I.F. Stone

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Isador Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 – July 17, 1989) was a Soviet propagandist considered by many liberals as the standard for independent investigative journalism. Several independent historians and researchers as well as retired KGB officials have come to the conclusion that Stone was among a number of persons inside the U.S. journalism community used as a Soviet agent of influence, with one columnist going as far to call Stone "the KGB's front man in American journalism."

Early life

Born Isador Feinstein in Philadelphia in 1907, Stone was the son of Bernard Feinstein and the former Katherine Novack, Jewish immigrants from Russia who owned a dry goods store.

As a teenager, Stone began reading (among others) Karl Marx, along with the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the Socialist Jack London. He became a radical, joined the Socialist Party and served on its New Jersey State Committee, he wrote, "before I was old enough to vote." In 1928, he became a public-relations man for Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas.[1] In 1937, he changed his last name from "Feinstein" to "Stone."[2]

Journalism

Stone got his start in journalism at The Progress, a liberal monthly in his New Jersey neighborhood. He became a reporter on The Haddonfield Press and The Camden Courier-Post, then, in 1927 a rewrite man at The Philadelphia Inquirer.[3] In 1933, he became a reporter for The New York Post.

Stone began writing for The Nation in 1932, becoming the magazine's Washington editor in 1940. He became Washington correspondent for the New York daily P.M.,[4] then in 1948 for its successor, The New York Star,[5] the next year moving, in turn, to that paper's successor, The Daily Compass,[6] for which he was a columnist until it went out of business in 1952. The next year he began his own newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly, which he published until 1971.[7]

Stone's modeled his weekly after In Fact, a newsletter founded in the 1930s by the secret Communist[8] George Seldes,[9] whom Stone lauded as a "distinguished foreign correspondent and crusading liberal journalist."[10] Seldes co-founded the paper with "Bruce Minton,"[11] who was actually Soviet agent Richard Bransten, code-named "Informator." The paper was secretly founded at the instigation of (and funded by) the Communist Party[12] as an American version of London's The Week,[13] published by Comintern agent Claud Cockburn.[14]

In 1939, the Committee for Cultural Freedom, co-founded by progressive educator John Dewey and Socialist Irving Howe, published a “Manifesto” in The Nation criticizing Stalin's purges, arguing that Stalinism had made the Soviet Union into a totalitarian country, like Fascist Italy or National Socialist Germany. Stone was one of “400 leading Americans” who signed an “Open Letter,” published in Soviet Russia Today, denouncing the CCF as “Fascists” and “reactionaries” for endorsing “the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike.”[15] Unfortunately for Stone and other defenders of Stalin, this righteous blast appeared in the September 1939 issue, coinciding with the revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact and joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland.

Even his worshipful biographer Myra MacPherson admitted that Stone voiced "only tepid criticism of Stalin's brutalities."[16] He was much more vocal in his criticism of the U.S. Government: for example, the Eisenhower White House's "merely 'official'" condolences upon the death of Stalin were "small-minded and unworthy of a great power," wrote Stone.[17] He came to be seen as “an apologist for the hammer-and-sickle,” according to another sympathetic biographer, Robert Cottrell:

“ there was something disingenuous in his willingness to suspend judgment or to refuse to criticize still more forcefully the terror that was being played out in Soviet Russia.... What could not be denied was that Stone, like many of his political and intellectual counterparts, continued to afford Russia and even Stalinist communism something of a double standard, fearing that to do otherwise would endanger... the very possibility of socialism.”[18] ”

Korean war disinformation

In 1952, Stone published the The Hidden History of the Korean War, in which he lent credence to the Communist propaganda that South Korea was the aggressor in that conflict, peddling the conspiracy theory that it had “deliberately provoked” an attack by Communist North Korea, with “secret support from Chiang Kai-shek and some elements of the U.S. Government.”[19] His double-talk style may be glimpsed in the following quote:

“ Whether on June 25 the North attacked without provocation or went over to the offensive after an attack from the South, the attempt to pick that tempting plum solved many political problems on the anti-Communist side.[20] ”

