“Izzy taught a great many of us about the importance of
independence, the critical ingredient of a good journalist,”
journalist Robert Kaiser, who later became managing editor of the
Washington Post, said of I.F. Stone upon his death in
1989. “Izzy was totally independent from the politicians and
officials he wrote about.” The Times of London titled
its obit: “I.F. Stone: Spirit of America’s Independent
Journalism.” Jeff Cohen, the founder of Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR), more recently called Stone “an American
patriot” whose “journalistic hallmark was independence.”
But the man behind I.F. Stone’s Weekly was neither
patriot nor independent. He was an agent for the Soviet Union.
“Charges about Stone’s connections with the KGB have been
swirling about for more than a decade, prompting cries of outrage
among his passionate followers,” write John Earl Haynes, Harvey
Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev in an excerpt of their new book,
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, posted
at Commentary magazine’s website and linked by the
Drudge Report. “Until now, the evidence was equivocal and subject
to different interpretations. No longer.”
Long before the trio of Cold War scholars came along with the
latest evidence, the case against Stone showing him as a
compromised rather than an independent voice was considerable.
The WWII-era Venona intercepts of Soviet spy cables document
repeated attempts by Soviet intelligence to contact Stone.
“PANCAKE to give us information,” one such cable triumphantly
reported. Stone, the Soviet spymaster noted, avoided the earlier
entreaties because he did not want to attract the attention of
the FBI or damage his career. That said, he reported that Stone
“would not be averse to having a supplementary income.”
Atop the Venona intercepts, numerous mid-century FBI informants,
including the former managing editor of the Daily
Worker, reported Stone as a onetime Communist Party member.
KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who plied his trade as a press liaison
at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., conceded in the early
1990s that Stone had been his agent. “We had an agent — a well
known American journalist — with a good reputation who severed
his ties with us in 1956,” he declared. “I myself convinced him
to resume them. But after 1968, after the invasion of
Czechoslovakia… he said he would never again take any money from
us.” Kalugin subsequently identified the unnamed agent as Izzy
Stone. After an uproar by Stone’s admirers in the U.S. and the
former Soviet Union, Kalugin vacillated as to how formal the
arrangement with Stone actually was.
And now, Vassiliev, a KGB-agent-turned-historian, has recovered
more than 1,100 pages of notes from research inside Soviet
intelligence archives. Included among them are details of Stone’s
work as a Soviet agent in the 1930s. “Relations with Pancake
[Stone’s codename] have entered the channel of normal operational
work,” a document from 1936 reports. The intelligence files
outline Stone’s role in recruiting other agents for the KGB and
passing along information to his handlers. “To put it plainly,”
Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev write, “from 1936 to 1939 I.F. Stone
was a Soviet spy.”
Even without the declassified FBI memos, decrypted Venona cables,
and the material from Soviet-era archives, Stone’s peculiar prose
was enough to raise suspicions.
During the Great Depression, Stone judged a “Soviet America” as
“the one way out that could make a real difference to the working
classes.” When Sidney Hook, John Dewey, Norman Thomas, and other
leftist intellectuals issued a proclamation condemning the Left’s
double standard on totalitarianism in Germany versus
totalitarianism in Russia, Stone was a signatory of the response
that held it “a fantastic falsehood that the U.S.S.R. and
totalitarian states are basically alike.” In the waning days of
World War II, long before the left expressed outrage over Robert
Novak’s “outing” of CIA officer Valerie Plame, Stone exposed four
American intelligence officers, including future CIA director
Allen Dulles, working undercover in neutral Switzerland. Stone
even advanced the idea, rejected just about everywhere save for
one prison state in East Asia, that the South Koreans started the
Korean War.
Alexander Vassiliev’s find documenting the espionage work of Izzy
Stone adds further confirmation of the journalistic icon as a
compromised puppet manipulated by Moscow ventriloquists. More
significantly, it exposes the gullibility, and utter incuriosity,
of journalists when the subject deserving investigation is one of
their own—both professionally and politically. It is a mark of
dishonor for journalism that journalists would honor someone so
dishonorable to their profession. But honor him they do.
Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism awards an
“I.F Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.” Ithaca College
hosts an “Izzy Awards” for “independent media.” The University of
California-Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism offers “I.F.
Stone Fellowships.” In 1999, New York University’s journalism
department, and a panel of prestigious scribes that included Jeff
Greenfield, Mary McGrory, and Morley Safer, named I.F.
Stone’s Weekly as number 16 on its list of the 100 best
works of U.S. journalism in the 20th century.
Don’t expect the academic honors, or the media hosannas, to
evaporate anytime soon. Stone took money from the KGB and not the
CIA, after all. Izzy Stone was wrong about nearly everything he
wrote about during the Cold War. It is only fitting that his
admirers got him so wrong too.
