I. F. Stone has never loomed larger as a role model for American journalists than he does now. Yet since his death in 1989, persistent allegations have surfaced about associations he may have had with Soviet intelligence. The Vassiliev notebooks shed important new light on this question, although definitive answers remain elusive. The notebooks show that Stone did actively cooperate with Soviet intelligence in the mid-to-late 1930s. They leave unclear whether he also maintained a furtive relationship in the 1950s. Evidence suggests that Stone's only active period of cooperation was in the 1930s.

As a wealthy American businessman and former ambassador, William Pawley was a key actor in PBSUCCESS, the covert operation that brought down the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954.The anti-Arbenz rebels, led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, could not have defeated the Guatemalan army on their own. The key to a successful coup was getting the army to act on their behalf, and in this regard, control of the air was vital. Pawley, owing to his knowledge of Latin America and experience in aviation, played a central role in ensuring that the rebels enjoyed air superiority during their move against the president. At a more abstract level, Pawley exempli fied the role non-governmental actors played in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The “state-private network,” as it has been dubbed, remains a rich vein for scholarly investigation.

Documentation from unexpected sources sheds new light on a question that had seemed unresolvable: how Senator Kenneth Keating learned about the emplacement of Soviet missiles in Cuba well before the Kennedy administration did. The new evidence not only reveals the intricacies of this longstanding mystery, but also provides valuable insights about U.S. intelligence operations, the making of U.S. foreign policy, and the rich opportunities for research about the Cold War in the four million pages of documents gathered under the Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992.