U.S. Says It Tapped Calls of Palestinian Defendants, Lawyers

A clandestine arm of the federal judiciary eavesdropped on telephone conversations between Los Angeles-area Palestinians charged with subversion and visa violations and their attorneys who are fighting to keep them from being deported, the government has disclosed.

In revealing the surveillance, the Justice Department said, in effect, that no constitutional rights were violated because “none of those conversations involve privileged attorney-client communications.”

The lead attorney for the Palestinians, Dan Stormer of Los Angeles, branded the surveillance “unlawful.” He said defense lawyers will make an effort in federal court to force the government to produce information that laid the foundation for the wire taps.

But the government said such exhibits must remain sealed because they “contain extremely significant documents concerning sensitive intelligence sources and methods used by U.S. intelligence agencies (and) would damage the national security of this nation.”

Stormer charged that the government misused its eavesdropping powers, authorized under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, when it tapped the Palestinians’ phones and picked up conversations with their lawyers.

“Under common law, the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment (which spells out the rights of the accused in criminal prosecutions) and state and federal evidence codes, the conversations between an attorney and a client are protected,” Stormer said.

Furthermore, he said, the Surveillance Act is aimed at individuals involved in criminal activity and “acting on behalf of a foreign power. Our clients have not engaged in any unlawful acts. They’ve only engaged in their First Amendment right of freedom of speech.”

The Justice Department memorandums, which also described the use of informants and video taping of one of the defendants, were filed last week in U.S. Immigration Court in Los Angeles in response to requests by defense lawyers.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said Saturday that the department will have no further comment on the surveillance disclosures.

The volatile case, which pits the Justice Department against civil rights and Arab-American groups, involves eight aliens who were accused under the McCarran-Walter Act of belonging to a Marxist faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization with a history of terrorism.

All eight--seven Palestinians and a Kenyan--have denied membership in the faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). None were charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

Defense lawyers raised the surveillance issue in June, 1987, in an Immigration Court filing alleging that they and their clients “have experienced unusual and inexplicable noises and clicking sounds during their telephone conversations.”

The government filings do not say whether the aliens are still under surveillance or how many conversations were monitored.

The wiretaps were authorized under the Carter Administration law designed to allow covert gathering of information for national security purposes. Wiretap orders were issued by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates in a closely guarded courtroom in the main Justice Department building in Washington, which is closed to defendants.

Began in 1985

In the government papers, a U.S. immigration attorney, Michael P. Lindemann, said the FBI carried out the surveillance as far back as July 31, 1985, when it began recording the telephone numbers called by one of the defendants, Julie Mungai, 30. She is the Kenyan-born wife of Khader Hamide, 34, of Los Angeles, one of the case’s two leading defendants.

Additionally, Lindemann said in a declaration, government lawyers “viewed a brief portion of one video tape, without sound, taken in the course of one surveillance.”

Government memorandums said that monitoring also took place by “consensual electronic surveillance,” which involves the use of informants.

Lindemann said “that while attorneys of record in this case have been overheard” talking to the Palestinians, whose phones were tapped, “only a single conversation was in connection with this case, and that single conversation did not involve attorney-client communication and was not otherwise privileged.” In any case, he said, the material would not be used in the deportation proceedings.

Deportations Delayed

Although the eight aliens were arrested and briefly jailed in January, 1987, legal maneuvering has delayed their deportation proceedings, now scheduled to resume in May.

Charges against six of the eight have been reduced to miscellaneous visa violations; and proceedings against two of these six were then halted when it appeared that they would be granted amnesty.

But deportation hearings are scheduled to proceed against two of the Palestinians whom the government alleged are local PFLP leaders--Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, 32, of Long Beach. Both have been charged under McCarran-Walter with “unlawful damage, injury or destruction of property.”

Complicating the government’s case, however, is a major free-speech decision last December in Los Angeles by U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson, who ruled that the McCarran-Walter Act’s political provisions were unconstitutional. The government is expected to appeal.