WASHINGTON — The FBI is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.
Anderson's family has refused to allow a search of the files of the well-known reporter who had long feuded with the FBI and had exposed plans by the CIA to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-Contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen.
His son said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father's principles and intimidate other journalists and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.
"It's my father's legacy," said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist's nine children. "The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to."
The FBI says the dispute over the papers, which await cataloging at George Washington University here, is a simple matter of law.
"It's been determined that among the papers there are a number of classified U.S. government documents," said Bill Carter,
a bureau spokesman. "Under the law, no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them. These documents remain the property of the government."
The standoff, which appears to have begun with an FBI effort to find evidence for the criminal case against two pro-Israel lobbyists, has quickly hardened into a new test of the Bush administration's protection of government secrets and journalists' ability to report on them.
The issue comes as FBI agents conduct a criminal investigation of several leaks of classified information, including details of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency and the secret overseas jails for terrorist suspects run by the CIA.
In addition, the two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, face trial next month for receiving classified information, in a case that has been criticized by civil liberties advocates as criminalizing the routine exchange of inside information.
The National Archives recently suspended a secret program in which intelligence agencies had pulled thousands of historical documents from public access on the ground that they should still be classified.
But the FBI's quest for secret material leaked years ago to a now-dead journalist, first reported Tuesday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems unprecedented, according to several people with long experience in First Amendment law.
"I'm not aware of any previous government attempt to retrieve such material," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Librarians and historians are having a fit, and I can't imagine a bigger chill to journalists."
The George Washington University librarian, Jack Siggins, said the university strongly objects to the FBI removing anything from the Anderson archive.
"We certainly don't want anyone going through this material, let alone the FBI, if they're going to pull documents out," Siggins said. "We think Jack Anderson represents something important in American culture — answers to the question, how does our government work?"
Anderson was hired as a reporter in 1947 by Drew Pearson, who bequeathed to him a column called Washington Merry-Go-Round. At the height of its popularity, it ran in more than 1,000 newspapers and reached some 40 million readers.
Anderson developed Parkinson's disease and did little reporting for the column in the 15 years before his death in December at 83, said Mark Feldstein, director of the journalism program at George Washington, who is writing a book about him.
His files were stored for years at Brigham Young University before being transferred to George Washington last year, but the FBI apparently made no effort to search them. "They waited until he was dead," Kevin Anderson said.
The columnist's son said FBI agents first approached his mother, Olivia, 79, early this year.
"They talked about the AIPAC case and that they thought Dad had some classified documents and they wanted to take fingerprints from them" to identify possible sources, Kevin Anderson recalled. "But they said they wanted to look at all 200 boxes and if they found anything classified they'd be duty-bound to take them."
Kevin Anderson said he believed the AIPAC case is a pretext for a broader search. That conclusion is shared by others, including Thomas S. Blanton, who oversees the National Security Archive, a collection of historic documents at George Washington.
"Recovery of leaked CIA and White House documents that Jack Anderson got back in the '70s has been on the FBI's wanted list for decades," Blanton said.
Anderson had a well-documented feud with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose trash he once searched and who once described the columnist as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures."
Carter of the FBI declined to comment on any connection to the AIPAC case or to say how the bureau learned that classified documents were in the Anderson files.
Feldstein, whose book, "Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture" is to be published next year, said he found it "a little daunting" when FBI agents came to his house last month to ask about the Anderson documents. He found they knew little about the columnist and his work.
Asked what Anderson might make of the FBI's actions, Feldstein said, "He'd be thunderously outraged, and privately bemused by the ineptness of his old adversaries."