The Spy Who Shushed Me
Remembering when the FBI snooped on library activities
Efforts by school boards and county and state governments to ban books have taken on historic proportions in recent years. According to the American Library Association, “challenges of unique titles surged 65% in 2023 compared to 2022 numbers, reaching the highest level ever documented by ALA.” Libraries have been closed, and staff members fired, over these struggles. There have even been laws to throw librarians in jail.
But even if government censorship of libraries is unprecedented in scope, it’s not new. Fifty years ago, there was another campaign to monitor people’s access to books. It was overseen not by local governments but by the FBI. Nor was it concerned about kids getting a peek at Captain Underpants (among the most-challenged books of the past decade).
It was looking for Russian spies.
The first evidence of FBI surveillance of libraries came in January 1971, when two agents visited the home of Zoia Horn, chief reference librarian at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. The agents were investigating a supposed plot to detonate tunnels beneath Washington, D.C., and kidnap Henry Kissinger, President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser. The FBI learned about this plot from Boyd Douglas, an inmate at a nearby federal…
