I. F. Stone

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Image:If stone.jpg Isador Feinstein Stone (better known as I.F. Stone) (December 24, 1907 – July 17, 1989) was an iconoclastic American investigative journalist best known for his influential political newsletter, I.F. Stone's Weekly .

Stone was born in Philadelphia. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and as a student he wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

1 Career
2 Alleged Soviet "agent of influence"
3 Quotes
4 References
5 Books
6 External links
- 6.1 Venona

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Career

Stone started his own newspaper, the "Progress" as a high-school sophomore in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He later worked for the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania he joined the Philadelphia Record. Influenced by the work of Jack London, Stone became a radical journalist. In the 1930s he played an active role in the Popular Front opposition to Hitler.

Stone moved to the New York Post in 1933 and during this period supported Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. His first book, The Court Disposes (1937), was a critique of the Court's role in blocking New Deal reforms.

After leaving the New York Post in 1939, Stone became associate editor of The Nation. His next book, Business as Unusual (1941), was an attack on the country's failure to prepare for war. Underground to Palestine (1946) dealt with the migration of Eastern European Jews at the end of the Second World War. At that time he shared many of the Zionists' positions. While he strongly defended the State of Israel at its inception, he became sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in the Sixties.

In 1940 Stone joined the progressive afternoon newspaper PM which went under in 1948 and was replaced first by the New York Star and then the Daily Compass until it ceased publication in 1952. A critic of the emerging Cold War, Stone published the Hidden History of the Korean War that same year. One of Stone's more famous books, Hidden History alleged that South Korea initiated hostilities with constant and unprovoked cross-border attacks, and that United States and Syngman Rhee welcomed the conflict.

Inspired by the achievements of the muckracking journalist George Seldes and his political weekly, In Fact, Stone started his own political paper, I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1953. Over the next few years, Stone campaigned against McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the United States (in 1955, Stone's name was included in the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee's list of the 82 most active and typical sponsors of Communist fronts in the United States). In 1964 Stone was the only American journalist to challenge President Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

During the 1960s Stone continued to criticize the Vietnam War. His newsletter enjoyed a circulation of 70,000, but in 1971 ill-health and failing eyesight forced Stone to cease publication. After his retirement, he learned Ancient Greek and wrote a book about the prosecution and death of Socrates called The Trial of Socrates.

According to Nation Magazine editor Victor Navasky, Stone's journalistic work drew heavily on obscure documents from the public domain; some of his best scoops were discovered by peering through the voluminous official records generated by the government. Navasky also believes that as an outspoken leftist journalist working in often hostile environments, Stone's stories needed to meet an extremely high burden of proof to be considered credible. Navasky argues that most of Stone's articles are very well sourced, typically with official documents. [1]

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Alleged Soviet "agent of influence"

Template:Totallydisputed-section Several historians and researchers, including Herbert Romerstein, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr as well as retired KGB officials have published claims and evidence to the effect that Stone was among a number of persons inside the U.S. journalism community used as a Soviet agent of influence. The meaning of this term is highly contested as well as whether or not it applied to Stone. The available evidence shows clearly that Stone was approached by the KGB during the Second World War, when the US and Soviet Union were allied. Stone, along with a great many other Americans including commentators like Walter Lippmann and Eleanor Roosevelt, believed that the wartime cooperation between the US and the Soviet Union might continue. He also initially had what many would consider a naive view of the relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe. Beyond that there is some disagreement.

The testimony of a high ranking KGB officerTemplate:Fact shortly after Stone's death set off months of speculation about Stone's alleged collaboration with that espionage agency, with one columnist going as far to call Stone "the KGB's front man in American journalism." Romerstein claimed that Oleg Kalugin, a former major general in the KGB who had worked as a press officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington, had verified his accusations. Kalugin later wrote in The First Directorate (1994) that KGB headquarters had cabled him to re-establish contact with Stone because "he was a man with whom we had regular contact." He goes on to describe Stone as a "fellow traveller who made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system."

