John Lennon's FBI Files Released

by publicreader | December 21, 2006 at 09:02 am

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Clearly a man who sang Imagine all the people/Living life in peace was a major league subversive, but still the FBI could not quite nail John Lennon. An American historian has finally won his 25-year campaign to expose the FBI's pursuit of the ex-Beatle - but the last 10 pages, released only after a string of court cases, don't quite make spy thriller reading.

The last few pages of the FBI files, released after years of effort by the historian Jon Wiener, show that while Lennon imagined, the FBI suffered from an acute case of over-imagining. In the early 1970's , the FBI recruited two Brits to befriend Lennon and persuade him to fund a leftwing bookshop in London. He turned them down, and the FBI concluded that there was "no certain proof" that Lennon had funded subversion. The FBI cited national security reasons for not releasing all of the files to Wiener, who said yesterday that "the claims the FBI has been making ( to support denial of access to the files ) were absurd."