The FBI’s purpose, according to Herbert N. Foerstel in his book “Surveillance in the Stacks,” was to demand details about library use by people from countries “hostile to the United States, such as the Soviet Union.” Agents tended to approach whoever was at the reference desk — often a student assistant or paraprofessional — and ask for names and other details of people who used the library to locate technical and scientific materials, such as engineering journals and publications of the National Technical Information Service. At the University of Wisconsin, according to Foerstel, agents watched a Soviet national reading the Russian newspaper “Pravda” and then asked a librarian if that copy “had been marked up.”
The rise in book bans, explained
The public was largely ignorant of these encounters until the case of Gennady Zakharov, a Russian-born United Nations aide who was indicted in 1986 for trying to transmit “unclassified information about [American] robotics and computer technology” to the Soviets. His source turned out to be a Guyanese college student who stole publicly available microfiche from several New York-area libraries and sold it to Zakharov.
The next year, the New York Times reported for the first time on the existence of the Library Awareness Program, calling it part of a national counterintelligence effort.
The FBI immediately tried to downplay the program’s significance. “Hostile intelligence has had some success working the campuses and libraries,” said James Fox, deputy assistant director of the New York FBI office, “and we’re just going around telling people what to be alert for.”
This explanation didn’t satisfy librarians. “We’re extremely concerned,” said Betsy Pinover, public relations director of the New York Public Library, “about intellectual freedom and the reader’s right to privacy, and are committed to protecting the privacy of our readers.” The New York Library Association and American Library Association issued similar statements. Rep. Major R. Owens (D-N.Y.), a former librarian, called it “a new low for the anti-intellectualism of the Reagan administration.” Cartoonists took aim; humorists made hay.
When the FBI Was Secretly Spying on People's Library Habits | @washingtonpost https://t.co/0jLhLJEkO9
— Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) January 24, 2023