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Gavin MacFadyen
Gavin MacFadyen (born 1940) is the Director-Founder of the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London.

Early Life

MacFadyen was born in Greeley Colorado to Marion Hall, a concert pianist and he spent his formative years in Hyde Park, Chicago. His step-father, Douglas Archibald MacFadyen, was a biometrical chemist, chess player and MD engaged in medical research at Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago.

He attended Harvard School for Boys, The University of Chicago Lab School, Manumit School in Pennsylvania, Hyde Park High School, and the University of Chicago, as an un-matriculated early-entrant. In this period he became acquainted with Geoffrey Steward, Van Allen Carlyle Jr. (aka Gregory Storm) and others in the Fat City movement. In 1954 MacFadyen was introduced to his best friend’s father, Carlos Hudson (aka Jack Ranger), who had driven to Mexico City as a young man to meet with Leon Trotsky where he became acquainted with Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Through the influence of the elder Hudson, MacFadyen again became an un-matriculated entrant at the Illinois Institute of Technology and attended lectures and classes by former Bauhaus alumni including R. Hilbersheimer and Mies van der Rohe. By 1955 MacFadyen was introduced to revolutionary ideas of equality and social reorganisation in the labour and radical movement and worked as a Midwest Field organiser amongst students and trade unionists in Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois.

Civil Rights Movement

With the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Congress on Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, MacFadyen became a civil rights activist and helped form these organisations at Indiana University Bloomington. In Chicago MacFadyen participated in the Rainbow Beach Wade-Ins and was arrested and jailed protesting discriminatory University housing, segregated restaurants and the defence of civil rights activists in the South. In this period he was forced with others into a hole in the ground and covered with chicken wire where the police urinated on the protestors.

Having joined the Teamsters Union, MacFadyen led a convoy of trucks filled with embargoed relief supplies to an embattled civil rights outpost in Tennessee. On arrival he discovered that inaccurate police fire had pockmarked the truck with bullet holes. On returning to Chicago he was informed that FBI agents had raided his house. Working subsequently as a longshoreman in New York, MacFadyen 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.

Television

MacFadyen attended the London School of Film Technique 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. In 1970 MacFadyen became a Director at the BBC Money Programme and Nationwide. A year later he was head-hunted to Granada Television’s World in Action by Gus MacDonald, where he produced and directed a wide range of investigative TV programmes including undercover human rights investigations in Turkey, child labour, police and government corruption in Hong-Kong, the Portuguese revolution, cement pollution in Britain, voting fraud in Guyana, the history of the CIA and many others.

MacFadyen left London to work in Hollywood from 1980 to 1990, in three Michael Mann films, motion picture research projects in SE Asia and a John Frankenheimer film project. He also produced two short BBC dramas written by Gordon Newman and joined Haskell Wexler in Nicaragua to make an independent feature, Latino. As an actor in Hollywood he appeared in three Hollywood movies: Thief, Ulterior Motives, and Latino.

In 1992 MacFadyen co-produced and directed an investigative documentary for the BBC on DeBeers/Anglo-American, called The Diamond Empire. He survived an expensive libel action as a result of this film in a climate in the UK which had become increasingly hostile to investigative reporting. This film was banned in Australia, South Africa and only a cut-down version was permitted in the UK.

Centre for Investigative Journalism

Between 1994 and 2002 the climate worsened for in-depth, sceptical reporting and MacFadyen, together with ex-World in Action colleagues, formed an independent investigative training organisation, [|The Centre for Investigative Journalism] (www.tcij.com) in 2003. The work of CIJ is committed to freedom of the press, protection of sources, and transparency and accountability in matters of public interest. Interns from the CIJ have been active in France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, the US and the UK. Since 2005 the CIJ has been a leading proponent of computer security courses for journalists and NGO researchers. CIJ’s videos and recordings, and the Logan Handbooks provide examples of the CIJ Annual Summer School workshops and courses in use by working journalists and students on three continents.

Amongst the leading key-note speakers at the CIJ Summer Schools were Anna Politkovskaya, murdered in Russia in 2006, Julian Assange the founder of WikiLeaks, Seymour Hersh, Lowell Bergman, David Leigh and Dr. Richard Stallman. MacFadyen was first married to Virginia Daum in New York by the Reverend A J Muste, who led the American Labor Party. They have a son, Michael, and were divorced in 1980.

He married Susan Benn in 2010 and lives in London.