On Friday, October 17, 1986, Eugene Hasenfus confessed to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua that he been employed by the C.I.A. when his Air America plane carrying weapons to the Contras had been shot down.1 His confession bookended William Buckley’s, who had been kidnapped in Beirut in 1984 and tortured by Iranian-led Islamic Jihadists, when he confessed to working for the C.I.A.
The same day Hasenfus confessed down in Managua, up in Washington, Congress approved $100 million in funds for the Nicaraguan rebels, reversing the Boland Amendment’s two-year ban on military aid to the South American country. Over in the Middle East, twenty-six containers of munitions departed Israel for Iran, nearly the last of a series of illegal shipments that had been carried out over the past year, dating back to November 1985, when a cargo-load of TOW missiles first shipped to Iran under the direction of then C.I.A. Deputy Director John N. McMahon.2 In the weeks and months to come, as details leaked out after Hasenfus’ confession, these events swallowed the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra scandal, a threateningly close-to-constitutional crisis not seen since the days of Deep Throat and Watergate.3
October 17 had been an eventful day, even by Washington standards. And it wasn’t over. In the evening, as dusk settled, Ben Bradlee, the editor of Kay Graham’s Washington Post, famous for his cool, steady steerage of that newspaper’s reporting during Watergate, and the publication of “The Pentagon Papers” the year before, received a call from F.B.I. Director Bill Webster. It was just before deadline. Webster had something urgent he needed to talk to Bradlee about. “Right away,” he said over the telephone. Could he come by and pick Bradlee up?4
Sensing something ominous approaching on the horizon, Bradlee sounded “General Quarters” – the Navy’s term for high alert, meaning “unidentified blips had appeared on someone’s radar screen, and until they were identified, God knows what was going to happen.”5
Minutes later, Webster’s navy-blue limousine pulled up outside The Post building on 15th Street in downtown Washington. There was Bradlee, waiting on the corner. He got in and sat beside Webster in the back. “The Judge,” as he was (and still is) called, instructed his driver to head north a couple of blocks, turn onto N Street, pull over, and get out.
Webster was dressed in a tuxedo for a dinner he was on his way to attend. He got right to the point: “The F.B.I. had received information from a source it considered reliable … that a Washington Post reporter had accepted $1,000 in cash from a K.G.B. official in Moscow.” As Bradlee tells in his memoirs:
My heart stopped. I could think of no more grievous blow.
Absolutely nothing could be more harmful to the paper that
was my life, and to the Grahams, whose courage and
dedication were so vital. It was literally a long minute before
I felt it just couldn’t be true and asked Webster who it was
and how could he be sure his source was reliable.
Webster said the reporter’s name was Dusko Doder, The Post’s “cigar-homping expert on Soviet affairs.” A Yugoslav by birth, Doder had immigrated to this country as a young man in 1960, to St. Louis, Missouri, where, it happens the future F.B.I. and C.I.A. director Bill Webster was then an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Doder underwent a crash-course in American higher education (Russian Studies and International Relations at Columbia, where he received bipartisan tutoring from the likes of future national security advisors Zbiginew Brezinski and Bret Scowcroft). Doder rapidly became a star reporter for The Post in the 1970s and 1980s, reporting from the Balkans to Greece to Canada and then Moscow, producing one scoop after another, most famously in February 1984 when he reported – before confirmation from either the U.S. Embassy or the C.I.A., even before the Kremlin – that Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov had died, thus setting off the sequence of succession in Kremlin leadership that would lead to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, and ultimately to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The source for this claim against Doder, Webster told Bradlee, was Col. Vitaly Yurchenko, head of the K.G.B.’s counterintelligence directorate, who had defected to the West the year before and then re-defected back to the East three months later.6
Yurchenko had given valuable information to the F.B.I., wrote Bradlee. He told them about how National Security Agency clerk Robert Pelton had betrayed the country by handing over “priceless” secrets to the Russians, involving the 1970s-era undersea taps on Russian communication lines (Operation “Ivey Bells”), and Yurchenko “had been right,” Bradlee wrote. Yurchenko also told the F.B.I. about Edward Lee Howard, whom Bradlee described as “the former Peace Corps volunteer who later defected to Moscow,” after he received extensive C.I.A. training in surveillance and counter-surveillance. He turned up in Moscow on August 7, 1986, the first former C.I.A. employee ever to defect to Russia, or so it was reported at the time.7 According to former K.G.B. General Oleg Kalugin (now a U.S. citizen and a U.S. counterintelligence consultant), Howard gave up “reams of information on [the United States’] moles in the K.G.B.”8 Yurchenko was right again, apparently.9
But as for Yurchenko’s allegations about Doder, Bradlee said those he could not believe. How did the F.B.I. know this wasn’t an effort by the Soviets to discredit Doder? After all, he asked Webster, hadn’t his “reporting had been head and shoulders over embassy and C.I.A. reporting about the U.S.S.R?”10 Hadn’t anyone at the Bureau bothered to check on this, to find any hint of Soviet propaganda in what he wrote?
Webster reassured Bradlee that the F.B.I. went over every story Doder filed and found “nothing but the obvious.” Doder simply had better contacts. Webster added that Yurchenko did not claim to have first-hand knowledge about any actual payment to Doder; only that he had heard about the payment, second-hand.
But why now? Why was Webster only bringing this to Bradlee in October 1986, a year after Yurchenko told the F.B.I. what he knew, before he turned around and defected back again, a move which cast his legitimacy as a genuine defector into doubt? Because, said Webster, “the F.B.I. had heard that Doder had been recently assigned to the intelligence beat. And the intelligence community did not “like to be covered by anyone, much less by someone whose 201 file now contained Yurchenko’s hearsay.”
The conversation ended as Bradlee told Webster that The Post could not take Doder off of intelligence coverage based on hearsay testimony from a once and future K.G.B. agent. Webster said he understood but Bradlee should be aware: “the intelligence community had decreed that no one should talk to Doder, at least for now.” At that, Bradlee got out of the car and walked back to The Post.
Dusko Doder was hardly The Inconvenient Journalist, the title of his 2021 memoir. He was in the right place at the right time, a prerequisite to being among the best. A Yugoslav Serbian by birth, his journalism career began in the capital of Sarajevo. By its end, Doder had covered the Soviet Union during détente under Leonid
Brezhnev, Yugoslavia during its experiment with self-managed market socialism, Canada during the rise and fall (and rise again) of Pierre Trudeau, back to the Soviet Union for the resumption of the Cold War and the ascension of Gorbachev, China during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, then, finally, back to Yugoslavia during its breakup. The latter event, and the ethno-nationalist bloodshed that followed, in many ways overshadowed the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, falsifying the inevitability of history according to Karl Marx, or, if you prefer, falsifying the “End of History” according to Francis Fukuyama of the RAND Corporation.6 In its place came the “Pandaemonium” that the ethnicisist and sometimes Senator Daniel P. Moynihan forecast would be the defining characteristic of international relations in the post-Cold War era, the “increasing salience of ethnicity in industrial or post-industrial societies," after, that is, his prediction ten years earlier that the Soviet Union would fall before the 1980s were out. Thus, it could be said that Dusko Doder was most conveniently indeed where the action was for a journalist. And his career, like the twentieth century itself, ended where it began, in Yugoslavia.
