Claudia Wright (17 June 1934 – 29 January 2005) was an Australian journalist, noted for highlighting the cause of feminism, and being one of the first journalists to interview Middle Eastern leaders in the 1970s.
Early years and working in Bendigo
Claudia Wright was born in Bendigo, June 17, 1934. Of poor, multicultural stock (her grandmother was Chinese), she attended school in Bendigo and worked her way up as a journalist, her first foothold being a job with the local Bendigo paper. She met her husband, Michael in Bendigo.
Early career
After leaving Bendigo, Wright joined the Melbourne Herald, working on the paper's social and fashion columns. She eventually was promoted to the position of editor of the Women's Section. Wright used the position to critique some of the hypocrisies and corruption of some the social set, especially the vice-regal pretensions of the Government House social scene. It gave her the opportunity to get to know the members at the Melbourne Cup, and despite her published critiques, she became good friends with many of them, even where there were political differences. She was moved out of the position by Rupert Murdoch, and became his lifelong critic.
Work at 3AW and the 1970s
She moved to Melbourne in the 1950s initially becoming a columnist for The Australian Women's Weekly.
After leaving The Herald, Wright moved on to a popular morning slot with long running hosts Ormsby Wilkins and Norman Banks. During this time, Wright became a high profile feminist, with support from the majority of the feminist community, and became a lifelong friend of Germaine Greer. She also became a public critic of the Catholic Church on a number of issues. She also travelled the Middle East. She was one of the first western journalists to meet Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat of the PLO, and leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman. She reported sympathetically on the plight of the Palestinians. She conducted interviews with famous Israeli figures at the time, including General Moshe Dayan.
She left 3AW in 1977. Her position was difficult there because of her involvement in Israeli-Arab politics, protests against her from various ethnic groups and her statements about Catholic doctrine had caused issue with the church doctrine. This had caused some alarm by advertisers. A change in management saw her position being challenged, and she resigned.
She was at the peak of her fame at this time, being one of the two most well known broadcasters in Australia, along with John Laws.
Move to the United States
She moved to the United States, basing herself in Washington, D.C. Here she worked on National Public Radio, and was a correspondent for several prominent publications, including the influential left-wing magazine New Statesman, for the French Catholic weekly Témoignage Chrétien, and for the leading Greek newspaper Ta Nea.
Her work was published widely in major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, as well as in prominent U.S. foreign policy journals such as Foreign Affairs.
While in the states she separated from her first husband and later married her John Helmer, a Russian scholar. Together, they had a son named Tully.
Health decline and death
Wright got dementia in her later years and was public about its effects. Suffering from its effects, she left her work in the U.S. and returned home to Australia, moving into her Toorak home in 1989. She lived there for six years before being admitted to a nursing home in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. She died in 2005.
Allegations of KGB involvement
In 1994, former KGB officer Yuri Shvets claimed that the Russian intelligence had utilized two "agents of influence": a British journalist and her associate who had worked in the Carter White House. Shvets identified them only by code names, "Sputnitsa" and "Socrates," but withheld their actual identities. Insight, a publication affiliated with The Washington Times, later named these individuals as Claudia Wright, then a journalist with the British left-wing publication New Statesman, and her husband, John Helmer, a White House aide.
Victor Cherkashin, a former deputy chief of the KGB's Washington operations, revisited these claims in his 2005 memoir, Spy Handler. Cherkashin explicitly denied that Helmer had ever been an agent or recruitment target but did not address the claims involving Wright. He also noted that a "Washington-based British journalist" had occasionally provided information to the KGB, including the identity of Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian double agent working for MI6. The Sunday Times speculated that this journalist might have been Wright, though Gordievsky himself expressed skepticism, questioning how a journalist could have known about his covert work with British intelligence.
Awards
Wright was honoured with the award of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at the United States Smithsonian Institution.
References
- ^ "Journalist Made of the Right Stuff". The Advertiser. 25 March 2005.
- ^ Melbourne, The University of. "The Women's Pages: Australian Women Journalists Since 1850 - Claudia Wright". www.womenaustralia.info. Retrieved 27 October 2021.
- ^ Copeland, Julie (23 February 2005). "Radical Commentator who took no prisoners". The Age.
- "Dementia: Into the Daylight". ABC News - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Transcripts. 15 March 2011.
- Shvets, Yuri (1994). Washington station: my life as a KGB spy in America. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-88397-3.
- Dettmer, Jamie (13 February 1995). "Spies, in From the Cold, Snitch on Collaborators - The Library of American History at LaGrange". Insight on the News. Archived from the original on 9 March 2012. Retrieved 3 November 2024.
- Cherkashin, Victor; Feifer, Gregory (2005). Spy handler: memoir of a KGB officer: the true story of the man who recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00968-8.
- Feifer, Gregory; Evans, Michael (3 January 2005). "MI6 double agent was 'betrayed by a journalist'". The Sunday Times. Archived from the original on 3 November 2024. Retrieved 3 November 2024.