It has been said that the Daily Herald ‘cheerfully adopted the nascent Cold War attitudes of the time’. The paper reported in July 1948 that the TUC had issued a circular against ‘the Communist menace’ and just in case readers didn’t receive it in their workplaces, reprinted it almost in its entirety. Norman Ewer, diplomatic correspondent and emerging Cold War hawk, played his part, helped by the IRD. However, his task was made more difficult by the paper’s steady decline, which it proved impossible to stop. Ewer survived and continued to work far beyond retirement age, but the resources available to him were diminishing.
It was at this time that Ewer became better known to radio audiences as a guest foreign policy expert on discussion programmes. He also broadcast for the BBC Overseas Service, where his relatively slow speech rate was well suited to audiences whose first language often was not English.
It was during the early 1950s that the IRD began publishing books – in an arrangement with several publishers. It launched a series of ‘background books’, which were ‘rather simple anti-Communist propaganda’. Authors published included Leonard Schapiro, Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, Bickham Sweet-Escott (who had been involved in wartime propaganda and intelligence operations), Bertrand Russell, trade unionist Vic Feather, Christopher Mayhew and, of course, Norman Ewer.
In the words of one historian, ‘the IRD’s hardest working and most dependable client soon became Daily Herald diplomatic correspondent W. N. Ewer’. It was also in the second half of the 1940s that Ewer began writing ‘a weekly diplomatic commentary for LPS [London Press Service], appeared on innumerable BBC talk shows, and wrote prolifically for the COI [Central Office of Information] and the IRD’. Interestingly, Ewer was considered by some Foreign Office diplomats as ‘ready … to take direction as to the lines on which he should write’.136
In 1959 Norman Ewer received the summons to attend Buckingham Palace to receive a CBE. It can only be surmised that the services he had performed for the IRD, for Labour and for Britain in the Cold War had expunged his actions of thirty years earlier. Equally possible, although far less likely, is that his chequered past had been forgotten.
In the years after Ewer retired he continued to write, but contented himself with occasional letters to The Times. He died in 1977, aged ninety-one.
The National Archives later released MI5 files that told some of Ewer’s story – at least from MI5’s perspective. With the records so incomplete (a continuing problem faced by all historians), the action led to some serious academic discourse between Ewer’s defenders and critics.
But it seems reasonably clear that he had been mixed up in things that went far beyond reporting. Even if it was not espionage, as Ewer had contended to Maxwell Knight, it certainly was not mere journalism. Rather than remaining an observer, Norman Ewer became a player in a political game, and he did it not once but twice – in different ways, at different times and for opposing sides.
When Ewer stepped forward to receive his perpetual press pass in 1964 it symbolised recognition that, in the end, after some meanderings along the line along the way, he had survived. Those former colleagues who are still alive are forgiving. As one, Geoffrey Goodman, told us, ‘Ewer was a chap that had interviewed Trotsky … you had to regard that with respect.’
3
WALTER DURANTY
In March 1933 several British reporters were at work in Stalin’s Russia. One was the doyen of the foreign press corps, the correspondent of one of the world’s great newspapers, but another was an outsider, a freelance uncertain of where his next commission would come from.
They were about to do battle over the coverage of a man-made disaster of epic proportions, maybe second only to the Holocaust in its scale and horror in the twentieth century.
One journalist would help to uncover the details, the other would deny them. It was a precursor of Holocaust denial. One man received accolades, the other was murdered. It took many years before the truth finally became known. But the story of the two men, which of them succeeded and which failed, is not a predictable tale of good prevailing over evil. It is much more complicated than that.
