FBI Seeks to Search Journalist’s Archives for Classified Documents
The FBI is demanding access to some 200 boxes of the papers and notes of Jack Anderson that the late investigative journalist’s family is donating to the George Washington University library to remove any leaked classified documents. However, the family has resisted the government’s efforts, claiming that turning over the materials would be inconsistent with the reporter’s life work.
Anderson’s son Kevin said in the April 19 New York Times that allowing federal agents to search the papers would betray his father’s principles and intimidate other journalists, adding that the family was willing to go to jail over the matter.
“It’s been determined that among the papers there are a number of classified U.S. government documents,” said FBI spokesman Bill Carter. “Under the law, no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them. These documents remain the property of the government.”
Duane E. Webster, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the FBI’s actions were “deeply disturbing and deeply in conflict with the academy’s interests in freedom of inquiry, research, and scholarship.” Tracy B. Mitrano, an adjunct assistant professor of information science at Cornell University, said, “Once you begin taking records out of library archives that researchers rely on for free inquiry and research purposes, it would be very difficult not to see it as a slippery slope toward government controlling research in higher education and our collective understanding of American history,” the Chronicle reported April 18.
Anderson, who died last December, was a muckraking journalist who exposed the Iran-Contra affair, a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, and congressional corruption. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his reporting on secret American involvement in the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War.
The FBI has said if the agency cannot reach an agreement with the family, it would ask the Justice Department to take action, the Chronicle reported April 20.
Posted April 21, 2006.
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