Founder-director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism, who spent his life trying to give a voice to the voiceless, Gavin MacFadyen became a close ally of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

Gavin MacFadyen

The investigative journalist Gavin MacFadyen, who has died aged 76, was founder-director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. He set up the CIJ, which is funded through charitable foundations, in 2003 to address what he saw as a worsening media climate for serious, in-depth and critical reporting and, over the following 13 years, established its reputation as one of the pre-eminent investigative journalism training institutions in the world.

Gavin intended the CIJ as a refuge for critically minded journalists who want to do adversarial, public interest journalism. He thought that journalists had become accessories to the powerful, rather than acting as a check upon them – in his view, journalism’s role in a democratic society should be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

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It was not surprising that, in 2010, when WikiLeaks began publishing documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and then the US state department cables, Gavin became a close ally of the group and of its editor and founder, Julian Assange. While many of the institutions that profited from Assange’s revelations later turned on him, Gavin was steadfastly loyal, seeing his role, as always, to stick up for those under fierce attack from powerful forces. Gavin and his wife Susan Benn were trustees of the Julian Assange Defence Fund, set up to help raise money for Assange’s legal defence.

Gavin’s house in London was a salon and refuge for dissidents, journalists and revolutionaries from all over the world. People – often young, sometimes difficult – would stay for long periods and be fed and housed. “I love it,” Gavin once told me. “I come down for breakfast and I don’t know who is going to be there.” He said the previous week “that brilliant Indian writer” – Arundhati Roy – had been over with “that Hollywood actor with good politics” – John Cusack. That was typical.

The CIJ itself was wonderfully chaotic and breathed with creativity and energy. Gavin was an arch democrat, completely open to anyone and everyone. He wanted to stretch the definition of what an investigative journalist is, to include artists, historians and even architects who use society as their raw material and try to filter information to reveal truth. The CIJ was and remains an open shop.

Born in Greeley, Colorado, to Marion Hall, a concert pianist, Gavin spent his formative years in Hyde Park, Chicago. He never knew his father, and in childhood took his stepfather’s surname, MacFadyen. In the 1960s, he became an activist in the civil rights movement. In Chicago, he participated in the Rainbow Beach “wade-ins” of 1961 that challenged segregation on public beaches, and was arrested and jailed while protesting against discriminatory university housing, segregated restaurants and in defence of civil rights activists in the south.

Gavin led a convoy of trucks filled with relief supplies to an embattled civil rights outpost in Tennessee. On arrival he discovered that police fire had pockmarked the truck with bullet holes, and on returning to Chicago he was informed that FBI agents had raided his house. In Chicago at this time, he met the young Bernie Sanders, then a student at Chicago University, and exposed him to the world of revolutionary leftist politics.

By working subsequently as a longshoreman in New York, Gavin was able to pay for a trip to Britain, where he joined the International Socialists, living for a time in the home of one of its leading writers, Michael Kidron. He described this as a formative period in developing his political consciousness.
Gavin attended the London School of Film Technique (the forerunner to the London Film School) in 1964, and shortly after graduation he formed an independent collective, Chicago Films. He filmed the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, anti-war demonstrations and race riots in Detroit, Washington DC and Harlem for the BBC. As he became more interested in marrying his aesthetic commitment to film with his politics, he decided he wanted to make hard-hitting investigative documentaries.

He produced and directed more than 50 documentaries, many for Granada Television’s World in Action, in countries as diverse as Ecuador, Guyana, South Africa, Mexico, Hong Kong, Thailand, the USSR, the US, Sweden, India and Turkey. His investigations covered topics including industrial accidents, neo-Nazi violence in the UK, Chinese criminal societies, the history of the CIA, Watergate, election fraud in Guyana, the Iraq arms trade, child labour, nuclear proliferation, and Frank Sinatra’s connection to organised crime.

In 1980 Gavin left London to work in Hollywood. He became a close friend of the screenwriter, director and producer Michael Mann, and was involved in three of his films, as well as motion picture research projects in south-east Asia and a John Frankenheimer film project. He joined Haskell Wexler in Nicaragua to make the independent feature Latino in 1985. He also appeared as an actor in Latino, as well as two other movies, Thief (1981) and Ulterior Motives (1993).

There was little time for small talk with Gavin; only the big ideas exercised him. He would throw his hands up when he got excited by a devious way of getting a story and shout “yes, yes, YES!” followed inevitably by “Let’s do it!” Being around Gavin for any amount of time made you feel anything was possible and that, eventually, if Gavin was around to help, justice and the truth would prevail.

One approach he favoured in the cause of linking social justice activism and investigative journalism was “direct action information gathering” – for example, chaining yourself outside the offices of a multinational corporation or department of state and staying there until they gave you the information you needed for your story. He was unbreakable in his commitment to the oppressed, risked his own life and liberty to stand with them, and saw unspeakable acts of human brutality. Yet at the same time, none of it had broken down his ability to love and bring joy to those around him: his presence lit up any gathering.

“For many journalists, work is simply a job,” he once wrote. “Their interest is in lapdog confidences and dining with the powerful. Those who passionately want to provide a voice for those without one, and who fight hypocrisy and exploitation, are sadly rare.” Gavin not only gave a voice to the voiceless. He handed them a megaphone.

Gavin is survived by Susan, whom he married in 2010, his son Michael, from a previous marriage, to Virginia Daum, which ended in divorce, Susan’s three daughters and six grandchildren.

• Gavin Hall MacFadyen, journalist, born 1 January 1940; died 22 October 2016

The Guardian – 6 November, 2016