page_title: Jon Wiener
section_title: Wiener vs. the FBI
hierarchical_section_title: Jon Wiener / Career / Wiener and the Lennon FBI files / Wiener vs. the FBI
caption_attribution_description: English: In the early 1970s, the US government conducted surveillance on ex-Beatle John Lennon. This is a letter from the government files. After a 25-year Freedom of Information Request battle initiated by historian Jon Wiener, the files were released. Here is one page from the file. This second release received by Wiener was less heavily magic-markered out, that is, redacted. A prior version was released which showed most of the document with heavily blacked out text.
context_page_description: Jon Wiener is an American historian and journalist based in Los Angeles. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a Los Angeles Times bestseller co-authored by Mike Davis. He successfully waged a 25-year legal battle to win the release of the FBI's files on John Lennon. Wiener played a key role in efforts to expose the surveillance as well as the behind-the-scenes battling between the government and the former Beatle, and is a recognized expert on the FBI-versus-Lennon controversy. A professor emeritus of United States history at the University of California, Irvine, he is also a contributing editor to the progressive political weekly magazine The Nation and host of The Nation's weekly podcast, Start Making Sense. He also hosts a weekly radio program in Los Angeles.
  Set the Night on Fire is a movement history of Los Angeles. The backbone of the book is the story of the civil rights, Black power and Chicano movements, as well as the anti-war movement, gay liberation and women’s liberation, and the battles between young people and the LAPD on Sunset Strip and at Venice Beach.
context_section_description: In 1981, while conducting research for a book about John Lennon, Wiener learned of the FBI surveillance, and that there were either 281 or 400 pages of files on the ex-Beatle. Wiener requested the release of the FBI's files on Lennon by citing the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI refused to release two-thirds or 199 pages of the files on the grounds that they contained "national security" information. The pages that were released were heavily blacked out with magic marker, or redacted.
  In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act with assistance from the ACLU of Southern California, including attorneys Dan Marmalefsky of Morrison & Foerster and Mark Rosenbaum of the ACLU. In response, the FBI turned over some documents, but withheld others claiming they contained "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality" and added that releasing the documents could lead to "military retaliation against the United States."
  Wiener chronicled much of his frustration with getting documents in his 1984 book Come Together including many "Orwellian moments" during the "tortoise-like progress" of the lawyers. While Wiener lost many of the early "skirmishes", a turning point came in 1991 when the 9th Circuit appeals court ruled in his favor, and declared that the FBI had failed to provide "adequate grounds" to keep the data secret. As a result, the FBI had to keep filing affidavits which had "sufficient detail" which allowed Wiener to keep advocating for their release, and for judges to "intelligently judge" the contest, according to several reports. Then justice department lawyer John Roberts, who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, appealed the decision, but the Supreme Court at the time sided with Wiener and the ACLU.
  The case of Wiener v FBI escalated over many years. A settlement with the FBI was reached in 1997 before the case could be heard before the Supreme Court, and most documents except ten were released to Wiener as part of the agreement. According to Wiener, the government paid $204,000 in court costs and attorney fees. The justice department lawyers retained ten documents under the national security proviso of the FOIA. In 2006, the final eight or ten documents of Lennon's file were released. According to Wiener, the ten pages revealed there had been contacts between Lennon and leftist and anti-war groups in London in the early 1970s but that there had been no signs that government officials saw Lennon as a serious threat, and only regarded solicitation of funds for a "left-wing bookshop and reading room in London" but that Lennon did not provide any funds for this purpose. Wiener wrote:
  I doubt that Tony Blair's government will launch a military strike on the U.S. in retaliation for the release of these documents ... Today, we can see that the national security claims that the FBI has been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning.
  — Jon Wiener, 2006, in USA Today
  Wiener expressed amazement that so much of the information had been withheld:
  One of the items here is a report from an undercover agent on a meeting of anti-war radicals in the East Village ... The undercover agent reports — this is to J. Edgar Hoover — that at this loft in the East Village, there is a parrot, and whenever the conversation gets heated, the parrot shouts, "Right on!" Now, it's kind of mildly interesting, but why does J. Edgar Hoover need to know this? Why should this be classified "confidential"?
  — Jon Wiener, in 2000, in an interview
caption: Wiener received this less-heavily blacked out copy of the same file page after more than a decade of litigation by the ACLU of Southern California.
exif: {}