Hangouts for the KGB are what libraries have become, according to the FBI. In a new report to the Senate, the Bureau says that libraries have been targets of espionage efforts since at least 1962. The Soviets have found that laying hands on secret documents is frequently unnecessary; they can simply collect what they need in public research libraries, identifying “the nation’s emerging technology before its components can become classified or restricted.” Among other activities, KGB agents engage in “large-scale theft of microfiche records” and make special attempts to recruit librarians, whose familiarity with research techniques makes it possible to pursue “thousands of topics and areas of interest.” Faced with this problem, the FBI has recently sought the help of librarians. The librarians, ever alert for the real enemy, have issued a call to arms against the FBI.

The Bureau’s request, directed mainly at 21 scientific and technical libraries in the New York City area (home of the United Nations and several hundred Soviet-bloc “diplomats”), has been for notification of suspicious behavior by persons from hostile countries. Librarians’ unions treat this as tantamount to establishing a police state. Margaret Chisholm, president of the American Library Association, imagines “the specter of . . . the FBI, or its surrogates, gazing over one’s shoulder, following one through the stacks and to the photocopying machine, and making reports on database searches or items requested through interlibrary loan.” Various ALA officials warn of “the gaze of Big Brother” and “a chilling impact on the First Amendment rights of each and every one of us.” People for the American Way, predictably suing the FBI over the program, warns that “ordinary citizens engaged in harmless research could easily become enmeshed in a web of suspicion.”

But FBI officials have proposed a limited program, involving not politically “dangerous ideas” but sensitive technical information which may determine the life and death of American soldiers and civilians. And, notwithstanding the talk of “webs of suspicion,” there are far too few FBI agents to deal with existing foreign agents; they have little time to make life miserable for “ordinary citizens.” (Other government agencies do that job.) In this program, they are doing the least they can do without forfeiting their duty of defending the United States.

If librarians are concerned about a police state on the horizon, they might reserve some alarm for the big one to the East. But on that issue they are the soul of equanimity. Moscow may be learning how to build a better bomber or a more powerful laser from our libraries, but ALA high-mindedly proclaims “our role to make available and provide access to a diversity of information.” Chisholm declares that “foreign nationals in this country are entitled to the same First Amendment protections of speech as are citizens.”

As this episode reminds, the public image of librarians is out of date. The prim-and-proper ladies who saw themselves as guardians of our civilization have retired. Their replacements, many of them children of the 1960’s, may not be able to discern the totalitarian threat in the Soviet Union, but they spot it all over America—in the FBI, the Moral Majority, parents who don’t want their children raised on Judy Blume. The most generous explanation for this world view is that today’s librarians aren’t too well-read. Some of them might benefit from checking out The Gulag Archipelago. (MK)