North China. Has this fear any basis?’ did not do his survival chances much good, when Jones happened to stumble across covert Japanese territorial expansion of Northern China, some four months later. Nigel Colley added "Jones’ Soviet past may well have followed him, as he stayed in Tokyo with journalist, Günther Stein, Richard Sorge's (a major Soviet spy) radio operator - who would have readily informed the Japanese of his previous damaging expose in the Soviet Union, and in doing so, ultimately signed Gareth Jones’ death warrant." As a result of Gareth Jones’ premature death, Malcolm Muggeridge was in later years able to accept more of the journalistic glory surrounding Ukraine's horrific holocaust, but historically, at the time, Gareth, appeared to take the hardest and dirtiest of Walter Duranty's flak. See: Russians Hungry, but not Starving where Duranty clearly undermined Jones in The New York Times: "Since I talked to Mr. Jones I have made exhaustive inquiries about this alleged famine situation. I have inquired in Soviet commissariats and in foreign embassies with their network of consuls, and I have tabulated information from Britons working as specialists and from my personal connections, Russian and foreign....All of this seems to me to be more trustworthy information than I could get by a brief trip through any one area." In an open reply to The New York Times, Jones stingingly stood by his accusations in his rebuttal of Duranty: ‘May I in conclusion congratulate the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the U.S.S.R.? Moscow is not Russia, and the sight of well fed people there tends to hide the real Russia.’ [See full transcript at http://www.garethjones.org/soviet_articles/jones_replies.htm ] Nigel Colley, concluded: "it is our hope that one day Gareth may be remembered as a 'hero' of Ukraine, for his courage to publicly take on the might of Stalin's regime; which may well have eventually cost him his life." In the eyes of many Ukrainians Gareth Jones has already earned himself the status of nothing less than a Cult Hero. A Welshman in Ukraine is one matter: a Welshman taking the fight for Ukrainian social justice to Stalin and the rest of his world's gullible is already far greater than many Ukrainians were prepared do for their own nation at that time. Gareth Jones was a clean and honourable journalist, but he soon became surrounded by a developing world of modern, professional and most definitely dishonourable spies.
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