F.B.I. chief lying — ex-agent

Press, 17 January 1979, Page 8

F.B.I. chief lying — ex-agent

NZPA San Francisco

A retired American Federal Bureau of Investigation agent has accused the bureau’s second-ranking executive of perjuring himself in sworn statements he has given in a long-running lawsuit against the bureau by the Socialist (Workers’ Party.

The accusations against Mr James Adams were made by Mr Wesley Swearingen. The retired agent takes strong exception to Mr Adams’s statement under oath - that releasing the names of F. 8.1. informants who have infiltrated the party over the years would jeopardise the safety of informants and the broader work of the bureau.

Despite an order by a Federal district judge, " the Justice Department has refused, chiefly on the basis of Mr Adams’s testimony, to turn the names of 18 F. 8.1. informants over to lawyers for the Socialist Workers’ Party.

One of the main points of

contention is Mr Adams’s assertion that those who act as the F.8.1.’s informants are assured that their identity will not be revealed and that the bureau’s informant programme is built upon an explicit promise of confidentiality in all cases.

Mr Swearingen says that the concept of a pledge of confidentiality was invented by the F. 8.1. after the Socialist Workers’ Party filed suit and that, during his 25 years with the bureau, agents were instructed to make certain that informants understood that they might well have ,to testify eventually in open court on the bureau’s behalf.

Steps are being taken in both New York and Washington to establish the accuracy of Mr Swearingen’s charges. And although one source said there was a possibility that some criminal charge might result from the inquiry, others said such a charge was less than likely at this point. Mr Adams has submitted a sworn affidavit, given a deposition and testified in

| the Socialist Workers case. The thrust of all his statements has been that the F. 8.1. has an obligation to honour its pledge of confidentiality to the 19 informants and that harm has come to informants whose names became known to the organisations they were assigned to infiltrate. Mr Swearingen takes issue with most of Mr Adams’s evidence and. in a few cases, accuses the F. 8.1. official of having misrepresented, deliberately or otherwise, the facts at his disposal.

Asked about Mr Swearingen’s charges, Mr Adams said through an F. 8.1. spokesman that the affidavit he had submitted had been prepared by F. 8.1. headquarters staff, based upon extensive research including a survey of all field divisions. Among the F. 8.1. documents that Mr Swearingen took with him when he left the bureau — an action which the bureau has decided not to prosecute — was a request from F. 8.1. headquarters in Washington for evidence of informants

who had suffered after their identities became known to the political groups against which they had been targeted. The evidence was to be presented to the court in the Socialist Workers case. Within the Los Angeles office, he said, the project of coming up with a list of such informants was the hottest thing in the bureau, and he said that eventually a list of 19 informants was compiled and sent to help buttress Mr Adams’s case

Mr Swearingen dismissed the list as a pack of lies, saying that none of the 19 names it contained had been those of political informants whose identities had become known against their wishes Nine of the 19, he said, were never informants at all but rather voluntary witnesses — three were informants in criminal cases — three were political informants who had volunteered to testify in public, two were informants who had disclosed their own roles, and one informant had been persuaded by the F. 8.1. to testify in a criminal case.