James Wechsler, a former leader of the Young Communist League[21] and writer at The Nation, who was at this time editor of the New York Post (from which he launched vicious attacks on Senator Joe McCarthy) characterized Stone as “a fairly regular apologist for the Communists.”[22] Meanwhile the ex-Communist Richard Rovere, a writer for The New Masses (a Marxist journal once edited by Soviet espionage courier Whittaker Chambers) and future author of a book trashing McCarthy,[23] accused Stone of writing “heavily documented rubbish” with a pro-Communist slant. He called Stone “a man who thinks up good arguments for poor Communist positions,” adding, “Never, I think, has the communist line been upheld with such an elaborate display of the mechanics of research.” The Nation itself dismissed the book as “tendentious.”[24] Even McPherson agreed that this was Stone's “most tendentious work.”[25]

KGB recruitment

“In 1937 Stone was a fellow traveler,”[26] according to Stone hagiographer [27] D.D. Guttenplan. “[H]e freely admitted as much.”[28] In 1988, Stone himself confessed, “I was a fellow traveler.”[29] But as late as 1989—the year Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe—Stone claimed to see no conflict between Communism and American ideals of freedom: “In a way, I was half a Jeffersonian and half a Marxist,” he admitted. “I never saw a contradiction between the two, and I still don't.”[30]

Stone was indeed a “fellow traveler" who "made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system,” according to Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB operations in the United States.[31] But he was far more than that: he was a willing intelligence source, “who began his cooperation with the Soviet intelligence long before me,” said Kalugin, “based entirely on his view of the world.”[32]

Stone was actually an “agent of influence”[33] who “could shape public opinion, manipulate public opinion,” according to Kalugin. Furthermore, Stone “was willing to perform tasks”: he would “find out what the views of someone in the government were or some senator on such and such an issue.”[34]

Stone was identified in Venona decrypts with the code name "Blin" (Pancake).[35] An NKVD New York station report dated April 13, 1936, indicates that “Liberal” (Frank Palmer, a Soviet agent in New York) recommended Stone to his bosses as a “lead.” The same report corroborates that “Isadore Feinstein [as Stone was then known], a commentator for the New York Post” was assigned the code name “Pancake.” A report from the same station the following month states that relations with “Pancake” had entered “the channel of normal operational work,” meaning that Stone had become a "fully active agent."[36] Stone also met with "Sergei",[37] who (under cover as “Vladimir Pravdin,”[38] New York bureau chief of the Soviet government news agency TASS)[39] was actually NKVD agent Roland Abbiat,[40] murderer of Ignace Reiss.[41]

Liberal icon and Wikipedia disinformation

Stone remained a major hero to elements of the liberal media in the United States following his death just months short of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led various print outlets from The Nation magazine to the Columbia Journalism Review to seek to exonerate him following the emergence of the new charges in 1992. In the pages of the Nation, liberal journalist D. D. Guttenplan argued that Stone could have agreed with some aspects of Soviet policy without his writing being limited to parroting their propaganda and that they may have considered him an agent of influence and sought meetings with him only to the extent he agreed. [42] Wikipedia of course got into the act and ended its own lengthy section of the I. F. Stone article by stating, "years of tailing by agents, informants, illegal car searches, and even pawing through his trash produced not a shred of evidence of clandestine activities." [43] These years apparently began only at the end of the Korean War and continued into the 1970's, when COINTELPRO was shut down. However, this statement notably lacked a cite, so we do not know where to go to read the declassified investigative reports accessed by Wikipedia.

