Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Alexander Vassiliev: "I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed"

[John Earl Haynes is a historian at the Library of Congress. Harvey Klehr is Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University. Alexander Vassiliev is a journalist living in London. In somewhat different form, this article appears in their new book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, out this month from Yale. Copyright © 2009 by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. Excerpted by permission of Yale University Press.]

... 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 interviewed Kalugin again, and he admitted that he had been referring to Stone but denied that Stone was a controlled agent. In a 1994 autobiography, Kalugin characterized Stone as a fellow traveler (someone with Communist Party beliefs but not membership) “who had made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system” before the mid-1950s. When he was asked to reestablish contact with Stone, Kalugin wrote, KGB headquarters in Moscow “never said that [Stone] had been an agent of our intelligence service, but rather that he was a man with whom we had regular contact.”

Kalugin’s careful parsing of Stone’s precise relationship to the KGB and the hints he offered of an earlier relationship with Soviet intelligence made the discovery of Stone-related materials in the KGB cables deciphered by the Venona project in the mid-1990s the occasion for an uproar. Four cables mentioned Stone. Two were entirely benign. A 1943 message from the GRU, or Soviet military intelligence, 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. On September 13, the KGB New York station sent a message to Moscow that Vladimir Pravdin, a KGB officer working under cover as a correspondent for TASS, the Soviet news agency, had been trying to contact “Pancake” in Washington, but that Pancake had been refusing to meet, citing a busy schedule. Samuel Krafsur, an American KGB agent code-named “Ide” who worked for TASS in the building that housed Stone’s office, had tried to “sound him out but Pancake did not react.” An October 23 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.”

Taken together, these messages were suggestive but not conclusive. Unquestionably, the KGB had wanted to establish a covert relationship with Stone and had been 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 that otherwise, he was not averse to a relationship. There was no firm evidence that Stone had agreed to cooperate with the KGB, although Kalugin’s revelation that he had been ordered to reestablish contact with Stone in the 1960s made it clear that Stone must have had some understanding of who was cultivating him....