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Isidor Feinstein Stone (December 24, 1907 - June 18, 1989; born Isidor Feinstein, better known as I.F. Stone and Izzy Stone) was an iconoclastic American investigative journalist.^[1]

He is best remembered for his self-published I.F. Stone's Weekly. At its peak in the 1960s, it had a circulation of about 70,000,^[2] but was regarded as very influential.

Contents 1 Early life and career 2 Debate over relationship with Soviet Union 3 Quotes 4 Legacy 5 References 6 Further reading 7 Publications 8 Biographies 9 External links 9.1 Venona

Stone was born Isidor Feinstein in Philadelphia. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who owned a store in Haddonfield, New Jersey.^[3] He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and as a student he wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer.^[1]

Stone attended Haddonfield Memorial High School, where he ultimately graduated ranked 49th in his class of 52.^[4] He started his own newspaper, the Progress as a high-school sophomore. He later worked for the Haddonfield Press and the Camden Courier-Post. After dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the The Philadelphia Inquirer.^[1] Influenced by the work of Jack London, he became a radical journalist. In the 1930s, he played an active role in the Popular Front opposition to Hitler.

In 1929, he married Esther Roisman, who later served as his assistant at I.F. Stone's Weekly.^[1] They remained married until his death, and had three children: Celia (m. Gilbert), Jeremy, and Christopher.

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. He officially changed his name to I. F. Stone in 1937, fearing antisemitic trends abroad. He would later recall he "still felt badly" about the change. ^[5]

After leaving the New York Post in 1939, Stone became associate editor and then Washington editor of The Nation.^[1] 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.^[1]

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.^[1] One of Stone's more famous books, Hidden History, alleged that South Korea initiated hostilities with constant and unprovoked cross-border attacks, and that the United States and Syngman Rhee welcomed the conflict.

Inspired by the achievements of the muckraking 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 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, in which he argued that Socrates wanted to be sentenced to death, to shame the Athenian democracy, which he despised.

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.^[6]

In 1970 Stone received a Special George Polk Award, and in 1976 he received the Conscience-in-Media Award, from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

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Evidence from decrypted KGB telegrams from America to Moscow suggests that Stone was approached by the KGB during the Second World War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union were allied. But these Venona telegrams provide "no evidence" whatsoever that the KGB succeeding in recruiting Stone to do anything.^[7] And records of investigations of Stone through the 1970s by the FBI, CIA, Army, State Department, and U.S. Postal Service have been declassified; years of tailing by agents, informants, illegal car searches, and even pawing through his trash produced not a shred of evidence of clandestine activities.^[8]

Stone had, from time to time, during World War II and after, lunched with a Soviet Embassy press attache named Kalugin. There is no evidence that Stone knew that Kalugin was working for the KGB but he was. And decades, later, in an interview with British journalist Andrew Brown, Kalugin alluded to these lunches with a “well-known American journalist” and said that, after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechslovakia, the journalist would not even permit Kalugin to pay for the lunch.

Brown’s report of these lunches applied the word “agent” to the journalist and referred to the journalist telling Kalugin, that he “would never again take any money from us”. But Brown said, later, that he never understood Kalugin to mean “paid” agent, that he used the word “agent” as meaning “useful contact”, and that the “take any money” reference meant that Stone would not permit a Soviet employee to pick up the check for lunch then, or in future, as had sometimes been done before.^[9]

When a New York Review of Books editor asked Brown what exactly Kalugin had said, Brown reinterviewed Kalugin to confirm his understanding. In the second interview, Kalugin flatly denied that he had mentioned Stone as a paid agent and said that the reference to money was that Stone “refused to be paid for the lunch. That’s all.” Brown wrote about this in the New York Review of Books.^[10]

But Brown’s unfortunate drafting had opened the door to an attack on Stone by Herbert Romerstein, a former employee of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. His point of view is amply described in his response to Brown’s letter in the December, 1992 issue of the New York Review of Books.^[11]

A companion response by a lawyer Martin Garbus, who had had dealings with Romerstein, calls Romerstein “utterly untrustworthy”. Garbus, who had interviewed Kalugin himself said that Kalugin had told him that Romerstein had “misreported” a conversation which Romerstein had had with Kalugin. Garbus said “the entire story circulated by Romerstein and Accuracy in Media, the right wing pressure group, is scurrilous and false.” ^[12]

