Sanford Gottlieb: US Spying Isn't New
[Sanford Gottlieb was executive director of SANE and is author of "Defense Addiction: Can America Kick the Habit?" He was on President Richard Nixon's ''Enemies List."]
Government Spying on Americans didn't start with President George W. Bush and the National Security Agency. I was spied on in the 1960s and 1970s.
While working in 1961 for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE, a citizens group organized to halt nuclear testing, I spoke to a small gathering of people at a private home in Skokie, Ill. One of them was an undercover FBI agent.
He wrote a report about the meeting, which I received years later with my extensive FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act. His muddled report managed to convey that I spoke about nuclear testing and the Kennedy administration's tentative plans for a civil defense program. Had I been a teacher grading the agent's sloppy paper, I would have given him an F.
My CIA file, also courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that the CIA had opened my domestic mail. The target of the agency's mail snoopers was a letter I had sent to Rennie Davis, a radical leader in the anti-Vietnam War movement. By the mid-'60s, SANE had become the anchor of the movement's moderate wing, and I was urging Davis to drop his radical tactics.
I have no idea what the snoopers made of this correspondence, but I know that domestic spying by the CIA was illegal then and remains illegal today.
One day in 1971, the SANE office in Washington received a phone call from someone who had recently been discharged from Army Intelligence. He suggested that we check our mailing list for the name of R. Allen Lee Associates of Alexandria, Va., a cover for Army Intelligence.
Sure enough, the name was there. In response we conducted a bit of guerrilla theater at the Bethesda home of then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. With cameras, notepads, and our ''SANE spy scope," we placed his home under our surveillance. The old Washington Star published photos of the caper with the headline, ''When turnabout is fair play."
Spying on civilians, however, is not fun and games....
Read entire article at Boston Globe
Government Spying on Americans didn't start with President George W. Bush and the National Security Agency. I was spied on in the 1960s and 1970s.
While working in 1961 for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE, a citizens group organized to halt nuclear testing, I spoke to a small gathering of people at a private home in Skokie, Ill. One of them was an undercover FBI agent.
He wrote a report about the meeting, which I received years later with my extensive FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act. His muddled report managed to convey that I spoke about nuclear testing and the Kennedy administration's tentative plans for a civil defense program. Had I been a teacher grading the agent's sloppy paper, I would have given him an F.
My CIA file, also courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that the CIA had opened my domestic mail. The target of the agency's mail snoopers was a letter I had sent to Rennie Davis, a radical leader in the anti-Vietnam War movement. By the mid-'60s, SANE had become the anchor of the movement's moderate wing, and I was urging Davis to drop his radical tactics.
I have no idea what the snoopers made of this correspondence, but I know that domestic spying by the CIA was illegal then and remains illegal today.
One day in 1971, the SANE office in Washington received a phone call from someone who had recently been discharged from Army Intelligence. He suggested that we check our mailing list for the name of R. Allen Lee Associates of Alexandria, Va., a cover for Army Intelligence.
Sure enough, the name was there. In response we conducted a bit of guerrilla theater at the Bethesda home of then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. With cameras, notepads, and our ''SANE spy scope," we placed his home under our surveillance. The old Washington Star published photos of the caper with the headline, ''When turnabout is fair play."
Spying on civilians, however, is not fun and games....