Contacting the FBI (from Stealing Fire)

"In 1999, I contacted the FBI, requesting their file on my father. Nearly a year later, when I had almost forgotten about my request, I finally received a phone call from an FBI representative. She graciously explained to me that they had two dossiers on my father, which together amounted to over 2,500 pages of material. To declassify the entire file would take more than five years. If, however, I would modify my request and be content with approximately 750 pages, which the FBI judged the most significant and important ones, the request for information could be processed within six months.

Why, I wondered, did releasing the files need to be so complicated? After all, it was over half a century since my father’s acts of espionage had taken place. By the time I spoke with this FBI representative, not only Theodore Hall and my father but also almost everybody else who had been involved was dead. Any interest in the case was, or at least should have been, historical rather than strategic. But I didn’t feel like agonizing over their reasons for the delays and readily amended my application.

Over a year passed, and still no files arrived. Despite repeated phone calls to the FBI, I received only bureaucratic assurances that my request under the Freedom of Information Act was being processed. Finally, I wrote to the FBI again, and within a week the files, a repository of forbidden knowledge, like that of the nuclear bomb itself, were in my mailbox.

I felt like a child lying in bed and listening to a violent argument going on in the next room. Ought I really to be reading such material? Was I trespassing? Few people have ever been able to come as close to revisiting their childhoods as I did by going through those papers from the FBI. Odd phrases preserved in the files evoked long buried, at times painful, memories, which are far too private for me to ever explain. As I read the files, I was torn between anger at and sympathy towards my father.

I had entered an eerie world of subterfuge, a parallel dimension accompanying everyday life yet seldom intersecting with it, like the world of spirits in traditional lore. Almost every document was stamped 'secret' or 'top secret,' and had entire sentences, at least names, blocked out. Often, a page was hardly more than a collection of black lines, with only an enticing phrase or two still readable."

Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage