.• •■••'-'. • .• , FBI. S read Gossip About Baby • Seberg n, g,-t- k a d Proa person send a note to Hollywood col- The FBI admitted yesterday that in umnists about Seberg. The proposed 1970 it spread gossip that actress Jean Mei-no Says Bureau note would read as follows: Seberg, who committed suicide re- cently, had become pregnant by a Tried to Cheapen Her "I was just thinking about you and Member of the Black Panther Party. remembered I still owe you a favor. The bureau released an internal So I was in Paris last week and ran memo that showed it had sought to bat advocates of unpopular causes into Jean Seberg who was heavy discredit Seberg because she supported have long since passed. We are out with baby. I thought she and Romain the black nationalist cause. that business forever." had gotten together again but she con- "It is felt that the possible publica- He said the FBI conducts investiga- fided the child belonged to (blank space) of the Black Panthers. The of Seberg's plight could cause her tions now only when tb,ere have been embarrassment and serve to cheapen charges of criminal conduct. dear girl is getting around."' her image with the general public," Government documents show that On May 6, 1970, the FBI, then under the memo said. in the memo, dated April 27, 1970, the the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, re- sponded that the idea was a good one. Her husband at the time, Romain Lbs Angeles office of the FBI asked Gary. a French diplomat and author, bureau headquarters in Washington "But to protect the sensitive source charged this week that the FBI had for permission "to publicize the preg- of information from possible compro- destroyed Seberg's life by disseminat- nancy of Jean Seberg, well-known mise and to insure the success of your ing he rumor about her pregnancy. movie actress." plan, Bureau feels it would be better The child was born dead. The references to a supposed mem- to wait approximately two additional months until Seberg's pregnancy --- The information about Seberg was ber of the Black Panther Party who would be obvious to everyone," the distributed by the FBI as part of its fathered the child, were deleted, as counterintelligence program known as was the name of the FBI informant memo cautioned. Cointelpro. who initially provided the tip to the It noted that "Jean Seberg has been In acknowledging the bureau's ac- FBI office in San Francisco. a financial supporter of the BPP tion, FBI Director William H. Webster The Los Angeles office of the FBI (Black Panther Party) and should be asserted that "the days when the FBI suggested that the best way to get the neutralized. The current pregnancy by used derogatory information to corn- story out would be to have a fictitious See SEBERG, All, Cot. I

SEBERG, From AI ing Miss Seherg, In Newsweek maga- Seherg's body was found this week zine's edition of Aug. 24, 1970, and (black space) while still married af- ip her car near the Paris apartment shortly thereafter she was rushed to a fords an opportunity for such effort." hospital for a premature delivery. A she had been sharing with an Alge- On May 19, 1970, the Los,Aneles French court subsequently awarded rian actor. She had been missing for Times published an article by Holly- her several thousand dollars in a libel nine days and had left a suicide note wood gossip columnist Joyce Haber, suit involving the article). for her I6-year-old son, Diego. The which referred to an anonymous In an interview earlier this year, Se- cause of death was diagnosed as an "miss A," an international movie star berg said she was seven months preg- overdose of barbiturates that a doctor who supported the "Black Revolution" nant when she read the article and had prescribed for psychiatric prob- and who "Is expecting ...Papa's said the shock was so great that it caused lems. to be a rather prominent Black Pan- her to go into labor immediately and ther." the child was dead at birth. Jean Seberg's Paris Burial The Haber article provided a num- Gary said that as a result she "be- ber of details that matched Seberg's came psychotic" and "every year on Attended by 200 Mourners personal and professional life. the anniversary of this stillbirth she (Gary. the actress's former husband, has tried to take her own life." PARIS, Sept. 14 (AP)—Actress Jean said in 1970 that while they were in Gary said he always believed the Seberg was buried in a Paris ceme- the process of getting a divorce, she child was his, and he said the child tery today, a suicide whose self-de- read a similar account, this time nam- was white. structive depression the family

blamed on an FBI subterfuge of al- most a decade ago. About 200 persons—friends, rela- tives, fans and the curious—gathered around the polished-wood casket, wreathed in lilies, daisies and yellow roses, for the service in Montparnasse Cemetery. Among the mourners were her three former husbands, her teen- age son, French actor Jean-Paul Bel- mondo and Algerian actor Ahmed Hasmi, with whom Seberg had been living before her death. Friday's funeral service began with the reading, in English, of a poem she wrote when she was 18: "1 went through the woods for a walk in the rain ... and as I walked my soul was freed from pain ... "