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>The new edition of Talking at the Gates contained an afterword which detailed the contents of the file the FBI opened on Baldwin in 1961 and maintained until 1974. In December 1963, his name was added to the Security Index, a list of people to be sought and detained in the event of a state of emergency. >Baldwin’s own telephone was never tapped, as far as the record shows, though there are Bureau records of his conversations with people whose phones were. In 1967 he was made the subject of an F#1 Stop Notice, or “lookout”, so that his arrival at US airports was reported. In this instance, it was by means of a telephone call as he collected his luggage from the carousel >In the mid-1960s, Baldwin was semi-resident in Istanbul. The FBI tracked his movements there, took note of his eviction from an apartment for “homosexual activities”, and of his intention to form an artistic association with the Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal and the actor Engin Cezzar. An interview from a Turkish newspaper was translated and sent to Washington with two sentences emphasized: “Baldwin had settled in Istanbul in March of 1966” and “After finishing his book the author will return to America”. Statements he made in the American press on Civil Rights affairs while in Turkey or in France were clipped and filed. >It includes scattered reports on Baldwin’s movements around the world, records of “pretext phone calls” made by agents for the purposes of soliciting information by deceit (posing as an “auto salesman” or a “member of a peace organization”, among other things), snoopers’ accounts of public meetings and private encounters, articles by and about Baldwin clipped from press sources, as well as oddities such as letters of complaint about his books or media statements, written to Hoover by concerned citizens. Really? This is all of us now? Sounds to me like they really targeted this guy. |