Born in 1937, Doder immigrated to the United States and became a nationalized citizen on November 6, 1966.8 He received two advanced degrees from Columbia University where he was a Ford Foundation fellow, attending seminars by future national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Bret Scowcroft.9
His dream of being a world-class reporter had begun in high school, in communist Yugoslavia, a country then suffering from near starvation under Stalin’s blockade after Marshal Tito’s split from the Soviet dictator. Doder’s father had made a mistake, he told his son in 1949, not escaping to America when he had the chance. Doder determined he would go to America, where the family had relatives, and “become a journalist in a country where journalists could tell the truth,” intending to get all the way to the top, to The New York Times.
When the opportunity for Doder to leave Yugoslavia arose, however, America – for reasons Doder does not tell – was out of the question in his father’s eyes. We are told father and son were both ardently anticommunist. But worse for Doder than his father’s rejection of America was his father’s rejection of journalists, whom he saw as “parasites,” peddling in others’ misfortune. This caused Doder to split from his father, perhaps even to split from himself. To fulfill his dream of being a truth-teller in the West, Doder resolves to deceive. Page 17:
The only way I could pursue my ambition, I finally decided,
would be through deception – something I was already well
practiced at. Deception was a way of life in Yugoslavia as I grew
up. We learned to keep our mouths shut or spout what was
necessary to survive, first under fascism, then under changing
brands of [c]ommunism. I persuaded Dad, with the same
enthusiasm with which I professed [c]ommunist beliefs in
school (a condition of graduating), that my new passion was to
become a neurologist and that the University of Vienna was the
best place to study for this career.
This was 1958. Doder had recently acquired a benefactor in Vienna, unbeknownst to his father, an American named Clyde A. Farnsworth. A veteran Associated Press correspondent, Farnsworth had reported from Egypt during World War II and later Taiwan covering Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers (a precursor to the C.I.A.’s Air America); then the Chinese Civil War between Chiang Kaishek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists in 1948 for Scripps-Howard, as well as India, Iran, Europe and Latin America.10
As if out of a scene from a Humphrey Bogart movie, Doder, then all of twenty-one, describes how he was playing piano part-time at the bar in the Concordia press club in Vienna.
My hands flew across the piano keys, I took requests and
accepted drinks. A glamorous woman in a red dress, her dark
hair piled high on her head, sauntered over and asked me to
play “The Man I Love.” It was Dolly. She mouthed the words of
the song to a distinguished-looking older man – Clyde – sitting
a few tables away.
After the song, Dolly and Clyde Farnsworth, her husband, invite Doder over to their table for a drink.11 Or it may have been to their “home for a decent meal,” as the Farnsworth memoir has it.12 Either way, Farnsworth, recently arrived in Vienna, tells of his exploits covering the world as a foreign correspondent. Doder is enthralled. The relationship grows over time and Doder tells Farnsworth how he has fallen in love with journalism. He had begun working at a local communist newspaper, Oslobodjenje (translated as Liberation). Farnsworth convinces Doder that journalism is a noble profession, and bolsters his conviction that the United States stands for all that is right. “We’re democracy’s last line of defense,” he tells Doder, hanging on every word. Journalists should try to be impartial, Farnsworth adds, but a journalist “selects what to leave in and what to leave out.” A journalist “shapes the narrative.” “The most important thing is an implicit trust from the readers that you’ll deliver a reasonable facsimile of events and people as they appeared to you.” “Whatever you do,” he tells Doder, “you must honor this trust.”
This obligation, Doder realizes, will not be possible in communist Yugoslavia, with its restricted press. Soon after, Farnsworth arranges a student visa for Doder to come to the United States. In spite of his father who, upon learning of his son’s plans, curses-out Doder in “Old Testamentstyle language,” telling him “God would extract a retribution for [his] deception,” Doder arrives in New York in December, 1959. Thus began an estrangement between father and son that lasted almost until his father’s death, seven years later.
Once in America, Doder and his first wife, Karin, who had come with him from Yugoslavia, make their way to St. Louis, where Doder’s uncle and other relatives on his father’s side lived. His aunt offers to pay his university tuition for a semester. In an admissions interview with the dean of the Washington University at St. Louis, Doder quotes James Joyce’s famous allusion to Marxism in Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”13 He is admitted in the Spring of 1960.
Over the next five years, Doder attends not only Washington University, but Stanford and Columbia universities as well, focusing on Soviet and Eastern European history and international relations. Scholarships and part-time jobs pay his way. At Columbia, in addition to Brzezinski and Scowcroft, he is exposed to luminaries such as Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional government in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, and Adolph Berle. Berle had been the state department official in the Roosevelt Administration who, in 1939, had famously been said to ignore warnings of communist infiltration in the United States by the former Soviet spy (and later TIME Magazine writer) Whittaker Chambers.
In 1965, Doder begins his journalism career in America with the Associated Press, cutting his teeth over the next three years first in New York, then Manchester, then Albany. Eager to fulfill his “outsized ambition of becoming a famous journalist,” Doder has his heart set on The New York Times. In 1968, Farnsworth arranges the meeting. All goes well until Doder starts speaking Russian to Harrison Salisbury, the legendary Times reporter, who had covered the Red Army as it pushed back the German advance into Russia during World War II. But Doder embarrasses Salisbury, who doesn’t speak the language. Farnsworth tells Doder not to worry. The Washington Post, he says, has a new editor by the name of Ben Bradlee, who had ambitions to make The Post every bit The Times’ equal, to turn it from second-tier status into an internationally-respected newspaper.
Before Doder connects with Bradlee and The Post, however, he and Farnsworth have a fortuitous encounter in a bar in New York with H. Roger Tartarian, the editor-in-chief and vice president of United Press International.14 On November 22, 1963, it had been Tartarian who had put out on the U.P.I. wire that Lee Harvey Oswald had defected to Moscow in 1959. Tartaran's report had come from Robert J. “Bud” Korengold, who had been in Moscow in 1959 for U.P.I., and was now there for Newsweek. Tartarian hired Doder virtually on the spot. Doder was now United Press International's Moscow correspondent.
Anyone who has read Tennent H. Bagley's free-to-read Yale University Press book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games," will know that Howard and Pelton were already suspected of being "moles" and therefore of no more use to the KGB when false defector Yurchenko fingered them. I guess Ben Bradlee at The Post and Stanley Cloud at Time Magazine didn't realize that. Also, Nosenko-defending / Bagley-denigrating Kalugin is probably still loyal to the Kremlin, as is unmentioned-in-the-article Oleg Gordievsky.
Your case seems to be that your former boss (Democrat) Daniel P. Moynihan and (Democrat?) Deputy Chief of CIA John N. McMahon were KGB "moles" who directly or indirectly caused us to: 1) get "bogged down" in the Vietnam War, 2) unilaterally freeze or limit our production of nuclear weapons, 3) become an immoral society, 4) devolve in cultural areas like architecture and art, 5) become more socialistic, and 6) [fill in the blank --I'm going from memory here].