We now know that the 1932 famine in the Ukraine was a major catastrophe, a tragedy in which millions suffered and died, although it took decades for information to become available. For many years the Cold War kept Soviet archives closed to all comers – not only to Western historians, but also to Russians. Even now the scale of the disaster can only be guessed at, as figures are not accurate enough to be relied upon. Russian estimates, which broadly agree with those of Western historians, suggest that ‘5 million or more’ people died, although records are neither detailed nor reliable enough to establish this as a certainty.137 The famine was man-made and was the result of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, which was intended to propel the Soviet Union into an advanced industrial age. The plan was implemented between 1928 and 1932, and the brutal methods used to overcome resistance from the countryside only made things worse.138
One journalist was called Walter Duranty. He was a Briton who worked for the New York Times. He liked living well. He enjoyed good food, drink and women. He liked chauffeur-driven Buicks and was used to getting what he wanted. Even in Moscow. And he managed to do all this while Lenin and Stalin were running the country, and at a time when there were no formal diplomatic relations between the USSR and the USA.
He was showered with praise from politicians, friends and colleagues and by the time he left the country he was a celebrity, hailed as the doyen of foreign correspondents. Any sneers from those who disapproved were dismissed as envy or inexperience.
Newspapermen’s reports were censored in Moscow in those days. But Duranty prided himself on knowing exactly what he could get past foreign ministry censors. So he wrote his stories close to the deadline, dropped them by the censors with little time to spare, and was then driven off to the cable office by his chauffeur, where he sent them to New York. And then he went off to enjoy whatever the good life had to offer that day. Remarkably, it was a lifestyle he kept up for what were thirteen of the most turbulent years in Russian history. By the time he left he had received plaudits from the leaders of both the Soviet Union and the United States. Who was Walter Duranty and what did he do to deserve such praise?
Duranty was an improbable figure. He aspired to be a writer rather than a journalist. But he admitted that he found it difficult to make up his mind about anything: ‘I generally see too many sides of a question to be quite sure which of them is true.’139 He worked full time for the New York Times for twenty-one years, the greater part of his working life. Former New York Times Moscow correspondent and the paper’s historian, Harrison Salisbury, said that Duranty ‘romanticised’ that he was a Manxman, but he actually came from an upper-middle-class Liverpool merchant family.140 He wrote that his family had died in a rail accident and that he was orphaned at the tender age of ten.141 It was untrue.
In the words of his biographer, Sally Taylor, Duranty was ‘short, balding, and unprepossessing in appearance, his one outstanding characteristic was a limp … that and his keen gray eyes were what saved him from commonplace’.142 He lost part of his left leg following a rail accident in France when he was in his late thirties. But he encouraged people to think it was a war wound. He had a ‘thick-lipped, sensual mouth’ and a nose that was ‘finely-chiselled, but a shade too large, that bit too flat’.143
Born in 1884, Duranty went to Harrow until he was fifteen, when failing family fortunes saw him moved to Bedford Grammar School, where he proved to be one of the better pupils. He won an open classical scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he rowed for the college. He was a contemporary of the novelist Hugh Walpole.
Some critics implied that Duranty was a bit of a fraud, aping the modes of behaviour and dress of his ‘betters’, but he was the real McCoy: ‘Duranty was indeed a Harrow boy, complete with top hat on Sunday, straw hat during the week; ample Latin, more Greek and the “steady drill in accidence and syntax,
the acquisition of vocabulary…”’144 He came easily to languages, was good with words; these skills later impressed journalist colleagues.
After Cambridge he spent several years travelling between Europe and the United States before finally deciding on a career in journalism. He came to the profession late: he was nearly thirty when he got his first job. He had hustled his way in to see the head of the New York Times bureau in Paris – Wythe Williams. Indeed Williams almost was the bureau. Duranty persisted every day until he finally wore Williams’s resistance down and was offered a job. It was December 1913.
