Attempt to Screen Archive Prompts Fears

Journalist's family wants to block search of papers held by university

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By SCOTT CARLSON

During his life and career as a muckraking journalist in Washington, Jack Anderson cultivated secret sources throughout the halls of government — sources who passed on information that allowed Anderson to investigate and write about Watergate, CIA assassination schemes, and countless scandals. His syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, earned him the enmity of the corrupt and powerful — so much so that during the Watergate years, associates of Nixon had discussed assassinating the columnist. They never went through with the plot. Anderson died in December at the age of 83.

His archive, some 200 boxes now being held by George Washington University's library, could be a trove of information about state secrets, dirty dealings, political maneuverings, and old-fashioned investigative journalism, open for historians and up-and-coming reporters to see.

But the government wants to see the documents before anyone else.

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have told university officials and members of the Anderson family that they want to go through the archive, and that agents will remove any item they deem confidential or top secret.

The Andersons, who have not yet transferred ownership of the archive to George Washington University, are outraged. They plan to fight the FBI's request and have sent a letter to the agency saying that they will not cooperate. Kevin N. Anderson, the journalist's son, who is speaking for the family, said he is willing to go to jail to protect his father's legacy.

Were he alive today, Jack Anderson "would probably come out of his skin at the thought of the FBI going through his papers," his son said. The removal of the papers — even if some were stamped "declassified" and returned — would "destroy any academic, scholarly, and historic value" of the archive, said Mr. Anderson.

Bill Carter, a spokesman for the FBI, said the agency has "determined that among the papers, there are a number of U.S. government documents that contain classified information," although he would not detail how the FBI made that determination.

Those papers "remain the property of the U.S. government," Mr. Carter added. "Under the law, no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them, and there is no legal basis under which a third party can retain them as part of an estate." He says that if the FBI makes no progress in negotiations with the Andersons, the agency will seek legal help from the Justice Department.

Asked why the FBI is pursuing the archive now — after all, Jack Anderson had been photographed holding up classified documents decades earlier — Mr. Carter said the agency only recently learned that the archive might contain classified information.

The case has stoked the fears of librarians and academics. They say the FBI's request is part of a renewed emphasis on secrecy in government, which has focused on libraries and archives in particular. Recently, librarians have been concerned about scores of documents that have been reclassified at the National Archives, and librarians have been particularly concerned about freedom of information since the passage of the USA Patriot Act in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The FBI's interest in the Anderson archive is "deeply disturbing and deeply in conflict with the academy's interests in freedom of inquiry, research, and scholarship," said Duane E. Webster, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries.

Tracy B. Mitrano, an adjunct assistant professor of information science at Cornell University, called the case "utterly alarming."

"Once you begin taking records out of library archives that researchers rely on for free inquiry and research purposes," she said, "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."

Some lawmakers are similarly alarmed. U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, has been critical of secrecy in government recently, particularly at hearings that a House of Representatives committee held on reclassifying information that is currently in the National Archives. He told The Chronicle in a written statement that "the FBI has no legitimate business poking through Mr. Anderson's private papers" and called the Anderson case a "new low" for a "secrecy crazed" administration.

Influential Newsman

As a journalist, Jack Anderson was a legend. He reported on the Central Intelligence Agency's scheme to assassinate Fidel Castro, the Mafia's crime network, and corruption among congressmen. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for reporting on American involvement in the Indo-Pakistan War. Young reporters who worked for Anderson included Brit Hume, now an anchor with Fox News, and Howard Kurtz, now a Washington Post columnist.

Anderson was a Mormon, and many of his papers sat at Brigham Young University for years before George Washington University acquired them. Archivists and scholars at George Washington University believe the Anderson papers will compliment the university's National Security Archive, a collection of declassified documents that have been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

"People who want to study how Washington works come here," said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. The Anderson papers are "a landmark collection for journalism and for the interaction of journalism with government for over five decades."

Mr. Blanton noted some interesting coincidences in the timing of the Anderson controversy. The Pulitzer Prizes, which were announced at virtually the same time, honored reporters who had used secret sources and classified information to report controversial government policies. Some prominent conservative pundits, however, argued that those journalists should have received not Pulitzers but jail time for publicizing government secrets.

The Anderson papers, though decades old, can still teach us something, Mr. Blanton said. "There are extraordinary lessons here about journalists in wartime," he added. "There is some resonance with today in Anderson's coverage of Vietnam or the secret and unseemly side of national-security affairs."