That may be true, but I seriously doubt they were also instrumental in the Kremlin's deciding, at the January 1959 "Extraordinary" 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to have the KGB abandon as its primary goal the theft of U.S. and NATO secrets, and to turn to (or return to, actually) waging disinformation, "active measures," and inside man / outside man "The Sting"-like strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies in a long-term effort to get us to destroy ourselves in a Sun Tzu kinda way. (IMHO culminating, so far, in DJT, QANON, 1/6, etc.)
We know now that in response to this mandate, the First Chief Directorate (today's SVR) created a new top-secret section known as Department D that was sealed off from the rest of the KGB (hint: the old outer KGB was now expendable for use in counterintelligence games) and that General Oleg Gribanov of the Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB), not to be outdone, set up his own top-secret, sealed-off-from-the-rest-of-the-KGB, Department 14. We know that Gribanov, with a "mole" or two (or five) already in place in the CIA (do you really think it was Moynihan and McMahon?) sent -- as soon as a recent traitor by the name of Oleg Penkovsky had been "trapped like a bear in its den" in Moscow in such a way that wouldn't implicate the "mole" in U.S. or British intelligence who had betrayed him two weeks after his recruitment (my money's on Russia-born George Kisevalter or Records & Requirements officer Leonard V. McCoy in the former, and MI5 director Roger Hollis in the latter) -- in late 1961 and early 1962 respectively, GRU Colonel Dimitri Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksei Kulak to the FBI's NYC field office to "volunteer" to spy for it at the U.N. And then, of course, sent false defector-in-place Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 to discredit what recent true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling James Angleton about possible KGB penetrations of U.S. Intelligence and the intelligence services of our NATO allies (and maybe even sent him back to Geneva in January 1964 to physically defect to the U.S.), Igor Kochnov to the FBI in 1965 and to the CIA in 1966, and your dad's favorite -- Valery Yurchenko -- to the U.S. in 1985. Et al. ad nauseam.
I haven't read prose so precise and nuanced and so obviously reflective of a contemplative, thoughtful and balanced mind since, well, the six volume set of the TRS-80 Mark III manual in 1981.
What I am talking about is precisely what you had put to NYU Professor Stephen F. Cohen, here:
"So to get the ball rolling without further adieu, Stephen, why don't you begin, not so much by summarizing your book -- hopefully everyone here will be itching to buy it at the end, and he'll be here signing copies -- but rather, thinking back, as you do, to the opportunity you think we lost in 1991, some sort of permanent peace in Russia, that this opportunity may be happening again. Yet it seems in your judgment that, okay, we've declared a reset, but that, too, is failing for many of the same reasons. Somehow we're continuing the same fundamental policies in the past with some different rhetoric, and basically we've still really failed to end the Cold War."
I watched your interview with Tucker Carlson last Friday evening and was intrigued by your comments as to how, if I understood you correctly, U.S. intelligence agencies have adopted the tactics of the K.G.B. This line of thought is in accordance with research I have been doing with respect to a re-appraisal of Senator Moynihan's career, particularly as it intersects with that of former C.I.A. deputy director John N. McMahon. Although largely relegated to historical obscurity today, McMahon, you may be aware, was central to major events such as Iran-Contra, as well as to the debriefings of numerous Soviet defectors [Golitsyn & Nosenko], and to the debriefing of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, to list just a few. Little known about Moynihan are his relationships with Leo Cherne and the International Rescue Committee (Germany, 1952) and with Jay Lovestone. Moynihan and McMahon would become publicly intertwined between 1982 and 1985 over the Nicaraguan harbor mining and other issues of congressional oversight and notification as well as over the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
I attach a recent letter I wrote to ... the House Intelligence Committee, in which I urged against expansion of the IIPA to extend to disclosure of the names of even deceased covert agents as such legislation would threaten not only our understanding of the role our intelligence agencies play in history but because such legislation would further put the internal security of those agencies at risk. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, I do not expressly state the conclusions of my research in my letter but attempted, however obliquely, to imply them through its enclosures.
If I could presume upon you and your time to have a read through the materials, I would be interested in whether you see what I am driving at. Perhaps you would be willing to discuss the implications with me, if so, although I readily expect, as you remarked on the Carlson program, that I may have asked you "to go someplace we can't go at length."
With kind regards,
Matt Cloud
Bethesda, MD
Alas, Professor Cohen was in poor-health already when I wrote him. His reply:
"Sorry, but in aftermath of cataract surgery and having fallen so far behind in many things, I have no time to delve into this. Must leave it to you. sfc"
"John N. McMahon (born July 3, 1929) is a former senior U.S. official of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Background
John Norman McMahon was born on July 3, 1929, in East Norwalk, Connecticut. His parents were Frederick Francis McMahon and Elizabeth Collins. In 1951, he obtained a bachelor's degree from the College of Holy Cross.
Career
CIA
McMahon joined the CIA in 1951 or 1966.
He served as Deputy Director for Operations from January 11, 1978, to April 12, 1981, and later, nominated by US President Ronald Reagan, as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence under Director William J. Casey as of April 27, 1982, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman. Questioning McMahon during his nomination included US Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who guided publication of the VENONA papers in the mid-1990s).
On March 4, 1986, McMahon, age 56, resigned and left office on March 26, succeeded by Robert M. Gates."
Now -- did either TIME in defense or Doder in offense depose John N. McMahon, the "former CIA official" who had "staked his career on Yurchenko's bona fides" in the libel suit in London? He'd be a natural suspect for having provided the damning quote to TIME, wouldn't he? He is in fact the only "former CIA official" who fits the bill for candidates as to having motivation and knowledge for making the damning quotation.
No? Neither party called him as a witness? Why not? Or do you not know that, either?
Here's a question for self-described 1/6 participant, Matt Cloud:
Was your presumed KGB "mole," CIA Deputy Director John N. McMahon, like your other presumed KGB "mole," Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, a hated DEMOCRAT by any chance?
Why in his memoirs did Doder omit the damning quote against him? He wrote that only Amb. Hartman had been quoted. Not so -- the first quote was from a "former official of the CIA", who said as to the source of the alleged payment, "of course he [Doder] knew it was the KGB. This was the Soviet Union. What else could he think?"
As I recall, the “damning quote” was a blind, unattributed slander of a remarkable journalist. Dusko was a dear friend who valiently resisted calumny from ignorant individuals prepared to think and spread the worst about diligent, valiant, even briliant journalists. The KGB was petrified about Dusko, his bilingual fluency in accent-free Russian who with his winning personality was able to develop sources far beyond the capacity of any other journos covering Russian during the depths of the cold war. The CIA was equally jealous and as prepared as the KGB (today FSB) to spread calumny about an individual who regularly beat them in telling the world about what was really happening in the USSR. For shame, Mr. Cloud, for following Dusko and his memory beyond the grave with something that you know NOTHING about. For shame.