Kalugin later explicitly denied that Stone had ever been a paid agent of the KGB or that he had meant to imply any contact beyond the normal exchange between a journalist and a source. Template:Fact

The East German government at one point held 15,000 subscriptions of The I.F. Stone's Weekly Reader.Template:Fact

It is claimed that Stone accepted lunch meetings with members of the KGB from 1944 to 1968. Template:Fact

The charge that Stone had an illicit relationship with the KGB was revived again by Romerstein and the right-wing pressure group Accuracy in Media after the decoded VENONA Project KGB cables were released in 1995 by the National Security Agency. In their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr do identify Stone as BLIN in VENONA Project cables [2]. Venona transcript #1506 October 23, 1944 from the New York KGB office to Moscow, after a meeting with Vladimir Pravdin states, he "not refusing his aid," but "had three children and did not want to attract the attention of the FBI." Allegedly Stone’s fear "was his unwillingness to spoil his career" since he "earned $1500.00 per month but… would not be averse to having a supplemental income." In response to Pravdin's question as to "liaison" Stone is reported to have "replied that he would be glad to meet but he rarely visited New York City." The cable went on to record: "for the establishment of business contact with him… we are insisting on reciprocity." American journalist and KGB operative Samuel Krafsur also was set to the task of recruiting Stone. (See list of VENONA references below). Klehr and Haynes, who report the cable contents, also offer a clear note of caution, declaring, "There is no evidence in Venona that Stone ever was recruited by the KGB." Template:Fact

Walter Schneir and Miriam Schneir writing about this particular passage ("Cables Coming in From the Cold", The Nation, July 5, 1999 issue) remark at length on the difficulties with the Venona materials (their hearsay nature, with many steps between a conversation and the sending of a cable; language difficulties; possibility of imperfect decryption; etc.), concluding, "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."

According to Kalugin, Stone sought to sever his ties with the KGB after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 and hearing Nikita Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. Stone returned home and wrote "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." Stone's conclusion that "nothing has happened in Russia to justify cooperation abroad between the independent left and the Communists" cost him over 400 subscribers to the Weekly.Template:Fact Kalugin stated that while Stone sought to sever ties in 1956, Kalugin eventually persuaded Stone to maintain his ties to the Soviets after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent quelling of the revolt. Template:Fact Miriam Schneir, writing in The Nation, said that Kalugin's memoirs merely mention Stone as one of many "leading journalists and politicians" Kalugin knew in Washington, DC and that "KGB headquarters never said [Stone] had been an agent of our intelligence service…" The only mention of a money matter between Kalugin and Stone was that after the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring, Stone "angrily" refused to let Kalugin pay a lunch tab and (in Schneir's words), "They never met again. End of story." (Miriam Schneir, "Stone miscast", The Nation, November 11, 1996).

D.D. Guttenplan claims to have settled the question of whether Stone was ever a witting collaborator with Soviet intelligence definitively (and in the negative) by writing in (D.D. Guttenplan, "Izzy an Agent?", The Nation, August 3/10, 1992; Romerstein's letter in response and Guttenplan's "Stone Unturned," September 28, 1992. For a more comprehensive critique of Romerstein's limitations see Stephen Schwartz, "A Tale of Two Venonas" in The Nation, January 8, 2001.)

Cassandra Tate, of the Columbia Journalism Review, argues that accusations of Stone’s involvement with the KGB are based on a few lines at the end of the KGB officer's speech and that after some research into Stone's history she concluded that he was not an "agent" and there is no evidence he was a collaborator with the agency. [3].

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Quotes

"You may just think I am a red Jew son-of-a-bitch, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive." [on journalistic marginalization of him]

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." (in Time of Torment, p. 317)

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References

Oleg Kalugin. (1994). The First Directorate. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.
Frank J. Donner. (1980). The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Victor S. Navasky. (1980). Naming Names. New York: The Viking Press.
Miriam Schneir, "Stone Miscast," The Nation, November 4, 1996.
Ellen Schrecker. 1994. The Age Of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents. Boston: St. Martin's Press.
Ellen Schrecker. 1998. Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little Brown.
Stanley Sandler. 1999. The Korean War, University Press of Kentucky