I. F. Stone, writer of truth to power, hero to generations of independent journalists … and Soviet agent?
A new book published by New Haven-based Yale University Press answers the question.
The book’s answer has stung Izzy Stone’s reportorial progeny and his legions of fans on the left. Meanwhile, their counterparts on the right are crowing. They’ve seized the book’s revelations to support a continuing campaign to rewrite the history of the late witch-hunting U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Stone’s diehard defenders aren’t giving up. The book just came out this month — and they have already launched an assault worthy of the most vituperative journalistic contretemps of the Cold War.
Of which this new spat is, in fact, yet another chapter.
This one is prompted by information that comes direct from briefly opened intelligence files from the old Soviet Union’s archives. New facts have come to light. And the facts get in the way.
A Window Opens, Briefly
The book is called Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. It has three authors: academics John Earl Haynes and Harvery Klehr, who have already published three eye-opening books for Yale based on intelligence documents that came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union; and Alexander Vassiliev, a Russian journalist and unapologetic former KGB agent.
Vassiliev was allowed a two-year look at thousands upon thousands of formerly secret files from the 1930s and 1940s detailing Soviet espionage against the United States. The Russian authorities closed the files again after Vassiliev’s look.
In an introduction he tells the story of how he got to see the documents, how he snuck his notebooks out of the country when the censor’s door slammed back shut, and how he has battled surviving participants of Cold War debates determined to squelch any new information that disrupts their hoary narratives. The introduction alone is a spellbinder.
In the subsequent 548 pages the authors meticulously update the record on previously unsettled disputes large and small. They settle the Alger Hiss episode; the Old Left’s cause celebre was a Soviet spy. The authors mine the record on the Manhattan Project’s Robert Oppenheimer; their conclusion proves inconvenient to right-wing Cold Warriors determined to portray him as a paid Soviet agent.
A mere six of those 548 pages are devoted to the record of I. F. Stone. So far at least, those six pages are proving the book’s dynamite.
Few survivors of the great 20th century political wars have remained as revered as Stone. He was a dogged reporter, a culler of public documents, a courageous defier of McCarthyism. He wrote passionate editorials for the once-liberal New York Post. He was a mainstay of the great newspaper experiment of the century, PM.
When McCarthy’s crowd drove many liberal writers out of business or underground, Stone refused to buckle. He published his own sheet, I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It became a legend that continues to inspire independent journalists, and now bloggers. Without the insider access of mainstream reporters, he exposed official lies about nuclear tests and the Vietnam War, using the public record and a keen critical eye. Generations of journalists including Carl Bernstein studied at his knee.
Before he died, he learned Greek in his old age to “break” a story about what really happened at the trial of Socrates. He said it was a free speech case.
“All governments are run by liars,” Stone famously proclaimed, “and nothing they say should be believed.”
He described himself as “a wholly independent newspaperman, standing alone, without organizational or party backing, beholden to no one but my good readers. I am even one up on Benjamin Franklin — I do not accept advertising.”
Stone was the man who never sold out. He fulfilled America’s patriotic press promise in the face of jingoistic smothering of dissent. He reported and wrote free of compromising relationships with political insiders.
That was his intact reputation upon his death in 1989.
“Pancake”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, whisperings emerged that the fearless independent journalist may have actually been a spy. The evidence was slim — a former Soviet KGB operative had lunch with Stone once, and Soviet files referred to an agent whom some people believed sounded like Stone.
That was enough “evidence” for a few right-wing media maniacs like Ann Coulter to brand Stone a paid Soviet agent, case closed. Such accusations were part of an effort to restore the reputation of the Joe McCarthy and his reviled campaign against purported Soviet agents in America.
(Stone was open about being a radical, and a socialist. There’s no evidence he ever belonged to the Communist Party.)
Spies comes up with new information drawn from Vassiliev’s notebooks. It turns out the KGB did have a code name for Stone. It was “Pancake.”
Vassiliev found references to Pancake, positively identified as Stone, as an agent doing “normal operational work” in 1936.
He “acted as a courier” — he helped recruit an American agent for the KGB living in Germany and named William A. Dodd Jr., the son of an ambassador.
Stone also “passed on to the KGB Dodd’s information, picked up from the American military attache, about possible German military moves against the USSR and the name of a suspected pro-Nazi embassy employee,” the authors report.
Vassiliev found just a few references about Stone from the period of his “normal operational work” in the 1930s. In addition to his go-between work with Dodd, Stone passed along a gossip tidbit about the Hearts news agency: Its Berlin correspondent had been ordered to “maintain friendly relations with Hitler” while Hearst was engaged in a deal to sell copper to German industry.
The next reference Vassiliev discovered was in the 1940s. Stone had publicly denounced the Soviet Union when Stalin and Hitler signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. He remained friendly and in sympathy with individual American Communists on many issues. But the authors report that while Stone eventually resumed advocating positions in line with Soviet policy, there’s no evidence he ever helped out the KGB or any other Soviet agency again. They cite documents discussing efforts to “reestablish” a relationship with him, with no word of success.
