Talk:I. F. Stone

message: He sure seems like a great guy from his quotes, I guess its pretty key to figure out if he was sincere, or a lying traitor. ¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸ 13:38, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: What is "not so great" about that quote? Stalin turned Russia from a mostly agrarian society into a industrialised society in under 15 years. He had a huge impact on Russia in many ways. He wasn't saying the man was "good". 203.38.62.211 (talk) 02:52, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

text: Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler, you dunce 81.28.80.19 (talk) 17:32, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotes 

message: I added this information, to be cited shortly when I figure out how, from Myra MacPherson's recent bio of stone. she read the declassified reports from start to finish and they are cited in her bibliography. whether kalugin said he was an "agent of influence", I dont know or care. If the US Government couldnt find any evidence of treason (and stone did consider selling secrets dire treason) I'm thinking that the general debate over whether he ACUTALLY DID ANYTHING to jeopardize the national security of the US is over. VanTucky 05:43, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Myra MacPherson's interpretation of the available evidence is certainly one POV that needs to be expressed in the article, but I doubt it will be the last word on the subject. Stone’s sycophantic shenanigans with respect to Stalin and the USSR in the mid-late 30’s are very well documented. Torturous Devastating Cudgel 20:43, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I made that statement a long time ago in the heat of the moment. My perspective on things has certainly matured. But the reason I got so hot in the above is that some people were adding statements to directly and unequivocally suggest that he was found guilty of spying. Which certainly isn't true, even if the debate is legit. While she certainly had her personal POV (as did  every biographer of Stone) I think it's important to note that she was the first, and so far the only, biographer to have full, unhindered access to the reports of years of spying on Stone by the government. VanTucky (talk) 20:48, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

text:  It seems unlikely to me that Stone was a card-carrying Communist because he was an admirer of Kropotkin, who ridiculed Marxism. However that may be, Stone's "accusers" do appear to have metaphysical certainty that he was an "agent", which they define, not as a spy but as someone whom in 1936-38 the KBG trusted (i.e, a fellow-traveling opponent of Nazisim). Now, reputable historians typically don't make claims of metaphysical certainty about the past in this way. There is only evidence and probability.  In 1952, the Washington DC F.B.I. had the VENONA reports and linked Stone to "BLIN". However,the NY FBI bureau countered that Stone could not have been BLIN because he made less than the $1,500 that the cables reported BLIN was making. The Washington bureau replied in 1952 only that Stone "could not be ruled out" (according to Gutteplan's book). The FBI then diligently investigated Stone for many years and accumulated a huge file and turned up nothing. Now a Russian journalist, Vassiliev, claims to have seen KBG evidence that Stone was BLIN in 1936. However, we have only his word. How reliable a character is Vassiliev? Well, he lost a libel case in Britain when the jury found his story in the Alger Hiss case unconvincing. The tone of certainty of Stone's detractors suggests an ulterior motive, the motive probably being to tarnish his posthumous reputation which has grown brighter as more and more of his predictions and interpretations, mostly based on accumulated evidence from careful reading, turn out to have been correct.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.167.73.139 (talk) 20:46, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  additions to KGB section 

message: I've cleaned up the citation style a little, and added ISBNs for all books.  But more work is needed.  One problem is redundancy. (E.g., the Macpherson bio appears both here and under "Biographies".)
A bigger problem might be relevance.  For example, Donner's Age of Surveillance has no mention of I.F. Stone, at least none found under Google Book Search snippet view.  General titles on the McCarthyism period don't have much claim to a place on this list unless they treat I.F. Stone at the chapter level, at least.  Some of these books seem to be listed only because they are cited in the section about allegations of spying for the KGB.  Of course these works deserve full footnote citations -- these allegations are a noteworthy aspect of a noteworthy figure, and the sources advancing or debating the allegations should be made as accessible as possible, ideally, from a link from the footnote itself.  However, if these books don't treat of I.F. Stone extensively, they aren't really "further reading" about I.F. Stone per se.  Better to fill out the relevant footnotes with bibliographic information.
At any rate, with ISBN links for all the book titles, it should now be easier for the rest of you (by searching on Google Book Search or on Amazon) to determine relevance and appropriate location for yourselves. Yakushima (talk) 06:32, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Further Reading section needs work 

message: In the very last sentence of the section detailing the espionage allegations against Stone, the term "Stalin-Hitler Treaty" is used.  Referring to the pact in such a way is very uncommon and it is almost exclusively referred to as the "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact".  Unless anyone has any objections, I am going to change it.74.141.153.78 (talk) 20:57, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stalin-Hitler Treaty 

