In "The Attack on I. F. Stone", Andrew Brown said that when he "used the phrase "an agent", to describe someone who turned out to be I. F. Stone", he understood the term metaphorically, meaning someone who was a "useful contact", and that the expression "take any money" referred to the fact that the journalist I. F. Stone would not permit a Soviet embassy employee to pay for a luncheon meal, neither then nor in the future, despite earlier lunches in the 1930s and 1940s. That, in September 1992, at the Moscow Journalists' Club, Kalugin had explained to the lawyer Martin Garbus that, "I have no proof that Stone was an agent. I have no proof that Stone ever received any money from the KGB, or the Russian government, I never gave Stone any money and was never involved with him as an agent."