After a 25-year legal battle, the UCLA historian, Jon Wiener has managed to secure the final 10 documents relating to the surveillance of John Lennon that the FBI were refusing to release.
I am absolutely delighted to read that J Edgar Hoover sent a memo to Nixon's bagman, HR Haldeman, informing him that Lennon was sympathetic to "extreme leftwing activities in Britain". This was hardly a secret to anyone in Britain at the time since the interview Robin Blackburn and myself conducted with Lennon was published as a supplement in The Red Mole. Photographs of John and Yoko wearing Red Mole T-shirts appeared on the cover of Ramparts magazine in the states (aficionados can see one of them on the cover of the new edition of my book Streetfighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, which also contains the interview).
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