Dusko doder biography of donald

As Moscow bureau chief broadsheet The Washington Post in significance early 1980s, Dusko Doder difficult to understand several advantages stemming from rulership upbringing in Yugoslavia: fluent native Russian and an intuitive encounter of the signs of succeed in within a totalitarian system.

He sensed something was unsuitable on a February night boring 1984, when state radio canceled a jazz program and relay somber classical music.

He attract also that the lights fuzz the Defense Ministry and say publicly Soviet secret police, the KGB, were blazing at hours considering that their offices were often in the main dark.

With deadline grave, Post colleagues in Washington knotty to get a response fit in more details from U.S. authorities. The State Department and blankness dismissed Mr.

Doder’s reporting likewise overblown. One U.S. Embassy diplomatist in Moscow replied to Divulge that Mr. Doder was in all probability “on pot,” according to Stake accounts.

Mr. Doder’s account ran on Page 28 stroke Feb. 10, 1984, with with the addition of caveats from U.S. authorities. Dump same day, the Kremlin proclaimed the death of Andropov, who had laid the foundations funds a major shift in Council policies by elevating a calling of reform-minded protégés, including twin who would become the stick up Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

“You scooped us all,” smashing chagrined U.S. official told Picture Post at the time, according to the newspaper’s story reconstructing the events of the grant. The story also noted “concern and some finger-pointing within rectitude government over an apparent dearth of alertness by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and different intelligence monitors to such dinky crucial development.”

For Free.

Doder, who died Sept.

10 in Chiang Mai, Siam, at the age of 87, his time in Moscow evade 1981 to 1985 — which included exclusives and scoops elapsed the Andropov story — trivial the triumphal centerpiece of monarch career as a journalist plus author.

To his big shock, Time magazine published orderly story in 1992 implying delay Mr.

Doder’s success in Moscow owed to having taken insolvency from the KGB in reinstate for planting information in Significance Post. The claims were attributed to a KGB colonel, Vitaly Yurchenko, who had allegedly passed on that rumor to loftiness CIA after he defected pre-empt the United States in 1985 (and who subsequently re-defected).

According to news accounts, integrity CIA handed the information take in hand the FBI, whose director, William Webster, informed Post executive redactor Benjamin Bradlee. The FBI see The Post conducted their disruption investigations into the allegations deliver found no substantiation.

As the Time story appeared, Followers.

Doder was reporting from Jugoslavija for American and European publications. He issued an outraged dispute and filed a libel demure in Britain, where laws glance at be more favorable to plaintiffs than in the United States.

He insisted his preventable with The Post came pass up nothing more than classic source-building and diligence, including gleaning ideas from Yugoslav diplomats and thrust, who often had more doorway than Westerners into Soviet associations.

Mr. Doder’s former colleagues at The Post, including professor top editors, stood solidly last him. There was also depressed confusion about why the plainly discredited claims by Yurchenko were given credibility after nearly eighter years.

Bradlee speculated meander U.S. intelligence officials were disconcerted by Mr.

Doder’s reporting endorse Andropov and other stories defer contradicted the agency’s assessments be proof against pushed Yurchenko’s claims to Firmly as payback. “Doder wrote piece of advice that embarrassed the C.I.A., current when the agency thought they saw a chance to kiss and make up even, they took their shot,” he wrote in “A Good Life,” his 1995 memoir.

“It’s rare to catch them intrude the act.”

“Everyone who worked in Moscow faced dignity same risks,” said Peter Osnos, who was Mr. Doder’s upfront editor at The Post at an earlier time who later founded PublicAffairs Books, “but only Dusko paid that type of price and was sold out by the U.S. intelligence community.” (Neither the CIA nor U.S.

intelligence officials have to one`s name publicly addressed the assertions lump Bradlee and others.)

Instruct in 1996, Time apologized to Notable. Doder and agreed to repay $262,000 in damages and stumble on his substantial legal fees. Orangutan part of the settlement, Sicken issued a statement that articulate the magazine “had no confirmation, and did not mean keep suggest, that the KGB familiar control over Doder’s reporting alien Moscow.”

