When Journalist Humiliated CIA in 1980s by Scooping Them, They Retaliated by Falsely Accusing Him of Being KGB Agent
Dusko Doder’s case has ominous reverberations in the era of Cold War 2.0
Dusko Doder [Source: msn.com]
Late one February night in 1984, Dusko Doder, The Washington Post’s Soviet correspondent, noticed hundreds of lights blazing at the Soviet Defense Ministry and KGB offices in Moscow.
He surmised that the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, who had been ill for a while, had died.
Highly unusual was the fact that, on that night, Soviet television unexpectedly changed its scheduled programming to classical music.
Doder’s suspicions were correct; Andropov had indeed died. He reported the scoop in The Washington Post—before the CIA had got wind of the story, which infuriated them as it made them look incompetent.
How could a regular journalist know something of this magnitude before them!
To add insult to injury, Doder’s story noted “concern and some finger-pointing within the U.S. government over an apparent lack of alertness by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and other intelligence monitors to such a crucial development [Andropoov’s death].”
So what did the CIA do? They decided to take retribution on Doder, planting a story with a friendly journalist suggesting that Doder had been paid $1,000 by the KGB and was beholden to the Soviet spy agency.
In his memoir, then Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee wrote that “Doder wrote something that embarrassed the CIA, and when the agency thought they saw a chance to get even, they took their shot.”[1]
The journalist who smeared Doder, Jay Peterzell, wrote for Time magazine, a part of the Henry Luce empire which had long-standing ties to the CIA.
Time’s principal reporter and editor on the Soviet Union at the time was Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s Oxford roommate and a member of Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society, who came from an old CIA family.
While at Oxford, Talbott had been recruited by the Agency with Clinton to smuggle Nikita Khrushchev’s diaries out of the Soviet Union and to translate them—a coup for the CIA in the Cold War since Khrushchev had denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin.[2]
Talbott was later appointed by President Clinton as the State Department’s point man for his Russia policy and became one of the godfathers of the Russia Gate scandal that drove forward Cold War 2.0.
Peterzell’s story drew on the false testimony of KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko, who told American officials that Doder had taken payment from the KGB.
Doder was interrogated by the FBI, who told him that “you’ve been an outstanding correspondent because you had a corrupt relationship with the KGB…Since the KGB controls everything, they were feeding you information to make you look good.”
After Peterzell’s story was published, Doder sued Time magazine for libel and won his case, as there was no credible evidence to ever emerge that he took any money from the KGB.
After the judge issued his ruling in August 1986, Time offered sincere regret and apologies in court and agreed to pay Doder $262,000 and to cover his lawyers’ fees and costs.[3]
However, Doder had suffered significant damage to his career and said that he had been “robbed of his dignity and prestige” as a result of the false accusations directed against him.
Doder died on September 10. He is remembered fondly as a highly professional reporter with an indefatigable work ethic who published several books, including The Yugoslavs (1978), Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (1986), and The Inconvenient Journalist: A Memoir (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).[4]
Doder’s story remains significant because it fit the pattern during the Cold War by which the CIA tried to smear journalists and investigators who were trying to expose corrupt Agency practices or otherwise made the Agency look bad.
One journalist researching the CIA’s complicity in the assassination of JFK, Dorothy Kilgallen, was even murdered—almost certainly by a man who had worked for the CIA in Guatemala during Operation PBSuccess (which overthrew left-leaning President Jacobo Árbenz).
Doder’s story especially reverberates today amidst a renewed Cold War environment.
Magazines like Time continue to promote stories of Russian interference in U.S. politics and media—like Peterzell’s story—based on dubious evidence and yellow journalism standards.
Whistleblowers and journalists who cast critical light on U.S. foreign policy or who fall in the crosshairs of the CIA are continuously susceptible to being accused of being Russian agents and face career suicide and potential legal trouble.
Witness the attempts to censor Russian TV and the case of Scott Ritter, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, whose critical writings, podcasts and speeches about the Ukraine conflict resulted in his blacklisting in the media, routine smears being directed against him, and his home being raided by the FBI.
Adam Nossiter, “Dusko Doder, Cold War Journalist Falsely Tied to K.G.B., Dies at 87,” The New York Times, September 21, 2024, B11. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the US Trajectory from Bush II to Biden (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023). ↑
Time issued a statement that said the magazine “had no evidence, and did not mean to suggest, that the KGB exercised control over Doder’s reporting from Moscow.” ↑
Nossiter, “Dusko Doder, Cold War Journalist Falsely Tied to K.G.B., Dies at 87.” Born in Sarejevo, Doder obtained a Master’s degree in journalism and international relations from Columbia University and worked for The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and Associated Press.