In July 1982, The Washington Post Magazine published a cover story featuring a State Department analyst who was an expert in the murky world of Soviet government and politics. Because the analyst did not want to be publicly identified, he was referred to in the article as "Mr. X."

Mr. X's identity remained a secret for 26 years until the death, on July 2, 2008, of Donald Graves '53. In a lengthy obituary in the Post, the Dickinson alumnus was revealed as Mr. X, one of the leading Kremlinologists of the Cold War era.

The 1982 article was written while Ronald Reagan was president and the Leonid Brezhnev era was ending in the Soviet Union. It described the meticulous analysis of Soviet newspapers and other documents that was required to glean even the smallest bits of information about changes in government and Communist party leadership. In that pre-computer era, Mr. X was described as one of the "the men with the best shoeboxes in town." The boxes contained some 800 index cards—one for each Soviet official for whom information was gathered.

Donald Graves visited the student garden when he returned to campus for his 50th reunion during Alumni Weekend 2003.

The Post obituary noted that Graves, following his service in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dickinson and went on to earn a master's degree in Russian studies from Harvard. His government career spanned more than 35 years and included a decade working for the CIA before he joined the State Department. His service included two years at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and a posting in Baku, Azerbaijan, with the Foreign Service reserve corps.

In March 2008 he established the Donald Graves '53 Scholarship Fund for a student studying Russian. The first recipient of this scholarship was Caitlin Rice '09, a Russian Language & Literature major. She has twice studied in Moscow—once during a summer language immersion program and again for a semester when she took classes at the Russian State University of Humanities. Caitlin hopes to follow a career path in translation and interpretation or security and intelligence.

For more information:

• "Donald Graves, 79; State Dept. Cold War Analyst"
  The Washington Post (July 18, 2008)
• "The Secret Files of Mr. X"
  The Washington Post Magazine (July 11, 1982)
• "Remembering Mr. X. Carlisle High School grad was a leading Cold War analyst."
  The Sentinel (Aug. 18, 2008)

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