Others who interviewed Kalugin and received similar comments opposed to Romerstein’s position include Don Guttenplan who wrote about Kalugin’s denials in both the Nation and the New York Post and Myra MacPherson who interviewed Kalugin in 2006 and was told “We had no clandestine relationship. We had no secret arrangement. I was the press officer...I never paid him anything. I sometimes bought lunch.” ^[13]

The press attache, Kalugin, who was working for the KGB under cover met with many journalists in Washington including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Kraft, Drew Pearson, Chalmers Robers and Murray Marder of the Washington Post and others.^[14]

According to Kalugin, Stone often had lunch with him but broke off this luncheon relationship after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 and hearing Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. Stone returned home and wrote in his newsletter: "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." (italics in original)

Stone's conclusion that "nothing has happened in Russia to justify cooperation abroad between the independent left and the Communists" cost him several hundred subscribers to the Weekly.^[15]

Kalugin stated that Kalugin eventually persuaded Stone to have lunch with him until after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent quelling of the revolt when he angrily refused to let Kalugin pay for the lunch and stopped lunching with him.

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." ^[16]

In their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr identify Stone as BLIN in VENONA Project cables.^[17] 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 reported the cable contents, state that there is no evidence in Venona that the KGB had recruited Stone.^[18]

Walter and Miriam Schneir writing about this particular passage^[19] 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."

In a 1992 Nation article, D.D. Guttenplan claims that the evidence shows clearly that Stone was never a witting collaborator with Soviet intelligence, while leaving open the question of exactly what the Soviets may have meant by the term "agent of influence".^[20]

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.^[21]

"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." ^[22]

Composer Scott Johnson makes extensive use of Stone's voice taken from a recorded 1981 lecture in his large-scale musical work, How It Happens, completed in 1991 on commission for the Kronos Quartet.

2008 Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards^[23] lists Stone's The Trial of Socrates as one his three favorite books.

• 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
• Myra MacPherson. 2006. "All Governments Lie." New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
• The Estate of I.F. Stone. 2006. "The Best of I.F. Stone." New York, NY: PublicAffairs.

• The War Years, 1939-1945 ISBN 0316817775
• The Court Disposes (1937)
• Business as Usual (1941)
• Underground to Palestine (1946) ISBN 0394502744
• This is Israel (1948)
• The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951 (1952) ISBN 0316817708
• The Truman Era, 1945-1952 ISBN 0394719085
• In a Time of Torment, 1961-1967 (1967) ISBN 0224614649
• The Haunted Fifties (1969) ISBN 0394705475
• Polemics and Prophecies, 1967-1970 (1970) ISBN 0316817473
• The Killings at Kent State (1971) LCCN 73148389
• The I.F. Stone's Weekly Reader (1973) ISBN 0394488156
• The Trial of Socrates (1988) ISBN 0385260326

• Andrew Patner. (1988). I.F. Stone: A Portrait, Pantheon.
• Robert C. Cottrell. (1992). Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
• Myra MacPherson. (2006). ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE - The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, Scribner.

• I. F. Stone at Encyclopædia Britannica
• I.F. Stone : American Rebel
• I.F. Stone Remembered, Open Source, September 22, 2006. Hour-long radio discussion about Stone, including clips of Stone speaking.
• NYTimes Sunday Book Review : "The Watchdog" by Paul Berman, October 1, 2006, review of "All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone" by Myra MacPherson and "The Best of I. F. Stone" Edited by Karl Weber. Introduction by Peter Osnos
• I.F Stone reviews at the New York Review of Books
• I. F. Stone at Find A Grave

• CIA VENONA files
• FBI Venona FOIA, p. 37

I.F. Stone is referenced in the following Venona decrypts:

• 1313 KGB New York to Moscow, 13 September 1944, pg.1
• 1313 KGB New York to Moscow, 13 September 1944, pg.2
• 1433, 1435 KGB New York to Moscow, 10 October 1944, pg.1
• 1433, 1435 KGB New York to Moscow, 10 October 1944, pg.2
• 1433, 1435 KGB New York to Moscow, 10 October 1944, pg.3
• 1506 KGB New York to Moscow, 23 October 1944, pg.1
• 1506 KGB New York to Moscow, 23 October 1944, pg.2