Early in his career as a Guardian journalist, David Fairhall, who has died aged 91, received a surprise personal invitation to a high-level meeting in Washington hosted by the US state department. Senior officials asked him to brief them on the US edition of his first book, Russian Sea Power, published in the early 1970s when there was great alarm over the prospect of the Soviet navy developing into a worldwide fighting force.
David realised at the meeting that he had actually been invited across the Atlantic for a simple reason: the state department wanted to discover how he had found out so much about the Russian fleet, and particularly the plans for naval aviation. Who were his sources?
