Final pages of an FBI surveillance report on John Lennon containing details of the late Beatle's links to left wing and anti war groups in the early seventies have been released following a long legal battle pursued by historian Jon Wiener.
Wiener first requested the documents back in 1981, shortly after deciding to write a book about Lennon's murder the previous year. Some files were released, but the FBI claimed that others were exempt from freedom of information laws. The historian was given a number of additional files back in 1997 after he sued the government and came to a settlement with the FBI, but the final ten pages of the report were withheld by Justice Department until now, when a federal judge ordered their release.
The FBI had maintained that making that information public could lead to political, diplomatic or economic retaliation against the US. Speaking to the LA Times, Wiener responded to those claims, saying: "I doubt that Tony Blair's government will launch a military strike on the US in retaliation for the release of these documents. Today, we can see that the national security claims that the FBI has been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning."
Talking about the content of the pages, Wiener explained that they showed that Lennon had refused requests from a body of UK leftists to fund a bookshop, and note an interview with leftist publication Red Mole, plus his support for Cambodia in the wake of US attacks in the country. The papers admit that Lennon "apparently resisted the attempts of any particular group to secure any hold over him".