James Whelan - Telegraph The Washington Times, he claimed, had become what detractors had always asserted, "a Moonie newspaper" with the aim of establishing "a worldwide theocracy headed by Moon." But few of Whelan's former colleagues rallied to his cause and Times news executives, none of whom were members of the Unification Church, vehemently denied Whelan's charges. Instead they released copies of correspondence between Whelan and the newspaper which revealed that he demanded a salary increase from $90,000 a year to $185,000 by 1989; replacement of his company-provided Cadillac every 40,000 miles, paid membership of five private clubs, new financial arrangements for his company-owned residence and guaranteed severance pay of $950,000. Whelan was depicted as a difficult man who was frequently absent from the paper and abusive to his senior staff: "He treated me like a copy boy - and I don't take well to that kind of crap," said Smith Hempstone, Whelan's replacement in the editor's chair. In fact, politics - anti-communist politics - rather than religion seems a more probable explanation for the Rev Moon's interest in the Washington Times, which has never been caught proselytising, directly or indirectly, for the Unification Church. And while Moon's writings and speeches made it clear that he regarded himself as a Messiah, Hempstone observed drily: "I've worked for a lot of publishers who thought they were God." James Robert Whelan was born in Buffalo, New York State, on July 27 1933 and dropped out of the University of Buffalo to work as a copy boy at the Buffalo Courier-Express. During the 1960s and 1970s he worked as a foreign correspondent for UPI and later for Scripps-Howard. In the late 1970s he was appointed vice-president and editor of the conservative The Sacramento Union. Whelan was the author of several books about Latin America and was married and divorced several times. He is survived by a son and daughter. James Whelan, born July 27 1933, died December 1 2012