TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122892/1228220.000

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                                                                                PRESS, Page 34

A Cold War Tale


When a Soviet defector accused a respected Washington Post
reporter of accepting money from the KGB, both the CIA and the
FBI tried to unravel who was using whom -- and failed

BY JAY PETERZELL/WASHINGTON


    On a fall day in 1986, a blue U.S. government limousine
cruised to a stop in downtown Washington. From the backseat,
William Webster, the director of the FBI, discreetly scanned the
sidewalk for the man he had arranged to meet. Within moments,
Benjamin Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post,
opened the door and climbed in.

    As the limo pulled back into traffic, Webster got right to
business. He said he had startling information from inside the
KGB: one of the Post's top reporters, Dusko Doder, had accepted
money from the Soviet intelligence agency. Webster was
especially concerned because the Post had just assigned Doder
to the national-security beat, a job in which he might gain
access to U.S. government secrets.

    Doder, a gruff, cigar-chewing workaholic with a
thrift-shop style of dress, was a star at the Post. Fluent in
Russian and an expert on Soviet affairs, he had 12 years of
reporting experience in Eastern Europe and Moscow. As the Post's
Moscow bureau chief from 1981 to '85, he produced scoop after
scoop on the inner workings of the Soviet government.

    The FBI believed that Doder had an unusually close
relationship to the KGB. Webster stressed to Bradlee that the
bureau had no proof that Doder had done anything illegal and
that the evidence about a payoff was hearsay. Bradlee said he
was shocked by the allegation and would look into it.

    The limo ride was the beginning of a dramatic decline in
a star reporter's public profile. By the following spring, Doder
no longer worked for the Post. Today the 55-year-old
journalist, who was never formally charged with any wrongdoing,
pursues a free-lance writing career in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in
what remains of the country where he was born. He says the
allegation that he took money from the KGB is "a lie." The story
of that accusation and the U.S. government's secret attempt to
find out whether Doder had been recruited by the KGB is a
remarkable tale of late-cold war intrigue, never before publicly
told.

    Did the KGB co-opt Doder? Or was it the other way around?
Certainly he owed his scoops to leaks from the Soviet
government, and his stories often reflected the views of his
sources. But then, many reporters -- whether they cover the
Kremlin, the White House or city hall -- echo their sources'
views and are given inside information as a result. In a cold
war environment, however, that ambiguity played havoc with
Doder's career. The U.S. government came to believe that Doder's
reporting was "too good."

    The case began on Aug. 1, 1985, when KGB Colonel Vitaly
Yurchenko walked into the U.S. embassy in Rome and announced
that he wanted to defect. Yurchenko established his credentials
with the CIA officer who talked to him by disclosing the 10 or
12 most important cases he knew about. One of those involved
Dusko Doder.

    As part of his job, Yurchenko said, he had met regularly
with officials from the KGB's domestic-intelligence division.
During one such meeting in late 1984 or early 1985, Yurchenko's
colleagues informed him that they had just scored a major
success. According to Yurchenko, they said Doder, while
traveling with an unnamed Russian woman south of Moscow, had
accepted a $1,000 payment from a domestic KGB officer. Yurchenko
did not know whether other payments to Doder followed. Nor did
Yurchenko know what, if anything, Doder did for the money. But
a former CIA 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?"

    Three months after his defection, Yurchenko abruptly
returned to Moscow, casting doubt on everything he had told the
U.S. -- including the story about Doder. But as the FBI and CIA
studied Yurchenko's disclosures over a period of four years, a
consensus emerged that the accuracy of his information was
extraordinary. As a former top official now says, "I don't know
Yurchenko to have given any bad information."

    Within the CIA, the Doder case was handled like dynamite.
Any leak could lead to charges that the CIA was spying on
journalists. By an odd coincidence, Doder ended his four-year
Moscow tour for the Post the day before Yurchenko defected.
Returning to Washington later that summer, Doder began a year's
leave of absence to write a book, Shadows and Whispers, about
power politics in the Kremlin. Doder's return to the U.S. put
him within the jurisdiction of the FBI, which launched an
intensive study of his articles in the hope of shedding light
on his relationship with the KGB.

    Doder's journalistic record was impressive. His stories
included details of closed-door Central Committee and Politburo
meetings as well as secret information about the health of
Soviet leaders, which was normally restricted to the highest
levels of the KGB and the Communist Party. When Leonid Brezhnev
died in 1982, Doder described how Yuri Andropov, who had headed
the KGB from 1967 until earlier that year, maneuvered to succeed
him, cutting out Brezhnev's protege, Konstantin Chernenko, by
using KGB communications to summon Central Committee members to
Moscow for a vote. While the Central Committee deliberated, the
KGB and Soviet army sealed off central Moscow with four
concentric rings of troops. Doder was "somehow" allowed through
and described for his readers the empty silence of Red Square.

