John Barron (journalist)

John Barron (1930-February 24, 2005)was an American journalist who exposed Communist activities.

Barron, son of a Methodist minister, was born in Texas, graduated from the University of Missouri, and studied Russian in the United States Naval Postgraduate School.

In 1965, Barron joined the Washington bureau of Reader's Digest. There he wrote more than 100 stories on a wide variety of subjects--notably a 1980 story concerning unanswered questions surrounding the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick.

Books

• KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Agents
• Murder of a Gentle Land with Anthony Paul
• MiG Pilot: the Final Escape of Lt. Belenko, 1980, ISBN 0-380-53868-7
• KGB Today
• Breaking the Ring
• Operation SOLO: The FBI's Man in the Kremlin, 1996, ISBN 0895264293

Quotations

"[Barron was] an investigative reporter whose meticulously researched articles and best-selling books helped unravel the mysteries of Soviet espionage and the Khmer Rouge's mass killings in Cambodia."

Matt Schudel in The Washington Post

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Susan Sontag in 1982

External links

• Washington Post obituary by Matt Schudel
• "He shot down Commies" National Review Online column by John Miller
• "Remembering long time Communist conspiracy fighter John Barron" Human Events article by William Schultz
• "John Barron, RIP." by Lowell Ponte at Moonbat Central

See also: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest, Eugene Lyons , Isaac Don Levine , Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz , Hede Massing , Elizabeth Bentley