Chapter 11: The FBI and I

My interactions with the FBI appear to have begun when I was a graduate student at Caltech. I had participated in 1952 at a meeting concerned with organizing a protest movement against the death penalty sentences of Julian and Ethel Rosenberg. At the entrance to the meeting hall, there was a desk at which we were asked to write down our contact information and make a contribution. Apparently, an FBI agent was there to make a list of the participants. I first discovered this when, in the mid-1970s, my brother Bob was refused a security clearance to do research at the Livermore Laboratory. Because his participation was deemed important to the laboratory, the administrators appealed and found out that the reason for the refusal was my documented presence at a Rosenberg protest meeting two decades previously at the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles led by the liberal minister, Stephen Fritchman. Once this unimportant item in his FBI file was found, Bob rapidly received the necessary clearance…