The Friends and The Feds

...The CIA found the Quakers somewhat "hostile" to the idea: "We were asked if the CIA had any agents abroad, particularly engaged in espionage activities, and we replied that we had no knowledge of such operations...

...The Friends and The Feds MARGARET H. BACON In February 1922, an FBI agent in Philadelphia sent a confidential and rather plaintive memorandum to his superior in Washington about the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which had been accused of being used "by anarchistic organizations as a medium for sending their funds for the relief of Soviet Russia": "[It] is the same as the one known as the Friends Society, which is commonly known as the Quakers...

...Perhaps half of the material the AFSC has received from various Government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act is of a similar nature — news releases, copies of correspondence, copies of publications, reports of public meetings...

...This Committee, which is known to be a nonpo-litical organization or society, has accepted and is accepting funds from any organization or individuals, whether radicals or not, but they do not allow anyone, no matter how big the contribution may be, to invoke or serve their political aims or propaganda through the Friends Committee.'" This pattern — an allegation that the AFSC is being "used" by a subversive element, followed by an investigation which establishes that it is a "sincere pacifist organization11 — runs through the mountains of files the Quaker organization has amassed under the amended Freedom of Information Act of 1975, which gives individuals and organizations limited access to the files kept on them by the FBI, CIA, and similar Government organizations...

...Among the duplicates of Government files received is the report of an interview in 1949 between several CIA officials and the foreign service section of AFSC, in which the former suggested that AFSC overseas staff provide information to the CIA on a regular basis...

...Yet Government agencies have gone to great lengths to attend and report on open meetings, to read and copy news releases, to intercept the mail...

...The principal objections were: (1) they were by no means convinced that the efforts of the CIA were directed entirely toward the establishment of peace and good will, (2) that the CIA was, by our own admission, part and parcel of the National Security Organization and as such close to the military, (3) that information which they might conceivably give us, no matter how apparently innocuous, could be of use to the military and thus in opposition to Quaker principles, (4) that by our own admission, one of the purposes of the CIA was to provide for the security of the United States and that as such had military implications, (5) that since information acquired by the CIA was limited in distribution principally to Army, Navy, Air Force, and State Department, and not available to all branches of Government, it therefore smacked of secrecy which they could not condone...

...More may be made available only after legal action...

...Throughout the 1950s, when anti-Communist hysteria was at its height, the files of the various Government agencies were swamped with requests from individuals for more information on the AFSC, or complaints over the AFSC's support for school integration, opposition to military preparedness, or efforts to establish people-to-people contacts with the Soviet bloc...

...The Government files provide ample proof that the mail of AFSC staff members has frequently been opened...

...But the record clearly establishes more than fifty years of Government surveillance, including wiretapping, the opening of mail, and outright spying...

...The CIA file contained the Washington Friends Newsletter, publication of the monthly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, for November 1967...

...As a result of this complaint, the Philadelphia bureau of the FBI once more made an investigation of the Committee, which resulted in yet another report stating that it was a "religious, charitable welfare and peace organization of Quakers and the Society of Friends, serving as a relief agency to refugees regardless of race, creed or color...

...that it contains only AFSC's name...

...role in supporting it...

...FBI files reveal that in 1954 at least three informants, "T-3," "T-4," and "T-5," infiltrated this meeting: "T-5 (of known reliability) advised that (name deleted) in one of his talks at the seminar at Avon Old Farms School in June of 1954 expressed the opinion that U.S...

...Similarly, a CIA analysis in 1958 concluded: "Ostensibly, this organization is pacifistic to the point of advocating a policy of friendship and cooperation with everyone — including Communists...

...The Defense Intelligence Agency has sent only one document, so heavily censored Margaret H. Bacon is a member of the information services staff of the A merican Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia...

...The National Security Agency has provided no information, although AFSC has learned from its CIA file that AFSC was on the Government "watch list" supplied to the major intelligence agencies, which probably included the NSA...

...The AFSC rehabilitation center in Quang Ngai, South Vietnam, was watched by various Government agencies troubled by AFSC staff members' outspoken criticism, both in Vietnam and in the United States, of the Thieu regime and the U.S...

...big business was the cause of the trouble in Guatemala because big businesses wanted to keep their interest alive in that country...

...Altogether, to date, the AFSC has received almost 1,700 pages from ten Government agencies, including 553 pages from the FBI, about 230 from the Air Force, 251 from the CIA, 88 from the Navy, 158 from the Internal Revenue Service, 66 from the Secret Service, and 335 from the State Department...

...He died in 1691...

