Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (36 page)

Identifies Isidor Feinstein (later known as I. F. Stone) as a KGB agent recruited in 1936 and engaged in
"normal operational work" Courtesy of Alexander Vassiliev.

1941 internal KGB summary report broke down the occupations of Americans working for the spy agency in the prior
decade. Twenty-two were journalists, a profession outnumbered
only by engineers (forty-nine) and dwarfing economists (four)
and professors (eight). Unlike engineers, scientists, military personnel, or
government officials, journalists rarely had direct access to technical secrets or classified documents, but the espionage enterprise encompasses
more than the classic spy who actually steals a document. The KGB recruited journalists in part for their access to inside information and sources
on politics and policy, insights into personalities, and confidential and nonpublic information that never made it into published stories. Certain journalistic working habits also lent themselves to intelligence tasks. By profession journalists ask questions and probe; what might seem intrusive or
suspect if done by anyone else is their normal modus operandi. Consequently, the KGB often used journalists as talent spotters for persons who
did have access to sensitive information and found them useful in gather ing background information for evaluating candidates for recruitment.
The flexibility of their work also made them desirable as couriers and agent
handlers, the liaisons between KGB professional officers and their American sources. There was also much less risk that a journalist having contact
with a government official or engineer would attract the attention of security officials than would a KGB officer under Soviet diplomatic cover.
And even if security officials did notice a meeting, it was much easier to
provide a benign explanation for contact with a pesky American journalist than with a Soviet diplomat. Additionally, the KGB could use journalists for "active measures," the planting of a story in the press or giving a
slant to a story that served KGB goals.'

The KGB cables, letters, and reports transcribed or summarized in
Alexander Vassiliev's notebooks document the relationships between the
KGB and a surprising array of American journalists, some of whom have
never been suspected of clandestine contact with Soviet intelligence and
others whose status has been the subject of bitter and long-standing debate.

When new information about KGB operations began to emerge in the
199os, no individual case generated as much controversy or outrage as
that of I. F. Stone. By the time he died in 1989, I. F. Stone had been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and
a teller of truth to power. But charges about connections with the KGB
have been swirling about for more than a decade. Until now, the evidence
was equivocal and subject to different interpretations.

Born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia in 1907 to Jewish immigrants
from Russia, Stone dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to become a journalist. After several years as the youngest editorial writer for
a major metropolitan newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, he moved to
the New York Post with instructions from its owner, J. David Stern, to
transform it into a champion of New Deal liberalism. Stone was, however, more than just a New Deal liberal. His sympathy for Soviet communism was obvious. In June 1933 he declared that a "Soviet America"
was "the one way out that could make a real difference to the working
classes" and insisted that FDR's New Deal was not reforming America
but leading it to fascism, a view that then reflected the position of the
CPUSA.2

In New York, Stone also became a contributor to the Nation and the New Republic and a familiar presence in the city's left-wing, Popular
Front intellectual scene. Although he had briefly been a member of the
Socialist Party in the early 1930s, he soon had a reputation as a fervent
pro-Communist, although he never joined the CPUSA. His biographer
conceded that he had a romantic view of communism and viewed "party
members as lined up on the correct side of historical developments, unlike fascists or even members of the smaller left-wing sects." While occasionally critical of aspects of Stalin's purges, he felt that because of the
battle against fascism it was too important to risk fracturing the Popular
Front by openly denouncing Stalin or the Soviet Union. He fervently supported the Loyalist cause in Spain from 1936 onwards. He was a signer
of the statement, published just days before the Nazi-Soviet Pact, defending the USSR and its progress toward democracy and denying it
shared any commonalities with Nazi Germany.3

After Stern finally fired him for his excessively pro-Soviet views, Stone
moved to the Nation. Briefly shaken by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he momentarily pulled back from his Communist alliances, writing an angry
denunciation of the agreement and taking part in a short-lived effort by
several other disillusioned Popular Fronters and ex-Communists to build
a new radical group critical of the CPUSA as a tool of Soviet foreign policy. When in 1940 he moved to PM, the left-wing daily edited by Ralph
Ingersoll, however, Stone reverted to his earlier attitudes and became a
stalwart of its pro-Communist faction. His uncritical support of Soviet
and Communist policies continued through the Stalin era. In 1952, for example, he wrote The Hidden History of the Korean War, where he promoted the falsehood that it was South Korea that had sparked the war by
invading the Communist North. After PM folded, he wrote for its leftwing successor and, when it also went under in 1953, started his own
muckraking newsletter, I. F Stone's Weekly, which gained a wide audience on the political left. Although he was occasionally critical of aspects
of Soviet policy, it was not until the mid-1950s that he lost his illusions
about the Soviet regime, writing a denunciation that cost his newsletter
a substantial portion of his Old Left, pro-Communist readership. In the
196os, however, I. F Stone's Weekly regained its leftist audience, particularly during the Vietnam War era, when his angry condemnation of
American foreign policy found a receptive audience among both the old
pro-Soviet left and the younger New Left. Stone learned classical Greek
in his retirement and wrote a book on Socrates and Athens, part of his
life-long obsession with issues of dissent. When he died in 1989, his reputation as a fiercely independent curmudgeon seemed secure.

