Ronnie Payne, the former Daily and Sunday Telegraph foreign correspondent who specialised in writing about terrorism and espionage, has died.
One of his friends, Paul Callan (Daily Mirror and Daily Express), reports that he died last night at his home in Oxfordshire. He was in his late 80s and had been ill for some time.
Ronnie, who spent several years as the papers' Middle East correspondent, was regarded as one of the foremost journalistic experts on terrorism, co-writing books with his friend Christopher Dobson on Mossad, Carlos the Jackal and the Dictionary of Espionage.
His foreign postings included spells in Paris and Moscow, and he also covered a number of conflicts, earning praise for his outstanding reporting.
He was responsible for obtaining a memorable interview with Colonel Gaddafi, which was conducted in 1976 in a bedouin tent. The Libyan dictator told him the Sunday Telegraph should be run under the control of a people's committee representing "the workers, the peasants, the merchants and the shopkeepers". (He wrote about the experience for The Spectator).
One of Payne's first excursions into books was to ghost the memoirs of Detective Chief Superintendent Malcolm Fewtrell, who headed the investigation into the 1963 great train robbery.
He went on to write, and co-write, more than a dozen books, about terrorism, spies and the Falklands war. In 2004, in a surprising departure from his usual journalistic output, he wrote a book based on his experience of living with his wife, journalist Celia Haddon, entitled One hundred ways to live with a cat addict. He followed this up with a similar volume about dogs.
For 20 years, Celia was the Telegraph's pets columnist and pet agony aunt. She worked previously for the Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard. She and Ronnie, says Callan, enjoyed a particularly happy marriage.