Isidor Feinstein Stone s-a născut în 24 decembrie 1907 în Philadelphia într-o familie de evrei ruși și a decedat în 18 iunie 1989. În anii 60, revista pe care o conducea era considerată pe locul 16 din punctul de vedere al influenței în Statele Unite ale Americii. A lucrat la New York Post în anii 30 și a fost unul din susținătorii lui Roosvelt. Apoi a scos IF Stone Weekly, unde a dus un război cu FBI-ul.
În Worldnet, Ion Mihai Pacepa și Ronald J. Rychlak prezintă cazul IF Stone. Cititi articolul
Leftist journalist a spy for Stalin
Posted: August 21, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
By Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak © 2009
Highly classified Soviet intelligence documents have recently proved that American writer I.F. Stone, an intellectual icon of the American political left, lived a secret, parallel life as a paid agent of the Soviet KGB and its predecessor, the NKVD. Unfortunately, many of Stone's devotees have been unable to face this ugly truth and continue to depict him as a hero. Certainly that is true of D.D. Guttenplan, London correspondent for The Nation and author of the book "American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone." Other commentators may not promote Stone's cause so openly, but many of them are – perhaps unwittingly – putting forth flawed arguments in his defense.
Consider the Washington Post's recent review of Guttenplan's book. In it, reviewer Michael Kimmage, assistant professor of history at the Catholic University of America, points out that the book fails to answer the charges that Stone spent most of his professional life as a paid Soviet agent. That was a good start, but then he lets Guttenplan – and Stone – off the hook by writing: "If Stone was a spy, he was not a significant one."
That argument, which frequently turns up in defenses of Stone, reflects a misperception about Soviet espionage. For most people, "spying" means stealing secrets. Soviet espionage, however, placed just as much emphasis on changing minds. Influence the media and you influence the public. Change enough minds among the public, and political policies will change as well. Changing minds constituted an extremely important part of NKVD/KGB operations. Changing minds was also Stone's main task as a spy, and he was good at it.
The NKVD/KGB motto during the years it was paying Stone to change American minds was: "Capitalist espionage reports history. We make it." As former CIA chief of Soviet operations David E. Murphy explains in his book, "What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa," Stalin wanted others to think that he already knew everything, He sometimes dismissed important intelligence, and he frequently took offense when his espionage service tried to tell him something new.
Stalin used his espionage service primarily to strengthen his rule and to embellish his own image – in other words, to lie to his own country and to the rest of the world. In the NKVD/KGB community, this kind of lie was called dezinformatsiya. Foreign leftists – who had not the faintest idea what life under communist terror might be like – enthusiastically joined Stalin's colossal swindle. I.F. Stone was one of them. At first, perhaps he did it for ideological reasons. Later he did it for money.
Original NKVD documents show that the Soviet espionage service recruited Stone in 1936 and gave him the codename "Blin" (Russian for "pancake"). Some of Stone's defenders have argued that these documents do not contain Stone's name. That is correct. But a recently disclosed report of April 13, 1936, from the NKVD's New York station (KGB file 35,112, v.5, pp.212, 283) shows that "Blin" was "Isidor Feinstein, a commentator for the New York Post." (Isidor Feinstein changed his name to I.F. Stone in the 1930s.)
Stone apparently broke off active contact with the NKVD in 1939, upset that Stalin had reached an agreement with Hitler. Deciphered wartime intercept communications show, however, that in October 1944 (by which time the Soviets were fighting against Germany) Stone had dealings with a new NKVD handler, Vladimir Pravdin.
Stone told Pravdin that he was interested in "supplementary income." Pravdin wrote to NKVD headquarters that if this "business" relationship were agreed upon, Stone would be required to do his part and "really produce." Subsequent intercepts show that by December 1944 the business relationship had been worked out. There was an unflinching rule in the KGB and its sister services: Whenever a Western agent agreed to receive money, he had to sign at least one handwritten receipt acknowledging the payment he got. That receipt was to be used as insurance for his cooperation in the future.
Stone was a prominent writer in his day, and he was certainly a prize catch for the NKVD/KGB. It is more than coincidental that after 1944 his articles expressed the position of the Soviet Union on so many issues: criticizing U.S. efforts to prevent communist expansion in Vietnam; belittling the FBI and embarrassing J. Edgar Hoover; blasting Sen. Joseph McCarthy's efforts to remove Communists from the government; maligning Pope Pius XII and faulting the Catholic Church for the Nazi persecution of Jews; supporting the Kremlin's efforts to persuade the world that there was no Soviet involvement in the JFK assassination; demonizing the Korean policies of John Forster Dulles, Gen. MacArthur and President Truman; and many, many similar issues. Stone raised a number of issues for which he might be hailed today, including opposition to racial discrimination, but his arguments were really more about criticizing U.S. policies and therefore fell right in line with the Soviet position.
In his review, without intending to do so, Kimmage explains how being a Soviet agent tainted Stone's work:
Quick to attack injustice in America, Stone was slow to acknowledge the criminal nature of Soviet governance. Over time he came to see the Soviet Union as tyrannical and to identify with the anti-Soviet dissidents, but this was not the story he wished to tell as a journalist.
Kimmage gives a benign (or at least semi-benign) reason for Stone's unwillingness to criticize the Soviets openly, despite Stone's personal feelings: "he did not engage in self-criticism. Doing so might have given comfort to Sen. McCarthy and his supporters on the House Committee for Un-American Activities, and it might have bolstered the neo-imperial hubris of Cold War America."
The more obvious answer here is that, as a paid agent of the NKVD/KGB, Stone was not at liberty to criticize the Soviet Union. Even if Stone had definitively broken relations – which was not the case – he still would have been under the KGB's thumb and subject to blackmail for the rest of his career.
"There are no ex-KGB officers!" Vladimir Putin warned his former KGB subordinates in 1998. "A KGB officer leaves us only feet first!" (The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 2003). Those are exactly the words the KGB and its Eastern European surrogates told their Western agents during the years Stone was getting secret money from Moscow to do the KGB's job.
Revelation of Stone's work for the NKVD/KGB has damaged his journalistic trademark, but he did much more harm than that. Stone was paid to serve the interests of an organization that killed and terrorized millions of people and crushed freedom throughout a third of the world. Much of the propaganda he advanced worked its way into Western culture and is believed today. He was influential, but not in service to a good cause.
In the book "United in Hate: The Left's Romance With Tyranny and Terror," Dr. Jamie Glazov (who escaped from the Soviet Union, where his parents were prominent dissidents) refers to those Westerners who hold an idealized view of the Soviet Union as believers. They believe there is something wrong with their own country, and they fantasize about building a new and just world, where they would fit in with the ruling elite. Many of Stone's followers would fall into that category. Stone himself, however, was more than a believer. He was a KGB mercenary who accepted money to denigrate his own country.
Good journalists spread the truth. I.F. Stone was secretly paid by the NKVD/KGB to spread its dezinformatsiya. He was not an American hero. He was a most significant Soviet spy.
Retired Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest official to have ever defected from the Soviet bloc. His latest book is "Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB and the Kennedy Assassination" (Ivan R. Dee, 2007).
Ronald J. Rychlak is professor of law and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Mississippi School of Laws. His most recent book is "Righteous Genesis: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis" (Spence Publishing, 2005).
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