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By Denis Mueller
John Lennon was the heart and soul of "The Beatles." It was
Lennon that gave the group their edge and he will be forever linked with the rebellious youth culture of the 1960s. John Lennon
was the political Beatle and for this he became a target of the FBI, the CIA, and President Nixon. Nixon went after Lennon,
while J.Edgar Hoover called him a dangerous subversive and the CIA was willing to break the law, and its own charter, in their
pursuit of the former Beatle.
Lennon had been very critical of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and after the break
up of the Beatles, he became increasingly interested in radical politics. This caught the attention of FBI czar J.Edgar Hoover.
Hoover's FBI had investigated artists for years. It kept files on writers such as; Nelson Algren, John Steinbeck, William
Faulkner and many others. Through the use of informants the FBI found that Lennon was planning to fuse his music with new
left politics. What really caught their eye of the bureau was a plan to go to the GOP convention and then do a series of concerts
to protest the war in Vietnam. Nothing illegal you say. It doesn't matter.
On December 10th, 1971, John Lennon gave a concert that
was intended to raise money for jailed political activist John Sinclair. Sinclair was arrested for possession of two sticks
a marijuana and then sentenced from two to ten years in prison. For the concert Lennon wrote the song "Free John Sinclair".
Sinclair was the former manager of the rock group the MC5. The Five, as they were called by their fans, were punk rockers
before punk became fashionable. They played all out rock and roll with a political edge-indeed they were the most exciting
band I have ever seen - and this, when coupled with Sinclair's politics, made John a target for the local police.
This
event was the beginning of a year long investigation by the FBI of Lennon. So what did they find? Basically, they found that
Lennon believed in non-violence and expressed no interest in joining any protest where there might be violence. They could
have just listened to his songs to learn that but this would be too simple. So they bugged him, followed him, and reported
his every move. Nixon also sought FBI support to deport Lennon while the CIA, in violation of its own charter, which forbids
domestic spying, also kept close tabs on him.
In 1980, after John was murdered on the streets of New York, Jon Wiener
a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see Lennon's
FBI files. The FOIA was created after the revelations of the FBI and CIA abuses of power. The newly elected Reagan administration
fought the request tooth and nail. Years passed and still the government dragged its feet.
In 1988, George Bush was elected president. Bush, a former
CIA director, was not eager to co-operate with FOIA requests. A successful corporate attorney named Kenneth Starr, who would
later head the investigations of Bill Clinton, was put in charge of the Lennon case. Starr fought hard against the disclosures.
He said, among other things, that compliance would be to costly for the government. This is, of course, the same guy who spent
40 million dollars on the Whitewater case.
In the end the documents were released due to the relaxation of the rules
by the Clinton administration. John Lennon had broken no law. It is not against the law to hold a benefit
concert or to
oppose anyone's election but the Justice Department spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, first on surveillance, and then
against release of the documents. All John Lennon asked the government for was to "Gimme some truth."
Sources: Jan
Wiener, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files. Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing
the Secret war Against America's Greatest Authors
Copyright
2005 by PENN LLC. All rights reserved. Go ahead and forward this, in its entirety, to others.
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