Investigating the Archive

Kevin Anderson says the FBI approached his mother about a month after his father's death, asking about the archives. When Kevin Anderson called the FBI, agents would tell him only that they were investigating an espionage case and that they believed his father had received documents related to it. "They were talking about retrieving the documents to get the fingerprints of people who might have handled them," Mr. Anderson said.

At the same time, FBI agents made inquiries elsewhere, as well. They contacted Lizanne Payne, executive director of the Washington Research Library Consortium, which maintains storage space for some 14,000 archival boxes for George Washington University. Ms. Payne said the FBI asked her if she knew the location of the Anderson archives in the collection. She did not. She speculated that had she known the location of the archive, the FBI might have tried to get the Anderson papers directly from her through a court order.

Two agents also showed up at the home of Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington who helped the university acquire the archive and who worked for Anderson in the 1970s. Mr. Feldstein is writing a biography of Anderson and, with the help of graduate students, has dug through most of the boxes in the archive. While he and his students saw some government documents in the boxes, he said, "we didn't see anything that was relevant to what they said they were looking for."

Most of what he found within the boxes was "ancient history," Mr. Feldstein said. "It's very difficult for me to envision that there is anything of use to the FBI or a criminal investigation."

He tried to tell this to the agents, he said, but they pressed him. "They were really pushing me on where [the papers] were housed physically and who had custody of them," he said, noting that the agents also wanted to know the names of the students who worked with him. Mr. Feldstein says he would not tell them, and that he referred the agents to the university's lawyers.

"They kept saying, 'Did you see anything that was a classified document?'" he said. "They kept coming back to that over and over, as if they wanted to hear the word 'yes' for some kind of warrant."

The FBI eventually told Kevin Anderson that the investigation centered on Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former officials with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who were charged last year with receiving and distributing national-defense information.

"That raised my hackles a bit," Mr. Anderson said. "As I researched the Aipac prosecution and talked to some of Dad's former reporters, ... they said this is nuts."

Mr. Anderson doubts that his father gathered information related to the Aipac case. He points out that his father had Parkinson's disease for the last 15 years of his life and that he had done his best muckraking in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s.

He wonders if there is anything of value to investigators in the archive. "Dad kept a lot of things in his head and, due to the sensitive nature of things, didn't write a lot of stuff down."

But even if Jack Anderson had gotten documents related to the Aipac case, Kevin Anderson points out, many have questioned the legitimacy of the case. An editorial in The Washington Post in March argued that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were being prosecuted under "an old and vaguely worded law" that dates back to 1917, and that the case could also be used as a "dangerous" precedent to prosecute journalists who receive and publish classified information.

'True to His Principles'

Jack Anderson earned fame and respect through publishing such state secrets — always, the journalist said, in the interest of the American people. Although his father shared information with the FBI in select situations, Kevin Anderson said, his father would not approve of the FBI combing through his archive.

"We want to stay true to his principles of First Amendment rights and journalistic freedoms," he said.

But more alarming to the Andersons is how the FBI might handle the archive if given access to it. The archive has not yet been organized and cataloged by George Washington University, so the FBI would have to pick through the entire collection to find any documents related to the Aipac case.

"They made it very clear on the front end that if they are looking through his papers and they come across documents that are stamped confidential or top secret, they would be duty bound to take those out of the collection," Mr. Anderson said.

Mr. Anderson said his family has reached an "impasse" with the FBI.

Although officials at George Washington University support the Andersons, the university has largely left the fight in their hands. Jack Siggins, university librarian, says the university has been discussing the transfer of ownership of the papers for the past year. That process froze once the FBI got involved.

"The family wanted to handle this issue with the FBI themselves," he said.

He says the FBI's interest in the archive is "an example of the pressure that libraries are under to change their fundamental philosophy — which is to provide the information to the people in order to let the people understand what is going on in their government."

In the meantime, the FBI might have provided an opportunity for a windfall for the university. The university has hired a librarian to index the archive — a process that will initially cost the library about $100,000, and perhaps much more in years to come. Mr. Siggins hopes that the FBI's interest in the papers will help the library raise that money.

"We think that there are a lot of people in the country who realize that the issue of government censorship and hiding what's really going on is such a hot topic that people will want to help us," he said.