The FBI's fishing expedition into Anderson's papers stinks

WASHINGTON — In an earlier life I spent 20 years as an investigative reporter, getting subpoenaed and sued in the United States, and censored and physically harassed in other parts of the globe. But when I switched careers to academia, I thought such scrapes would come to an end. I was wrong.

On March 3 two FBI agents showed up at my home, flashing their badges and demanding to see 25-year-old documents I've been reading as part of my research for a book I'm writing about Jack Anderson, the crusading investigative columnist who died in December.

I was surprised, to put it mildly, by the FBI's sudden interest in journalism history. I asked what crimes the agents were investigating.

"Violations of the Espionage Act," was the response. The Espionage Act dates to 1917 and was used to imprison dissidents who opposed World War I.

Evidently the Justice Department has decided that it wants to prosecute people who whispered national security secrets decades ago to a reporter now dead. The FBI agents asked me if I had seen any classified government documents in the nearly 200 boxes of materials the Anderson family has

donated to my university. I replied that I had seen some government documents — reports, audits, memos — but didn't know what their classification status was.

"Just because the documents aren't marked 'classified' doesn't mean they're not," Agent Leslie Martell suggested helpfully. But I was unable to give her the answer that she wanted: that our collection housed classified records.

Later, after I thought about it, I could recall seeing only one set of papers that might once have been classified: the FBI's own documents on Jack Anderson. But our version of those papers was heavily censored, unlike the original FBI file already in their own office.

Ironically, for the past five years the FBI and other federal agencies have refused to turn over such documents to me under the Freedom of Information Act, even though almost all the people named in them are now dead. The government claims it would violate their privacy, jeopardize national security or — in the most absurd argument of all — compromise "ongoing law enforcement investigations."