message: I've removed an old neutrality tag from this page that appears to have no active discussion per the instructions at Template:POV:
::This template is not meant to be a permanent resident on any article. Remove this template whenever:
::#There is consensus on the talkpage or the NPOV Noticeboard that the issue has been resolved
::#It is not clear what the neutrality issue is, and no satisfactory explanation has been given
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Since there's no evidence of ongoing discussion, I'm removing the tag for now. If discussion is continuing and I've failed to see it, however, please feel free to restore the template and continue to address the issues. Thanks to everybody working on this one! -- Khazar2 (talk) 04:50, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  removing POV tag with no active discussion per [[Template:POV]] 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article seems to be fixated on the Sykes-Picot agreement, dragging it in whether it's relevant or not.  I removed one semi-nonsensical invocation of it, but other fixes are needed. AnonMoos (talk) 00:19, 4 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sykes-Picot agreement 

message: I wonder why this entry doesn't have anything about what Stone considered one of his best stories -- that underground nuclear tests could be detected 2,600 miles away. 
This meant that with a network of seismographic stations around the world, the US could monitor Soviet underground tests to make sure they weren't cheating. This also meant that Edward Teller, and the Atomic Energy Commission, were wrong when they claimed that underground tests couldn't be detected more than 200 miles away. 
This is also a classic lesson for journalists on how to report a story by digging into the scientific facts. It's also a classic lesson for journalists on how government officials lie. 
Stone told this story many times, and a couple of versions are available on his web site, which gives permission to reuse his works freely. You can also read and use the original articles from his newsletter on his web site. And there are many WP:RS about it, which is why it belongs in the entry. 
http://ifstone.org/collectedifstone.pdf
I.F. Stone
The Best of I.F. Stone
Public Affairs Press (2006) 
One can always ask questions, as one can see from one of my “coups”—forcing the Atomic Energy Commission to admit that its first underground test was detected not 200 miles away—as it claimed—but 2600 miles away. This is the story of how I got that story— one example of what independent news gathering can be like. 
The first underground test was held in the fall of 1957. The New York Times report from the test site in Nevada next morning said the results seemed to confirm the expectations of the experts: that it would not be detected more than 200 miles away. But the Times itself carried “shirttails” from Toronto, Rome and Tokyo saying that the shot had been detected there. Since the experts (viz. Dr. Edward Teller and his entourage at Livermore Laboratory, all opposed to a nuclear test ban agreement) were trying to prove that underground tests could not be detected at a distance, these reports from Toronto, Rome and Tokyo piqued my curiosity. I did not have the resources to check them by cable, so I filed the story away for future use. 
Next spring, Stassen, then Eisenhower’s chief disarmament negotiator, testified before the Humphrey Disarmament Sub-committee of the Senate that a network of stations a thousand kilometers (or 580 miles apart) could police a nuclear test ban agreement and detect any underground tests. Two days after his testimony the AEC issued its first official report on the Nevada explosion for publication the following Monday. This said that the Nevada underground explosion had not been detected more than 200 miles away. The effect was to undercut Stassen’s testimony. If the Nevada blast could not be detected more than 200 miles away then a network of stations 580 miles apart would not be able to police an agreement. I recalled the New York Times report of the previous fall, dug it out of a basement file and telephoned the AEC press office. I asked how the AEC reconciled its statement in the report about to be released that the blast was not detected more than 200 miles away with the reports from Rome, Tokyo and Toronto the morning after that it had registered on seismographs there. The answer was that they didn’t know but would try to find out. 
In the meantime I decided to find me a seismologist. By telephoning around I learned there was a seismology branch in the Coast and Geodetic Survey, where I duly found a seismologist and asked him whether it was true that Tokyo, Rome and Toronto had detected the Nevada underground blast. He said that he did not believe the claims of these three foreign stations but he showed me a list of some 20 U.S. stations which he said had certainly detected it. One of these was 2600 miles north of the test site in Fairbanks, Alaska, another was 1200 miles east in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I copied the names and distances down. When he asked why I was so interested, I said the AEC was about to release a report for the following Monday claiming that the explosion was not detected more than 200 miles away. When he heard the AEC angle, he became less communicative. I had hardly got back to my office when the phone rang; it was the AEC press relations man. He said “We just heard from Coast and Geodetic. There must be some mistake. We’ll reach Nevada by teletype in the morning and let you know.” When the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy later investigated the incident, the AEC claimed it was an “inadvertent” error.        
http://ifstone.org/weekly/IFStonesWeekly-1958mar10.pdf
March 10, 1958: Vol. 6, No. 10
Dr. Teller's Campaign Against A Ban on Testing
http://ifstone.org/weekly/IFStonesWeekly-1958mar17.pdf
March 17, 1958: Vol. 6, No. 11
Why the AEC Retracted that Falsehood on Nuclear Testing
http://www.ifstone.org/weekly/IFStonesWeekly-1958mar24.pdf
March 24, 1958: Vol. 6, No. 12
How the AEC Got Itself Whitewashed
--Nbauman (talk) 02:33, 8 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Underground nuclear testing story