BIG SISTER IS WATCHING YOU

Margaret H. Bacon

Don't assume that because you are an average American housewife with thoughts no more subversive than getting rid of ring-around-the-collar or establishing a local day care center, that you have been immune to the attack of government spying that has lately convulsed our country. You haven't, if your case is any- thing like Joan B.'s.

Joan had been mildly active in the movement against the Vietnam War back in the late 1960's. Recently, having heard alarming reports of government snooping during this period she decided to send for her FBI files under the new Freedom of Information Act. What then her total surprise to find that she had indeed been spied upon, and by the most unlikely person imaginable, the Welcome Wagon lady !

When Joan had first moved to Glencoe, Illinois, the Welcome Wagon woman had come to make her feel at home, and offer her coupons for merchandise, and ask a few polite questions: Where had they lived? How many children did they have? What did her husband do?

The answers to these questions were evidently transmitted to the FBI:

"The records of the 'Welcome Wagon' determined that the

subject and her husband moved to Glencoe, Illinois from

Chicago on October 3, 1968. In Glencoe they reside at

663 Fernwood, a home purchased by husband John Doe. The

record disclosed that at the time they had two children,

ages five and nine. The husband is employed as a sales

executive for . The wife is a full time

housewife." (Excerpted from Joan B.'s FBI file.) -2-

Or take the case of Barbara B. a housewife in St. Louis, Missouri active in the civil rights movement, again in the late 1960's. As Barbara became involved in planning various actions, and attended night meetings, her marriage with Fred B. suffered. She was never quite sure why he seemed so remote, and almost suspicious of her activities. Finally the marriage dissolved, and the two were divorced.

Only last year, when the civil rights organization for which she had worked wrote for its files, did Barbara learn that Fred had been receiving letters crudely penned supposedly by inner city black women (but in fact written by FBI agents) saying that she was sleeping with the black leaders of the demonstrations.

The charges were entirely false, but it was far too late to undo the damage they had caused.

Sometimes the spying is conducted by local police "Red Squads" (a common term for police intelligence units). In Chicago a middle-aged Quaker woman, Mary McDougal

Hannaford, learned that she had been the subject of surveillance by the Chicago Red

Squad for her activities in support of the peace movement at the time of the Demo- cratic National Convention. When the Chicago police files were made public as the result of a law suit, there were some twenty cards reporting Mary Hannaford's presence at meetings, some in her own home, to discuss nonviolent solutions to the tensions of the times.

"They were all small groups, in my home or in friends' homes," Mary Hannaford commented. "You can tell there had to be a spy among us, and that is very dis- turbing to me. I used to wonder how it could happen in Germany and Russia. There must be people willing to inform on other people. I'm afraid this must mean it could happen in every society. If they are encouraged, and there is a climate for it, then people are apparently willing to spy on their friends."

A suit against the Chicago police for spying on thousands of citizens like

Mary Hannaford was filed by The Alliance to End Repression made up of 15 organizations,

4 churches and 18 individuals. One of the organizations, the Board of Church and

Society of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church, was represented at Alliance meetings by a pleasant and earnest woman whom we'll call -3-

Jane Smith. Other members of the Alliance recalled vaguely that Jane Smith had

once represented a right-wing Methodist group, but felt she had become aware of the

dangers of a police state. So in sympathy with the objectives of the Alliance,

and so willing to work hard was Jane Smith that she was soon made a member of the

Steering Committee. When she attended meetings of the Chicago Police Board in

this capacity she often spoke strongly against police abuse.

But Jane herself, it turned out, was a spy for the police, writing undercover

reports on the Alliance. These were disclosed when the Alliance received material

as the result of a disclosure motion in the federal suit. By a process of checking who was present at each meeting from which a report was filed, the author was nar-

rowed down to one person, Jane Smith. Her conversion to a civil liberties position

had been only protective covering all along. Other women representing church groups

on the Alliance were upset to realize that the nice woman who had sat next to them

at so many meetings had in fact been willing to report on them.

Like Pandora's box, the opening of the Chicago police files revealed a stream

of horrors. Not only was the Alliance to End Repression spied upon, but so were

its member agencies, including the United Methodist Church itself. Some 55 pages

of police files were turned over to the church as a result of a court action. They

reveal that operatives attended meetings of the Board of Social Concerns, dealing with such issues as prison release, ministry, aid to migrant farm workers, a center

for summer youth activities, and community action against racism. Matters of church

budget and pastoral appointments were scrutinized, and an Annual Conference attended

by some 900 ministers and laity from 420 churches was infiltrated.

The revelation of spying on Methodists has caused many other church groups

to wonder about their activities. The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker

Service Organization, ha2 earlier requested its files from nearly a dozen federal

agencies and discovered it has been under continual surveillance by the FBI since

1921. Mail had been opened and meetings infiltrated in order that the government could observe such activities as the organizing of parent groups in the deseg- regation of schools or the holding of seminars on international problems in church basements. In the process of the AFSC revelations it was discovered that the CIA was also watching the Society of Friends, having included at least one issue of the Newsletter of the Washington, D.C. Florida Avenue Friends Meeting in its files. This was the Meeting which Herbert Hoover, hardly our most radical president, attended while in the White House. Among the names circled for further checking was that of George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, who died in 1691!

