Libraries and Gumshoes

Last year two FBI agents walked into the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Library at UCLA and asked the librarian about the reading habits of a visiting foreign student. The agents told her that it was her patriotic duty to help them and assured her that anything she told them would be kept secret. The librarian told them that they information they sought was confidential.

The incident at UCLA has occurred repeatedly around the country over the past 15 years as part of the FBI’s Library Awareness Program--a counter-intelligence effort to keep tabs on Soviet spies. Among other things, the bureau asks librarians to keep an eye out for people with foreign names asking for certain kinds of information. This activity, which has come to light over the last several months, has been denounced by the American Library Assn. as “an unconscionable and unconstitutional invasion of the right of privacy of library users.”

For its part, the FBI insists that it is not interfering with anyone’s right to read anything; it is merely recognizing that libraries--particularly technical libraries--are good places to keep tabs on Soviet spies, many of whom have diplomatic immunity and give no other clue that their real job is intelligence.

The FBI also notes that a recent spy case involved Gennadi F. Zakharov, a Soviet employee of the United Nations, who recruited a student at the Queens College library in New York to help gather information. At a recent hearing of the House Judiciary subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights, FBI Director William S. Sessions defended the surveillance of libraries and said that libraries are “where people are being recruited for foreign and hostile intelligence sources.”

Last January, Thomas DuHadway, a deputy assistant FBI director for intelligence, explained the bureau’s Library Awareness Program in a closed-door appearance before the National Commission on Libraries and Information Sciences, a federal advisory panel. His lengthy testimony was subsequently made public under the Freedom of Information Act.

“We don’t want you to be a spy,” DuHadway told the library commissioners. “You’re not trained to be a spy. If in the legitimate course of your business you see something you think we ought to know about, please tell us.” He noted that 90% of what the Russians gather in the United States is free and open to anyone and said, “We don’t have any concern about that, but we do like to know who’s collecting and what they are collecting.”

That may sound OK to DuHadway, but the idea that the FBI is asking librarians to watch and report about what people read is intolerable. The Library Assn., normally a quiet group, is right to be outraged by the government’s action. Typically, the FBI agent approaches not the head librarian, but a clerk. He flashes a badge, mentions something about patriotic duty, and asks for information. How many clerks realize the seriousness of this request?

If the FBI has probable cause to suspect someone of spying, it can seek a court order to gain access to his library records. Otherwise, what people read is no business of the government. No fishing expeditions in libraries, please. If the bureau won’t stop this practice on its own, Congress should order it stopped.