David Leitch

The career of the journalist and writer David Leitch, who has died at the age of 67, reached its high point in his war reports from Vietnam. But he could never quite free himself from what he himself called "an inchoate sense of dispossession" overshadowing his entire existence.

At the age of eight, he was told by his adoptive mother that she was not in fact his birth mother. Twenty-eight years later, he wrote a book describing what had happened.

His real mother, Truda, put a small ad in the Daily Express offering her London-born baby for sale. David and Ivy Leitch took the eight-day-old bundle from the Hotel Russell, Bloomsbury, back to their home in Harrow on the Hill. They looked after the little boy dutifully and with affection, which he returned, and sent him to Merchant Taylors' school, Northwood, Middlesex, where he learned to bowl left-arm fast-medium. He went on to read history at St John's College, Cambridge, and to a brilliant career as a reporter, successively with the then Manchester Guardian, the Times, and the Sunday Times. Even his friendly rivals ungrudgingly acknowledged him as the most talented of all the ambitious and irreverent young journalists assembled there by Denis Hamilton, Godfrey Smith and Harold Evans.

Leitch had a seemingly effortless gift for recording what he witnessed in direct, simple prose, and a raw sense of injustice and a horror of cruelty. In the 1960s, he was an enviable figure, by day an admired star on the hottest paper of the decade, and in the evenings a dandy around swinging west London.

Only after winning his reputation the hard way, at great cost to his own emotional stability, did Leitch set out to slay his personal demons. He deliberately called his book God Stand Up For Bastards (1973), a provocative paraphrase of Edmund in King Lear, hoping the word would shock his mother into declaring herself. Eventually she did, explaining that he was not in fact illegitimate, but the rightful son of herself, a housewife, and her husband, an elusive insurance salesman whose death certificate recorded him as John Chester, aka Griffith, aka Chester-Griffith, aka for symmetry Griffith-Chester.

Leitch did much good work after he first tracked down his birth mother, but in the end he was incapacitated by an obsession with his own identity and parenting. The fact that he eventually found that his mother was a secretive serial rejecter of her children - giving away, in slightly differing circumstances, two younger sisters for adoption as well - did not make it any easier.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, he was a golden boy, so gifted as a reporter that employers would always forgive his increasing reputation for unreliability, loved by women and liked by men, but gradually alcohol became his master. He continued to be protected by a growing family and old and new friends. But where once drinking got him into more or less serious scrapes, in later life it could change a gentle personality into something violent and destructive.

After Cambridge, Leitch worked for the Guardian in Manchester and Liverpool, where he covered a number of dock strikes. He moved to the Times in the early 1960s, and in 1963 was recruited to the Sunday Times (then under different ownership), working in a special projects group for Godfrey Smith.

It was a time of group journalism, and in 1966 Leitch teamed up with Phillip Knightley to cover an assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle and the Florence floods of that year. Later, he joined the Insight team, then led by Bruce Page, which pulled off one of the defining stories of the investigative journalism done during Evans's tenure at the Sunday Times: the exposure of the senior British intelligence official, Kim Philby, as a KGB agent. Leitch also wrote, with Page and Knightley, a book, Kim Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed A Generation, and a number of other co-authored Sunday Times books.

In early 1968 came an experience from which Leitch perhaps never fully recovered. At the height of the Vietnam war, he managed to bribe his way into Khe Sanh, an enclave where 2,700 US Marines were pinned down by North Vietnamese artillery, who rained down 1,600 shells a day on a position less than one mile by half a mile.

Later Leitch explained in careful understatement what it felt like: "It was beyond human endurance ... It was like being in one of those medieval sieges where you knew you actually had to lose because you didn't have water, and they were going to get you and cut your throat. Meanwhile, you had a day or two to live, and you had to live like a man." He felt unbearably guilty that, while he could hope to be helicoptered out, the brave young marines he admired knew they would die in their trenches.

Leitch lived to do much more fine work. In the summer of 1968, in Los Angeles, he helped cover the murder of Robert Kennedy. In November he was in Gaza, gathering testimony from Palestinians who said they had been tortured by the Israelis. In Prague in January 1969, he reported the suicide of Jan Palach, a student who burned himself to death to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. There were other wars, other horrors. In 1974, he was under fire again in Cyprus when the Turkish army invaded.

In 1969, he married the Australian writer and critic Jill Neville, who bore him a son, Luke, now a journalist on the Evening Standard. The Sunday Times sent him to Paris, not the happiest of choices, for although he wrote some memorable features, he was soon drinking from morning to night, and in the end it was too much for the paper's managers. He continued to write excellent features from Paris for the New Statesman, and occasionally for the Sunday Times magazine, into the early 1980s.

In the 1970s, missing his son Luke, he went to Australia to write for the National Times. There had been idyllic moments in the marriage with Jill, such as a slow journey in 1974 from Cassis, near Marseille, to North Africa and back by way of Madrid, but the marriage was difficult from the beginning, and in 1979 they were divorced; she died in 1998.

In 1983, Leitch married the journalist Rosie Boycott, later editor of the Independent and of the Daily Express, by whom he had a daughter, Daisy. Even after they eventually separated, Rosie continued to look after him, as did other loyal friends. In his last years, Leitch tried to write another book, but it was too much. He was intermittently bingeing and suffered from poor health, including lung cancer. The end was merciful. He died in his sleep, of pneumonia and a heart attack.

In addition to Luke and Daisy, he is survived by another daughter, Miranda, by a childhood friend, Barbara Pollock.

· David Leitch, journalist and writer, born October 27 1937; died November 24 2004

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