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By Seth Rosenfeld The telephone rang in my cramped apartment above the Co-op grocery store on University Avenue that day in the summer of 1981. It was a call from my editor at the Daily Californian. Ken Weiss stood out as an editor for at least two reasons: He was allergic to newsprint, which gave him a rash. And he loved a good story that gave others a rash. He had an assignment for me. The Daily Cal had obtained about 9,000 pages of previously secret FBI files about events in Berkeley during the 1960s. Would I see if there was a story? I knew, of course, that the campus had been the scene of some of the era's most significant protests. Events at Berkeley had also loomed large in state politics--Ronald Reagan made the protests at Cal the main issue in his 1966 campaign for governor. I also knew that 1970s Congressional hearings had revealed massive FBI surveillance and disruption of citizens around the country who opposed government policy. Now I had a chance to see what the FBI had been up to at Berkeley. A few days later, I was pushing a hand truck overloaded with FBI files across campus to my apartment, already imagining what secrets they might reveal. I had no idea that I was about to embark on a 20-year odyssey into the FBI's covert campus activities; that I would bring three lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in a precedent-setting legal fight that would reach the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court; that the FBI would spend more than $1 million trying to withhold public information; and that, ultimately, the story would involve not only the FBI but also the CIA, Ronald Reagan, the Board of Regents, and a plot to fire UC President Clark Kerr. Nor did I envision that the San Francisco Chronicle would publish my findings about the FBI's wide-ranging and unlawful campus operations on June 9, 2002, at a time when the nation was once again struggling to balance national security concerns and civil liberties. But, if there is one thing I've learned since my days as a Cal journalism student, it's that you never know where a story will lead. I had come to Berkeley in 1977, a sophomore in liberal arts, curious about many things, not yet focused on any one thing. During one registration week I wandered into the journalism department and, on a whim, enrolled in Journalism 100, an introductory newswriting course. I was hooked. I discovered in journalism a way to learn firsthand about the world, to meet different kinds of people, and to practice the art of writing while providing people with information necessary for informed decision-making. I started writing for the Daily Californian, the East Bay Express, Pacific News Service, and New West magazine. Then Weiss called with the FBI story. He explained that, in 1977, the Daily Cal had submitted an FOIA request for Bureau records concerning certain events on campus, and that the records had trickled in over the years. I took the assignment and the files. I made them the subject of my senior project, and in the summer of 1982 the Daily Cal published my stories reporting that the FBI had tried to disrupt both the 1964 Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam Day Committee, which organized huge anti-war protests in 1965 and 1966.
In November 1981, I hunkered over my second-hand Royal typewriter and pounded out the first in a series of FOIA requests for "any and all" records on more than 100 different events, organizations, and people--including Kerr. With some excitement, I mailed it off from the main Berkeley Post Office. I figured I would receive the new files within a year or so, write up my findings, and move on to the next story. Two and a half years later, I was still waiting for the files. I took a job with the San Francisco Examiner in March 1984, but continued to pursue the FBI project on my own time. I consulted with Dan Noyes and David Weir of the Center for Investigative Reporting. They referred me to San Francisco civil rights lawyer Thomas Steel '72, who had successfully sued the FBI in an earlier FOIA case. Steel agreed to take my case pro bono, and over the next six years filed three suits to help me get the files. The Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to waive processing fees when it is in the public interest to release the requested records. The FBI claimed there was little public interest in its files on UC, and demanded I pay thousands of dollars before it would begin processing my request. In 1985, Steel filed suit seeking a fee waiver. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled in my favor, ordering the FBI to waive all costs, and to release several thousand pages of the requested records. The Bureau complied, but excised many documents, claiming that the information had to be withheld to protect the privacy of people named in the records, or to protect law enforcement operations and national security. I was especially curious about a series of heavily redacted FBI memos concerning Kerr, one of which said he was "at best...a highly controversial figure in California education." Nearly all the rest of that memo had been blacked out. What lay behind the impenetrable darkness of the FBI's black felt-tip pen? I wanted to know. But how could I convince the court that the deleted information should be released when I couldn't see it? I spent many evenings and weekends analyzing records. My research drew heavily on campus libraries, where I found evidence that cast doubt on the Bureau's need for secrecy. In one case, I found records of 1950s Congressional hearings that disclosed information the FBI had blacked out in documents about a 1940s spy case involving Berkeley's Radiation Lab. And, while browsing at Shakespeare's used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue, I stumbled upon a book in which one of the FBI's campus informants described his undercover operations--details of which the Bureau was still trying to withhold. My research filled the growing banks of file cabinets in my second-story apartment on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, causing my landlord some concern about the strength of his floors. With this growing body of evidence behind us, we again petitioned the courts. In 1988, then-U.S. Magistrate Claudia Wilken concluded that the FBI was wrongly withholding many of its records on the FSM and Kerr. In 1991, Judge Patel adopted the magistrate's findings with few changes, ruling that I had presented "highly persuasive" evidence showing that the Bureau's initially lawful investigation of the FSM had turned into political spying, and that it had unlawfully investigated Kerr. But again the FBI dug in its heels, this time appealing to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
