The transatlantic web of official conspiracy surrounding John Lennon since his death nearly 20 years ago started unravelling in a Los Angeles federal court building last Friday. The critical moment came when judge Brian Robbins finally lost patience with the FBI and orderd it to release two files of secret suveillance operations on the former Beatle.
The FBI is expected to appeal against the decision, but the dam of official secrecy has been breached, and three of the last 10 documents held by the FBI since the ealy 1970s are set to see the light of day. The final seven are almost certain to follow.
The agency has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to keep them secret becasue, it says, the information they contain belongs to a "foreign power".
Evidence put before Robbins indicates that not only were Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono spied on by the FBI under the direct orders of its director, J. Egdar Hoover, acting on the wishes of president Richard Nixon, but he was also monitored by the British Special Branch and MI5 for years before he moved to the US.
The files are being squeezed out of the agency by Jon Wiener, a deceptively mild-mannered history professor from the University of California. He began his campaign to explore relations between the musician and the authorities a few weeks after Lennon was gunned down outside his New York home in 1980.
"It began out of simple curiosity, a desire to check out a few rumours that Hoover was not Lennon's greatest fan. It then started snowballing into a crusade when I realised how many obstacles were being thrown in my path," the academic said last week.
It was at the height of the anti-Vietnam war protest movement in the early 1970s that Lennon and Ono became key targets for the FBI. Nixon felt cowed and trapped inside the White House as thousands of hippies swarmed outside in the largest demonstrations since the death of Martin Luther King. Both the president and Hoover believed that the outspoken Lennon and his "wierd" wife Ono, fresh from their Amersterdam "sleep-in for peace", were poisoning the minds of American youth.
In 1972, in the middle of a 15-month period of intense surveillance, documents uncovered by Wiener show the FBI orchestrated a police raid in New York that, conveniently, found a small quantity of cannabis that could have been used to end the star's attempts to become a US citizen. The 10 remaining files will reveal the British role in the FBI's operation, said Wiener, whose campaign is being underwritten by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Robbins has been studying Wiener's petitions for at least three years, when the last batch of FBI documents was made public. It is believed, however, that the key that turned the final lock was an affidavit faxed over to his courtroom last week by David Shayler, a fugitive in France after revealing MI5 secrets, declared that in 1993 he saw MI5 files on Lennon.
It is believed one of the two files before the judge concerned information from an MI5 "mole" who had infiltrated the far Left of British politics. According to the file, the millionaire rock star gave £45,000, the equivalent of £400,000 ($900,000) today, to left-wing groups including the Workers' Revolutionary Party, in which the actor Vanessa Redgrave and her brother, Corin, were leading lights, and the IRA.
Officers from MI5's F branch were already carrying out surveillance on the WRP, which was regarded as a serious threat to democracy in Britain. It had a "deep throat" within the organisation, possibly the very person to Lennon talked. This, to MI5, made him a legitimate target: they wanted to know whether he was conspiratorial or just naive. To this end they opened a general file on him, including newspaper cuttings and snatches of gossip. It appears also to have included a handwritten version of the lyrics to Lennon's most overtly political song, "Working Class Hero". He had sent the sheet as a gift to the WRP and it was intercepted by MI5's agent in the party. These days, the lyrics would be worth thousands of dollars at auction.
In the early '70s, when Lennon started worrying the FBI, the Washington agency approached its British colleagues for background information. This request, however, put MI5 into a quandry. It feared that any information it handed over could endanger its mole within the WRP. A summary of Lennon's file was sent to the FBI, omitting any details that could compromise the agency.
It struck a chord in Washington. Undercover agents tracked the Liverpool-born singer and his wife to Irish bars in New York that were holding fundraising events. Their agents even scribbled down the lyrics of the songs he was performing.
Lennon proclaimed: "If it's a choice between the IRA and the British army, I'm with the IRA."
It is the transatlantic link that the FBI feels honour-bound to protect. Earlier files on Lennon have been declassified as the agents died or, in one case, changed their minds and wanted their work for the FBI acknowledged. There is no way of knowing about the current status of the WRP mole, although he or she is unlikely still to be active. The left-wing group has shrunk to a mere faction in recent years.
MI5 is likely to be angered by the Los Angeles court decision. It will confirm old-guard suspicions that any information passed to the US in confidence will, sooner or later, be made public and could rebound on them.
On the other hand, Shayler's revelations demonstrate that the MI5 is not leak-proof.
The final victim of all this hot-headed paranoia was Lennon. the battle to stay in the US, which he finally won in 1974, undermined his physical and mental health and, say biographers, sent him on a "lost weekend" of drugs and women in Los Angeles that lasted through the mid-'70s. Wiener said: "The spying game corrupted the intelligence service, but it broke John Lennon."