Richard Gott is a British author, historian, and journalist. He studied at Oxford, worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the University of Chile where he authored a report on Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. Gott was a candidate in the 1966 Kingston upon Hull North by-election for the Radical Alliance, running on a platform that opposed the Vietnam War. He polled only 253 votes. As a journalist, Gott began working for The Guardian sometime in the early 1960s: first as a freelance journalist in Cuba, later as the Latin America correspondent and features editor in London. He resigned in December 1994 after an article alleged he’d been an “agent of influence” for the KGB, the main security agency for the Soviet Union. The source of the allegation was Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB spy turned double agent for British intelligence. In “The Spy and the Traitor,” Ben Macintyre writes that Gott “relished his brush with the spy world.” His handlers gave him the code name RON, and he accepted paid trips to Vienna, Nicosia, and Athens. Gott initially rejected Gordievsky’s claim, but admitted in his resignation letter: "I took red gold, even if it was only in the form of expenses for myself and my partner.” In the years since, Gott has authored numerous books, worked as an associate fellow at the University of London, and continued to contribute articles about Latin America to The Guardian.