Tinker, Taylor, Librarian, Spy

THE Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has dealt with some powerful enemies in the past. As if combating communist-sympathizing church congregations and advocates of peace in El Salvador weren't enough to keep them busy, the FBI has found yet another grave threat to the national security.

No, it isn't violent Klan members or neo-Nazi paramilitary organizations in Idaho. The group that has warranted the surveillance of FBI agents across the United States is librarians. That's right, librarians, the quiet old people who "Shhh!" you and give you dirty looks when you eat Doritos in the stacks.

At issue is a program initiated in the 1960s to keep tabs on the reading habits of the large number of East bloc immigrants in New York. The FBI seemed particularly concerned with persons perusing scientific and technical journals--not to mention people with funny names ending in "-icz" or "-vev."

The whole idea was rather silly--or scary, depending on how you look at it. Though the program was secret, it never ranked especially high on the FBI's agenda. I suppose they realized that any spy who had to find his information in Popular Mechanics couldn't be one of the Kremlin's top-guns.

Despite the low probabilty of nabbing any high-level spooks, the FBI nonetheless took the program seriously. So seriously, in fact, that when librarians began to criticize the program as an unwarranted infringement on the privacy of patrons, the FBI was convinced that that criticism must have originated in the Kremlin.

The FBI undertook an investigation of those librarians who objected to spying on bookworms of Slavic origin. After all, weren't the librarians dupes of the communist threat, making waves so that the FBI couldn't get vital intelligence from library circulation records?

Documents released this Saturday by the National Security Archive show that the FBI began to check librarians to discover "whether a Soviet active-measures campaign had been initiated to discredit the Library Awareness Program." Implicit in this request is the FBI's belief that any criticism of its programs is downright un-American.

FBI Director William S. Sessions claims that the FBI usually surveys persons whom they have contacted for an investigation. This is true, but it does not explain why more than 100 of the 266 investigations performed under the Library Surveillance Program were librarians. Nor does it explain why the scrutiny of librarians began only after the program was exposed. At that time, some librarians became public opponents of the program, and thus the subject of FBI investigations.

IT'S bad enough that the FBI could so egregiously disregard citizens' privacy. But to assume that citizens' disagreement with a government agency indicates the influence of a foreign adversary is simply unbelievable. Instead of owning up to this mistake, the FBI became even more paranoid and defensive.

Concerned about increasing criticism of the surveillance program, the FBI sent agents to library associations urging them to be aware of manipulative counter-intelligence agencies. The supposed Soviet campaign, the FBI wrote in an in-house memo, could not go "unchallenged."

When the heat from civil libertarians became too intense, Sessions went before the American Library Association to explain the FBI's policy. His speech was more hypocrisy than genuine contrition. At the same time he was soothing librarians fears of surveillance, Sessions was telling his agents to continue approaching librarians--but to be more discreet about it. Evidently, he thought the investigation more a public relations failure than a moral outrage.

THE FBI's defenders will claim that the average citizen can't understand the necessity of these seemingly trivial investigations. The motive for beginning this long and costly investigation, however, was not a legitimate security concern, but J. Edgar Hoover's paranoia. The FBI had no probable cause and no evidence that librarians were tools of a Soviet conspiracy. Even more disturbing, Sessions still doesn't believe that FBI was doing anything out of the ordinary.

Although Congress has been asked to investigate the investigation of the investigation, it is likely that little will come of it. The FBI's domain remains fairly sacrosanct, and Congressional scrutiny will not change the attitude of those who initiated the librarian surveillance.

To date, the FBI has found nothing confirming their suspicions of the librarians. Perhaps the agency, convinced that the Kremlin must be behind it somehow, is now investigating the agents who failed to find anything on the librarians. At this rate, the FBI just might find the root of their troubles after all.