1992 allegations and their rebuttal
In March 1992, Guardian journalist Andrew Brown quoted a Soviet Embassy attaché, KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, as saying, "We had an agent ... a well-known American journalist ... with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia he said he would never again take any money from us." In June 1992, Herbert Romerstein, a former official of the USIA and minority chief investigator of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Ray Kerrison reported in the New York Post that Kalugin identified Stone as that agent. The allegations were further developed in a book written by Romerstein and Eric Breindel, editorial page editor of the New York Post,
The Venona Secrets.
Brown subsequently conceded that when he had "used the phrase 'an agent' to describe someone who turned out to be I.F. Stone", that he understood the term, “agent” to mean “useful contact,” and that the “take any money” reference simply meant that Stone would not permit a Soviet employee to pick up the check for lunch then, or in the future, as had sometimes been done before. He adds that New York trial lawyer and author Martin Garbus recounted that in September 1992, while at the Moscow Journalists Club, Kalugin had explained to him, "I have no proof that Stone was an agent. I have no proof that Stone ever received any money from the KGB or the Russian government, I never gave Stone any money and was never involved with him as an agent."
Kalugin's testimony also contradicted Romerstein's allegation that Stone was a Soviet "agent" in interviews he gave I.F. Stone's two most recent biographers, historian D.D. Guttenplan (author of
Holocaust on Trial) and former Washington Post writer Myra MacPherson (author of the Vietnam War classic,
Long Time Passing). Guttenplan reported Kalugin’s denials in articles in the
Nation and the
New York Post. To Myra MacPherson Kalugin said: “We had no clandestine relationship. We had no secret arrangement. I was the press officer... I never paid him anything. I sometimes bought lunch.”
MacPherson notes, however, that American journalist Max Holland persisted in repeating allegations about Stone accepting money from the Soviet Union, even while acknowledging the unreliability of their source (i.e., Oleg Kalugin):
As for the conflicting tales woven by former KGB agent Kalugin about his relationship with Stone from 1966 to 1968, Holland correctly notes that "Kalugin seemed incapable of telling the same story more than once." Still, this did not keep Holland from repeating the damaging and long refuted lie that Herbert Romerstein, former HUAC sleuth, developed after talking with Kalugin, that Moscow Gold subsidized Stone's weekly newspaper. No where is there any evidence that Stone took money for anything except a possible lunch or two. Nor is there any evidence, as Holland points out, that Kalugin was able to plant stories with Stone.
In his own memoir about his years as an undercover KGB man working as a Soviet press attaché in Washington, Oleg Kalugin revealed that he routinely met with many journalists in addition to Stone, including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, Drew Pearson, Chalmers Robers and Murray Marder of the
Washington Post, and others.
According to Kalugin, Stone followed a practice of having lunch with a Soviet press attaché from time to time, but broke off this luncheon relationship after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 and after hearing Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. When Stone returned home from this trip to Russia he wrote in his newsletter: "Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials.
This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men." (italics in original) Stone's comment that "nothing has happened in Russia to justify cooperation abroad between the independent left and the Communists" cost him several hundred subscribers to the
Weekly.
Kalugin stated that later he persuaded Stone to lunch with him until after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent quelling of the revolt when Stone angrily refused to let Kalugin pay for the lunch and stopped lunching with him.
Cassandra Tate of the
Columbia Journalism Review wrote that the alleged evidence of Stone’s involvement with the KGB is based on a few lines at the end of a KGB officer's speech. She concluded that he was not an "agent" and that there is no evidence he collaborated with KGB.
In a 1992 article in
The Nation, Guttenplan argued that the evidence shows clearly that Stone was never a witting collaborator with Soviet intelligence, while leaving open the question of exactly what the Soviets may have meant by the term "agent of influence." (See also, the further Sections below.)
VENONA Project decrypts: Agent "BLIN": a question of identity
In July 1995 the National Security Agency released to the public documents relating to the VENONA Project a US Signals Intelligence effort to collect and decrypt the text of Soviet KGB and GRU telegraph messages from the 1940s. According to the VENONA files, on September 13, 1944, the KGB New York station sent a message to Moscow that Vladimir Pravdin, a NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB) officer working under cover as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS, had been trying to contact a person by codename "BLIN" (the Russian word for pancake) in Washington, but that "BLIN" had been refusing to meet, citing a busy schedule. He reported that Samuel Krafsur, an American NKVD agent code-named "IDE" who worked for TASS in the building that housed Stone’s office, had tried to "sound him out but BLIN did not react."
VENONA transcript 1506, dated October 23, 1944, indicated that Pravdin had by now successfully met with "BLIN". The cable claimed that "BLIN" was "not refusing his aid" but "had three children and did not want to attract the attention of the FBI." "BLIN"'s fear "was his unwillingness to spoil his career," since he "earned $1500.00 per month but...[Pravdin speculated] would not be averse to having a supplemental income."
