Irving R. Levine, irving r levine, irving r levine International Man of Mystery

Irving R. Levine, irving r levine, irving r levine International Man of Mystery. Former NBC News reporter Irving R. Levine, who died last year, was a hilariously nerdy TV presence: A soft-spoken, bow-tied mensch. So it's surprising to learn, via declassified FBI files, that he deftly parried KGB attempts to blackmail him. Levine, whom we briefly eulogized after his death in March, covered economics for NBC News in the 1970s and 1980s, and we always got a kick out of him because he was this mousy little man with the anachronistic bearing of a 1950s Latin teacher. But it turns out that Levine was among the first network news reporters to get a visa to cover the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and his FBI file, which we obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, tells a gripping tale of espionage involving an attempt by the KGB to set Levine up and turn him into an informant, and some heavy duty FBI spying into his private life. UPDATE: A commenter points out that Levine related the meat of this story in this New York Times op-ed in 2001. Levine arrived in Moscow to...