- WASHINGTON - Deep inside the forbidding
FBI fortress is a small, drab room with fluorescent lights and rows of
tall bookshelves.
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- There's an institutional table, a few
chairs and some nondescript landscape paintings on the walls.
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- This is the FBI Reading Room where juicy
FBI secrets are stashed.
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- 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.
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- In the FBI Reading Room, you can learn
that Lucille Ball registered to vote as a Communist in 1936 at her grandfather's
insistence.
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- 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.
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- 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?).
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- It's all there - worn and wrinkled letters,
clippings, telegrams and memos.
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- The FBI aims to put its entire Reading
Room collection on its Web site - an extraordinary undertaking at 1.3 million
pages.
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- 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
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- "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."
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- Collingwood, who says he has reviewed
all the cases, doesn't have a favorite.
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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).
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Already, there have been 20 requests
for any files on Frank Sinatra and Barry Goldwater, according to FBI officials.
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- The most common Reading Room patrons
are college students, authors, academics and attorneys working for clients.
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- 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."
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- "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.
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- 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."
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- Lesar believes the volume of files, especially
of celebrities and spies, had to do with the times.
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- "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."
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- Historian David Garrow says it's important
to remember that just because someone had an FBI file didn't mean the bureau
was snooping.
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- "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."
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- Putting the files on the Internet is
a dramatic departure for the FBI, he said.
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- "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."
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- "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."
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- "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:
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- http://www.seattletimes.com
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- *FBI web site
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- *Excerpts from files on Elvis, Mickey,
Bonnie and Clyde
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