FBI Releases John Lennon Files

NME reports that a surveillance report on John Lennon, issued by the United States intelligence services, will finally be released to the public after a court judge officially ordered the action.

The John Lennon documents have been concealed for 25 years and show the musician's connections to left wing and anti-war protest groups in London during the 1970s. It is believed that Lennon's participation in protests against the Vietnam War made him a target subject for the FBI surveillance, complete with wire-tapping.

In 1981, historian Jon Wiener requested the documents in order to write a book in honor of the star's death, but the FBI only released some of the files, insisting that the others were exempt from the existing freedom of information laws due to their political nature. Wiener then sued the American government, which granted the release of some more of the documents in a settlement in 1997. This week, a federal judge ordered the release of the remaining ten pages of documents.

Among the files is an interview with left-wing newspaper, Red Mole, and show Lennon's support for Cambodia during the United States attacks. However, the documents also show that he rejected a request to fund a left-wing bookshop. This led the FBI to suggest that Lennon "apparently resisted the attempts of any particular group to secure any hold over him."

Wiener does not think the files will cause the British or American government to take any different security actions, stating, "I doubt that Tony Blair's government will launch a military strike on the US in retaliation for the release of these documents. Today we can see that the national security claims that the FBI had been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning."