It's been in their genes since J. Edgar first slipped on a pair of pink panties and spied on gay congressmen in his bedroom, but I'd forgotten the FBI's sixties antics
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this seems familiar
The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz sues to get secret FBI files on his ‘60s band
The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz sued the Justice Department on Tuesday to try to get secret files the FBI compiled on the pop rock band while they protested the Vietnam War in their 1960s counter-culture heyday.
The 77-year-old singer — the sole surviving member of the made-for-TV band — filed the lawsuit in Washington, DC, federal court after his attempts to obtain the records via the Freedom of Information Act were ignored, the legal papers say.
The FBI’s website confirms the band is a subject of two files — including, mysteriously, one that is “redacted entirely.”
The other is a 1967 Los Angeles Field Office memorandum that was released in a heavily redacted form in 2011 — unknown at the time to Dolenz and his attorney.
Under the misspelled subject “THE MONKEYS,” the file said it had looked into “four young men who dress as ‘beatnik types'” who “sang as a ‘combo.'”
An FBI informant — whose identity was redacted — detailed how The Monkees played live with “subliminal messages” on a stage — which “constituted ‘left-wing intervention of a political nature.’
“These messages and pictures were flashed of riots, in Berkley, anti-US messages on the war in Vietnam, racial riots in Selma, Alabama, and similar messages which had received unfavorable response from the audience,” the file said.
From a 2012 NPR interview with author Tim Weiner:
"Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state. Every fingerprint file, every DNA record, every iris recorded through biometrics, every government dossier on every citizen and alien in this country owes its life to him. We live in his shadow, though he's been gone for 40 years. As they always told the agents at the FBI academy when they were training, 'An institution is the length and shadow of a man.' "
