Page 1 of 1 pages
As I recall, I.F.Stone came dangerously close to being a Soviet agent.
Posted by logan on Sep 15, 2006 at 8:47 AM
Stone’s newsletter was absolutely great. I subscibed during the Viet-nam “war” while I was in the US Air Force. He was that “breath of fresh air” we needed. Just for the record, I served on active duty for 28 years and retired in 1986.
Posted by frank67 on Sep 18, 2006 at 11:00 AM
What does that mean being close to being a Soviet?
We are being taken over by illegal immigrants and you still have faries of communism in your head?
We have much bigger fish to fry.
I.F. Stone: When you take on a cause you know you are going to lose you must do it because you truly believe in it, not as a martyr. You must enjoy the fight because you believe in it and your only hope is someday others will agree and continue the fight.
Posted by PoBoy on Sep 20, 2006 at 1:05 PM
Illegals. ..communists…subversives…“Krauts”...“Japs”... “gooks”...
“hadjis”...Are scapegoats ALWAYS needed?
Unless you are Native American, each and every one of us is an immigrant or a descendent of immigrants. Were THEY all legal?
Posted by frank67 on Sep 20, 2006 at 3:20 PM
At pages 247-249 of VENONA, a book about decrytpting electronic intercepts of Soviet KGB messages with and regarding Americans, the authors, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, state that a retired KGB general identified I.F.Stone as a fellow traveler with whom the KGB had regular contact. The KGB’s cover name for Stone was Bliny or Pancake.
Posted by logan on Sep 20, 2006 at 3:25 PM
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.
In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing—for the sheer fun and joy of it—to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.”
—I.F. Stone
Posted by PoBoy on Sep 27, 2006 at 5:49 PM
I am no expert on I F Stone but I understand that the allegations are pretty thin on evidence a summary exists here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_F_Stone).
I guess there are few things to think about when you read these sorts of allegation.
The first is to ask if it makes sense. Given that he was known for breaking stories based on information on the public record, what good would he be as a spy. He didn’t have access to secret information. Embassies all over the world employ researches to look at publicly available information, so it may have made sense for the USSR to employ him in this capacity, but doing so would not make him a soviet agent.
Ok, what if they were using him to pass on propaganda? Well, if this was the case the evidence would be in the paper, no one would have to look at the Soviet archives. But I understand that he was considered to be unusually reliable. (Though, I should add that one has to be careful when doing this: an apologist for a cause is not necessarily an agent– (s)he could be sincerely stating his or her own opinion. )
Second: who benefits from the allegations? In the above article it is clear he did not exactly follow the government line: and we know that those who make this decision today are accused of aiding the terrorists: how long before it said that today’s jounralists came dangerously close to being Al Qaida agents?
Posted by richard123 on Sep 28, 2006 at 12:22 AM
Those Venona files are bullshit anti Communist crap, mostly false.
I F Stone Newsletter was one of the few publications I actually paid for. Not only was he a researcher but he had a great style.
Posted by Spinoza750 on Sep 28, 2006 at 10:34 PM
Spinoza, whether you like it or not, the Venona decryptions are FACT, however unpleasant it may be to trogdolytes.
Posted by logan on Sep 29, 2006 at 8:52 AM
You anti-Communist pricks are rather disgusting.
Please send this around the net. It is very important to fight the Brown Shirts
————————————————————————————————————————-
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15156.htm
A Personal Declaration of Independence
I refuse to accept as my government actions by the current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate.
By William A. Cook
“If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic … It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” (President George W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006 report by AP’s Terence Hunt)
09/29/06 “Palestine Chronicle”—- -Citizens of the United States of America bear an awesome responsibility to maintain control of their government’s behavior since that government derives its powers from the consent granted it by the citizens. When the government ceases to act in accord with the dictates of the respective consciences of its citizens as determined by its foundational documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—, when it violates the established principles that give this nation legitimacy before the nations of the world through mutually accepted agreements, charters, and conventions, when it abrogates the inalienable rights granted the citizens by the Creator, when it declares unequivocally that the citizens cannot dissent with an action or actions taken by the government, then it is the right and the duty of the citizen to “alter or abolish” that government.
For the past five years, the present government of the United States, including the Executive branch, the Congress and the Senate, has committed a “long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object (that) evinces a design to reduce them (the citizens) under absolute despotism.” As a citizen of these United States for 70 years, I refuse to be ruled by a tyrant who imposes despotic, autocratic control on the citizens of these United States through a series of clandestine actions that usurp the rights of the people.
