Foreign correspondent who broke the news of Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin
John Rettie
Foreign reporter John Rettie in Santo Domingo during October 1992. Photograph: Vivien Ashley Vivien Ashley/Vivien Ashley

John Rettie, who has died aged 83, was among the last of those gentleman foreign reporters who deployed their linguistic skills and historical understanding to illuminate the countries in which they were stationed. Writing for nearly half a century, mostly for the Guardian and Reuters, and broadcasting for the BBC World Service, Rettie was a radical, fiercely independent correspondent in several parts of the world - notably the Soviet Union and Latin America, but also Finland, Mexico, Sri Lanka and India.

In 1954 he became one of the handful of foreign correspondents in Moscow. Two years later he brought from the Soviet capital the details of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin, a scoop of which he remained justly proud. Rettie had been approached by a Soviet contact, Kostya Orlov, who gave him a full account of what had been said. One detail dealt with the unrest the speech had caused, particularly in Georgia. Another gave Khrushchev's description of how Stalin used to humiliate his circle. "Once he turned to me," Khrushchev had declared, "and said: 'Oi, you, khokhol, dance the gopak.' So I danced." Khokhol is a derogatory term for a Ukrainian, while the gopak is an intricate dance, in the execution of which the portly Khrushchev would have looked ridiculous.

Was Orlov an agent provocateur, as some of Rettie's colleagues believed, or controlled by the KGB? Could Reuters put out a story that had a single, rather dubious, source? Rettie and his Reuters boss, Sidney Weiland, concluded that they had to believe the story. Rettie left for Stockholm the next day with his notebooks, and Reuters published his anonymous story with a Bonn dateline. It was worldwide front-page news. Years later, he concluded that Khrushchev had authorised the leak, a probability vouched for by Sergo Mikoyan, son of the formidable Anastas Mikoyan, and Khrushchev's son, Sergei.

Rettie was an old-fashioned liberal, an enthusiastic supporter of national independence, highly critical of the Soviet and, increasingly, the US empires. Endlessly witty and amusing, a wonderful storyteller and teacher - though possessing a caustic tongue - he had an immense, global army of friends.

Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where his father and grandfather had owned and managed tea estates, Rettie went to the Yorkshire Dales aged four: his mother's family owned farms in Coverdale. He was educated at Rugby school, and went to Canada to train as an RAF flier, but this was cut short by the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, so he enrolled in the services' Cambridge Russian language course, as the cold war got under way. He then took a degree in Russian and Spanish at Peterhouse, Cambridge, beginning a lifelong fascination with language and linguistics.

Joining Reuters, he was despatched first to Helsinki, where he married a Finn, Oili Lehtonen. Once in Moscow, he had unprecedented access to the Soviet high command, explaining years later how Khrushchev had understood that journalists would provide the easiest way for him to present himself to the world as a human being to do business with, rather than as a Stalinist ogre. Khrushchev and his politburo colleagues frequented diplomatic receptions, drinking, chatting and arguing. Rettie watched Khrushchev at close quarters for three years, once or twice a week, sometimes shouting and bullying, sometimes silent and listening. "It all made great copy," Rettie recalled, "especially the drinking."

Rettie left Moscow in 1957, alarmed by apparent KGB threats, and depressed by his wife's elopement with the Agence France press correspondent. Back in London, he joined the News Chronicle foreign desk, along with Willie Forrest, Tom Baistow and James Cameron, but the Chronicle closed in 1960, even though its circulation topped 1 million.

Rettie then freelanced from Mexico, and married his second wife, Vanda Summers. In 1964 he stood as Liberal candidate for Middlesbrough West, coming third in the general election. By 1965, he was sending vivid reports to the Guardian on the US invasion of the Dominican Republic.

Settling back in Britain in 1967, he helped set up Latin American Newsletters, a weekly review, which built up a network of continent-wide correspondents, as well as a bunch of enthusiastic young London-based journalists. During the 1970s, when much of Latin America fell under military rule and censorship prevailed, the Newsletter was a respected news source. Rettie put his capital and his energies into its success, but eventually fell out with two of his partners, Hugh O'Shaughnessy and Christopher Roper, and was voted off the board, along with myself, in 1980.

Around the same time, a Middlesbrough engineering firm, James Brown, of which he had been the non-executive chairman, collapsed. He was left, aged 53, with no job, pension, or income. But he worked for the BBC Latin American service, where, because of his love of Mexico and Mexican food and tequila, he was considered an honorary Mexican. He went on several Latin American reporting trips for the Guardian, notably during the Falklands war.

From 1986 he reported for the BBC and the Guardian from his native Sri Lanka, in a time of increasing violence. Rettie concluded that Sri Lankan politicians "were more devious than any others I know".

In 1988 the Guardian asked if he would like to return to Moscow, then at the height of the Gorbachev reforms, to join Jonathan Steele. Rettie covered the furious, increasingly public debates and splits in the Communist party which led to its collapse in 1991 and to the implosion of the Soviet Union. His knowledge of Finnish helped in the Baltic republics, in particular Estonia, as the independence movements developed.

He was hugely generous to colleagues, including young Russian journalists who had to learn to abandon Soviet-era self-censorship and to write graphically and quickly. His final posting came at the age of 69, for the Guardian in Delhi. He took an interest in the underclass - India's "untouchable" caste - as he had once done in Latin America.

When Rettie finally retired, he established himself in the small gamekeeper's house on the family estate in Coverdale, to the surprise of friends who could not imagine a cosmopolitan burying himself in the country. They were wrong. Rettie lived alone and rarely ventured south, but recruited a legion of new friends among Yorkshire's farmers, publicans, journalists, gamekeepers, beaters and breadmakers, and organised regular Yorkshire visits for Ukrainian children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

His deep pessimism about the approaching environmental crisis was reflected in his perennial remark (inherited from his friend the late Harry Riley) that "t'human race has outlived its usefulness", yet this invariably led on to another, much-favoured request to "open another bottle!"

He remained on friendly terms with his two wives, and is survived by them, his son and daughter from his second marriage, and his beloved sister.

Phil Gunson writes: A self-described "anarcho-liberal", John was generous and tolerant of most human foibles. But his tolerance did not extend to unimaginative bureaucrats, abusers of the English language or bullies.

Try splitting an infinitive, or - horror! - employing American spelling or phraseology, and you would soon feel the sharp end of his tongue. And that should be north American, lest we lend credence to the notion that they own the whole continent.

If he never got around to writing the autobiography that surely would have been a bestseller, that is because he was too busy living it to the last. One of his greatest frustrations as he got older was that travelling became harder. But that did not stop him celebrating his 80th birthday on Easter Island.

Cartmel John Alexander Rettie, journalist, born 24 November 1925; died 10 January 2009