Duranty’s life in Paris was a mixture. He was clubbable, well liked – even by many of his detractors – and was a great teller of tales. He had an eye for women, and many seem to have been attracted to him in return. In 1913 the earnest new journalist was a member of Left Bank café society, and had interesting friends. He shared one of these, his lover Jane Chéron, with the self-proclaimed ‘wickedest man in the world’, Aleister Crowley, who introduced him to Magick.145 Jane introduced him to opium. It was a case of ‘sex with the one partner, drugs with the other, a little magic on the side’.146 He continued to use the drug periodically for some years, although he never became addicted. He practised satanic rituals with Crowley, but gradually distanced himself because he saw no results. But he kept in touch with Crowley into the 1930s.147
Walter Duranty never fought in the First World War, although he was early in predicting it.148 During the hostilities Duranty worked for the New York Times as a journalist, first pounding the Paris beat while he learned his trade then serving as a war correspondent, where he witnessed terrible events and saw widespread carnage on the battlefield that allegedly affected his views about humanity ever after. Under pressure from his paper he faked at least one story, which he confessed in his autobiography twenty years later.149
After the war he soon became bored with peacetime Paris, fell out with colleagues and was grateful to be sent on foreign assignments. He covered episodes in the Russian Revolutionary Civil War and the Kapp Putsch in Germany.150 While in Latvia he scored what he considered to be his biggest scoop: a Russian courier en route to the United States had been caught red handed carrying instructions for organising unrest. The courier was laden with jewels, cash and gold, and Duranty was given the exclusive story. Revealing a delight for the discomfort of others, he managed to persuade British diplomats not to tell an American diplomat, with whom he had fallen out over a woman.151 The story broke on Christmas Day 1919 and was a hit in the US as it melded neatly into a contemporary ‘Red Scare’ then gripping the country; and it earned him a bonus. Afterwards, he filed stories from Paris about the Russian–Polish war; these he later admitted were wrong and based solely on one-sided French government hand-outs.152
How did all this lead to Duranty ending up in Moscow and becoming a star correspondent? It is here that fate lent a hand. He was the right person in the right place at the right time.
In 1920 the integrity of reporting by the New York Times came under the critical spotlight from two writers, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz. Concerned by the paper’s reports about Russia they studied its output from March 1917. They did not like what they found. Covering about 1,000 issues and 3,000 to 4,000 news stories, they concluded that the New York Times’ reports were biased, misleading and in some cases completely false. Duranty – seven mentions – was among those whose work was singled out. The reportage was a case of selective perception, Lipmann and Merz concluded.153 ‘In the large’, they wrote, ‘the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.’154 In terms that do not seem far removed from Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into the standards of the British press they concluded, ‘Where is the power to be found which can define the standards of journalism and enforce them? Primarily within the profession itself. We do not believe that the press can be regulated by law. Our fundamental reliance must be on the corporate tradition and discipline of the newspaper guild.’155
Their report made waves in the New York Times offices, although the paper never commented publicly. However, its editor, Carr Van Anda, knew that to avoid repeats he would have to post a permanent correspondent to Russia. It was then that chance played a leading hand for Duranty.
In summer 1921 a major famine broke out in Russia in the wake of a bloody civil war. Bearing Lippmann’s strictures in mind, Van Anda decided that the paper needed a reporter on the spot to report events accurately. He chose 36-year-old Duranty. It was to be his big break. Duranty later wrote, ‘at last in July 1921 luck came my way in the shape of the great Russian Famine, which then threatened to cost about 30,000,000 lives, and probably did cost 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 including deaths from disease.’156 He faced some difficulty in getting into the country as Maxim Litvinov, the foreign affairs commissar, had been unhappy with his civil war reports, just like Lippmann and Merz. But Duranty soon won this opposition over. He would remain in Moscow as the paper’s resident correspondent for the next thirteen years.