I refuse to accept as my government actions by the current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate, that include
spying on its citizens without their knowledge or consent, an action contrary to existing law;
elimination of personal privacy through the Patriot Act, an action that presumes culpability, not innocence until proven guilty;
preemptive invasion of other nations determined by the unilateral judgment of an all powerful executive that eviscerates the power of the peoples’ representatives;
acts of extrajudicial execution and the abandonment of rule by law thereby making the President, in effect, judge, jury and executioner;
acts of torture and the unilateral infliction of “acceptable” torture techniques thus casting America before the world as an amoral nation beholden to no international agreement and placing at risk the soldiers who defend it;
imposition of illegal actions of war instituted through an orchestrated control of lies communicated to the citizenry thereby negating their democratic right to know that they might vote in accord with their conscience;
levying an incredible tax burden on the citizens to pay for the consequences of these lies that will cost them and their children dearly for decades to come while corporations reap a windfall of profit from closed bids and corruption;
read rest of article
Posted by Spinoza750 on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:30 PM
Spinoza, what is Nazi about the Venona decryptions? The authors are respected Ivy League academics. Obviously, you have not read their book, or if you have, you are incapable of objective analysis. Sadly, both appear to be the case. Rave on and reveal your willful ignorance.
Posted by logan on Sep 29, 2006 at 5:43 PM
I might be ignorant about many things but I know a fascist when I see one. You are a fascist. Izzy was a good decent human being and why should anyone care whether or not he was a communist. (Which I doubt) Communists did a lot of good in the world and scum like you are only evil.
The best capitalist is a dead capitalist.
Posted by Spinoza750 on Oct 7, 2006 at 5:41 PM
Spinoza, come in off the streets and get a life!
Posted by logan on Oct 8, 2006 at 9:19 AM
What we need to do is get in the streets and fight fascism
Posted by Spinoza750 on Oct 9, 2006 at 12:41 AM
Communist? Oh come on, that’s like the “news flash” that Pete Seeger denounced Stalin many decades ago.
BUT it seems either the author or reviewer have made a terrible mistake - as early as the early 1940s, Stone was certainly NOT obscure, with a series of books written on the “dollar a year” WW II profiteers, regular columns and articles in many NY newspapers and magazines, oft syndicated - followed by his late-40s trips to the Middle East to watch the birth of Israel (the only books not republished in the 1980s by Little, Brown - I guess out of some obscure bigotry or Political Correctness attitude there.
He was a central figure in NY’s experimental ad-less tabloids, PM and the New York Star, which just couldn’t make it on the extra penny a copy and encyclopedia sales. (Newspapers traditionally relied on the cover price to cover ONLY the cost of printing, paper and distribution, with the newsroom subsisting on the leavings of the ad department ... Ad-oriented publishers, to this day, find it kind of silly to support a department that directly generates no income, and in a good paper, every-so-often fires shots at, or sinks a major source of ad revenue - though folks who still read newspapers tend to want the real news that, more and more, simply wraps the ad package.
Back to Izzy - By 1953, because of the insane (and, incidentally, very anti-semetic) fools of HUAC and Sen. McCarthy in the capitol, Father Coughlin and friends on the air, Stone was unemployable.
THATs when he started his immediately-successful Weekly, which instanly got the subscribers who had been shocked at his tales of US government and corporate abuse, and thrilled by his tales of Israel’s creation and immediate attack by the Arab nations simultaneously created. They subscribed by the thousand, and Stone and his wife were able to live comfortably, albeit drowned in the work they love until 1971, when Stone’s doctors told him to take it easy.
Though by the mid-1960s, most newspapers would have welcomed Stone to their newsrooms, he wanted to retain 100% editorial control over his words.
From 1971 until his death, Stone pursued with the same vigor he pursued HUAC, the Ancient Athenian polis, and the strange trial ending in the execution of Socrates for supporting government-by -Aristocracy-or-monarchy in a free state where anyone else got away with floating even more crackpot ideas. His fellow ancient Greek experts say they eventually accepted the 3 a.m. ‘deadline’ calls when Stone demanded they check out words on two different ancient Greek manuscripts.
As Jules Feiffer wrote, upon the great man’s death, there is nobody left to explain the madness of the world to him anymore.
Anyway, Steve, keep the penguins marching ....