The first report of Stone's possible ties to the KGB came in 1992,
when Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB general, told a British journalist: "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." Herbert Romerstein, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, quoted an unidentified KGB source as saying that the journalist in question was Stone. The British journalist then reinterviewed
Kalugin, who admitted that he had been referring to Stone but denied
that Stone was a controlled agent. In his later (1994) autobiography,
Kalugin characterized Stone as a fellow traveler "who had made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system" before the mid-1950s. He
wrote that when he was asked to reestablish contact with Stone, KGB
headquarters in Moscow "never said that he had been an agent of our intelligence service, but rather that he was a man with whom we had regular contact."4

Kalugin's careful parsing of Stone's exact relationship to the KGB and
hints of an earlier relationship made the discovery of Stone-related materials in the KGB cables deciphered by the Venona project in the mid199os the occasion for another uproar. Four cables mentioned Stone.
Two were entirely benign. A GRU message from 1943 merely reported
that someone with GRU connections had been in Washington and talked
with several correspondents, including Stone. A KGB message dated December 1944 mentioned Stone along with several other journalists who
had contacts with military leaders. The other two, both from 1944, were
more suggestive. In all the KGB messages, Stone had the cover name
"Pancake." By itself, that did not indicate that he worked for the KGB.
Many individuals, like President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill,
were given cover names; they were as much a convenience for cipher officers (who could avoid having to laboriously use a "spell table" to cipher
a Latin alphabet name) as for security.

On 13 September 1944, the KGB New York station sent a message to
Moscow that Vladimir Pravdin, a KGB officer working under cover of a
TASS correspondent, had been futilely trying to contact "Pancake" in
Washington, but he had been refusing to meet, citing his busy schedule.
Samuel Krafsur, "Ide," an American KGB agent who worked for TASS in
the same building as Stone's office, had tried to "sound him out but Pancake did not react." A 23 October 1944 message then reported that
Pravdin had succeeded in meeting with Stone:

P. ["Pancake"/Stone] said that he had noticed our attempts to contact him, particularly the attempts of Ide [Krafsur] and of people of the Trust [USSR Embassy], but he had reacted negatively fearing the consequences. At the same
time he implied that the attempts at rapprochement had been made with insufficient caution and by people who were insufficiently responsible. To
Sergey's [Pravdin's] reply that naturally we did not want to subject him to unpleasant complications, Pancake gave him to understand that he was not refusing his aid but one should consider that he had three children and did not
want to attract the attention of the Hut [FBI]. To Sergey's question how he
considered it advisable to maintain liaison P. replied that he would be glad to
meet but he rarely visited Tyre [New York].

While Stone earned a good living, the message added, "he would not be
averse to having a supplementary income."5

Taken together, these messages were suggestive but not conclusive.
The KGB wanted to establish a covert relationship with Stone and was
willing to pay him, but what exactly it had in mind was left unstated. Another implication was that Stone feared a connection with the KGB could
attract FBI attention and jeopardize his career but otherwise was not
averse to dealing with it. There was no firm evidence that Stone had
agreed to cooperate with the KGB, although taken with Kalugin's revelation that he had been ordered to reestablish contact with Stone in the
196os, it was clear that Stone must have had some understanding of who
was cultivating him.

The controversy about Stone continued to simmer in the ensuing
decade, fueled in part by charges by conservative columnist Robert
Novak and polemicist Ann Coulter that he was a paid agent and a Soviet
spy. In zoo6 a new biography of Stone hysterically charged that "neocons" had launched these slanderous attacks on Stone since they "have a
vested interest in portraying Stone as a paid Kremlin stooge because he
remains an icon to those who despise all that the far right espoused." Putting aside the matter that the paleo-conservatives accusing Stone of
spying would recoil at being referred to as neo-conservatives, Myra
MacPherson also attempted to demonstrate that there was no reason to
assume "Pancake" was Stone; that even if he was, he had done nothing
more than meet with a Soviet correspondent; and that his only reason for
doing so reluctantly was because the nefarious FBI was terrorizing anyone who dared meet with a Russian.'

MacPherson's book set off another round of accusations. Paul Berman, a left-wing anti-Communist writer, dismissed her whitewashing of Stone, noting that the weight of Stone's own writing showed that he had
a long history of glorifying the Soviet Union until the 195os and that just
because he had no access to official secrets and did not steal anything did
not mean that the KGB would not value his cooperation. General Kalugin, reinterviewed, remained enigmatic about Stone's precise relationship but added that he had first been in contact with the KGB in 1936.
Eric Alterman, a one-time Stone protege and prominent left-wing
polemicist, called the Stone-KGB stories "smears," "phony," and "pathetic," dismissing the whole contretemps as "an almost entirely bogus
controversy over whether Stone ever willingly spied for the Russians or
cooperated with the KGB in any way. He did not."7