A CIA Target at Home in America

Because of me, the Central Intelligence Agency has had to concede it does spy on Americans. Just last month, the agency had to remove a denial posted on its Web site that it doesn’t do this. For it kept a file on me throughout the 1980s and ‘90s--despite a law against political spying on Americans.

Just before Christmas, the CIA revised its Web site. The new version says the CIA can keep files on Americans if they are suspected of espionage or international terrorism.

But I am no spy or terrorist. The CIA conceded as much by settling my lawsuit, paying my lawyers some $46,000 and promising to expunge my file and never spy on my political activities in the future.

The CIA probably first took notice of me because, as a librarian specializing in the alternative press, I wrote reviews of anti-surveillance periodicals. A copy of one review, in a 1979 Library Journal, showed up in my CIA file, which I finally obtained after almost a decade of requests. Clipping files are one thing (after all, I clip anything I can on the CIA), but creating a dossier on me in its covert operations directorate sent shivers down my spine when I found out about it.

Many of the formerly secret cables in my dossier were labeled “EYES ONLY,” as if I were a character out of some John LeCarre novel. At first, the CIA wouldn’t even tell me how many pages it had in my dossier, citing “national security.”

The CIA says my dossier was created because of my work with CovertAction Information Bulletin, now CovertAction Quarterly. I understand the agency’s unhappiness with a magazine that tries to expose its shenanigans, but all I did was index its magazine. That’s not subversive.

I now suspect the people in Langley went through each issue of the magazine with a fine-tooth comb. My name must have jumped out at them. If I were named Smith, it might not have merited another look. But, even years before Proposition 187 and the Asian fund-raising scandals, my suspiciously foreign-sounding last name could well have turned me into a marked man.

My cumulative index to the first 12 issues of CAIB came out in 1981. Beginning that year, my CIA file reveals, the agency sent repeated queries to the Immigration and Nationalization Service about my nationality status, describing me as a “Hong Kong-born Chinese.” I suppose the nation’s security would be safe- guarded if one more subversive could be deported, just like the Nixon administration tried to get John Lennon kicked out of the U.S. for an old marijuana conviction. But, in the end, the INS told the CIA it didn’t have anything on me. It was right: I am a U.S. citizen through my mother, who was born in Seattle.

The early 1980s was also when Gay Insurgent magazine, which I edited, published an article about a softening in the official attitude toward homosexuality in Cuba. In a subsequent issue, I wrote that the Washington Blade, a gay paper, had called the CIA to ask if the article was accurate. Perhaps that was why the CIA seemed to want to know not only anything on me but also on Gay Insurgent.

The CIA obviously sent its librarians and informants to work. My dossier contains details on where I attended graduate school (University of Michigan) and what I studied (world politics). It also noted that I edited Gay Insurgent and created Lavender Archives, an alternative library. At Temple University, where I served as a research librarian, the file noted I had organized Covert Action Research at Temple. The last item in the file was a copy of a 1991 cable to CIA headquarters from an undisclosed CIA domestic station citing a Michigan Daily story about my case.

But the CIA didn’t just compile a dossier on me. It turned it over to a foreign government. Is that standard operating procedure, turning over information on Americans whenever a foreign government asks? After all, on its new Web site, the CIA admits it “works with friendly foreign governments and shares pertinent information.”

The CIA’s original Web site advised browsers to use the U.S. Privacy Act to confirm that the CIA does not keep files on us. But that recommendation no longer appears. I used the Privacy Act to request my file, but the CIA long refused to release it, claiming “national security.” Only when I got the Center for National Security Studies and the American Civil Liberties Union involved in a lawsuit against the CIA did I get my file, though many sections were still blacked out.

For the past decade, I’ve lived a somewhat Kafkaesque life. When friends and UC Irvine colleagues heard about my CIA file, some wondered if they should be seen talking with me. I wondered if I was becoming paranoid. I wondered whether phone calls on my cordless phone were being intercepted: Every time I heard some static on the phone, I got nervous, though I know sophisticated spycraft would leave no traces.

Worse was when I traveled abroad: I never knew if the CIA had sent instructions to bar me from entering a particular country. On my last visit to Taiwan, I got in but, at the airport departure gate, an immigration official wouldn’t let me board my plane home until I produced my California driver’s license. My newly minted--and renewed--U.S. passport was not good enough.

My lawyers discovered that the CIA actually doesn’t follow the Privacy Act’s ban on collecting information on Americans’ activities protected by the 1st Amendment. Congress enacted that ban in the wake of widespread domestic spying during the Vietnam War. It is time for Congress to act again to ensure the act is not being eviscerated today.