Dusko Doder, an acclaimed journalist whose career was cut short by a false accusation in Time magazine in 1992 that while working as the Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post he had been recruited by the K.G.B., died on Sept. 10 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He was 87.
His death, in a hospital, was from Lewy body dementia, his wife, the journalist Louise Branson, said. They had moved to Thailand from suburban Virginia in 2000 as his health declined, she said.
Mr. Doder, who was known for his scoops, was reporting for The Post in February 1984 when he noticed hundreds of lights blazing at the Soviet Defense Ministry in Moscow. He surmised that the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, had died. United States officials, dismissing the suggestion, said that Mr. Doder was “smoking pot,” as he and Ms. Branson wrote in a 2021 memoir, “The Inconvenient Journalist.”
“Soviet television and radio Thursday night unexpectedly changed scheduled programs to classical music,” Mr. Doder’s dispatch read. “The unusual change came against the backdrop of the illness of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov.”
He was correct: Mr. Andropov had died. The C.I.A. was furious. Eight years later — and long after the F.B.I. had cleared Mr. Doder of any ties to Soviet intelligence — Time magazine published a thinly-sourced article by the reporter Jay Peterzell suggesting that Mr. Doder had accepted a $1,000 payment from the K.G.B. and was beholden to the agency.
Mr. Doder sued the magazine in Britain for libel and won. In August 1996, Time offered “sincere regret and apologies” in court and agreed to pay him $262,000 and cover his lawyers’ fees and costs, a rarity.
Mr. Peterzell left the magazine not long after. Ben Bradlee, The Post’s former executive editor, recalled in his 1995 memoir, “A Good Life,” that “Doder wrote something that embarrassed the C.I.A., and when the agency thought they saw a chance to get even, they took their shot.”
“It’s rare to catch them in the act,” he added.
But Mr. Doder’s career never recovered. The Time article had come out despite a last-ditch appeal by The Post’s owner, Katharine Graham, to halt publication, made to Strobe Talbott, the magazine’s editor at large, who later became deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.
“We believe it’s true,” Mr. Talbott told Ms. Graham, at a Washington dinner party. It was an assurance that proved costly to the magazine.
After the article appeared, in December 1992, “I felt myself being killed,” Mr. Doder wrote in his memoir, “not by an assassin’s single bullet, but slowly, the poison of the falsehood starting to spread throughout my body. I anticipated the weeks and months of predictable awfulness that would follow. I’d cease to exist for my friends and colleagues.”
Until then, he had had an exemplary journalism career. A Yugoslav immigrant whose middle-class family had been ruined by communism, he had been educated at top U.S. schools — including Washington University and Columbia — before becoming a correspondent in the Moscow bureau of United Press International in 1968. There he immersed himself in Soviet society and culture, playing chess in parks and gaining an easy familiarity with Russia that was useful to him in later years.
Mr. Doder joined The Post in 1970, hired by Mr. Bradlee. By then, Mr. Doder wrote, he had a patriotic, idealistic vision of journalism that dovetailed with the spirit he found at The Post. “I believed that the United States’ mission was to help the weak and oppose the oppressors,” he recalled. “We American journalists were the good guys because we were going after the truth.”
Mr. Bradlee later sent him to Belgrade, and from there he wound up covering conflicts in Cyprus and Lebanon before being named Moscow bureau chief in 1981. He soon put his Slavic background and fluent Russian to good use, developing sources in the government and at its shadowy fringes that were unmatched by most other correspondents.
“In the United States and other Western countries, I thought, political journalists cultivated sources in the elite to help them report on power politics,” Mr. Doder wrote. “Why not do this in the secretive Soviet Union? Soviet officials and members of the elite were, after all, human beings.”
He went on to detail his familiarity with Russian curse words and Soviet soccer and hockey stars, using all of it to gain the confidence of his sources. He also wrote about his enormous capacity for drinking vodka, his workaholism and the toll this took on his first marriage, which ended in divorce.
It was precisely this ability to ferret out sources that led the F.B.I. to investigate him. And then a supposed Soviet defector, Vitaly Yurchenko, who briefly came to the U.S. before returning to the Soviet Union in 1985, told American officials that Mr. Doder had taken a payment from the K.G.B.
“You’ve been an outstanding correspondent because you had a corrupt relationship with the K.G.B.,” an F.B.I. agent snapped at Mr. Doder during an interrogation in 1986, according to his memoir. “Since the K.G.B. controls everything, they were feeding you information to make you look good.”
But that investigation, like a previous one, came to naught: It concluded that Mr. Doder had no “corrupt” connection to the K.G.B.
Mr. Doder, feeling bruised, left The Post in 1987 for a posting in China with U.S. News and World Report. He later went back to Belgrade with Ms. Branson to work as a freelance journalist, and it was there, in September 1992, that he was confronted by Mr. Peterzell in a hotel lobby.
After the article appeared in Time three months later, several dozen prominent American journalists wrote to the magazine in protest, and Yevgeny Primakov, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, said there was nothing in K.G.B. files to support the allegations. Still, Time fought Mr. Doder in court, forcing him to sell his house to cover his legal expenses before settling with him three and half years later.
But the article had done its damage. He wrote, “It was the end of the world as I knew it, I thought — to be insulted and robbed of my dignity and prestige.”
Dusko Doder was born on July 22, 1937, in Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia, to Vaso and Marija (Gjurhu) Doder. His father was a pharmacist. While in high school in Sarajevo he wrote for a local paper. In 1958, to make ends meet, he was playing the piano at a press club in Vienna when he met an Associated Press correspondent, Clyde Farnsworth.
Mr. Farnsworth, who later joined The New York Times, helped start Mr. Doder’s career, paying for his ship passage to the United States. Mr. Doder stayed with relatives in St. Louis, where he earned a bachelor’s degree from Washington University. He went on to receive master’s degrees in journalism and international affairs from Columbia in 1964 and 1965. He worked for The Associated Press in New Hampshire and Albany, N.Y., before joining U.P.I. in 1968.
Mr. Doder wrote several books, including “The Yugoslavs” (1978); “Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics in the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev” (1986); “The Firebird Affair” (2011), a novel set in Moscow; and, in addition to his memoir, two other books with Ms. Branson, his second wife: “Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin” (1990) and “Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant” (1999), about the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Peter, from his first marriage; two sons, Thomas and Nicholas, from his second marriage; and two grandchildren. His first wife, Karin, died of leukemia in 1994.
At a Columbia Journalism School symposium in honor of Mr. Doder in 2023, Jonathan Randal, a former Post colleague, told the audience, “I saw firsthand the steadily encroaching paralysis that came over him as a result of Time’s hatchet job.”
Mr. Doder’s “only failing was consistently scooping his colleagues,” Mr. Randal said, adding: “Being ahead of the curve sometimes visits a terrible, long lasting vengeance on its practitioners.”
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