Once in Moscow he quickly set about getting himself well connected. His sociable nature helped. He soon got to know almost everyone who was worth knowing, including the resident Western press correspondents. A bon viveur, he kept a good table; his Russian housekeeper and mistress, Katya, who later bore him a son, was by all accounts a very good cook, which undoubtedly helped. Duranty quickly got to know how things worked, which levers to pull and which to leave alone. He was a regular guest of foreign embassies, although records show that the British, for one, were suspicious of him: some thought him clever, others mediocre.157
Within eighteen months of getting to Moscow Duranty had already acquired a reputation for accepting official news without question. Harrison Salisbury wrote that ‘by 1923 Duranty was being called a “pro-Bolshevik correspondent” by an ad hoc committee on Soviet propaganda’ that was working inside the New York Times editorial offices. Salisbury continued, ‘Whatever the case … Duranty’s dispatches through the 1920s and into the 1930s saw Soviet Russia through lenses which, if not rosy, were certainly soft focus … He was quick to defend Stalin and to provide a rationale for the food measures…’158 Salisbury’s verdict, however, was that Duranty was less than politically committed, and was rather a ‘cynical man on the make’. One of Duranty’s contemporaries, William H. Stoneman, saw Duranty as ‘simply amoral about the rights and wrongs of Communism’. Another Moscow correspondent and contemporary, William Henry Chamberlin, thought Duranty had ‘decided that the Communists were going to survive … and that it was the job of a correspondent to back them, especially since he had no scruples about the dirty things they were doing’.159 Maybe remarkably, there was an anti-Duranty lobby operating in the New York Times offices which saw him ‘as little more than a press agent not only for the Bolsheviks but for the worst Bolshevik of all, Stalin’.160 But it did not seem to have much effect: his editors still approved his stories and ran them with by-lines.
Duranty was no slouch. The record shows that he regularly filed stories: he filed over 150 by-lined stories in 1932 alone, and they covered topics as diverse as the Soviet economy, political murder, how Moscow was uninterested in the Lindbergh kidnapping, a woman who sold her husband for 100 roubles, freedom of speech, defence, foreign affairs, progress with the first Five Year Plan, peasants and the question of food, and the birth of the Union of Soviet Writers. The despatches also included stories about action against speculators, prospects for opening up diplomatic relations between the USSR and the USA, poor grain production – particularly in the Ukraine, the discovery of ‘immensely important’ iron deposits, decrees about Soviet food difficulties, educational reform, the expulsion of Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev from the Communist Party, food problems and their links to housing and industrial production, food and goods shortages, Moscow’s view of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election, and ‘cleansing’ of agricultural organisations in the north Caucasus which led to slow grain collection. In November 1932 he wrote a series of
stories about ‘growing food shortages’ which he got out of the country using means which by-passed the censors. His editors were highly satisfied with that series.161 But Moscow was not.
It is likely that some of the stories were re-written from official hand-outs, but then most of the Moscow correspondents would have done some of that. Duranty would check the facts to see if they made sense, and might add his own analysis, but sometimes he might also have gone out looking for stories. But he did not as a matter of course dig around for news in the way that, say, an investigative journalist might. He and many of his contemporaries did not hail from a tradition that as a matter of habit went and found stories that foreign governments would have preferred not to appear.
Duranty’s experience in wartime Paris had taught him not to challenge what he was told by ‘official’ sources too persistently.162 Where he scored with his bosses and many of his readers was that he sought to explain and interpret what he saw going on in the Soviet Union. He wrote despatches as a supporter, rather than a critic. He explained and justified rather than providing his readers with objective analysis. His editors in New York seemed to be satisfied and kept running his stories.
Duranty supported Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which was an attempt to kick-start agricultural production after the bloody civil-war years by introducing small-scale capitalism. He did not question whether the Communist project was justified.163 He endorsed Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, despite its likely high cost in human misery. He told his readers in a 1931 despatch, filed from Paris while he was on holiday, that Stalin was giving his people ‘what they really want namely, joint effort, communal effort. And communal life is as acceptable to them as it is repugnant to a Westerner.’164 ‘The whole purpose of the plan’, he wrote, ‘is to get the Russians going – that is, to make a nation of eager, conscious workers out of a nation that was a lump of sodden, driven slaves.’ Some in America were equally enthusiastic observers.165
When Reporters Cross the Line Page 7
