FBI Comes Clean on Lennon Files

After years of foot-dragging in the name of national security, the FBI has finally made public the last of its surveillance files on late Beatle John Lennon
by Josh Grossberg

It wasn’t instant, but karma prevailed.

After years of foot-dragging in the name of national security, the FBI has finally made public the last of its surveillance files on late Beatle John Lennon, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Southern California office announced today.

The disclosure of the final 10 documents caps a 25-year legal battle initiated by historian John Wiener, who sued under the Freedom of Information Act for access to the files in 1981. He was repeatedly denied on the grounds that releasing the documents could “compromise a foreign government’s security apparatus,” which in turn could lead to “military retaliation against the United States.”

“I doubt that Tony Blair’s government will launch a military strike on the U.S. in retaliation for the release of these documents,” says Wiener, a history professor at the University of California at Irvine. “Today we can see that the national security claims the FBI has been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning. The Lennon FBI file is a classic case of excessive government secrecy.”  (continued…)

Perhaps a case of watching the wheels of government intransigence go round and round?

The papers contain few, if any, major revelations about the music icon’s political activities, except to confirm that authorities often bugged his phone and collected intelligence on his whereabouts. But what the reports do reveal are the extent of Lennon’s contacts to New Left leaders in Great Britain in 1970 and ’71 and his affiliations with several antiwar groups at the time.

Lennon gave an interview to The Red Mole, a London underground newspaper published in 1971, in which he talked about “his proletarian background and his sympathy with the oppressed and underprivileged people of Britain and the world.”

Two British leftists, Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, also lobbied the former moptop to “finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London,” but despite pressure, he did not give them money and “apparently resisted the attempts of any particular groups to secure any hold over him.”  

The government also believed Lennon held “revolutionary views…by the contents of some of his songs.”

Imagine.

Perhaps more important, according to the ACLU, the documents demonstrate that the rocker’s calls for peace, such as his famous “bed-ins” to protest against the Vietnam War, were hardly the security threat to the United States that then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the Nixon administration made them out to be.

“The release of these final documents, concealed from public view for nearly a quarter of a century, reveals government paranoia at a pathological level and an attempt to shield executive bran abuse of civil liberties under the rubric of national security,” says Mark Rosenbaum, legal director for the ACLU of Southern California.

“They show that the only military secrets protected were revelations about Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover’s war against John Lennon for his lawful dissent. Our government jeopardizes the national security when it treats as the enemy a rock musician and his lyrics about peace.”

Weiner’s long quest to access the government’s Lennon file began shortly after the singer’s Dec. 8, 1980, assassination by a crazed fan. After several setbacks, the historian scored a victory in 1991 when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the FBI failed to properly justify keeping the documents from public view and shielded from the Freedom of Information Act.

In 1997, Weiner reached a deal with the Justice Department under the Clinton administration that saw some 300 pages released. The bulk of those documents became the basis for Wiener’s book Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI File, which also served as a source for the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which hit theaters in September.

However, the bureau fought the disclosure of the last 10 pages, claiming they contained information from a foreign intelligence service and, if released, might result in “foreign diplomatic, economic and military retaliation” against the U.S. But a federal judge ruled otherwise, and the FBI eventually agreed to settle with Wiener, leading to today’s release.