U.S. Department of Defense

Burns began his career in journalism humbly enough. Born in Nottingham, England, he spent much of his youth in Ottawa, where his father, a senior official with the British military, was assigned to head up the British Defence Liaison Staff. Burns's first job as a youngster was toiling as a copyboy for the now defunct Ottawa Journal, ferrying newspaper stories from reporter to editor to typesetter.

He considered following his father into the military, but went to McGill instead. Years later, his father told him he had made the right choice. "He thought I was too much of a maverick, too uncompromising to survive in a military environment."

At McGill, Burns delighted in the teachings of professors he continues to admire today, among them James Mallory, Canada's foremost expert on constitutional politics for many years, and political philosopher Charles Taylor.

"Taylor was one of the biggest single influences on my career," Burns states. "It was as if someone had handed me a road map of the evolution of Western liberal thought from the Enlightenment onwards."

Burns does have one regret about his McGill years. He was too much of a bookworm.

"I don't think I used my time at McGill particularly well. I regret not playing a much larger role in university life." When his own kids went off to college, Burns told them, "Remember something that no one bothered to impress on me when I was your age: enjoy yourself."

He graduated with first class honours and a fellowship from Harvard, but he had other plans. Throughout his studies at McGill, he had spent the summers as a junior reporter with the Ottawa Citizen. "I would cover the police beat at night, chase ambulances, cover a local appearance by Liberace. I had so much fun, I couldn't bring myself to go back to university." He signed on to work at the Globe and Mail instead and soon began covering Parliament Hill for the paper.

Burns filed a story raising questions about how Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau seemed to be treating buddies like Barbara Streisand to free trips on government jets and soon made himself a powerful enemy.

When Burns next encountered Trudeau's press secretary, Roméo LeBlanc, in a corridor, LeBlanc grabbed the young reporter and a shoving match between the future Pulitzer Prize winner and the future Governor General ensued. Trudeau himself stumbled onto the scene. Canadian newspapers gleefully reported the donnybrook, to Burns's considerable dismay.

He soon noticed that he no longer was receiving the briefing notes that went out to every other parliamentary reporter. He was out of favour and out of the loop. His editor summoned him to Toronto.

The editor declared that, as a result of the fuss, Burns could no longer cover Parliament. The reporter, fully expecting a demotion, wasn't surprised. What he heard next did startle him. He was going to China.

China and Canada had just reached an agreement allowing each country to create a news bureau in the other. As Burns tells it, China wasn't all that interested in reporting on Canadian goings-on. Their news bureau was principally a mechanism to enable Chinese spy networks to gain a North American foothold.

"When I went to China, I received extremely bad advice," Burns recalls. Colleagues and other seasoned China watchers counseled Burns that, as a Westerner, he was in no position to judge Chinese society. "'Nothing in your background equips you to understand centuries of Chinese history or culture,' they informed me."

Arriving in 1971 in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, Burns soon discovered that Chinese government officials had their own unique approach to spinning the truth. Spotting a body floating in the river one evening, bludgeoned and clearly the victim of foul play, Burns turned to his Beijing-assigned "minder," who suggested that the dead man had probably tumbled into the water accidentally.

Burns experienced a career turning point weeks later when he had his car serviced at a Western embassy. "You write a lot of nonsense," the mechanic informed Burns as he worked on the reporter's Volkswagen. "This place is a goddamned prison camp and I never read that in what you write."

The remark stung because Burns knew he was right.

"The truest things that journalists can bring to any foreign posting are our eyes, our ears and our own sense of right and wrong," Burns says. If government authorities don't like what you write and limit your access as a result, Burns reasons, "What I am able to see is still infinitely more than what my readers are able to see.

"If a whole picture is a jigsaw with 1,000 pieces, over a matter of years [in a closed society], you may never be able to assemble more than 30 or 40 pieces. But almost inevitably, that is enough to discern a pattern of conduct. If you see amber eyes and a striped tail in the pieces you've put together, you can be pretty sure that you are looking at a tiger."

Burns began to take a more forceful approach in his coverage of China. The shift earned him his current job with the New York Times, whose editors were impressed by a blistering piece Burns authored about the various techniques used by government officials to manipulate the truth. His more aggressive reporting techniques also got him arrested when he embarked on an unauthorized motorcycle tour of Chinese locales that were off-limits to foreigners. He was charged with spying, spent several days in a prison cell and was deported to Hong Kong.

Burns's next assignment would probably be the least stressful of his career. "The Times sent me to cover Canada as sort of a rest cure," he says. "I was free to travel anywhere I liked. I went from the Queen Charlotte Islands to the high Arctic to the Cabot Trail to junior hockey games in Saskatchewan. I've rarely enjoyed any assignment as much."

Once his stint in Canada was completed, Burns was again assigned tougher tours of duty, heading off to South Africa, Sarajevo and Afghanistan, under Soviet and then Taliban rule. In 2002, he was sent to Iraq.

"I thought I understood what repressive totalitarian regimes looked like. I had been in China and in South Africa during the apartheid era. Saddam's Iraq was in a different league altogether.

"Saddam murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people," Burns says. "He gouged out the eyes of his enemies and had their wives and daughters raped. The only other regime that comes close to my mind is North Korea and that country goes to great lengths to hide what happens there. Saddam took no such precautions. He understood the power of terror."

Burns became disenchanted with the manner in which some of his Western colleagues in Baghdad approached their own reports. The book Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, published last year, includes an interview with Burns and the veteran reporter's pronouncements sent shockwaves through the journalistic community.

"In the run-up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility," Burns declared in the book. He believed that many Western reporters were too soft in their coverage of Saddam's brutality, charging them with an "absolutely disgraceful performance."