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Article Excerpt
SOMETIME IN 1981 in Washington, D.C., a friend suggested I take advantage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to see if I had a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) file. My friend, an attorney, specialized in litigating FOIA requests for journalists, authors, and academics, so when he offered to do all the paperwork, I accepted. I had been active in the New Left and the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so I thought, well, maybe there will be a mention or two of my name somewhere.
I had underestimated the U.S. government's interest in my life. Six hundred and forty-six pages had been compiled about me by various agencies of the U.S. Department of Justice. (1) Files on me--referred to as "Subject"--existed at FBI Headquarters and at FBI field offices in New York City, Newark, San Diego, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and Boston. As I would eventually find out, the material that would be released to me was collected between October 4, 1968, and May 21, 1973.
I became a concerted focus of surveillance in July 1968 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when, about to begin a tenure-track job as an assistant professor of Hispanic literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, I started working with a New Left organization, the New University Conference (NUC). The surveillance continued throughout the two years I lived in Pittsburgh (July 1968-July 1970) and the year I lived in San Diego, California (July 1970-July 1971). In both places I was affiliated with a university and active in NUC and in the women's liberation movement. My file contains informants' reports and copious press clippings about my participation in the women's liberation movement from both Pittsburgh and San Diego. Recommendations to place me on the Security Index/ADEX because of "subversive" activities were sent to FBI headquarters, one from the Pittsburgh field office in late 1969 and one from San Diego in 1971. (2)
In 1969, in Pittsburgh, I was considered a "dangerous subversive" because "subject is a national coordinator for New University Conference (NUC), a new organization to promote revolutionary changes, not only in universities, but in the social system of the US [and because] Roberta Salper was one of 15 NUC members who traveled to Cuba during the period July 25-August 21, 1969." (3) No mention is made of the women's movement in this recommendation to put me on the Security Index in 1969.
In 1971, the San Diego field office again recommended I be placed on the ADEX, judging me to be a danger to national security this time because of "subject's membership in the New University Conference, her relationship with members of the Revolutionary Union, and her role as an active leader in the Women's Liberation Movement." (4) (Emphasis added).
What had changed in the FBI's vision of the women's liberation movement and my role in it between 1969 and 1971? Why had the FBI not considered the women's liberation movement a threat to national security in Pittsburgh in 1969, but did in 1971 in San Diego?
In light of recent discussions among feminists about the existence of U.S. government surveillance of the women's liberation movement in its early years, this essay is my attempt to figure that out. I discuss the process of obtaining my FBI file, its contents and my activities, particularly in Pittsburgh and San Diego, and then I focus on those parts of the dossier that deal with the women's liberation movement. By analyzing these parts in the context of both the whole file and the historical moment, I offer some conclusions about the nature of FBI surveillance in the early years of the women's liberation movement.
OBTAINING THE FILE: THE PROCESS
The process of obtaining my FBI file was agonizingly slow and arduous. Starting in July 1981, my friend, who subsequently became my official lawyer, initiated correspondence with the section of the FBI's Records Management Division that deals with Freedom of Information issues. Dozens of letters were exchanged, and over the next several years the agency intermittently released 351 pages in bits and pieces. The FBI denied access to the rest, approximately one half of the total amount they said were on file. "Exemptions" were invoked--that is, access was denied--for one or more of six reasons dealing with the interest of national defense and foreign policy, materials related to the internal rules and practices of the FBI, various stipulations to protect FBI informants, and material reporting investigative efforts pertaining to the enforcement of criminal law.
The most frequently used exemption in my file is (b)(1), the "national security" exemption. (5) The FBI regularly uses (b)(1) to hide information that has no bearing on national defense or foreign relations; it is often used to shield evidence of the disruptive and frequently illegal activities and strategies taken by the FBI in its war against domestic advocates of political and social change. (6) Large portions of the records the FBI did release were blackened out for one or more of these same reasons. Apparently, this is standard practice.
During the 1990s, several actions in the judicial and executive branches regarding national security and freedom of information access suggested it had become easier to retrieve more significant portions of one's FBI file. Due to this apparent easing of restrictions, my lawyer again sent out "Freedom of Information Requests" to the same agencies that had acknowledged having files on me in our first inquiry almost twenty years ago. He asked for copies of the hundreds of pages that had been denied in the early 1980s, and he also sent requests for copies of files on me to the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. He made these requests in 1999; by 2001 an additional 37 pages were released. This brought the total retrieved to 388 out of the 646 the FBI Records Management Division had originally stated it had. It had taken twenty years of intermittent activity to get these 388 pages. All the material released was dated between October 1968 and May 1973. To this day, I have no idea why the remaining 258 pages the FBI admitted having on "Subject" were not released to me.
By 2001, my lawyer believed we had gotten all the information we could without going to court, which we decided not to do. Although my lawyer requested a copy of everything in my file, all of our attempts had never yielded a single document from the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency nor any information concerning "Subject's Activities" between 1973 and 1981. (7) This is interesting in view of the fact that I left a tenured position at State University of New York (SUNY), Old Westbury, in 1974 to work as a resident fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C., between 1974 and 1979. I worked closely with the exiled Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and was sharing an office with him until shortly before he was assassinated in the streets of Washington in September 1976. The FBI interviewed me, along with many other of my colleagues at IPS, immediately after Letelier's death, but no record of that interview was ever released to me.
THE PRACTICE OF "NATIONAL SECURITY" IN THE UNITED STATES
Before we examine the contents of my file, a brief introduction to the U.S. government's concept of "National Security" may be helpful. For over seventy-five years the FBI file, the dissenter's dossier, has stood as a symbol of the vast, somewhat irresponsible surveillance the state has conducted on its most activist public. Paradoxically, it was during the administration of the New Deal that current practices of citizen surveillance were institutionalized. Although before Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration, political repression was substantial, it usually took the form of physical assaults, police beatings, lynchings, and even murders. (8) The New Deal institutionalization that centralized bureaucratic management of U.S. life seemed to be a giant step forward for free expression, dissent, and political activism, just as it seemed to be for the economy itself; and indeed, in the wake of federally enforced rules of fair play, violent acts of repression...
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