Well since I knew Dusko -- his son Peter lived with me in '86, during his father's divorce from Karin, who was among my mother's closest friends, just as Dusko was being taken off the intelligence beat (as Ben Bradlee tells us in his memoirs), and I know the recipient of the damning quote -- my father, Stanley Cloud of TIME -- and the author of the story, Jay Peterzell, and perhaps most importantly, Pat Moynihan -- my former boss -- who actually gave the damning quote to TIME, which is why TIME settled the Doder suit the day before I joined Moynihan's staff on Aug 2, 1996, I'd say I know far more about this great story than you may realize. So save your feigned indignation.
Doder is actually NOT the issue in this story. He was sacrificed, to protect The Issue. Sacrificed by both TIME AND The Post, the latter having essentially fired him and only through the intervention of David Gergen did U.S. News & World Report take him on. (No one goes from The Post to U.S. News, as you probably know.)
__
"September 18, 2018
MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION
SUBJECT: Telephonic conversation with Dusko Doder regarding Vitaly
Yurchenko allegations in 1992 TIME magazine article
I spoke with Dusko Doder today, who called me at noon. His wife Louise Branson had called me earlier in the morning at eight o’clock, after I had called there yesterday afternoon and left a message. I had sent an email earlier in the day yesterday to Doder including the November 1985 letter from Senator Daniel P. Moynihan to CIA Deputy Director John N. McMahon expressing Moynihan’s “firm conviction” that Yurchenko was “genuine and was never a plant.” When Branson called I told her I had information that would perhaps be of interest to them, relating to the identity of one of the sources of the 1992 TIME story by Jay Peterzell alleging Doder had taken money from the K.G.B. while working as a reporter for the Washington Post in Moscow in the 1980s. She said they had conducted a lot of discovery during the subsequent libel suit and the name “Colin something” (former CIA analyst Colin Thompson, I inferred) had come up as a source. She also informed me that Doder had had a stroke and I think she said a mild heart attack recently, but that he was writing a book on the subject and that it would be “big.” She said neither of them had seen or read the email I had sent him.
When Doder himself later called it was apparent he was in poor health. His speech was strained and weak. I told him at the outset that I was speaking to him independently, that I was not calling on behalf of my father or anyone else. He said he understood. I asked him if he had by then read my email; he replied he had not, that it had ended up in the trash (whatever that meant). I told Doder that I had a theory as to who the source in the TIME article had been, who had been quoted as saying, “of course he [Doder] knew it was the K.G.B. This was the Soviet Union. What else could he think?” I told Doder that this quote came from John McMahon. I asked Doder if he knew who that was. He said “sure.” I then asked if he knew who it really was and he said “sure” again and I said it was Moynihan ....
...
I left open the possibility of working with Doder further on the subject, saying if he changed his mind, either he or his wife should get in touch with me. He said he would see. I said I hoped his health improved and he said thank you.
Yurchenko fooled a lot of people, not just DEMOCRAT Moynihan. As did Nosenko, Kochnov, Polyakov, Kulak, Kalugin, Gordievsky, Papuhsin, Bruce Leonard Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and [fill in the blank].
Now, to come full circle, and answer the question I put to you, but which you ignored and instead castigated me, "Why in his memoirs did Doder omit the damning quote against him?" Because I had called him two years before his book came out and blew the whole contrived charade. That's why Doder omitted the damning quote.
Writing in The Nation, Alexander Cockburn provided a useful, however inadvertent, analysis:
"The original Time story had a quote immediately following the citation of Yurchenko’s allegations about the $1,000 bribe: “a former C.I.A. official says the source of the money was clear to Doder: ‘Of course he knew it was the KGB. This was the Soviet Union. What else could he think?’”
This quote from the “former C.I.A. official” suggested that somehow the bribe offer itself was beyond argument. As TIME's internal communications submitted to the English court make clear, the magazine’s editorial director, Henry Muller, raised questions on two separate occasions about the quotation. On a draft dated December 19, 1992, Muller wrote, “How does the official know except that Yurchenko told him? This information, if it is relevant, should be attributed to Yurchenko, otherwise the reader would be led into believing that we have triangulated this accusation with independent third parties.” Editorial director Muller was disregarded. The smear quote stayed in."
Alexander Cockburn, "TIME SLIME REVISITED.", The Nation (January 6, 1997).
Read that again: "[T]he reader would be led into believing we have triangulated this accusation with independent third parties.” Exactly.
In his memoir Doder does discuss this TIME deliberation, but changes the source of the quotation from a "former CIA official" to a "former government official," and, as stated above, omits that the quote was even included at all in the TIME article. But if the quote was, as Mr. Andelman's says, a "blind, unattributed slander," Doder should have said as much and knocked it out, rather than deny its foundational presence in the article. Unless, that is, there's something else behind it.
A page number from Doder's memoir can be provided upon request.
I suppose back then there was no reason to suspect that it was the KGB who, according to false defector Vitaly Yurchenko, gave Doder "information and $1,000."
(I hope that neither you nor Mr. Andelman believe Yurchenko was a true defector.)
Your Mentor,
-- Stephen, I mean Tom
PS Gee, I wonder if ABC's Sam Jaffe got any money from that world-class humanitarian organization . . .
Yurchenko's bona fides are NOT the issue. You keep trying to frame this in binary terms, which is exactly what has gone on since Nosenko's days, and is what continues to keep the matter from being understood. And I know you know that notwithstanding your hardline posture. The issue is why the allegation -- no matter it's veracity -- was made against Doder. The answer is that Doder's contacts in the Soviet Union would have exposed Alexander Yakovlev, his source for example on the Novosibirsk Report, who was in 1992 accused of being CIA. Them's the facts. Ergo, accuse Doder of being KGB to protect Yakovlev, The Mole in the Kremlin. Doder was the conduit between the Yakovlev faction there and the Moynihan faction here. When he came back from the USSR, in 86, and was now being fed info from Moynihan, that's when CIA flipped out. Looking into Doder would expose both. And THAT would have exposed what we now call "Russian Collusion." Or, if you like, the managed fraud of the Cold War. A tough story to explain by those who led it.
Beyond the byline I have no idea what you could be talking about ….
On Friday, October 17, 1986, Eugene Hasenfus confessed to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua that he been employed by the C.I.A. when his Air America plane carrying weapons to the Contras had been shot down.1 His confession bookended William Buckley’s, who had been kidnapped in Beirut in 1984 and tortured by Iranian-led Islamic Jihadists, when he confessed to working for the C.I.A.
