BUREAUCRACY WATCH : Suspect Beatle

While living in the United States, John Lennon engaged in such subversive activities as urging people to imagine what it would be like to have world peace. The FBI was watching on the sidelines, keeping secret files on his activities.

Many of the tidbits collected by the FBI easily could have been learned at any magazine stand or from an album jacket. However, for Jon Wiener--a historian at UC Irvine who has written on the social and cultural history of the period--prying loose the classified collection of memos, lyrics and even one rock concert review has been laborious and litigious work.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court, in a strong show of support for the Freedom of Information Act, has agreed with a lower court that the FBI failed to make a case that releasing 69 more documents would compromise national security. Wiener had used the act previously with moderate success to unlock some of the files. The FBI now must present a federal court in Los Angeles with a more convincing argument or turn over its additional Lennon material.

The files are a vestige of the domestic spying conducted against political adversaries during the Nixon Administration. Wiener, in pressing on with this case, has focused attention on how spurious claims of national security exemptions can be in freedom-of-information cases.

Indeed, the public record to date suggests that the complete Lennon file says a lot more about an Administration’s obsession with a cultural idol than it does about sensitive secrets of government.