SIGHTINGS


 
FBI's Juicy Secrets
Going Online
From The Seattle Times
by Angie Cannon
Knight Ridder Newspapers
From Stig Agermose <Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk>
6-13-98

 
 
WASHINGTON - Deep inside the forbidding FBI fortress is a small, drab room with fluorescent lights and rows of tall bookshelves.
 
There's an institutional table, a few chairs and some nondescript landscape paintings on the walls.
 
This is the FBI Reading Room where juicy FBI secrets are stashed.
 
And now, you don't even have to travel to Washington to see them. The FBI is putting its entire Reading Room collection on its Web site - an extraordinary undertaking at 1.3 million pages.
 
In the FBI Reading Room, you can learn that Lucille Ball registered to vote as a Communist in 1936 at her grandfather's insistence.
 
You can read about an FBI investigation of John Lennon when agents learned the musician had contributed $75,000 to a group planning to disrupt the Republican National Convention in 1972.
 
You can bone up on John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Face Nelson. You can peruse files about enduring mysteries: aviator Amelia Earhart's disappearance, UFOs (one of the most requested) and John Wilkes Booth (was he alive for years after President Lincoln's assassination?).
 
It's all there - worn and wrinkled letters, clippings, telegrams and memos.
 
The FBI aims to put its entire Reading Room collection on its Web site - an extraordinary undertaking at 1.3 million pages.
 
Another batch of 20 files (including Errol Flynn, Adolf Hitler and Marilyn Monroe) went online a few days ago, more than doubling the number of files on its Web site. The files are available online at www.fbi.gov
 
"We believe making this information available on our Web site helps maintain the public's confidence that the FBI is investigating consistent with the rule of law," said John Collingwood, an assistant FBI director. "We think the best way for the public to be confident in how the FBI conducts itself is to see the underlying documents."
 
Collingwood, who says he has reviewed all the cases, doesn't have a favorite.
 
"Several are interesting for different reasons," he said. "The Rosenberg file is historically significant. The Bonnie and Clyde file is very entertaining." The Mississippi Burning file is the kind of historical records we are trying to get on our Web site as quickly as we can."
 
The Internet may make the Reading Room go the way of "Old Beulah," the Packard sedan agents drove to crime scenes in the 1930s. Even now, there are weeks when no one shows up at the Reading Room. Sometimes, only five to 10 people come in.
 
The Reading Room is open five days a week, but visits are by appointment only and require two-day notice. Most requests for files are made through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
 
The FBI office that handles FOIA requests is huge - 400 to 600 employees. The bureau gets 12,000 to 13,000 written requests annually for files - many of which aren't among the 278 files in the Reading Room. Linda Kloss, a public-information officer for FOIA requests, says it takes at least one to four years to fulfill a request. People can pay for copies of files, which then are sent through the mail.
 
There's one catch - for the FBI to make one of its files public, the subject must be deceased, unless an individual is seeking his or her own file.
 
Already, there have been 20 requests for any files on Frank Sinatra and Barry Goldwater, according to FBI officials.
 
The most common Reading Room patrons are college students, authors, academics and attorneys working for clients.
 
Jim Lesar, a Washington attorney, was in the Reading Room the other day with a research assistant, combing files for his research on an "aspect of J. Edgar Hoover's life."
 
"There's lots of good stuff in the FBI files," says Lesar, head of the small Assassination Archives and Research Center, which focuses chiefly on JFK's assassination.
 
Lesar says he has spent his legal career devoted to Freedom of Information Act litigation. "I sue the FBI on a very regular basis," he says, noting that he intervenes on behalf of clients, such as author Anthony Summers, who wrote a biography of J. Edgar Hoover called "Official and Confidential."
 
Lesar believes the volume of files, especially of celebrities and spies, had to do with the times.
 
"It is a product of the Cold War and earlier periods under J. Edgar Hoover," he said. "It still goes on, but not nearly at the same pace as it did during the Cold War."
 
Historian David Garrow says it's important to remember that just because someone had an FBI file didn't mean the bureau was snooping.
 
"The FBI wasn't investigating 75 percent of the people who have files," said Garrow, who has requested many files during his years of research on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "The FBI was a vacuum cleaner of clipping operations. And people who think a 200-page FBI file is a big deal don't realize that people who the bureau was seriously following have thousands and thousands of pages."
 
Putting the files on the Internet is a dramatic departure for the FBI, he said.
 
"This is absolutely wonderful," said Garrow, who has written numerous books about King and the civil-rights movement, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Bearing the Cross."
 
"I'm stunned that they would be technologically with it enough," he said. "And what amazes me is that they would be motivated to do this. The whole inescapable bureau problem is that the more they release, the worse their history looks."
 
Indeed, some files are a showcase of guns-blazing G-man triumphs. Others, however, portray an agency that engaged in petty snooping or was comically out of its time.
 
Hoover, for instance, was advised not to meet Elvis in 1970 because the rock 'n' roll icon was "wearing his hair down to his shoulders and indulges in the wearing of all sorts of exotic dress."
 
The Nixon White House, in anticipation of a reception, asked Hoover to pore over FBI records for derogatory information on various athletes and sports-journalism figures. Among those who came up clean were Ewing Kauffman, the Kansas City Royals owner; Carl Lindeman, the former CBS and NBC vice president for sports; and Dick Peebles, the Houston Chronicle sports editor.
 
"A lot of the old files contain information that was collected in a different era, when standards were different and the law was different," Collingwood said. "The FBI collected substantial amounts of information that we would never collect today. It was not unlawful at the time. But in hindsight, it was clearly not justified. Today's laws and guidelines and internal policies preclude us from collecting that type of information." Links to the FBI's Web site are on The Seattle Times Web site at:
 
http://www.seattletimes.com
 
 
*FBI web site
 
*Excerpts from files on Elvis, Mickey, Bonnie and Clyde


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