Word: program
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...whole idea was rather silly--or scary, depending on how you look at it. Though the program was secret, it never ranked especially high on the FBI's agenda. I suppose they realized that any spy who had to find his information in Popular Mechanics couldn't be one of the Kremlin's top-guns...
Despite the low probabilty of nabbing any high-level spooks, the FBI nonetheless took the program seriously. So seriously, in fact, that when librarians began to criticize the program as an unwarranted infringement on the privacy of patrons, the FBI was convinced that that criticism must have originated in the Kremlin...
Documents released this Saturday by the National Security Archive show that the FBI began to check librarians to discover "whether a Soviet active-measures campaign had been initiated to discredit the Library Awareness Program." Implicit in this request is the FBI's belief that any criticism of its programs is downright un-American...
...Director William S. Sessions claims that the FBI usually surveys persons whom they have contacted for an investigation. This is true, but it does not explain why more than 100 of the 266 investigations performed under the Library Surveillance Program were librarians. Nor does it explain why the scrutiny of librarians began only after the program was exposed. At that time, some librarians became public opponents of the program, and thus the subject of FBI investigations...
Concerned about increasing criticism of the surveillance program, the FBI sent agents to library associations urging them to be aware of manipulative counter-intelligence agencies. The supposed Soviet campaign, the FBI wrote in an in-house memo, could not go "unchallenged...