No smoking gun, but smoke.
cjr.org
"during an appearance at Exeter University in England on March 11. The speaker was Oleg Kalugin, a former major general in the KGB who had worked as a press officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington (see "The Spy Who Gave Me a Scoop," CJR, November/December 1990). Among other things, Kalugin discussed the problems the KGB had had in recruiting agents during the cold war. Andrew Brown, a reporter for the London Independent, summarized his comments in a ten-paragraph story that included this quotation, which set the whole plot in motion..."
"...We had an agent -- a well-known American journalist -- with a good reputation, who severed his ties with us after 1956. I myself convinced him to resume them. But in 1968, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia . . . he said he would never again take any money from us."...
"...In early September, Kalugin told several journalists attending a Nation-sponsored conference held in Moscow that, while he had indeed been referring to Stone in his Exeter speech, he had not meant that Stone had been a paid KGB agent -- only that he had sometimes lunched on the Soviet tab. He went on to say that by "agent" he had simply meant a useful contact, not an intelligence tool. After 1968, he said, Stone refused to let the Russians buy him any more lunches..." |