-wtp
Posted by -wtp on Sep 5, 2007 at 11:06 AM
I.F. Stone did get a free pass after it was discovered in the Venona files that he was a bag man for the KGB. No fault of his own. He was raised back in the “great despression” when times were tough. The mood of the country was to hate captialism and love socalism. Apparently Stone and people like him could never see beyond that frame of mind. My parents were like that to some extent, but unlike Stone, they appreciated all that they received from this country. The Venona files are a very interesting part of our country’s history and too bad it did not receive more attention from the press. I think they were too worried it would identify that the McCarthy might not have been too far from the truth and Truman was correct in starting his witch hunt for “reds” in the late 1940;s. Both RFK and JFK were hunting reds early in their career too. Stone is a guy that outlived his usefullness to the KGB and just sort of faded away. Still and interesting character to read about and study. It’s good to see people like him that are so full of hate that it blinds them to what the USA is about.
Posted by totsuka on Jul 22, 2008 at 5:56 PM
Totsuka-
The full name of those files were the Verona INTERCEPTS, encoded transmissions from the Sov. embassy back home. Interestingly, though they have been used to damn people (especially those long dead), they never used *real* names.
The names, like the names of Julius Rosenberg, were gratuitously tacked on to people mentioned in the files under a cover name to match the needs or imagination of agencies that kept them.
Izzy Stone was of value to the KGB for the same reason he was of value to all of us - he reported on things we were supposed to know - things even both the US and USSR already knew, but were kept deep and dark secrets from the people of this country for NO GOOD REASON!
Or no good reason outside of the folks who always have operated in CYA mode. He wasn’t a “bag-man”
He played the equivalent role to the USSR that “The New York Times” did in Dr Strangelove -paraphrasing Prez Muffley - ‘I didn’t know we were building a doomsday machine’ Sov Ambassador ‘Our source was the New York Times.
I am sure that every piece Stone wrote outing the Military-Industrial Complex long before Ike did, (and the only books of his never reprinted - his coverage ofn the change of a chunk of The British Mandate of Palestine into about a dozen countries, and Nasser’s moves to trick the Arab forefathers of the “Palestinians” into leaving everything for Gaza and the Jordan River to “Drive Israel into the Sea’ creating the problems that exist to this day.) were diplo-bagged back to Soviet authorities in need of some accurate Pravda.
But that’s as close as Stone got to functioning as “bag man” for the KGB - he collected and read everything (due to his hearing problem) and assembled the pieces for EVERYONE.
When you read the Intercepts, remember that the names were hung on the document by the US government, with alleged aid by the last Soviet government. I take the position that those names were stuck there to further present and past political agendas, not necessarily accurate representation of an operative’s cover name..
Posted by -wtp on Jul 23, 2008 at 10:00 AM
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Reader Comments
As I recall, I.F.Stone came dangerously close to being a Soviet agent.
Stone’s newsletter was absolutely great. I subscibed during the Viet-nam “war” while I was in the US Air Force. He was that “breath of fresh air” we needed. Just for the record, I served on active duty for 28 years and retired in 1986.
What does that mean being close to being a Soviet?
We are being taken over by illegal immigrants and you still have faries of communism in your head?
We have much bigger fish to fry.
I.F. Stone: When you take on a cause you know you are going to lose you must do it because you truly believe in it, not as a martyr. You must enjoy the fight because you believe in it and your only hope is someday others will agree and continue the fight.
Illegals. ..communists…subversives…“Krauts”...“Japs”... “gooks”...
“hadjis”...Are scapegoats ALWAYS needed?
Unless you are Native American, each and every one of us is an immigrant or a descendent of immigrants. Were THEY all legal?
At pages 247-249 of VENONA, a book about decrytpting electronic intercepts of Soviet KGB messages with and regarding Americans, the authors, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, state that a retired KGB general identified I.F.Stone as a fellow traveler with whom the KGB had regular contact. The KGB’s cover name for Stone was Bliny or Pancake.
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins.
In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing—for the sheer fun and joy of it—to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.”
—I.F. Stone
I am no expert on I F Stone but I understand that the allegations are pretty thin on evidence a summary exists here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_F_Stone).
I guess there are few things to think about when you read these sorts of allegation.
The first is to ask if it makes sense. Given that he was known for breaking stories based on information on the public record, what good would he be as a spy. He didn’t have access to secret information. Embassies all over the world employ researches to look at publicly available information, so it may have made sense for the USSR to employ him in this capacity, but doing so would not make him a soviet agent.
