FBI wants to screen papers of columnist

WASHINGTON — The FBI is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.

Anderson's family has refused to allow a search of the files of the well-known reporter who had long feuded with the FBI and had exposed plans by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-Contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.

His son said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father's principles and intimidate other journalists and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.

"It's my father's legacy," said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist's nine children. "The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to."

The FBI says the dispute over the papers, which await cataloging at George Washington University here, is a simple matter of law.

"It's been determined that among the papers there are a number of classified U.S. government documents," said Bill Carter,

a bureau spokesman. "Under the law, no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them. These documents remain the property of the government."

The standoff, which appears to have begun with an FBI effort to find evidence for the criminal case against two pro-Israel lobbyists, has quickly hardened into a new test of the Bush administration's protection of government secrets and journalists' ability to report on them.

The issue comes as FBI agents conduct a criminal investigation of several leaks of classified information, including details of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency and the secret overseas jails for terrorist suspects run by the CIA.

In addition, the two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, face trial next month for receiving classified information, in a case that has been criticized by civil liberties advocates as criminalizing the routine exchange of inside information.

The National Archives recently suspended a secret program in which intelligence agencies had pulled thousands of historical documents from public access on the ground that they should still be classified.