Richard Gott, former Guardian journalist and historian, dies aged 87

The former Guardian journalist and historian Richard Gott has died aged 87.

- Mark Brown

Gott's career at the Guardian began in 1964 and included spells as foreign correspondent, leader writer, features editor and literary editor. He is remembered as one of the most informed of all commentators on Latin American affairs - a dashing, charismatic figure of the left who met Che Guevara in 1963 and was in Bolivia on the day the Cuban revolutionary was executed by US-backed forces in 1967. Gott was the only journalist able to identify the body on display.

Gott resigned from the Guardian in 1994 after the Spectator magazine accused him of being a paid KGB informer. The claim was based on information provided by the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky. Gott denied the accusations, seeing it as a "bizarre revival of the McCarthyism of the 1950s".

But Gott also, in his resignation letter, admitted he had accepted Soviet-paid trips to Vienna, Athens and Nicosia. He acknowledged taking "red gold, even if it was only in the form of expenses".