The same day Hasenfus confessed down in Managua, up in Washington, Congress approved $100 million in funds for the Nicaraguan rebels, reversing the Boland Amendment’s two-year ban on military aid to the South American country. Over in the Middle East, twenty-six containers of munitions departed Israel for Iran, nearly the last of a series of illegal shipments that had been carried out over the past year, dating back to November 1985, when a cargo-load of TOW missiles first shipped to Iran under the direction of then C.I.A. Deputy Director John N. McMahon.2 In the weeks and months to come, as details leaked out after Hasenfus’ confession, these events swallowed the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra scandal, a threateningly close-to-constitutional crisis not seen since the days of Deep Throat and Watergate.3
October 17 had been an eventful day, even by Washington standards. And it wasn’t over. In the evening, as dusk settled, Ben Bradlee, the editor of Kay Graham’s Washington Post, famous for his cool, steady steerage of that newspaper’s reporting during Watergate, and the publication of “The Pentagon Papers” the year before, received a call from F.B.I. Director Bill Webster. It was just before deadline. Webster had something urgent he needed to talk to Bradlee about. “Right away,” he said over the telephone. Could he come by and pick Bradlee up?4
Sensing something ominous approaching on the horizon, Bradlee sounded “General Quarters” – the Navy’s term for high alert, meaning “unidentified blips had appeared on someone’s radar screen, and until they were identified, God knows what was going to happen.”5
Minutes later, Webster’s navy-blue limousine pulled up outside The Post building on 15th Street in downtown Washington. There was Bradlee, waiting on the corner. He got in and sat beside Webster in the back. “The Judge,” as he was (and still is) called, instructed his driver to head north a couple of blocks, turn onto N Street, pull over, and get out.
Webster was dressed in a tuxedo for a dinner he was on his way to attend. He got right to the point: “The F.B.I. had received information from a source it considered reliable … that a Washington Post reporter had accepted $1,000 in cash from a K.G.B. official in Moscow.” As Bradlee tells in his memoirs:
My heart stopped. I could think of no more grievous blow.
Absolutely nothing could be more harmful to the paper that
was my life, and to the Grahams, whose courage and
dedication were so vital. It was literally a long minute before
I felt it just couldn’t be true and asked Webster who it was
and how could he be sure his source was reliable.
Webster said the reporter’s name was Dusko Doder, The Post’s “cigar-homping expert on Soviet affairs.” A Yugoslav by birth, Doder had immigrated to this country as a young man in 1960, to St. Louis, Missouri, where, it happens the future F.B.I. and C.I.A. director Bill Webster was then an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Doder underwent a crash-course in American higher education (Russian Studies and International Relations at Columbia, where he received bipartisan tutoring from the likes of future national security advisors Zbiginew Brezinski and Bret Scowcroft). Doder rapidly became a star reporter for The Post in the 1970s and 1980s, reporting from the Balkans to Greece to Canada and then Moscow, producing one scoop after another, most famously in February 1984 when he reported – before confirmation from either the U.S. Embassy or the C.I.A., even before the Kremlin – that Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov had died, thus setting off the sequence of succession in Kremlin leadership that would lead to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, and ultimately to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The source for this claim against Doder, Webster told Bradlee, was Col. Vitaly Yurchenko, head of the K.G.B.’s counterintelligence directorate, who had defected to the West the year before and then re-defected back to the East three months later.6
Yurchenko had given valuable information to the F.B.I., wrote Bradlee. He told them about how National Security Agency clerk Robert Pelton had betrayed the country by handing over “priceless” secrets to the Russians, involving the 1970s-era undersea taps on Russian communication lines (Operation “Ivey Bells”), and Yurchenko “had been right,” Bradlee wrote. Yurchenko also told the F.B.I. about Edward Lee Howard, whom Bradlee described as “the former Peace Corps volunteer who later defected to Moscow,” after he received extensive C.I.A. training in surveillance and counter-surveillance. He turned up in Moscow on August 7, 1986, the first former C.I.A. employee ever to defect to Russia, or so it was reported at the time.7 According to former K.G.B. General Oleg Kalugin (now a U.S. citizen and a U.S. counterintelligence consultant), Howard gave up “reams of information on [the United States’] moles in the K.G.B.”8 Yurchenko was right again, apparently.9
But as for Yurchenko’s allegations about Doder, Bradlee said those he could not believe. How did the F.B.I. know this wasn’t an effort by the Soviets to discredit Doder? After all, he asked Webster, hadn’t his “reporting had been head and shoulders over embassy and C.I.A. reporting about the U.S.S.R?”10 Hadn’t anyone at the Bureau bothered to check on this, to find any hint of Soviet propaganda in what he wrote?
Webster reassured Bradlee that the F.B.I. went over every story Doder filed and found “nothing but the obvious.” Doder simply had better contacts. Webster added that Yurchenko did not claim to have first-hand knowledge about any actual payment to Doder; only that he had heard about the payment, second-hand.
But why now? Why was Webster only bringing this to Bradlee in October 1986, a year after Yurchenko told the F.B.I. what he knew, before he turned around and defected back again, a move which cast his legitimacy as a genuine defector into doubt? Because, said Webster, “the F.B.I. had heard that Doder had been recently assigned to the intelligence beat. And the intelligence community did not “like to be covered by anyone, much less by someone whose 201 file now contained Yurchenko’s hearsay.”
The conversation ended as Bradlee told Webster that The Post could not take Doder off of intelligence coverage based on hearsay testimony from a once and future K.G.B. agent. Webster said he understood but Bradlee should be aware: “the intelligence community had decreed that no one should talk to Doder, at least for now.” At that, Bradlee got out of the car and walked back to The Post.
*****
Dusko Doder was hardly The Inconvenient Journalist, the title of his 2021 memoir. He was in the right place at the right time, a prerequisite to being among the best. A Yugoslav Serbian by birth, his journalism career began in the capital of Sarajevo. By its end, Doder had covered the Soviet Union during détente under Leonid
Brezhnev, Yugoslavia during its experiment with self-managed market socialism, Canada during the rise and fall (and rise again) of Pierre Trudeau, back to the Soviet Union for the resumption of the Cold War and the ascension of Gorbachev, China during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, then, finally, back to Yugoslavia during its breakup. The latter event, and the ethno-nationalist bloodshed that followed, in many ways overshadowed the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, falsifying the inevitability of history according to Karl Marx, or, if you prefer, falsifying the “End of History” according to Francis Fukuyama of the RAND Corporation.6 In its place came the “Pandaemonium” that the ethnicisist and sometimes Senator Daniel P. Moynihan forecast would be the defining characteristic of international relations in the post-Cold War era, the “increasing salience of ethnicity in industrial or post-industrial societies," after, that is, his prediction ten years earlier that the Soviet Union would fall before the 1980s were out. Thus, it could be said that Dusko Doder was most conveniently indeed where the action was for a journalist. And his career, like the twentieth century itself, ended where it began, in Yugoslavia.
Born in 1937, Doder immigrated to the United States and became a nationalized citizen on November 6, 1966.8 He received two advanced degrees from Columbia University where he was a Ford Foundation fellow, attending seminars by future national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Bret Scowcroft.9
His dream of being a world-class reporter had begun in high school, in communist Yugoslavia, a country then suffering from near starvation under Stalin’s blockade after Marshal Tito’s split from the Soviet dictator. Doder’s father had made a mistake, he told his son in 1949, not escaping to America when he had the chance. Doder determined he would go to America, where the family had relatives, and “become a journalist in a country where journalists could tell the truth,” intending to get all the way to the top, to The New York Times.
