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Before Vietnam, before Watergate, before Iran Contra or Iraq,
there was Rainier in Nevada
A
rea 51 is famous. Area 12 should be more famous, given the shameful things associated with it that happened. On Sept. 19, 1957, the first underground test at the Nevada atomic testing ground was detonated. Federal officials then engaged in misinformation designed to torpedo a nuclear test ban treaty. Lazy reporters were their collaborators. A brave, independent journalist caught them at it and blew the whistle. The device was detonated at 10 a.m. at the end of a 2,000foot tunnel that put the bomb 900 feet under a mesa. The test was designated “Rainier.” A short time later, officials at the test site issued a news release saying “there was [sic] none of the usual visible effects of surface or above-surface shots. There was no flash of light, no wave of heat, no shock wave, and no mushroom cloud.” What the release did not report was that shock waves from the blast were felt around the world at a time when the U.S. was arguing in test ban negotiations with the Soviet Union that underground tests were seismically undetectable. A U.S. station in Alaska, 2,300 miles away, detected Rainier. So did seismic labs of other nations on the other side of the planet. The next day, Rainier was on the front page of the New York Times, in the lower right hand corner, then jumped to page 13. The article, written by Gladwin Hill, parroted the
Atomic Energy Commission’s claims about the test: “There were reports from points in California about 300 miles away that some seismographs recorded a small tremor at the moment of the blast. … But in general the experiment seemed to have conformed with predictions of A.E.C. scientists that the explosion would not be detectable more than a few hundred miles away.” In D.C., a short, rumpled fellow named I.F. Stone read the Times story. He noticed that it was followed by a shirttail from Toronto reporting detection of the test by a seismology lab there. A shirttail was a news story that came in too late for the main story. It was tacked on at the end. It could look untidy but was a real service to readers, giving them the latest information. (Advanced technology has made shirttails obsolete.) When Stone saw the shirttail, he left his home and walked to a newsstand to pick up a later edition of the Times. Stone found “more little shirttails, from Rome and from Tokyo, saying they detected it. I didn’t have the resources you’d need to cable those places and check out what was happening, but the discrepancy really piqued my curiosity, so I put it away in the basement with my back numbers of the Times.” Time passed. Isidor Feinstein Stone was the greatest U.S. reporter who ever lived, but in 1957 he was out of favor in Cold War D.C.
After a long reporting career in daily journalism, his views got him blacklisted during McCarthyism, so he set up shop on his own. He began publishing a newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly. The first issue appeared Jan. 17, 1953. At its height, it had a whopping 66,000 subscribers. Stone’s now-respected 1952 book The Hidden History of the Korean War—initially rejected by 28 publishers—was so accurate and embarrassing to U.S. officials that Che Guevara told him the U.S. embassy in Mexico City bought up and destroyed all the copies it could find. The book was not reviewed in the U.S. because, as historian Stephen Ambrose wrote in 1970, Stone was “too honest too soon.” Stone said of establishment reporters and news executives who got too close to the people they covered, “You begin to understand there are certain things the public ought not to know.” Because he had to operate outside of the journalism establishment, Stone had no ties to sacred cows and insiders. He published information that often fell outside of allowable circles of discourse for mainstream reporters. And because his pariah status denied him the kind of sources other reporters cultivated, he relied for information on the public record—especially material government published that rarely got attention. With the passing years, his newsletter became so well known for reliability that its editor gained a kind of respectability. In February 1965, the U.S. State Department issued a “white paper” designed to answer the question the public kept asking—“Why are we in Vietnam?” On March 8, the Weekly appeared. In four pages, it annihilated the department’s facts, reasoning and analysis, often using the department’s own information to make its case. One of his biographers points out that, years later, major press entities “would begin to announce the same findings as ‘exclusives.’” Stone’s freedom as an independent self-publisher meant he never had to do pieces on the 10 best places in town to find bouillabaisse. I.F. Stone’s Weekly was dense text, continued on page 14 had no photographs, contained dry
“sCoop”
03.14.19
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