In 1968, Mr. Meyer scored a hard-to-get visa to Czechoslovakia after lunching with Joseph Alsop, the influential Post columnist. Mr. Alsop, he recalled, referred him to a photograph showing the Czech leader Alexander Dubcek with Soviet leaders and observed: “Of course the Russians will invade. You can tell by their expressions. They want to eat him alive.”

Mr. Meyer arrived in Prague in time to cover the invasion.

He later said his diplomatic coverage had been guided by the advice of Flora Lewis, whom he succeeded as The Post’s London bureau chief when she became The Times’s foreign affairs columnist. He quoted her as saying: “Remember, Karl, it’s not the ambassadors you want to cultivate but the No. 2 person in the embassy. They have better information and can afford to be indiscreet.”

In 1990, as an editorial writer for The Times, Mr. Meyer was assigned the delicate task of responding to a new biography by S.J. Taylor, “Stalin’s Apologist,” which elaborated on serious reporting lapses by Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of The Times in the 1920s and early ’30s.

In a signed editorial, Mr. Meyer concluded that Mr. Duranty had been guilty of “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper” — including his indifference to the 1930-31 famine in which millions perished in Ukraine, a result of Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization of farms. Mr. Duranty had dismissed the reports of famine as “mostly bunk.”

“Having bet his reputation on Stalin, he strove to preserve it by ignoring or excusing Stalin’s crimes,” Mr. Meyer wrote. “He saw what he wanted to see.”

Mr. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage. In 2003, despite continued controversy over the award, the Pulitzer board decided that it did not have enough grounds to revoke the prize.

Mr. Meyer’s opinion bore more fruit in another case, when ancient monuments were about to be lost to flooding with the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt in the 1960s.