In Baltimore, Libby Jones joined a women's consciousness raising group in the late sixties. Libby was home with two small children while her husband was going to medical school. She had received her master's in English before having Ronnie; she found the small apartment and the constant stream of diapers less than stimu- lating. In the group she was helped to understand that her feelings were not wrong, or particularly unusual, and that she owed a duty to herself as well as to her children and would, in fact, be a better mother for developing her own capacities.

As part of its action program, the group with which she met discussed establishing a child care center where small children would receive adequate care while their parents worked.

Dave Jones went to Cleveland for his residency, and Libby found she could combine part time editing with the care of her children. Years after she left the Baltimore area she discovered that her name was in the FBI files for her participation in the consciousness raising group. The agent, who could only have been one of the group, was apparently mystified by the whole process:

"The movement started in Baltimore in the summer of 1968. There

was no structure or parent organization. There were no rules

or plans to go by. It started out as a group therapy session

with young women who were either lonely or confined to the

home with small children, getting together to talk out their problems. Along with this, they wanted a purpose and that

was to free women from the hum-drum existence of being only

a wife and a mother. They wanted equal opportunities that

men have in work and in society. They wanted their husbands

to share in the housework and in rearing their children. They

also wanted to go out and work in whatever kind of jobs they

wanted and not be discriminated against."

In the volumnious files which have now been made public on the FBI's sur- veillance of the women's movement, the same note of petulant puzzlement can be heard. "This movement reflects the same restlessness and dissatisfaction which has motivated minority, student and a variety of other groups to engage in agitation," a San Francisco plant wrote. A poor Cleveland informer could make little of it: "Women's Liberation is currently even less defined than the year previously in the Cleveland Division. Some of these issues (child care, abortion, counselling, birth control) are gaining respectable support from clergy and from public and private social workers. "

Women interested in parent participation in the development of day care centers, or in programs for dealing with women's health issues both came under scrutiny in the early 1970's. A group of mothers who picketed a conference on industrial day care were reported upon in New York. In Michigan, the local police Red Squad used a trumped-up drug charge to raid the headquarters of a problem pregnancy counselling group, and go off with personal files on all the women who had been patients.

Much of the surveillance makes no sense, unless one believes as a few FBI agents evidently did, that any form of restlessness or dissatisfaction was by definition subversive to the American way of life. It can only be understood as part of a vacuum cleaner approach to information gathering; the agents thought that if they would suck up all the dirt they could find, what would emerge would be "the big picture." Instead, what emerged is what emerges from a vacuum cleaner, a bag of dust.

As Mary Hannaford says, it is upsetting to think of women spying on other women. In some cases we know an electric bugging device was used to collect information rather than paid informers, but stories have also surfaced of women who found themselves slowly enmeshed into informer roles. Such a woman was Mary

Jo Cook, of Buffalo, New York. The oldest daughter in a Catholic family of four- teen children, she was asked by the FBI to serve as a "big sister" to a local branch of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, advising them at the same time she collected information on them. Ultimately, she also became active in the women's movement in the Buffalo area. When the FBI pressed her for more and more informa- tion, she became upset and finally made a public protest that was written into the

Congressional Record.

With the exposure of extensive illegal spying by the FBI and the CIA, there has been an effort to make it appear that less surveillance is actually going on in this country. Both Watergate and the end of the war in Vietnam have contributed to a different climate. Nevertheless, there is no reason to believe that local police Red Squads have been any less active in keeping tabs on those in the community who appear to be interested in social change movements. Many of the people whose mindset equates an interest in community day care centers with an interest in revolution are still in place. Evidence that all these police intelligence units or Red Squads share their information through a little known nationwide network, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, privately financed and responsible to no one, has recently surfaced. One can assume if one were once the subject of surveillance in Buffalo or Seattle, one's name is now on file in all of the 225 member agencies. We have never had a police state in this country, and likely we never will.

But the apparatus is in place. Housewives with social consciences should not allow the possibility of being reported upon to deter them from their community activities. To do so is to let the anti-freedom forces win. But it is well to be alert to the possibility that one is being watched, and to speak out as force- fully as one can against such a state of things.

Under the Freedom of Information Act it is possible to get one's individual file, or the file of a community organization to which one has belonged by writing to the FBI, CIA or other relevant agency.

In a few cities, where citizens groups have launched class action law suits, police surveillance files are open to individuals. Most are not; there is a crying need for freedom of information laws specifically geared to permitting the in- dividual access to his own police file. More and more church and community groups are preparing to work on such legislation. If you volunteer to do such work in your community you may be watched, but you will be helping to make sure that your children's freedom is intact.

To quote a Cheyenne woman:

"A nation is not conquered

Until the hearts of its women

Are on the ground

Then it is done, no matter

How brave its warriors

Nor how strong its opponents."