...Ambassador and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger debate the wisdom of permitting the South Vietnamese to take over the rehabilitation center and thus rid themselves of the troublesome Quakers, who were accused of "implacable hostility" to the South Vietnamese government and "wide dissemination of gross distortions about the current realities in Vietnam...

...It is our opinion that this conference was a failure and that we will receive no assistance from the American Friends Service Committee...

...The AFSC has always made it a point to be an open, public organization...

...it has no secrets to be spied out...

...For years the New England regional office of the AFSC sponsored an annual seminar on international relations, called the Avon Institute...

...Thomas R. Kelly, deceased, a Quaker author and mystic, and George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends...

...The papers that the AFSC received from the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act contain a telling sequence in which the U.S...

...Army made a study of the AFSC, apparently as the result of such a complaint...

...Perhaps the best example of the waste, confusion, danger, and absurdity of the whole process is a file received from an individual who had requested his record from the various government agencies...

...Some was released after the AFSC successfully appealed a denial of information...

...He also stated that the United States, and other western powers, should keep out of Indochina affairs...

...During the early 1970s, the Government obviously kept watch on AFSC's participation in the growing antiwar struggle...

...An FBI agent in San Antonio, Texas, for example, reported on AFSC's participation in the New Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam and the Vietnam Moratorium Committee...

...Included are copies of letters exchanged between an AFSC staff member and Russian professors regarding the recruitment of students for AFSC's program of international seminars and work camps...

...There was also an eleven-page report on an antiwar planning conference held in Austin, Texas, where as many as four agents seem to have been busy gathering information...

...Some of this material was received on request after the AFSC agreed, under protest, to pay photocopying charges...

...In checking up on almost all of the officers of the executive committee it was found that they are all persons of high standing in commercial and social circles, many of whom are devoting their time, without monetary gain, in the Committee's undertaking to help the famine-stricken people of Soviet Russia and in their other philanthropic undertakings...

...Earlier, in fact, the CIA had considered asking the AFSC to join its information-gathering network...

...The files received on this program are heavily censored on grounds of "national security," but mention is made of a NARMIC study on weapons of counterinsur-gency...

...The opening of AFSC overseas mail is apparent in the files received from the CIA...

...Yet the CIA saw fit to obtain the draft at taxpayer expense, to copy and file it at taxpayer expense, and to analyze it at taxpayer expense...

...Someone in the CIA had gone through the newsletter, circling many of the names to be crosschecked, as is apparently routine procedure in the intelligence agencies...

...There was nothing startling, let alone confidential, in the draft, which was, of course, made public a few weeks later...

...In 1957, the U.S...

...Since the program was open and aboveboard, announced in the press and undertaken with the full knowledge of the State Department, it is difficult to understand what purposes of national security were supposedly served by this invasion of privacy...

...On the first page of the newsletter, three names were checked: Douglas Steere, Bible scholar and professor emeritus of religion at Haverford College...

...A suspicious local resident opened the mail and forwarded its content to the FBI, noting that it contained pro-Japanese material...

...Kissinger suggested that if the Quakers were excluded, this could be explained to Americans as a form of "Vietnamization...

...The Army says it has destroyed all its files, as it was ordered to do, but copies keep showing up in other collections...

...In Mobile, Alabama, for example, the Justice Department spied on an AFSC education program concerned with equal rights for black students and reported to the Mobile school administration about the AFSC's work — though the Department was, at that time, participating in a suit to bring the Mobile School Board into compliance with a higher court order to desegregate...

...The Army concluded that the AFSC was "a sincere pacifist organization" but noted, in keeping with the spirit of the times, that it issued some "pro-Soviet publications" and sponsored "Institutes of International Relations which are sometimes used as forums for Communist Party propaganda...

...An AFSC program begun in the late 1960s, National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex (NARMIC), has apparently aroused the Government's anxiety...

...AFSC workers in the civil rights struggle in the South and elsewhere have been conscious of being watched and harassed by Government agencies...

...In the 251 pages the AFSC has received so far from the CIA, eighty-six are a prepublication draft of a booklet, Experiment without Precedent, written by eleven representatives of the AFSC who spent three weeks in the People's Republic of China in May 1972, two months after Richard M. Nixon's famous visit...

...In 1943, an AFSC staff couple vacationing at a state park in West Virginia received some letters from the Philadelphia office regarding applications from college students to work as peace volunteers...

...There was also a letter from a Nisei who hoped she would be able to leave a relocation center to continue her education...

...The most interesting information — dealing, for example, with the planting of informers, will probably never be released...

...To read through the pages and pages of resulting reports is to be overwhelmed by the sheer inefficiency and duplication of effort within the vast surveillance network just now coming to light...