Fonda, Astor, Seberg Were Targets of INLET Program
Jan. 3, 2000
By Janon Fisher
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| AP/Lionel Cironneau |
| Actress Jane Fonda in 1994 |
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NEW YORK (APBnews.com) -- An administrative program set up by the FBI to provide information to the president during the late 1960s and early 1970s sometimes resembled a scandal sheet on the same level as the Star, the National Enquirer or even the Weekly World News.
In fact, some of the information collected by the bureau was also passed along to gossip columnists who published the scandalous tidbits.
The program, called INLET -- FBI shorthand for intelligence letters -- gives a history lesson on major events in the underground movement in the tumultuous era. The trial of the Chicago Seven, the Kent State shootings and the flight of Black Panther Bobby Seale are all present in the file, but the bureau couldn't help slipping in the irrelevant, the petty and the scandalous from time to time.
The FBI took an interest in actress Jean Seberg, star of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, after she became a financial contributor to the Black Panther Party. Seberg grew up in a small middle-class town in Iowa, about as far as you can get from the tough neighborhoods that spawned the Black Panther Party. But Mark Rappaport, who directed a documentary called From the Journals of Jean Seberg, said the actress did more than just make donations to the radical group.
"She dated two Black Panthers, not at the same time, but serially," said Rappaport.
Nixon in the loop
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| A Sept. 25, 1970, file photo of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover |
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In 1970 Seberg became pregnant. The FBI alerted President Nixon to this development, even providing rumors as to who the father might be. "She has for some time been the paramour of BPP [Black Panther Party] Minister of Education Raymond Hewitt. She recently informed a source she was four months pregnant by Hewitt and expects to have his baby in Europe this fall."
It is not clear what the president would do with the information provided by the bureau -- especially the last part of the entry: "Hewitt has other illegitimate children, a fact wryly acknowledged by Miss Seberg when she said she had devised a new nickname for him, 'Johnny Appleseed.'"
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| AP/File |
| Thirteen months before Watergate, President Nixon, shown in this 1990 photo, directed an intelligence-gathering effort against leading Democrats, the San Francisco Examiner reported in 1997. |
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The president wasn't the only one to receive this information, Rappaport said. The Los Angeles Times ran the item on its gossip page. Although Seberg, who was married at the time to writer-director Romain Gary, denied that a Black Panther was the baby's father, she was so traumatized by the revelation that she became depressed and started drinking heavily. Seberg then miscarried, which sank her into a further depression.
Rappaport said that Seberg attempted suicide every year on the anniversary of her baby's death.
"When she took the baby back to Iowa to have it buried, she wanted a glass-faced coffin so that everyone could see that it was not the a Black Panther baby. She was obviously really far gone at that point," he said.
Jane Fonda also a target
Seberg was not the only actress about whom the FBI kept the president informed. Details of Jane Fonda's financial contributions to the Black Panthers were also passed to the president, along with a comment from a leader of the group. "A leader of this extremist group plans to meet with the movie star, whom he considers 'ugly' and of no interest other than as a source of funds, to ask her for another $10,000 for the Panthers," the letter says.
The items on both actresses seem to fly in the face of at least one of INLET's criteria that "mere rumors or nebulous information will have no place in this letter."
Brooke Astor gets a mention
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| Actress Jean Seberg, shown in this 1965 file photo, gained fame in France playing opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in 1960. She committed suicide in 1979. |
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INLET also contained items that might be at home in the society pages.
Socialite Brook Astor was threatened by the Black Panthers after a fund-raising party that was chronicled in Tom Wolfe's essay "Radical Chic."
According to a memo, "Although invited, New York society leader Mrs. Vincent Astor did not attend conductor Leonard Bernstein's much-publicized fund-raising party for the Black Panthers on January 14."
The bureau reports that Astor did not approve of the Black Panthers and that the day after the party, a white woman in a chauffeured limousine left six letters for Astor at her home, one of them containing a threat.
"One of the notes -- all of which were purportedly from the Black Panther Party -- threatened '... We are going to kill you and all white pigs. Most of all J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI white pigs. You too. Signed the Black Panthers," the memo states.
INLET's real intention
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| AP/Serge J-F. Levy |
| Brooke Astor, philanthropist and socialite, in 1997 |
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There were six main criteria for appropriate material for INLET reports: information on national and international security, developments on current or pending security matters, developing intelligence trends, weak points in national security that could affect foreign policy, "inside" information on demonstrations or civil disruptions.
But the sixth item of INLET's mission statement specified the bureau sought "items with an unusual twist or concerning prominent personalities which may be of special interest to the President or Attorney General."
A memo describing INLET in the Oregon field office contained an additional paragraph to item six that later lead the press and Congress to believe that this was the FBI's domestic-spying program. The field office addition stated, "It is to be noted that the type of information desired in paragraph six may be obtained through investigations not wholly related to the security field."
Disgruntled feds leaked the program
In December 1972, the code name INLET was no longer used by the FBI, but the bureau advised field offices that "they had a continuing responsibility to be alert for high-level intelligence data of the type formerly specified under the 'INLET' program."
The program became public through a leak, the bureau believed, by two disgruntled former agents in the mid-1970s and was subsequently the focus of a probe lead by Congressman Les Aspin and an expose by the Oregon Times in February 1973.
When the story broke in the Oregon Times, bureau headquarters in Washington attributed the controversy to that one line from the field office. A June 14, 1973, memo stated, "It is believed that the unfortunate phrasing of the quoted example combined with the inaccurate interpretation of the latter quote is the grounds for the critical attention which this matter received."
"The INLET program was nothing more than an administrative device designed to insure that such information would reach the President on a timely basis, consolidated into one document," the bureau concluded.
Cindy Adams can rest easy.
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