    When Andropov came to power, Doder's scoops took on a
partisan tone: Andropov was in undisputed control of the
Kremlin; he had reformed the KGB during his long tenure there,
staffing it with the best and brightest of Soviet society. As
Andropov kept his enemies among the old Brezhnev crowd
off-balance with corruption probes, Doder often had advance word
on who was being investigated by the KGB -- complete with rumors
about their drinking and sexual habits.

    These scoops contained a depth of detail and quality of
analysis that would have won plaudits, not to mention prizes,
if they had been about Western capitals; being about the closed
world of the Kremlin, they aroused suspicion. "My impression at
the time," recalled Arthur Hartman, the U.S. ambassador to
Moscow in 1981-87, "was that [Doder] had a very good source
close to the Andropov group -- probably KGB direct."

    Doder aroused further questions with the biggest scoop of
his career: a story in the Feb. 10, 1984, issue of the Post
announcing that Andropov had died. The Soviets have
traditionally leaked word of the death or ouster of a national
leader to a favored American reporter. The Post ran Doder's
story on page 1; but when U.S. officials in Moscow denied
Doder's report and joked that he was "on pot," the Post softened
it in later editions and moved it to page 27. The next day the
Kremlin announced that Andropov had died. Doder insists that he
had no source other than changes in radio programming,
late-night activity at offices and other signs.

    The FBI analysts reviewing Doder's work in late 1985
concluded that he had been systematically helped by the Soviets.
"It was clear he was being fed information by the KGB," says a
former top FBI official. Doder seemed to have been the target
of a classic recruitment effort. After cultivating reporters
with scoops for some time, the Soviets often tried to get them
to take money. The cash, usually small amounts at first, was
meant as much to compromise as to motivate.

    When asked by TIME in September and again last week about
the allegation that he had accepted money from the KGB, Doder
ridiculed the charge but did not explicitly deny it. He
contended that the CIA had leaked the story to get even with him
because his 1984 scoop about Andropov's death had "publicly
humiliated" the agency. "I have made permanent enemies of the
CIA. They went to great pains to screw me," he said. "If you
think that I, as bureau chief of the Washington Post, could be
bought for $1,000, we have nothing to talk about." But late last
week, Doder flatly denied taking the money.

    As FBI agents proceeded with their investigation in 1985,
they came to realize that they had no ground on which to
prosecute Doder. He had not had access to U.S. classified
information while in Moscow and could therefore not have
committed espionage even if he had wanted to. If Doder had
failed to report income from the KGB, he might have violated the
Foreign Agents Registration Act or U.S. income tax laws, but
that did not cause "any great tightening of the sphincter" at
the FBI, in the words of one agent. The bureau's investigation
sputtered to a halt in early 1986. But the FBI took notice again
when Doder returned to work from his leave of absence in
September 1986 and was assigned to cover national security.
James Geer, who ran the bureau's intelligence division, asked
Webster to make a quiet approach to Bradlee.

    After the limo ride, Bradlee and assistant managing editor
Robert Kaiser questioned Doder, reviewed his work with Post
lawyers and talked to officials. Bradlee concluded that the
FBI's suspicions were "bull." Recalls Bradlee: "I satisfied
myself, and I walked away from it. I'd done the right thing to
the best of my ability." Doder was given "a clean bill of
health," said Kaiser, and was kept on the intelligence beat.

    Webster and the Post's lawyer discussed giving Doder a
lie-detector test but reached no decision. Meanwhile, the FBI
tested Doder in a different fashion, arranging a sting to see
if he would pass classified information to the Soviets. The U.S.
often had good enough sources in the KGB to know whether certain
types of information had been passed to the other side. But
Doder did not give the material to the Soviets. The FBI
concluded that he was not acting as a Soviet agent in the U.S.

    Nonetheless, according to a friend, Doder said Yurchenko's
accusations had put him "under a cloud" and made it impossible
for him to stay at the Post. Despite his achievement in Moscow,
Doder had been informed that his future at the Post was limited.
He was a "useful citizen," he was told, but there would not be
a lot of glamorous foreign assignments in his career if he
stayed. In March 1987, he abruptly left to cover China for U.S.
News & World Report. In 1989 he parted with the magazine and
moved to Belgrade, where he writes for several newspapers and
has completed a book about Albania.

    Vitaly Yurchenko's allegation that Doder took money from
the KGB cannot be proved. But Doder's scoops raise the question
that every reporter must deal with: Where is the line between
responsibly using information obtained from inside sources and
uncritically reflecting those sources' views? The line is
sometimes a blurry one, but it is a distinction that nonetheless
must be heeded -- whether covering the Kremlin, the White House
or city hall.