When the opportunity for Doder to leave Yugoslavia arose, however, America – for reasons Doder does not tell – was out of the question in his father’s eyes. We are told father and son were both ardently anticommunist. But worse for Doder than his father’s rejection of America was his father’s rejection of journalists, whom he saw as “parasites,” peddling in others’ misfortune. This caused Doder to split from his father, perhaps even to split from himself. To fulfill his dream of being a truth-teller in the West, Doder resolves to deceive. Page 17:
The only way I could pursue my ambition, I finally decided,
would be through deception – something I was already well
practiced at. Deception was a way of life in Yugoslavia as I grew
up. We learned to keep our mouths shut or spout what was
necessary to survive, first under fascism, then under changing
brands of [c]ommunism. I persuaded Dad, with the same
enthusiasm with which I professed [c]ommunist beliefs in
school (a condition of graduating), that my new passion was to
become a neurologist and that the University of Vienna was the
best place to study for this career.
This was 1958. Doder had recently acquired a benefactor in Vienna, unbeknownst to his father, an American named Clyde A. Farnsworth. A veteran Associated Press correspondent, Farnsworth had reported from Egypt during World War II and later Taiwan covering Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers (a precursor to the C.I.A.’s Air America); then the Chinese Civil War between Chiang Kaishek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists in 1948 for Scripps-Howard, as well as India, Iran, Europe and Latin America.10
As if out of a scene from a Humphrey Bogart movie, Doder, then all of twenty-one, describes how he was playing piano part-time at the bar in the Concordia press club in Vienna.
My hands flew across the piano keys, I took requests and
accepted drinks. A glamorous woman in a red dress, her dark
hair piled high on her head, sauntered over and asked me to
play “The Man I Love.” It was Dolly. She mouthed the words of
the song to a distinguished-looking older man – Clyde – sitting
a few tables away.
After the song, Dolly and Clyde Farnsworth, her husband, invite Doder over to their table for a drink.11 Or it may have been to their “home for a decent meal,” as the Farnsworth memoir has it.12 Either way, Farnsworth, recently arrived in Vienna, tells of his exploits covering the world as a foreign correspondent. Doder is enthralled. The relationship grows over time and Doder tells Farnsworth how he has fallen in love with journalism. He had begun working at a local communist newspaper, Oslobodjenje (translated as Liberation). Farnsworth convinces Doder that journalism is a noble profession, and bolsters his conviction that the United States stands for all that is right. “We’re democracy’s last line of defense,” he tells Doder, hanging on every word. Journalists should try to be impartial, Farnsworth adds, but a journalist “selects what to leave in and what to leave out.” A journalist “shapes the narrative.” “The most important thing is an implicit trust from the readers that you’ll deliver a reasonable facsimile of events and people as they appeared to you.” “Whatever you do,” he tells Doder, “you must honor this trust.”
This obligation, Doder realizes, will not be possible in communist Yugoslavia, with its restricted press. Soon after, Farnsworth arranges a student visa for Doder to come to the United States. In spite of his father who, upon learning of his son’s plans, curses-out Doder in “Old Testamentstyle language,” telling him “God would extract a retribution for [his] deception,” Doder arrives in New York in December, 1959. Thus began an estrangement between father and son that lasted almost until his father’s death, seven years later.
Once in America, Doder and his first wife, Karin, who had come with him from Yugoslavia, make their way to St. Louis, where Doder’s uncle and other relatives on his father’s side lived. His aunt offers to pay his university tuition for a semester. In an admissions interview with the dean of the Washington University at St. Louis, Doder quotes James Joyce’s famous allusion to Marxism in Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”13 He is admitted in the Spring of 1960.
Over the next five years, Doder attends not only Washington University, but Stanford and Columbia universities as well, focusing on Soviet and Eastern European history and international relations. Scholarships and part-time jobs pay his way. At Columbia, in addition to Brzezinski and Scowcroft, he is exposed to luminaries such as Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional government in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, and Adolph Berle. Berle had been the state department official in the Roosevelt Administration who, in 1939, had famously been said to ignore warnings of communist infiltration in the United States by the former Soviet spy (and later TIME Magazine writer) Whittaker Chambers.
In 1965, Doder begins his journalism career in America with the Associated Press, cutting his teeth over the next three years first in New York, then Manchester, then Albany. Eager to fulfill his “outsized ambition of becoming a famous journalist,” Doder has his heart set on The New York Times. In 1968, Farnsworth arranges the meeting. All goes well until Doder starts speaking Russian to Harrison Salisbury, the legendary Times reporter, who had covered the Red Army as it pushed back the German advance into Russia during World War II. But Doder embarrasses Salisbury, who doesn’t speak the language. Farnsworth tells Doder not to worry. The Washington Post, he says, has a new editor by the name of Ben Bradlee, who had ambitions to make The Post every bit The Times’ equal, to turn it from second-tier status into an internationally-respected newspaper.
Before Doder connects with Bradlee and The Post, however, he and Farnsworth have a fortuitous encounter in a bar in New York with H. Roger Tartarian, the editor-in-chief and vice president of United Press International.14 On November 22, 1963, it had been Tartarian who had put out on the U.P.I. wire that Lee Harvey Oswald had defected to Moscow in 1959. Tartaran's report had come from Robert J. “Bud” Korengold, who had been in Moscow in 1959 for U.P.I., and was now there for Newsweek. Tartarian hired Doder virtually on the spot. Doder was now United Press International's Moscow correspondent.
******
Anyone who has read Tennent H. Bagley's free-to-read Yale University Press book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games," will know that Howard and Pelton were already suspected of being "moles" and therefore of no more use to the KGB when false defector Yurchenko fingered them. I guess Ben Bradlee at The Post and Stanley Cloud at Time Magazine didn't realize that. Also, Nosenko-defending / Bagley-denigrating Kalugin is probably still loyal to the Kremlin, as is unmentioned-in-the-article Oleg Gordievsky.
(You're making my case, whether you realize it or not.)
Matt,
Your case seems to be that your former boss (Democrat) Daniel P. Moynihan and (Democrat?) Deputy Chief of CIA John N. McMahon were KGB "moles" who directly or indirectly caused us to: 1) get "bogged down" in the Vietnam War, 2) unilaterally freeze or limit our production of nuclear weapons, 3) become an immoral society, 4) devolve in cultural areas like architecture and art, 5) become more socialistic, and 6) [fill in the blank --I'm going from memory here].
That may be true, but I seriously doubt they were also instrumental in the Kremlin's deciding, at the January 1959 "Extraordinary" 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to have the KGB abandon as its primary goal the theft of U.S. and NATO secrets, and to turn to (or return to, actually) waging disinformation, "active measures," and inside man / outside man "The Sting"-like strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies in a long-term effort to get us to destroy ourselves in a Sun Tzu kinda way. (IMHO culminating, so far, in DJT, QANON, 1/6, etc.)
