My Father’s Red Scare

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/opinion/04klein.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print


January 4, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
My Father’s Red Scare
By PETER W. KLEIN

Vancouver, British Columbia
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My father was never a spy, never a member of the Communist Party. He came by ship to the United States in 1956, fleeing Communism during the Hungarian revolution to pursue the American dream. He worked on a Ford automobile assembly line in Cincinnati by day and moonlighted sharpening lawnmowers at night, saving enough money in a few years to buy a small house. To him, treasonous behavior meant buying a car made outside of America. Nonetheless, as I discovered recently, the F.B.I. kept a file on him from the day he arrived in the United States.

J. Edgar Hoover sent a personal memo to the C.I.A. director calling my father a person of current interest; the case was handled by Alan Belmont, a top bureau official who was instrumental in the case against the Rosenbergs. I discovered this after filing a Freedom of Information Act inquiry as part of some family research for a book. I was shocked to receive 50 F.B.I. pages riddled with my father’s name, the edges dotted with weathered stamps marked “SECRET.” I matched what I read with stories I remembered from when he was alive, and began piecing the case together.

My father once mentioned that during the voyage over, he got into an altercation with another refugee, a man he didn’t know from a town he had never visited. According to the file, this man told an Army captain that my father had been an agent for AVO — the Hungarian K.G.B. — in his town of Tatabanya, that he had interrogated and beaten the man for speaking out against the regime, and that he’d subsequently sent the man to a prison camp. The story was a complete fabrication.

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It has already happened. Last year a Syrian informant told the New York police that five Arabs he knew were importing weapons for a suicide bombing. After several weeks and the involvement of more than 30 New York police agents, as well as federal customs officials, the F.B.I. and Israeli law enforcement, it was determined that the “weapons” were in fact jewelry. As with my father, the informant had a vendetta and had lied to the authorities.........

[Lisa]

1. that's the thing about security files -- poor quality info, and mistakes ...

.... often seem to go uncorrected. (You'd think if national security was THAT important to the folks who keep tabs, they would want to make sure they had accurate information!)

My cousin got a shock when she had to go through a security check when applying for a Canadian government job, and was red-flagged. Not only did they have her personal info mixed up with her mom's -- since her mom had been interned as a Japanese-Canadian during WWII, all that stuff was still in there as a security issue (even though the feds apologized and paid compensation two decades before!). Also there was a lot of bogus stuff which was quite bizarre, and we don't even know whether it was supposed to be about her or her mom.

To make matters worse, the Mounties started to tail her around town after she'd put in the FOI request (she was just following the instructions of her prospective gov't employer, too). The guy doing the following was a friend of a friend (they live in a small town so everybody knows everyone else). He was very apologetic, since it's not as if he didn't have other more important things he could have been doing.