I.F. Stone Was No Spy

AP Photo Today's news cycle brings "proof" that legendary journalist I.F. Stone was a Soviet spy. Stone's friend and Daily Beast contributor Eric Alterman dissects a decades-old tale that won't go away.

Well, here we go again.

Conservatives have been trying to pin the “spy” label on the legendary independent scholar/journalist—and proto-blogger— I.F. Stone for nearly two decades. They began not long after his June 1989 death, seizing on an ambiguous statement from a cagey former KGB agent named Oleg Kalugin to a British journalist about their conversations together. Back then, Herbert Romerstein, an ex-staffer of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, insisted that Stone had been on the KGB payroll "for more than two decades." Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media—which is to actual accuracy in media what the Holy Roman Empire was to holiness, Roman-ness, and empires—added that Stone had been "paid with Kremlin gold" for "at least 15 years." These charges, Kalugin later qualified, to me and to several other journalists, were false. All that had happened was that Stone had had lunch a few times with a man whom he had not known was a KGB agent. Incredibly, for an American journalist, he actually insisted on picking up the tab.

So what do we have? A man of avowed anti-Fascist sympathies, still-foolishly naïve about Stalin and the Soviet Union, agreed on a couple of occasions to help those whom he believed to be actually fighting fascism, while his own country, still mired in childish isolationism, looked away.

When Myra McPherson published her biography of Stone two years ago, Paul Berman, the onetime leftist intellectual who was among the most prominent of “liberal” supporters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, writing in The New York Times Book Review, seized on Kalugin’s remarks to the author to level the charge once more. It was an odd, almost fantastical reading of what McPherson had actually written, as she pointed out in a letter to the editor. She wrote “Your reviewer, Mr. Paul Berman, refers to Oleg Kalugin continually as a KGB agent—never once acknowledging, as the book repeatedly notes, that his cover was as the Russian press attache. This was the only capacity in which Stone and other American reporters—who also talked with him in the 1960s—knew him.” McPherson also pointed out that, according to the KGB’s own files, Walter Lippmann—whom no one at all considers a spy—“offered much more useful information to the Soviets than Stone ever did.” I criticized Berman’s errors here.

Now Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, working with ex-KGB agent, Alexander Vassiliev, have entered the fray with an article in Commentary magazine, drawn from their new book, Spies. They agree that until now, “There was no firm evidence that Stone had agreed to cooperate with the KGB.” Nevertheless, they insist that long before these events took place, “from 1936 to 1939, I.F. Stone was a Soviet spy.”

The authors do have some documents upon which to base their claim so let’s clarify a few matters. First off, definitions. Dictionary.com defines “spy” as follows (in its first definition): "a person employed by a government to obtain secret information or intelligence about another, usually hostile, country, esp. with reference to military or naval affairs."

Now, what according to the authors did Stone actually do during his period as a “spy?” Well—based on notes in the KGB archives taken by Vassiliev which are posted online here—no one else has claimed to see the originals—Stone is identified by Soviet agents as having “assisted Soviet intelligence on a number of such tasks: talent-spotting, acting as a courier by relaying information to other agents, and providing private journalistic tidbits and data the KGB found interesting.”

First off, none of those activities comport with my—or Dictionary.com’s definition of the word “spy.” Stone did not obtain any secret information of any kind, nor even any government information of any kind, much less that related to military or naval affairs. He had access to none during the course of his work as a well-known radical journalist and there is no indication whatsoever that he ever attempted to secure it surreptitiously. (In fact, Stone’s famous methodology—one that has inspired tens of thousands of bloggers today—was to find information about official malfeasance that was available on the record in published government documents, but that went largely ignored by the then-MSM.)