In an article that ran in the April 12, 1980, issue of The Nation, Sigmund Diamond, Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, printed a series of Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] confidential memoranda that resulted from an article which ran in The Crimson in June, 1949. The Crimson investigative feature on FBI activities at Yale claimed that undercover agents at Yale were interfering with faculty appointments by providing secret reports on professors suspected of Communist leanings to Yale administrators.

The memoranda, obtained recently through the Freedom of Information Act, trace the consequences of that article. William F. Buckley Jr., then-chairman of the Yale Daily News, worked with the FBI over the next year, assuring it that the News disapproved of the Crimson article and supported the FBI. Buckley also arranged the first-ever FBI open forum to allow Bureau officials to tell their side of the story.

This article reconstructs the controversy of those years through FBI documents, past issues of both the Crimson and the Yale Daily News, and recent interviews with participants in the conflict.

The Investigative Article

WILLIAM S. FAIRFIELD, managing editor of The Crimson in 1948, wrote an article on June 4, 1949, which reported that undercover FBI agents "wander in and out of (Yale) Provost Edgar S. Furniss's office every day" to inform on young faculty up for tenure. The physics department received the most extensive surveillance. Fairfield reported. The FBI approached Henry Margenau, a professor in the Physics Department and now Higgins Professor of Physics and Natural Philosophy Emeritus at Yale, to reproach him for speaking before the New Haven Youth Movement, a group with supposedly leftist leanings, Fairfield claimed. He noted that Margenau later nervously checked with the FBI every time he gave a speech before an unknown group.

And that was one of the minor incidents. Fairfield alleged that the FBI provided Yale President Charles Seymour with clandestine, often inaccurate reports on faculty members' politics. That procedure clearly broke the president's official policy of accepting no secret, unsolicited information, even though he also did not want to hire any Communists. The university did allow one official liaison from the FBI but prohibited the presence of the other informants, whom faculty members told Fairfield were "suspected of watching their homes and in one case of opening their mail." Fairfield also reported that Robert S. Cohen, a post-doctoral student in Yale's philosophy department, was denied an instructorship when the university's Prudential Committee overrode the recommendation of the philosophy department and the unanimous vote of the faculty. The committee reversed its decision when information on Cohen's alleged Communist activities--which Furniss said came from the FBI--proved grossly inaccurate.

Finally, Fairfield cited a third "probable case" in which the FBI "again definitely violated its own code of ethics" by using scare tactics. Furniss told Fairfield that late one night "an eminently respectable" Yale faculty member, "a one-time refugee from Nazi Germany," received a mysterious phone call:

Why aren't you a naturalized American citizen?

I am.

Oh. Well you better report it. It isn't on the records.

The voice continued to ask probing questions. The next day the professor showed up in Furniss's office, extremely disturbed by the mystery caller. Furniss called the FBI liaison man into his office and warned him to tone down his information-gathering techniques. Fairfield's story ended by reporting rumors that Yale officials supplied "complete appointment lists" to the FBI.

The FBI Response

THE CRIMSON received an official-looking letter, six days after Fairfield's article ran, from J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, labeling the piece "inaccurate, distorted and untrue." Hoover insisted that: no undercover agents or general informants operated at Yale; no secret files were provided to "Yale or any other educational institution"; no FBI agents "influenced Yale academic and political activities; and no FBI agent ever investigated "applicants for teaching positions in Yale or any other college or university." Finally, Hoover asserted, two people quoted in Fairfield's story had denied the statements attributed to them. The letter ran in The Crimson with a defense from Fairfield, in which he claimed to have spoken to about thirty people at Yale.

The following September, J.J. Gleason, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's New Haven office, wrote to Hoover. Subject: discussions between himself and FBI Assistant Director L.B. Nichols about the Fairfield story "which was derogatory to the Bureau." Gleason warned Hoover that he had received a call from a Yale Daily News reporter, tipping him off that the News planned to run a follow-up story, featuring an interview with Cohen. The post-doctoral student's "identity was known to the Bureau" (FBI-speak for a person who is on file with the FBI), Gleason made sure to note.

Gleason added that he had called H.B. Fisher, the FBI Liaison Officer at Yale, and asked him to look into the matter. Fisher told Gleason that Yale administrators were attempting to "have the News story killed inasmuch as it was entirely inaccurate and would only tend to prolong the effects, if any, of the original article in The Harvard Crimson." He also noted that Margenau, the Physics professor, and Provost Furniss had officially denied the Crimson statements attributed to them.