FBI Surveillance: The Objective Is Fear

Re “At FBI, a Traitor Helped in Search for Subversives,” July 29: Monitoring the legal, political and social activities of Americans should be prohibited. The Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations requested covert surveillance of legitimate liberal groups. The files have come to light only because one of the FBI’s agents in charge of domestic spying, Robert Hanssen, is being charged with providing secrets to the Soviets that resulted in the execution of double agents in the USSR.

Are there no liberal FBI agents? Why not? Does an agent have to pass a political or religious litmus test to be hired by the agency? If the FBI actually reflected the diversity in society, I doubt it would stomach requests from paranoid presidents for surveillance of the political activities of American citizens.

No papers relating to this domestic spy program should be redacted. Let the information out completely without omissions or editing. The patriotism of liberal Americans is as strong or stronger than that of conservative agencies or administrations. The greater danger to democracy is from secret military, paramilitary and unmonitored programs.

Jean E. Rosenfeld

Pacific Palisades

It is interesting how the mention of the practice of economic cannibalism is said to be “class warfare,” while the actual practice seems to attract no opprobrium whatever (“Executives Get Rich, Workers Get Peanuts,” Commentary, July 29). Some elements in the “fear” category of reasons John Balzar gives for the present pathetic state of discourse were neglected. An important element appeared on the front page of the same issue of The Times: the Gestapo factor.

As a delicious irony, Hanssen happened to have been one of those in charge of the search for subversives among the general populace. These people are not going through the enormous drudgery of reading everyone’s mail and listening to their phone conversations for the fun of it; their objective is fear and elimination--as in, for example, what happened to the Industrial Workers of the World, or to people caught in the Palmer raids.

James L. Jenkins

Westlake Village