Walter and Miriam Schneir, in a 1999
Nation article about the Venona materials, "Cables Coming in From the Cold," remarked on the difficulties of interpretation caused by their hearsay nature; the many steps between a conversation and the sending of a cable; language difficulties; the possibility of imperfect decryption, and concluded "the Venona messages are not like the old TV show
You Are There, in which history was re-enacted before our eyes. They are history seen through a glass, darkly."
However, in the August 2000 book
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Cold War historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr claim with certainty that BLIN was Stone.
Then in late 2000, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel published a book
The Venona Secrets and repeated the allegation that BLIN was Stone. As evidence they cited a remark that Stone had made in his column of November 11, 1951 in response to reports in the
NY Herald Tribune about his leftist sympathies, that he would not be surprised if he read in the
Herald Tribune "that I was smuggled in from Pinsk in a carton of blintzes". Romerstein and Breindel suggest that Stone's use of the word "blintzes" betrayed a knowledge of his alleged codename, "BLIN.". According to Stone's biographer, Myra MacPherson, however, the FBI never identified Blin/Pancake as I.F. Stone. Instead they suspected Ernest K. Lindley, who also had three children. The FBI contended that Blin must have been someone “whose true pro-Soviet sympathies were not known to the public...” and hence could not have been Stone, who, on the contrary, far from being "fearful," did not hide his beliefs. Indeed, rather than wishing to avoid FBI attention as BLIN reportedly did, I.F. Stone made a point of suggesting to the Soviet press attache Oleg Kalugin that they lunch together at Harvey’s, a favorite Hoover haunt, in order to "tweak his [the F.B.I. Director's] nose.”.
2009 Klehr, Haynes,and Vassiliev book
In 2009, Klehr and Haynes together with Alexander Vassiliev, a former Russian KGB agent turned journalist, published
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. The Yale University Press book was partially financed by the Smith Richardson Foundation, which also hosted a symposium to publicize it in May 2009 at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. The authors cite a KGB file (allegedly seen by Vassiliev while in Russia) that explicitly named "Isidor Feinstein, a commentator for the
New York Post" in the 1930s, as BLIN and indicating that in 1936 BLIN "entered the channel of normal operational work." Another note supposedly listed BLIN as one of the New York KGB Station's agents in late 1938. Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev claim that Stone "assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of tasks, ranging from doing some talent spotting, acting as a courier by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalist tidbits and data the KGB found interesting." Specifically, they state that "Pancake" was supposed to help recruit and support anti-Nazi resistance activity in Berlin, Germany, at this time (1936—38). The authors admit that Stone broke with the KGB after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939; and they speculate that later Soviet contacts were in the nature of trying to reactivate the previous relationship. They conclude: "The documentary record shows that I.F. Stone consciously cooperated with Soviet intelligence from 1936 through 1938 [the period of the Popular Front]. An effort was made by Soviet intelligence to reestablish that relationship in 1944-45; we do not know whether that effort succeeded. To put it plainly, from 1936 to 1939 I.F. Stone was a Soviet spy",
Jim Naureckas, writing for FAIR counters that Klehr, Haynes, and Vassiliev's allegations, if true, indicate merely that Stone was “just gossiping,” and he assails the authors for their “nefarious” and “tendentious” magnification of “relatively innocuous behavior” on the basis of one anti-Nazi maneuver. As for Stone being listed as an “agent”, Naureckas points out that Walter Lippmann is listed as an agent as well.
Max Holland argues that, while in his opinion there is no question I.F. Stone was a "fully recruited and witting agent" from 1936 to 1938, Stone "was not a 'spy' in that he did not engage in espionage and had no access to classified material."Max Holland, " I. F. Stone: Encounters with Soviet Intelligence," Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 11, Number 3, Summer 2009.
Reviewing
Spies in the
Nation ( May 25, 2009), Guttenplan opines “
Spies never explains why we should believe KGB officers, pushed to justify their existence (and expense accounts) when they claim information comes from an elaborately recruited ‘agent’ rather than merely a source or contact.” He says the authors of
Spies distort the report from VENONA 1506 (October 1944) and never prove that BLIN was Stone in 1936. He adds that their charges merely show that Stone “was a good reporter” and notes that when Walter Lippmann is quoted in
Spies as having professional contacts with “a Soviet journalist with whom he traded insights and information.” This is the same man (Pravdin) whom Stone is said to have avoided.
In a response to the allegations, the I.F. Stone website responded:
There is not the slightest indication of espionage or access to classified information in the scraps of KGB file information cited, so this exaggeration has been deplored by sophisticated observers. Indeed, in the one anecdote described, an anti-fascist maneuver in Berlin, it is not clear whether the Russians were acting on Stone’s suggestion (i.e., as his agent) or whether he was helping them in his consistent, well-known, anti-fascist inclinations in the thirties.
In addition, it is often assumed, without evidence, that Stone was pro-Soviet Union and pro-Stalin during the 1930s or beyond when in fact Stone's writings were fairly critical of the Soviet Union and Stalin during that time. Stone was a public journalist who aired his views in public.
