The Nation - News from July 6, 1988

A white FBI agent has admitted planning with white colleagues a retribution campaign against a black agent who brought charges of racism within the FBI, according to a published report. The disclosures came in internal FBI documents filed in a Washington court and made available to the lawyer for Donald Rochon, the black agent. They amount to the FBI’s first public acknowledgment that white agents may have taken part in harassing Rochon, the New York Times reported. Rochon has said that while working in Chicago from 1984 to 1986, his family’s safety was threatened by white FBI agents. He has filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, which charges the FBI and several white FBI officials in Chicago and Omaha, where Rochon was based previously, with violating federal civil rights laws. The Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have found that Rochon was the victim of racial harassment in the FBI’s Omaha office in 1983 and 1984. A federal grand jury is investigating later incidents in Chicago.