We know now that in response to this mandate, the First Chief Directorate (today's SVR) created a new top-secret section known as Department D that was sealed off from the rest of the KGB (hint: the old outer KGB was now expendable for use in counterintelligence games) and that General Oleg Gribanov of the Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB), not to be outdone, set up his own top-secret, sealed-off-from-the-rest-of-the-KGB, Department 14. We know that Gribanov, with a "mole" or two (or five) already in place in the CIA (do you really think it was Moynihan and McMahon?) sent -- as soon as a recent traitor by the name of Oleg Penkovsky had been "trapped like a bear in its den" in Moscow in such a way that wouldn't implicate the "mole" in U.S. or British intelligence who had betrayed him two weeks after his recruitment (my money's on Russia-born George Kisevalter or Records & Requirements officer Leonard V. McCoy in the former, and MI5 director Roger Hollis in the latter) -- in late 1961 and early 1962 respectively, GRU Colonel Dimitri Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksei Kulak to the FBI's NYC field office to "volunteer" to spy for it at the U.N. And then, of course, sent false defector-in-place Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 to discredit what recent true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn was telling James Angleton about possible KGB penetrations of U.S. Intelligence and the intelligence services of our NATO allies (and maybe even sent him back to Geneva in January 1964 to physically defect to the U.S.), Igor Kochnov to the FBI in 1965 and to the CIA in 1966, and your dad's favorite -- Valery Yurchenko -- to the U.S. in 1985. Et al. ad nauseam.
(To be continued.)
-- Tom
I haven't read prose so precise and nuanced and so obviously reflective of a contemplative, thoughtful and balanced mind since, well, the six volume set of the TRS-80 Mark III manual in 1981.
Dear Grasshopper,
I'll take that as a compliment.
Regardless, do you really think it was (Democrat) Moynihan and (Democrat?) McMahon?
Your Mentor,
-- Tom
What I am talking about is precisely what you had put to NYU Professor Stephen F. Cohen, here:
"So to get the ball rolling without further adieu, Stephen, why don't you begin, not so much by summarizing your book -- hopefully everyone here will be itching to buy it at the end, and he'll be here signing copies -- but rather, thinking back, as you do, to the opportunity you think we lost in 1991, some sort of permanent peace in Russia, that this opportunity may be happening again. Yet it seems in your judgment that, okay, we've declared a reset, but that, too, is failing for many of the same reasons. Somehow we're continuing the same fundamental policies in the past with some different rhetoric, and basically we've still really failed to end the Cold War."
https://www.cfr.org/event/russia-update-reset-working
I had written him myself, in October 2019, to provoke some further thought.
Re: Your comments on the Tucker Carlson Show
Stephen Cohen <sfc1@nyu.edu>
Oct 13, 2019
Dear Professor Cohen,
I watched your interview with Tucker Carlson last Friday evening and was intrigued by your comments as to how, if I understood you correctly, U.S. intelligence agencies have adopted the tactics of the K.G.B. This line of thought is in accordance with research I have been doing with respect to a re-appraisal of Senator Moynihan's career, particularly as it intersects with that of former C.I.A. deputy director John N. McMahon. Although largely relegated to historical obscurity today, McMahon, you may be aware, was central to major events such as Iran-Contra, as well as to the debriefings of numerous Soviet defectors [Golitsyn & Nosenko], and to the debriefing of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, to list just a few. Little known about Moynihan are his relationships with Leo Cherne and the International Rescue Committee (Germany, 1952) and with Jay Lovestone. Moynihan and McMahon would become publicly intertwined between 1982 and 1985 over the Nicaraguan harbor mining and other issues of congressional oversight and notification as well as over the passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
I attach a recent letter I wrote to ... the House Intelligence Committee, in which I urged against expansion of the IIPA to extend to disclosure of the names of even deceased covert agents as such legislation would threaten not only our understanding of the role our intelligence agencies play in history but because such legislation would further put the internal security of those agencies at risk. Because of the sensitivity of the subject, I do not expressly state the conclusions of my research in my letter but attempted, however obliquely, to imply them through its enclosures.
If I could presume upon you and your time to have a read through the materials, I would be interested in whether you see what I am driving at. Perhaps you would be willing to discuss the implications with me, if so, although I readily expect, as you remarked on the Carlson program, that I may have asked you "to go someplace we can't go at length."
With kind regards,
Matt Cloud
Bethesda, MD
Alas, Professor Cohen was in poor-health already when I wrote him. His reply:
"Sorry, but in aftermath of cataract surgery and having fallen so far behind in many things, I have no time to delve into this. Must leave it to you. sfc"
Dimitri Simes?
THAT Dimitri Simes?
I think you wanted that in reply to my comment below. Anyway, which "former CIA official" had "staked his career on Yurchenko's bona fides?"
Here's a hint: He was a protege of Gen. Lucian Truscott in Berlin in 1953.
"John N. McMahon (born July 3, 1929) is a former senior U.S. official of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Background
John Norman McMahon was born on July 3, 1929, in East Norwalk, Connecticut. His parents were Frederick Francis McMahon and Elizabeth Collins. In 1951, he obtained a bachelor's degree from the College of Holy Cross.
Career
CIA
McMahon joined the CIA in 1951 or 1966.
He served as Deputy Director for Operations from January 11, 1978, to April 12, 1981, and later, nominated by US President Ronald Reagan, as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence under Director William J. Casey as of April 27, 1982, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman. Questioning McMahon during his nomination included US Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who guided publication of the VENONA papers in the mid-1990s).
On March 4, 1986, McMahon, age 56, resigned and left office on March 26, succeeded by Robert M. Gates."
Now -- did either TIME in defense or Doder in offense depose John N. McMahon, the "former CIA official" who had "staked his career on Yurchenko's bona fides" in the libel suit in London? He'd be a natural suspect for having provided the damning quote to TIME, wouldn't he? He is in fact the only "former CIA official" who fits the bill for candidates as to having motivation and knowledge for making the damning quotation.
No? Neither party called him as a witness? Why not? Or do you not know that, either?
Here's a question for self-described 1/6 participant, Matt Cloud:
Was your presumed KGB "mole," CIA Deputy Director John N. McMahon, like your other presumed KGB "mole," Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, a hated DEMOCRAT by any chance?
"Other collateral information Yurchenko provided about Soviet recruits,
which he said could not be discussed outside the secure rooms in
the CIA, would prove "beyond a shadow of a doubt, Yurchenko
was a genuine defector." McMahon stated, therefore, "no other
hypothesis is necessary." He then dramatically concluded by saying:
"I would stake my career on Yurchenko's bona fides." It
was a statement that he would have cause to regret in forty-eight
hours."
-- Edward Jay Epstein, Deception - The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA (1989).
https://archive.org/stream/Deception-TheInvisibleWarBetweenTheKGBAndTheCIA/Deception+-+The+Invisible+War+Between+the+KGB+and+the+CIA_djvu.txt
Truly ! Lucian ... thanks ever so much, Ransom !!
Makes up for a few of those churlish types who, as soon as they see an oddball post, 'disable' me!!
;-((
https://thomasgraves.substack.com/p/dusko-doder-well-connected-journalist/comments
Why in his memoirs did Doder omit the damning quote against him? He wrote that only Amb. Hartman had been quoted. Not so -- the first quote was from a "former official of the CIA", who said as to the source of the alleged payment, "of course he [Doder] knew it was the KGB. This was the Soviet Union. What else could he think?"