Nowhere does the record show Stone receiving money. Or turning over state secrets, or any information harmful to the United States. It does show him helping out the KGB.
And that’s it.
Or is it?
Glee & Defensiveness
Nope, according to the passionate debate that broke out this month over these findings.
Some right-wing commentators have seized on the findings to proclaim that Stone, the hero of the left, was a paid Soviet spy, through the 1940s.
These triumphant exaggerations leave out inconvenient facts — such as the numerous denunciations Stone subsequently published of the Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Or, more importantly to Spies coauthor Harvey Klehr, the fact that the book doesn’t present any evidence that the KGB ever paid Stone or that he remained an agent in the 1940s.
“For the right it’s a source of glee,” Klehr, a professor of politics and history at Emory University, said of his Stone revelations.
The left-wing journalists who celebrate Stone’s use of government documents, meanwhile, have switched to denial mode now that government (albeit Soviet government) documents have fleshed out Stone’s own life story, parts he himself never revealed.
Curiously, one of the Stone defenders did what the right-wing triumphalists do — magnify the book’s claims, but in this case in order to shoot them down.
In a lengthy piece in the May 6 Nation, Stone biographer D.D. Guttenplan rolled out the red herring. He expressed outrage that with no concrete evidence, the authors of Spies accused Stone of being “a paid agent of the KGB.” The authors in fact state that they have no evidence that Stone was ever a paid agent.
But they do brand him an “agent.”
“I don’t find it at all hard to believe that in 1936 I.F. Stone would have happily traded information with a Tass correspondent, whether or not he suspected the man had other duties,” Guttenplan wrote. “That’s what journalists did, and still do.”
Stone disciple Eric Alterman tried a somewhat more honest tack. He didn’t contest the evidence that Stone helped the Soviets with “talent-spotting,” “acting as a courier by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalistic tidbits and data the KGB found interesting.”
Alterman instead dismissed the significance of that information. “[N]one of those activities comport with my — or Dictionary.com’s — definition of the word ‘spy’ …” Alterman wrote in The Daily Beast.
“So what do we have? A man of avowed anti-Fascist sympathies, still-foolishly na√Øve about Stalin and the Soviet Union, agreed on a couple of occasions to help those whom he believed to be actually fighting fascism, while his own country, still mired in childish isolationism, looked away.”
What’s A “Spy”?
In a phone conversation with the Independent, Klehr (pictured) was asked about how to define “spying.”
After all, American reporters all the time share information with American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They trade gossip, analysis of publicly available information.
“There is a difference between a journalist talking to an agency of his own government and a journalist talking to the espionage apparatus of a foreign government,” Klehr said.
“…The context is important here. It’s one thing if you give that information to friends, to potential other newspapers you’re thinking of trying to get a job with. Stone was giving this to the KGB. He knew who he was dealing with.
“Is that information secret? Is it necessarily harmful to the United States? No.
“But one of the points we make in the book is: The people that the KGB recruited, a number of them did not have access to secret information. They were useful for other things… [and Stone] cooperated with them.”
Perhaps Stone was gossiping with knowledgeable Soviet emissaries in the hope of obtaining information, the way reporters regularly do with government sources at home?
Klehr said his team has found “no indication that Stone was using the KGB as a source. He was the source. There was nothing to suggest the he was asking them questions.”
Then there’s the question of whether Soviet file-writers may have embellished their interactions with Stone to burnish their reputations. That can happen with intelligence files when people want to impress their bosses.
“But there’s no indication with Stone that he’s providing hot information,” Klehr noted. “He’s just another one of the sources they recruited.”
Just another source, maybe. But Stone wasn’t just another American journalist. Call it “spying.” Or just call it “cooperation” and “agency.” Whatever the term, seven decades after providing some minor help to the KGB, Stone remains revered — so the emerging facts draw blood.
“Here is this icon of incorruptibility, integrity, independence,” Klehr observed. “These people just get so enraged. You’re attacking the religious faith.”
What Would I.F. Do?
Perhaps it’s possible to be inspired by a man’s vision — and respect his tremendous accomplishments — without turning him into a religious icon. Perhaps I.F. Stone can continue to inspire without having to be held up as a hero without clay feet.
You might even argue that I. F. Stone himself would offer that advice to today’s reporters and political partisans. You might argue that I. F. Stone would counsel fearlessly facing facts in unearthed government documents, like the ones in Spies.
Back in the 1980s, when the New Haven Independent was a weekly print newspaper, a quotation was taped to the editor’s computer. It was a denunciation of the journalistic tendency to get too close to official sources. It defined freedom as the ability “to sit in your bathtub and want for nothing.”
Stone’s words have often offered succor in the face of the loneliness that comes with independent reporting, the kind that complicates or destroys friendships.
His words, and his example, still do.
Time curled the edges of the piece of paper and yellowed the tape that fastened that credo to the computer. Just as time has a tendency to gnaw at the edges and darken the reputations of respected historical figures who turn out to be fallible, mortal.
But heroic ideas that spring from the hearts and imaginations of mortals — including Stone’s ideas — persevere.