Sunday, August 2, 1998

Why FBI keeps so many files closed

By Joseph Spear

It appears there is something Bill Clinton didn't tell us three years ago when he ordered the automatic declassification of government secrets that were more than 25 years old.

He exempted the FBI.

This is a little like promulgating new zoo rules and exempting the elephants. According to the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, there are 1.5 billion pages of certified secrets that are at least 25 years old. An estimated 200 million-plus of these lie a-moldering in the FBI's vaults, second only to the Pentagon, which has 998 million pages.

When Clinton determined to crack down on secrecy in government, the bureau asserted that its files were too massive to finish the job by the year 2000; that the release of FBI files would violate privacy laws; and that the wholesale release of documents would imperil national security.

The administration bought the arguments and consented to let the bureau proceed at its own pace.

The existence of the agreement was itself a secret until it surfaced in a recent legal case, and the Washington Post filed a Freedom of Information request for it.

As it happens, I have some expertise in the matter of secret FBI files. While working for muckraking columnist Jack Anderson in the early 1970s, I came into the possession of, oh, perhaps a thousand pages of them.

What I discovered was that the bureau spent an inordinate amount of time probing the private lives of political figures, movie stars, athletes and assorted luminaries.

I obtained files on -- to name but a few -- actors Jane Fonda, Harry Belafonte, Tony Randall and Rock Hudson; singer Eartha Kitt; civil-rights leaders Coretta Scott King, Ralph David Abernathy and Floyd McKissick; football players Joe Namath and Lance Rentzel; baby doctor Benjamin Spock; boxer Muhammad Ali; investigative reporter I.F. Stone; and writer James Baldwin.

At the time, Jane Fonda was a rambunctious anti-war activist, and the FBI regarded her as "subversive" and an "anarchist." They followed her to college campuses and military bases and wrote down every word she said.

When she appeared on a nationally televised talk show, FBI agents faithfully taped and transcribed her remarks and then stamped their transcript: "Top Secret. No Foreign Dissemination. No Dissemination Abroad. Controlled Dissemination. For Background Use Only."

When Fonda was detained in 1970 on suspicion of bringing "drugs" into the country from Canada, the authorities itemized everything in her possession and copied a notebook which contained the addresses and telephone numbers of such well-known revolutionaries as Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman and Tony Curtis. The notebook showed up in the FBI files. The drugs, incidentally, turned out to be vitamins and prescription medicines.

The late writer James Baldwin's file notes that on July 13, 1969, he "arrived at Istanbul, Turkey, from Athens, Greece, via Air France."

There followed the complete transcript of an interview that Baldwin granted to a Turkish newspaper called "Milliyet." It was marked "Secret -- No Foreign Dissemination."

Eartha Kitt was of interest because she participated in civil-rights rallies, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington.

How did the bureau know this? Because "movie actor Charlton Heston ... furnished a list of movie personalities who planned to participate in the march.' "

Rock Hudson's file contained this national-security secret:

"During 1965 ... a confidential informant reported that several years ago while he was in New York he had an 'affair' with movie star Rock Hudson. The informant stated that from personal knowledge he knew that Rock Hudson was a homosexual. ... On another occasion, information was received ... that it was common knowledge in the motion-picture industry that Rock Hudson was suspected of having homosexual tendencies."

I think you can deduce from all this yet another reason the FBI is so intent on keeping many of its files secret. And it has less to do with national security than it does political security.

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