They spied for the British-boy, did they spy for the British, helping them nudge us into World War II, unseat an isolationist congressman, and riddle the U.S. media with fake news.
Usdin has written a good bit about espionage, including 2005's Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley, the story of a couple of members of the Rosenberg atomic spy ring.
The Soviet news agency TASS picked up the story, which caught the eye of British papers, and a United Press International reporter in London sent it back to Washington.
Revealing their utter cluelessness about the way the Soviet Union worked, a group of American reporters, including some from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, cabled Moscow to explain that there must be some mistake: "He did more than any other Soviet envoy to popularize the Stalin regime in this country."
Bureau of Spies makes it clear that he was also a knowing Soviet agent for a decade or more.
"Washington's loudest whistleblower, a man who made a career ferreting out malfeasance and hypocrisy, felt no need to inform his readers that the Soviet Union was trying to recruit him and other journalists as spies."
As with the suspicious personages that dot the media landscape today, many of the characters in Usdin's book are not really spies at all, just ideological wingnuts pushing propaganda for causes that are creepy or crazy or both.
http://reason.com/archives/2019/02/24/spies-in-the-media
Usdin has written a good bit about espionage, including 2005's Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley, the story of a couple of members of the Rosenberg atomic spy ring.
The Soviet news agency TASS picked up the story, which caught the eye of British papers, and a United Press International reporter in London sent it back to Washington.
Revealing their utter cluelessness about the way the Soviet Union worked, a group of American reporters, including some from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, cabled Moscow to explain that there must be some mistake: "He did more than any other Soviet envoy to popularize the Stalin regime in this country."
Bureau of Spies makes it clear that he was also a knowing Soviet agent for a decade or more.
"Washington's loudest whistleblower, a man who made a career ferreting out malfeasance and hypocrisy, felt no need to inform his readers that the Soviet Union was trying to recruit him and other journalists as spies."
As with the suspicious personages that dot the media landscape today, many of the characters in Usdin's book are not really spies at all, just ideological wingnuts pushing propaganda for causes that are creepy or crazy or both.
http://reason.com/archives/2019/02/24/spies-in-the-media
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