As for influence eight-year gap since the Yurchenko allegations, Time said the erection, by Jay Peterzell, meant the same as show the challenges of conduct in a totalitarian state.

(The Soviet Union had collapsed integrate 1991.)

“The core waning my journalistic integrity had back number challenged, and I beat Time,” Mr. Doder said after dignity settlement. “Now I can hike on with my life.”

Living in fear

Dusko Doder, the son of unblended pharmacist and a homemaker, was born in Sarajevo on July 22, 1937, and the kinship lived through the Nazi break-in of Yugoslavia during World Fighting II and the iron hold of authoritarian leader Josip Solon after the war.

The kinfolk listened to broadcasts of distinction BBC and Voice of U.s.a., and young Dusko learned Objectively through those radio transmissions come to rest a summer spent in Kingdom.

While attending medical institution in Vienna, at the canon of his father, Mr. Doder found himself inspired by prominence encounter with an American newsman, Clyde Farnsworth, who extolled birth virtues of a free keep under control.

Farnsworth, who became a handler, paid for Mr. Doder’s wind-jammer passage to the United States in 1959.

Mr. Doder received a bachelor’s degree come across Washington University in St. Prizefighter in 1962 and master’s calibration in journalism and international contact from Columbia University in 1964 and 1965, respectively.

Powder worked for the Associated Put down in New Hampshire and Town, N.Y., before being hired mass United Press International for warmth Moscow bureau in 1968.

Decency Post recruited him in 1970, and he served as Canada correspondent, among other jobs. Accomplish 1973, he was asked descendant Bradlee to return to Jugoslavija to cover Eastern Europe give birth to The Post’s bureau in Beograd. The assignment led to Well-known. Doder’s first book, “The Yugoslavs” (1978).

After Mr.

Doder returned from Moscow in 1985, he took a leave cause the collapse of The Post to write exceptional book. He also was calligraphic regular commentator on Soviet relations during Gorbachev’s era of glasnost, or openness, with his away praised examination of the new evolution of Soviet leadership, “Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics have as a feature the Kremlin from Brezhnev preserve Gorbachev” (1986).

Mr. Doder left The Post in 1987 and then served as Peking correspondent for U.S. News & World Report from 1987 control 1990, contributing to coverage past it the Chinese government’s massacre entrap pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Quadrangular. He then moved to Beograd as a contributor to a number of publications during the violent unraveling of Yugoslavia along ethnic elitist religious lines.

Mr. Doder’s first marriage, to Karin Weberg Rasmussen, ended in divorce. Influential. Doder married British journalist Louise Branson in 1989.

Misstep and Branson co-wrote “Gorbachev: Protester in the Kremlin” (1991), complicate the last Soviet leader, submit “Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant” (1999), based on their covering Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his unwavering quest look up to expand Serb-controlled territory.

They too collaborated on “The Inconvenient Journalist” (2021), Mr. Doder’s memoir.

Mr. Doder and Branson fleeting in Northern Virginia before heartrending to Thailand in 2020. Obvious. Doder died at home on the way out complications from Lewy body disorder, Branson said.

Other survivors include a son from enthrone first marriage, Peter; two heirs from his second marriage, Clocksmith and Nicholas; and two grandchildren.

In 2023, Columbia Foundation hosted a panel discussion absolution coverage of Kremlin affairs styled “Reporting the Kremlin from Dusko Doder to the Present.” Earlier colleagues shared stories about Also clientage. Doder, almost all involving circlet indefatigable work ethic, his fondness of cigars, and his colossal interest in chasing stories allude to politics and power.

Encircle an interview with The Rod, Osnos recalled that Mr. Doder made clear that he wasn’t in Moscow to cover Council culture. “He didn’t care what they had for dinner,” Osnos said. “He wanted to manna from heaven out about what was embarrassing on behind the scenes break down the Kremlin.”