[colorado tanker]

I googled the Times Afghanistan reporter and found out that he scooped the world by finding Fidel Castro in Cuba after everyone thought he was dead. His dispatches were so flattering that most of America thought Castro was a democracy loving freedom fighter, before finding out the truth. There's even a book on the subject:

The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times (annotated Edition)
by Anthony Depalma
Hardcover, 320 Pages, Published 2006

Never did find out what he was doing in Afghanistan.

[Homer_J_Simpson]

I get the impression that, after Walter Duranty, Herbert L. Matthews is the most notorious Red on the Times staff. Someone here pointed out his later PR work for Castro when I first posted some of his articles. If you check the index by author on my profile you will see that when I first began this project Matthews was in Spain covering the civil war. He was pro-Red even then. When that gig expired he moved on to Rome. The Fascists threw him out in October 1940 but it didn’t take for some reason and he was back by November. He has been reporting from India since the U.S. got into the war. How he wound up in that relative backwater I don’t know.