References

  1. ↑ A Word about Myself (The Official Web Site of I.F. Stone)
  2. ↑ I.F. Stone, Encyclopædia Brittanica
  3. ↑ Peter B. Flint, "I.F. Stone, Iconoclast of Journalism, Is Dead at 81," The New York Times, June 19, 1989
  4. ↑ P.M., The Writings of I.F. Stone (The Official Web Site of I.F. Stone)
  5. ↑ The Star, The Writings of I.F. Stone (The Official Web Site of I.F. Stone)
  6. ↑ The Compass, The Writings of I.F. Stone (The Official Web Site of I.F. Stone)
  7. ↑ I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The Writings of I.F. Stone (The Official Web Site of I.F. Stone)
  8. ↑ John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), ISBN 0300123906, pp. 169
  9. ↑ "'In 1952 I was over in Paris as correspondent for a paper that I knew wouldn't last very long and George [Seldes] saw me over there and encouraged me to start a little weekly like his,' said Stone..." John Guttenplan, "Obituary: George Seldes," The Independent (London), July 14, 1995
  10. ↑ A Word about Myself (The Official Web Site of I.F. Stone)
  11. ↑ Never Tire of Protesting (L. Stuart, 1968), p. 53
  12. ↑ John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), ISBN 0300123906, pp. 169-172
  13. ↑ David Randall, The Great Reporters (Pluto Press, 2005) ISBN 0745322972, p. 85
  14. ↑ Chapman Pincher, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage against America and Great Britain (Random House, Inc., 2009) ISBN 140006807X, pp. 43-47
  15. ↑ To All Active Supporters of Democracy and Peace, Soviet Russia Today, vol. 8, no. 5 (September 1939), pp. 24-25, 28
  16. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 118
  17. ↑ Isidor Feinstein Stone (Karl Weber, ed.), The Best of I.F. Stone (PublicAffairs, 2006) ISBN 158648463X, pp. 112-113
  18. ↑ Robert C. Cottrell, Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone (Rutgers University Press, 1994) ISBN 0813520088, pp. 68, 76
  19. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 264
  20. ↑ Lionel Abel, “Cold War, Reader Letters, Commentary, August 1969
  21. ↑ Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Regnery Publishing, 2000) ISBN 0895262754, p. 172
  22. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 126
  23. ↑ Richard Halworth Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (University of California Press, 1996) ISBN 0520204727
  24. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 268
  25. ↑ Myra MacPherson, “Review: Spies: the Rise and Fall of the KGB in America and 'Three Tales of I.F Stone and the KGB: Kalugin, Venona and the Notebooks'”, HuffingtonPost.com, May 28, 2009
  26. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 326
  27. ↑ Robert Fulford, “Two views on I.F. Stone,” National Post (Canada), June 14, 2009
  28. ↑ D.D. Guttenplan, “Red Harvest: The KGB in America,” The Nation, May 25, 2009
  29. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 354
  30. ↑ Tim Graham, Radical Writer I. F. Stone Wasn't A Paid Soviet Agent: He'd 'Perform Tasks' For Free, NewsBusters.org, September 30, 2006; The Nation, July 10, 1989, as cited in Notable Quotables, July 10-March 6, 1989
  31. ↑ John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), ISBN 0300077718, p. 247
  32. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 326
  33. ↑ Oleg Kalugin and Fen Montaigne, The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence & Espionage Against the West (Darby, Penn.: Diane Publishing Company, 1994), ISBN 0788151118, p. 74
  34. ↑ Myra MacPherson, 'All Governments Lie!': The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006) ISBN 0684807130, p. 327
  35. ↑ Index of Cover Names, New York-Moscow Communications (Venona, National Security Agency), p. 10. Cf. John Earl Haynes (2008), Vassiliev Notebooks Concordance: Cover Names, Real Names, Abbreviations, Acronyms, Organizational Titles, Tradecraft Terminology, p. 159
  36. ↑ John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), ISBN 0300123906, p. 150
  37. ↑ Venona 1506 KGB New York to Moscow, 23 October 1944
  38. ↑ Robert L. Benson, The Venona Story (Center for Cryptologic History, Fort George G. Meade, Md., 2001), p. 31 (PDF p. 34)
  39. ↑ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 2000), ISBN 0-465-00310-9, p. 124
  40. ↑ Harvey Klehr, “Devils in America,” The New Republic, February 12, 2004
  41. ↑ Walter Krivitsky, In Stalin's Secret Service: An Exposé of Russia’s Secret Policies by the Former Chief of the Soviet Intelligence in Western Europe (Harper & Brothers, 1939), pp. 261-263 (PDF pp. 285-287)
  42. ↑ D. D. Guttenplan, "Izzy an Agent?", The Nation, August 3/10, 1992
  43. ↑ Accessed online May 1, 2007

External links

External link

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