At last, I thought, I would finally see the files that the FBI had by now been wrongly withholding for more than a decade. Not yet. The Bureau asked the three-judge appeals court to reconsider. When that court declined, the FBI asked the entire Ninth Circuit to review the decision. But no judge would take the case. In late 1995, the FBI appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. I faced a tough choice: I might well win my case in the nation's highest court. But I might lose both an important decision in favor of open government and the chance to ever see many of the documents. For its part, the FBI faced the possibility of yet another adverse ruling. Before the Supreme Court decided whether to take the case, Steel struck a settlement that left the Ninth Circuit ruling on the books and required the FBI to release the records with far fewer redactions than usual. The FBI also agreed to pay Steel's legal expenses of more than $600,000--a sum in addition to the estimated $900,000 the Bureau had already spent excising records. Finally, the FBI began releasing information it had been withholding for more than 15 years. All told, the Bureau shipped me more than 200,000 pages. In 1997, I took a year's unpaid leave from the Examiner to read the records. By the time I returned to the paper, I still had not finished reading through the more than 100 boxes that crowded my apartment. In June 2001, now working for the Chronicle, I proposed a series of articles based on the FBI files. Executive editor Phil Bronstein won approval from publisher John Oppedahl '67 (himself a former Daily Californian editor) to run the story as an eight-page special section in the Sunday paper. I spent most of the next year researching and writing the piece, making extensive use of records at Bancroft Library, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. I interviewed current and former University and FBI officials, historians, intelligence experts, and former members of Governor Reagan's staff, including Edwin Meese III. (A 1958 Boalt Hall graduate, Meese was an assistant in the Alameda County District Attorney's office who prosecuted Free Speech Movement members for sitting-in at Sproul Hall, and later served as President Reagan's Attorney General.) Kerr was especially gracious, taking time from completing his memoirs to sit for repeated interviews. On June 9, the Chronicle published "The Campus Files: Reagan, Hoover and the UC Red Scare," which detailed how Hoover and other FBI officials resented Kerr's strong stand in defense of academic freedom and open debate, blamed him for not handling campus dissenters more firmly, and campaigned to sabotage his career and get him fired. (For the full story see www.sfgate.com/campus.)
Kerr was fired later that month at the first regents' meeting attended by Reagan, who had made clear during his campaign that he intended to seek Kerr's dismissal. The governor's former aides told me Reagan did not plan to fire Kerr for at least several months, but when Kerr asked the regents to clarify his status, they voted 14-8 to dismiss him. Over the years, Kerr had been named to federal advisory boards by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. He had held the highest level security clearance since 1952. The FBI never found any evidence he was disloyal. But after his dismissal--and the FBI's misleading background report about him--Kerr never received another Presidential appointment. Kerr, now 91, recently told me he knew the FBI had been on campus to conduct legitimate background investigations, but he was surprised and disturbed to learn of their efforts to oust him. "I always had a high opinion of the FBI, so it came to me as quite a shock that they would step outside their boundaries the way they did. I think they did me some damage," he said with characteristic reserve. Kerr added that he felt the FBI had also harmed the University as an institution by intruding into campus affairs and exacerbating internal disputes in pursuit of its own political agenda. After more than 20 years, it was an enormous relief to finally see my story in print. The Chronicle received more than 500 e-mails and letters from readers about it. The Associated Press account of my report appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and other papers around the country. Those articles prompted editorials, including one in the New York Times on June 17 that said: "The documents should be required reading for the Bush administration and Congress as they consider how to reconfigure domestic intelligence. These accounts of the FBI's malfeasance are a powerful reminder of how easily intelligence organizations deployed to protect freedom can become its worst enemy." The FBI maintained in court that its campus activities were proper, but it refused my repeated requests for comment. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cited the article at a hearing on the Homeland Security Department plan. And Senator Dianne Feinstein sent a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller expressing her "deep concern" about the Chronicle's disclosures. She noted that in 1960 the FBI had put 72 UC staff members and students on the Bureau's secret "security index" of people to be detained without warrant in the event of a national emergency, and asked if the FBI now had similar plans to detain citizens. She also asked if the FBI had deliberately tried to cover up embarrassing information in its documents, and what steps it was taking to prevent such misuses of power in the future. As of this writing, Mueller had not replied. Meanwhile, I am waiting for the FBI to finish releasing the last of the documents I requested, and I have begun work on a book based on "the Campus Files." I have a feeling there's more to the story. |
 FBI agents secretly briefed then-Governor Ronald Reagan about student protests, the regents, and Clark Kerr. Photo by Lesley Walsh
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