In Pursuit of Anderson's Papers, FBI Says It Will Go to Prosecutors if Talks With Family Fail

By SCOTT CARLSON

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday that it will ask the Justice Department to take action if the government cannot reach an agreement with the family of the muckraking journalist Jack Anderson to search through his papers. The FBI believes that Anderson's archive, which is now held by George Washington University's library, contains classified information -- although most of it is likely decades old.

Anderson, who died in December, was for decades one of Washington's best-known investigative journalists. His syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, was carried in hundreds of newspapers.

Although the FBI will not detail its plans, turning to the Justice Department would likely result in a subpoena for the papers, said Kevin N. Anderson, Jack Anderson's son. He said he would continue to resist the government's demands.

"I'm going to get a Blackberry so I can send out word on my way to jail," he said while driving to a television station for an interview. The case, which was first reported on Tuesday in The Chronicle, has garnered national media attention and raised the ire of liberal and anti-government bloggers.

Bill Carter, a spokesman for the FBI, said the agency had "determined that among the papers, there are a number of U.S. government documents that contain classified information," although he would not describe how the FBI made that determination.

Those who have seen the papers have said that there is probably little of interest to the FBI in the archive. Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at the university, dug through the archival boxes with graduate-student assistants recently. Most of what he found was "ancient history," Mr. Feldstein said.

"It's very difficult for me to envision that there is anything of use to the FBI or a criminal investigation," he said.

Several weeks ago, when FBI agents showed up at Mr. Feldstein's home asking about the Anderson papers, he tried to tell the agents that he hadn't seen anything that looked sensitive or classified. But they pressed him for information, he said.

"They were really pushing me on where [the papers] were housed physically and who had custody of them," he said, noting that the agents also wanted to know the names of the students who had worked with him. Mr. Feldstein said that he would not tell them, and that he referred the agents to the university's lawyers.

If there are classified papers in the archive, those papers "remain the property of the U.S. government," said Mr. Carter, the FBI spokesman. "Under the law, no private person may posses classified documents that were illegally provided to them, and there is no legal basis under which a third party can retain them as part of an estate."

Asked why the FBI was pursuing the archive now -- decades after Jack Anderson was photographed holding classified documents -- Mr. Carter said the agency had only recently learned that the archive might contain classified information.

Since news of the FBI's interest in the papers became public, many scholars and even some lawmakers have expressed concern about the agency's inquiries.

U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman, a Democrat from California, has been critical of secrecy in government recently, particularly at hearings that a House of Representatives committee held on reclassifying information that is currently in the National Archives. He told The Chronicle in an e-mail message on Tuesday that "the FBI has no legitimate business poking through Mr. Anderson's private papers" and called the case a "new low" for a "secrecy crazed" administration.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted some interesting coincidences in the timing of the Anderson story. The Pulitzer Prizes, which were announced at virtually the same time, honored reporters who had used secret sources and classified information to report controversial government policies -- the same techniques that made Anderson famous.

Some prominent conservative pundits, however, argued that because those journalists used classified information, they should have gotten not Pulitzers but jail time.

This shows the value of the Anderson papers, Mr. Blanton said. "There are extraordinary lessons here about journalists in wartime," he said. "There is some resonance with today in Anderson's coverage of Vietnam or the secret and unseemly side of national-security affairs."

• National Archives Will Stop Letting Agencies Secretly Withdraw Documents (4/19/2006/)

• George Washington U. to Receive Jack Anderson's Papers -- but FBI Wants to See Them First (4/18/2006)

• Bush's Choice for U.S. Archivist, Known for Book on Alger Hiss, Irks Some Historians (4/30/2004)

• Draft Executive Order on Declassification Eases Some Fears About Government Secrecy (3/18/2003)

• Historians Attack Bush Executive Order on Presidential Records (11/16/2001)