Ok, what if they were using him to pass on propaganda? Well, if this was the case the evidence would be in the paper, no one would have to look at the Soviet archives. But I understand that he was considered to be unusually reliable. (Though, I should add that one has to be careful when doing this: an apologist for a cause is not necessarily an agent– (s)he could be sincerely stating his or her own opinion. )
Second: who benefits from the allegations? In the above article it is clear he did not exactly follow the government line: and we know that those who make this decision today are accused of aiding the terrorists: how long before it said that today’s jounralists came dangerously close to being Al Qaida agents?
Those Venona files are bullshit anti Communist crap, mostly false.
I F Stone Newsletter was one of the few publications I actually paid for. Not only was he a researcher but he had a great style.
Spinoza, whether you like it or not, the Venona decryptions are FACT, however unpleasant it may be to trogdolytes.
You anti-Communist pricks are rather disgusting.
Please send this around the net. It is very important to fight the Brown Shirts
————————————————————————————————————————-
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15156.htm
A Personal Declaration of Independence
I refuse to accept as my government actions by the current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate.
By William A. Cook
“If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic … It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” (President George W. Bush, Sept. 15, 2006 report by AP’s Terence Hunt)
09/29/06 “Palestine Chronicle”—- -Citizens of the United States of America bear an awesome responsibility to maintain control of their government’s behavior since that government derives its powers from the consent granted it by the citizens. When the government ceases to act in accord with the dictates of the respective consciences of its citizens as determined by its foundational documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—, when it violates the established principles that give this nation legitimacy before the nations of the world through mutually accepted agreements, charters, and conventions, when it abrogates the inalienable rights granted the citizens by the Creator, when it declares unequivocally that the citizens cannot dissent with an action or actions taken by the government, then it is the right and the duty of the citizen to “alter or abolish” that government.
For the past five years, the present government of the United States, including the Executive branch, the Congress and the Senate, has committed a “long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object (that) evinces a design to reduce them (the citizens) under absolute despotism.” As a citizen of these United States for 70 years, I refuse to be ruled by a tyrant who imposes despotic, autocratic control on the citizens of these United States through a series of clandestine actions that usurp the rights of the people.
I refuse to accept as my government actions by the current administration and its obsequious servants, the Republican Congress and the Republican Senate, that include
spying on its citizens without their knowledge or consent, an action contrary to existing law;
elimination of personal privacy through the Patriot Act, an action that presumes culpability, not innocence until proven guilty;
preemptive invasion of other nations determined by the unilateral judgment of an all powerful executive that eviscerates the power of the peoples’ representatives;
acts of extrajudicial execution and the abandonment of rule by law thereby making the President, in effect, judge, jury and executioner;
acts of torture and the unilateral infliction of “acceptable” torture techniques thus casting America before the world as an amoral nation beholden to no international agreement and placing at risk the soldiers who defend it;
imposition of illegal actions of war instituted through an orchestrated control of lies communicated to the citizenry thereby negating their democratic right to know that they might vote in accord with their conscience;
levying an incredible tax burden on the citizens to pay for the consequences of these lies that will cost them and their children dearly for decades to come while corporations reap a windfall of profit from closed bids and corruption;
read rest of article
Spinoza, what is Nazi about the Venona decryptions? The authors are respected Ivy League academics. Obviously, you have not read their book, or if you have, you are incapable of objective analysis. Sadly, both appear to be the case. Rave on and reveal your willful ignorance.
I might be ignorant about many things but I know a fascist when I see one. You are a fascist. Izzy was a good decent human being and why should anyone care whether or not he was a communist. (Which I doubt) Communists did a lot of good in the world and scum like you are only evil.
The best capitalist is a dead capitalist.
Spinoza, come in off the streets and get a life!
What we need to do is get in the streets and fight fascism
Communist? Oh come on, that’s like the “news flash” that Pete Seeger denounced Stalin many decades ago.
BUT it seems either the author or reviewer have made a terrible mistake - as early as the early 1940s, Stone was certainly NOT obscure, with a series of books written on the “dollar a year” WW II profiteers, regular columns and articles in many NY newspapers and magazines, oft syndicated - followed by his late-40s trips to the Middle East to watch the birth of Israel (the only books not republished in the 1980s by Little, Brown - I guess out of some obscure bigotry or Political Correctness attitude there.
He was a central figure in NY’s experimental ad-less tabloids, PM and the New York Star, which just couldn’t make it on the extra penny a copy and encyclopedia sales. (Newspapers traditionally relied on the cover price to cover ONLY the cost of printing, paper and distribution, with the newsroom subsisting on the leavings of the ad department ... Ad-oriented publishers, to this day, find it kind of silly to support a department that directly generates no income, and in a good paper, every-so-often fires shots at, or sinks a major source of ad revenue - though folks who still read newspapers tend to want the real news that, more and more, simply wraps the ad package.
Back to Izzy - By 1953, because of the insane (and, incidentally, very anti-semetic) fools of HUAC and Sen. McCarthy in the capitol, Father Coughlin and friends on the air, Stone was unemployable.
THATs when he started his immediately-successful Weekly, which instanly got the subscribers who had been shocked at his tales of US government and corporate abuse, and thrilled by his tales of Israel’s creation and immediate attack by the Arab nations simultaneously created. They subscribed by the thousand, and Stone and his wife were able to live comfortably, albeit drowned in the work they love until 1971, when Stone’s doctors told him to take it easy.
Though by the mid-1960s, most newspapers would have welcomed Stone to their newsrooms, he wanted to retain 100% editorial control over his words.
From 1971 until his death, Stone pursued with the same vigor he pursued HUAC, the Ancient Athenian polis, and the strange trial ending in the execution of Socrates for supporting government-by -Aristocracy-or-monarchy in a free state where anyone else got away with floating even more crackpot ideas. His fellow ancient Greek experts say they eventually accepted the 3 a.m. ‘deadline’ calls when Stone demanded they check out words on two different ancient Greek manuscripts.
As Jules Feiffer wrote, upon the great man’s death, there is nobody left to explain the madness of the world to him anymore.
Anyway, Steve, keep the penguins marching ....
-wtp
I.F. Stone did get a free pass after it was discovered in the Venona files that he was a bag man for the KGB. No fault of his own. He was raised back in the “great despression” when times were tough. The mood of the country was to hate captialism and love socalism. Apparently Stone and people like him could never see beyond that frame of mind. My parents were like that to some extent, but unlike Stone, they appreciated all that they received from this country. The Venona files are a very interesting part of our country’s history and too bad it did not receive more attention from the press. I think they were too worried it would identify that the McCarthy might not have been too far from the truth and Truman was correct in starting his witch hunt for “reds” in the late 1940;s. Both RFK and JFK were hunting reds early in their career too. Stone is a guy that outlived his usefullness to the KGB and just sort of faded away. Still and interesting character to read about and study. It’s good to see people like him that are so full of hate that it blinds them to what the USA is about.
Totsuka-
The full name of those files were the Verona INTERCEPTS, encoded transmissions from the Sov. embassy back home. Interestingly, though they have been used to damn people (especially those long dead), they never used *real* names.
The names, like the names of Julius Rosenberg, were gratuitously tacked on to people mentioned in the files under a cover name to match the needs or imagination of agencies that kept them.
Izzy Stone was of value to the KGB for the same reason he was of value to all of us - he reported on things we were supposed to know - things even both the US and USSR already knew, but were kept deep and dark secrets from the people of this country for NO GOOD REASON!
Or no good reason outside of the folks who always have operated in CYA mode. He wasn’t a “bag-man”
He played the equivalent role to the USSR that “The New York Times” did in Dr Strangelove -paraphrasing Prez Muffley - ‘I didn’t know we were building a doomsday machine’ Sov Ambassador ‘Our source was the New York Times.
I am sure that every piece Stone wrote outing the Military-Industrial Complex long before Ike did, (and the only books of his never reprinted - his coverage ofn the change of a chunk of The British Mandate of Palestine into about a dozen countries, and Nasser’s moves to trick the Arab forefathers of the “Palestinians” into leaving everything for Gaza and the Jordan River to “Drive Israel into the Sea’ creating the problems that exist to this day.) were diplo-bagged back to Soviet authorities in need of some accurate Pravda.
But that’s as close as Stone got to functioning as “bag man” for the KGB - he collected and read everything (due to his hearing problem) and assembled the pieces for EVERYONE.
When you read the Intercepts, remember that the names were hung on the document by the US government, with alleged aid by the last Soviet government. I take the position that those names were stuck there to further present and past political agendas, not necessarily accurate representation of an operative’s cover name..
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