As I recall, the “damning quote” was a blind, unattributed slander of a remarkable journalist. Dusko was a dear friend who valiently resisted calumny from ignorant individuals prepared to think and spread the worst about diligent, valiant, even briliant journalists. The KGB was petrified about Dusko, his bilingual fluency in accent-free Russian who with his winning personality was able to develop sources far beyond the capacity of any other journos covering Russian during the depths of the cold war. The CIA was equally jealous and as prepared as the KGB (today FSB) to spread calumny about an individual who regularly beat them in telling the world about what was really happening in the USSR. For shame, Mr. Cloud, for following Dusko and his memory beyond the grave with something that you know NOTHING about. For shame.
Well since I knew Dusko -- his son Peter lived with me in '86, during his father's divorce from Karin, who was among my mother's closest friends, just as Dusko was being taken off the intelligence beat (as Ben Bradlee tells us in his memoirs), and I know the recipient of the damning quote -- my father, Stanley Cloud of TIME -- and the author of the story, Jay Peterzell, and perhaps most importantly, Pat Moynihan -- my former boss -- who actually gave the damning quote to TIME, which is why TIME settled the Doder suit the day before I joined Moynihan's staff on Aug 2, 1996, I'd say I know far more about this great story than you may realize. So save your feigned indignation.
So you see I'm the reason TIME settled the Doder suit.
It's all right here for decoding by a discerning reader ...
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R000201640010-1.pdf
Doder is actually NOT the issue in this story. He was sacrificed, to protect The Issue. Sacrificed by both TIME AND The Post, the latter having essentially fired him and only through the intervention of David Gergen did U.S. News & World Report take him on. (No one goes from The Post to U.S. News, as you probably know.)
__
"September 18, 2018
MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION
SUBJECT: Telephonic conversation with Dusko Doder regarding Vitaly
Yurchenko allegations in 1992 TIME magazine article
I spoke with Dusko Doder today, who called me at noon. His wife Louise Branson had called me earlier in the morning at eight o’clock, after I had called there yesterday afternoon and left a message. I had sent an email earlier in the day yesterday to Doder including the November 1985 letter from Senator Daniel P. Moynihan to CIA Deputy Director John N. McMahon expressing Moynihan’s “firm conviction” that Yurchenko was “genuine and was never a plant.” When Branson called I told her I had information that would perhaps be of interest to them, relating to the identity of one of the sources of the 1992 TIME story by Jay Peterzell alleging Doder had taken money from the K.G.B. while working as a reporter for the Washington Post in Moscow in the 1980s. She said they had conducted a lot of discovery during the subsequent libel suit and the name “Colin something” (former CIA analyst Colin Thompson, I inferred) had come up as a source. She also informed me that Doder had had a stroke and I think she said a mild heart attack recently, but that he was writing a book on the subject and that it would be “big.” She said neither of them had seen or read the email I had sent him.
When Doder himself later called it was apparent he was in poor health. His speech was strained and weak. I told him at the outset that I was speaking to him independently, that I was not calling on behalf of my father or anyone else. He said he understood. I asked him if he had by then read my email; he replied he had not, that it had ended up in the trash (whatever that meant). I told Doder that I had a theory as to who the source in the TIME article had been, who had been quoted as saying, “of course he [Doder] knew it was the K.G.B. This was the Soviet Union. What else could he think?” I told Doder that this quote came from John McMahon. I asked Doder if he knew who that was. He said “sure.” I then asked if he knew who it really was and he said “sure” again and I said it was Moynihan ....
...
I left open the possibility of working with Doder further on the subject, saying if he changed his mind, either he or his wife should get in touch with me. He said he would see. I said I hoped his health improved and he said thank you.
Matt Cloud"
Dear Grasshopper,
Yurchenko fooled a lot of people, not just DEMOCRAT Moynihan. As did Nosenko, Kochnov, Polyakov, Kulak, Kalugin, Gordievsky, Papuhsin, Bruce Leonard Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, and [fill in the blank].
Your Mentor,
-- Stephen Sestanovich, I mean Tom
You're not following. No one that I am discussing was "fooled."
Now, to come full circle, and answer the question I put to you, but which you ignored and instead castigated me, "Why in his memoirs did Doder omit the damning quote against him?" Because I had called him two years before his book came out and blew the whole contrived charade. That's why Doder omitted the damning quote.
Writing in The Nation, Alexander Cockburn provided a useful, however inadvertent, analysis:
"The original Time story had a quote immediately following the citation of Yurchenko’s allegations about the $1,000 bribe: “a former C.I.A. official says the source of the money was clear to Doder: ‘Of course he knew it was the KGB. This was the Soviet Union. What else could he think?’”
This quote from the “former C.I.A. official” suggested that somehow the bribe offer itself was beyond argument. As TIME's internal communications submitted to the English court make clear, the magazine’s editorial director, Henry Muller, raised questions on two separate occasions about the quotation. On a draft dated December 19, 1992, Muller wrote, “How does the official know except that Yurchenko told him? This information, if it is relevant, should be attributed to Yurchenko, otherwise the reader would be led into believing that we have triangulated this accusation with independent third parties.” Editorial director Muller was disregarded. The smear quote stayed in."
Alexander Cockburn, "TIME SLIME REVISITED.", The Nation (January 6, 1997).
Read that again: "[T]he reader would be led into believing we have triangulated this accusation with independent third parties.” Exactly.
In his memoir Doder does discuss this TIME deliberation, but changes the source of the quotation from a "former CIA official" to a "former government official," and, as stated above, omits that the quote was even included at all in the TIME article. But if the quote was, as Mr. Andelman's says, a "blind, unattributed slander," Doder should have said as much and knocked it out, rather than deny its foundational presence in the article. Unless, that is, there's something else behind it.
A page number from Doder's memoir can be provided upon request.
Dear Grasshopper,
I suppose back then there was no reason to suspect that it was the KGB who, according to false defector Vitaly Yurchenko, gave Doder "information and $1,000."
(I hope that neither you nor Mr. Andelman believe Yurchenko was a true defector.)
Your Mentor,
-- Stephen, I mean Tom
PS Gee, I wonder if ABC's Sam Jaffe got any money from that world-class humanitarian organization . . .
Yurchenko's bona fides are NOT the issue. You keep trying to frame this in binary terms, which is exactly what has gone on since Nosenko's days, and is what continues to keep the matter from being understood. And I know you know that notwithstanding your hardline posture. The issue is why the allegation -- no matter it's veracity -- was made against Doder. The answer is that Doder's contacts in the Soviet Union would have exposed Alexander Yakovlev, his source for example on the Novosibirsk Report, who was in 1992 accused of being CIA. Them's the facts. Ergo, accuse Doder of being KGB to protect Yakovlev, The Mole in the Kremlin. Doder was the conduit between the Yakovlev faction there and the Moynihan faction here. When he came back from the USSR, in 86, and was now being fed info from Moynihan, that's when CIA flipped out. Looking into Doder would expose both. And THAT would have exposed what we now call "Russian Collusion." Or, if you like, the managed fraud of the Cold War. A tough story to explain by those who led it.
Your memoir is going to be a fascinating page-turner David!
Bingo! You are an amazing read, David. I am just finding time to get through your posts. Lucian Truscott is another favorite of mine also.