Hopes for peace in the former states of Indochina promised by the 1954 Geneva Agreements soon turned into covert and then overt war as the US replaced France as the regional Western power to counter China and the threat of Communism. A united Communist Vietnam with Ho Chi Minh as president was not part of the American plan for the region. The ‘Domino Theory’ sold to Western public opinion as justification for intervention suggested that if one ‘domino’ (South Vietnam) fell to the Communists, other dominos would follow. It was the duty of America and her allies to stop the ‘Red’ and ‘Yellow’ hordes.

From Wilfred Burchett's perspective things stood very differently: US imperialism had replaced French colonialism and was preventing the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from achieving true independence and national reconciliation on their own terms.

In the first half of 1962 he visited the former states of Indochina and returned convinced that the US was preparing for full scale military intervention. For the next two decades he would denounce American imperialism and the Vietnam War from ‘behind enemy lines’ in countless articles, books, pamphlets, films, interviews, speeches and so on, which secured his fame and notoriety. He became, as his biographer Tom Heenan writes, ‘arguably the war's most influential journalist’.

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In introducing The Furtive War Burchett wrote: