Scientists under surveillance : the FBI files / JPat Brown, B.C.D. Lipton, and Michael Morisy ; foreword by Steven Aftergood ; introduction by Walter V. Robinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brown, J. Patrick, author.

Lipton, Beryl, author.

Morisy, Michael, author.

Contributor:

Aftergood, Steven.

Robinson, Walter V., 1946-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Scientists--20th century.

Scientists.

Governmental investigations--United States--History--20th century.

Governmental investigations.

United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation--Records and correspondence.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (440 pages).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : MIT Press, 2019.

Summary:

Cold War-era FBI files on famous scientists, including Neil Armstrong, Isaac Asimov, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Alfred Kinsey, and Timothy Leary. Armed with ignorance, misinformation, and unfounded suspicions, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover cast a suspicious eye on scientists in disciplines ranging from physics to sex research. If the Bureau surveilled writers because of what they believed (as documented in Writers Under Surveillance ), it surveilled scientists because of what they knew. Such scientific ideals as the free exchange of information seemed dangerous when the Soviet Union and the United States regarded each other with mutual suspicion that seemed likely to lead to mutual destruction. Scientists Under Surveillance gathers FBI files on some of the most famous scientists in America, reproducing them in their original typewritten, teletyped, hand-annotated form. Readers learn that Isaac Asimov, at the time a professor at Boston University's School of Medicine, was a prime suspect in the hunt for a Soviet informant codenamed ROBPROF (the rationale perhaps being that he wrote about robots and was a professor). Richard Feynman had a "hefty" FBI file, some of which was based on documents agents found when going through the Soviet ambassador's trash (an invitation to a physics conference in Moscow); other documents in Feynman's file cite an informant who called him a "master of deception" (the informant may have been Feynman's ex-wife). And the Bureau's relationship with Alfred Kinsey, the author of The Kinsey Report , was mutually beneficial, with each drawing on the other's data. The files collected in Scientists Under Surveillance were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by MuckRock, a nonprofit engaged in the ongoing project of freeing American history from the locked filing cabinets of government agencies.

Contents:

Neil Armstrong

Isaac Asimov

Hans Bethe

John P. Craven

Albert Einstein

Paul Erdos

Richard Feynman

Mikhail Kalashnikov

Alfred Kinsey

Timothy Leary

William Masters

Arthur Rosenfeld

Vera Rubin

Carl Sagan

Nikola Tesla.

Notes:

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

0-262-35302-4

OCLC:

1082364392