FBI targets universities in new scheme to recruit informers

This is the perfect chance to bring speakers onto these campuses
and talk about the history of FBI agents engaging in Death Squad activities.
It can also be used as a vehicle for students to organize around the issue of policing their own campuses and translating that model to the larger community.

3 easy reads
FBI warns colleges of terror threat
Asks more vigilance on theft of research
Warren T. Bamford says colleges are vulnerable. Warren T. Bamford says colleges are vulnerable.

By Shelley Murphy and Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff | June 12, 2007

Federal agents are warning leaders at some of the region's top universities -- including MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts -- to be on the lookout for foreign spies or potential terrorists trying to steal their research, the head of the FBI's Boston office said yesterday.


Agents plan to visit many more New England colleges in the coming months and are offering to provide briefings about what they call "espionage indicators" to faculty, students, or security staff as part of a national outreach to college campuses.

"What we're most concerned about are those things that are not classified being developed by MIT, Worcester Polytech, and other universities," said Warren T. Bamford, special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office. He said colleges are vulnerable to those looking to exploit that information and use it against the United States.

The FBI's website says universities should consider the possibility of foreign spies posing as international students or visitors and terrorists studying advanced technologies and scientific breakthroughs on campus, as well as violent extremists and computer hackers.

"We don't walk in with the idea we're are going to stop the free flow of information," Bamford said during a meeting with Globe editors and reporters.

"The academic community is designed to be open, and we just have to make the community aware," he said. "There are people who would be willing to establish relationships to take secrets."

Dennis D. Berkey, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, said he and several other university administrators met with Bamford about two weeks ago and welcomed the advice about protecting their unpublished research. For example, researchers shouldn't leave laptops unprotected in a hotel room in a foreign country, where they could be stolen. Berkey said he puts his own laptop in the hotel safe.

The agents also suggested that professors be wary about who contacts them to talk about their work.

"The general point was, if there is unnatural or unexplained interest in your research and you're nervous about it, here's how to be in touch with us," Berkey said.

He said it was useful to open lines of communication, although he didn't think WPI would take the FBI up on its offer to train faculty, because the university is already well versed in how to protect its research. He welcomed the FBI's interest, however.

"I think that in the era we're living in, we have to be more aware of what's going on around us, generally," he said.

Bamford also recently visited Boston College's president, the Rev. William P. Leahy, said Kevin Shea, Leahy's executive assistant.

"Boston College was very appreciative of their outreach," Shea said. He said BC probably would be taking the FBI up on some of its offers of support, but said he did not have details.

John Reinstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, questioned the FBI's presence on college campuses.

"There ought to be some concern about keeping a little bit of distance between the universities and the intelligence community."

He added that the FBI's alliance with universities could have a chilling effect on students or researchers.

"Are you going to ask all the questions you want to ask if someone is out there taking notes and reporting to the FBI that you asked the question which they perceived as suspicious?" Reinstein asked.

Lucia Ziobro, the acting assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's counterintelligence branch in Boston, said, "We're not out there to recruit people and place spies in the academic setting."

She said that the agency would like colleges to report any serious concerns to their campus security, local police, or the FBI, but that the program's goal is "to get ahead of the curve on counter-proliferation and espionage . . . [and] to give some real useful information to universities."

Erik J. Dahl, a counterintelligence specialist and research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said, "I don't think there's anything wrong with the FBI or other elements of the government reaching out to academia."

But he voiced doubts about how successful it would be in uncovering plots. "It just doesn't seem likely that a foreign terrorist or a homegrown terrorist would be getting tips for his next plot on a university campus."

Bamford and two other FBI agents met about six weeks ago with University of Rhode Island president Robert L. Carothers and Robert A. Weygand, vice president for administration and a former Rhode Island congressman.

The agents talked about another danger in foreign hotel rooms, that hackers might break into a professor's laptop through the hotel Internet system.

The university will consult with researchers and other officials before deciding whether to accept the FBI's offer of faculty training, Weygand said.

"It was a very nice offer," he said. "We are taking it under consideration."

FBI agent found masturbating on UA campus, police say
DAVID L. TEIBEL
Tucson Citizen
An FBI agent faces sex-offense charges after a cleaning woman claimed she found him May 3 masturbating in a women's lavatory on campus, a University of Arizona police spokesman said.
Ryan Seese, 33, was cited on suspicion of three misdemeanors, public sexual indecency, criminal trespassing and indecent exposure, Sgt. Eugene V. Mejia said, adding Seese was released to an FBI supervisor.
The woman opened a Student Union restroom stall to clean it and spotted a man playing with himself, Mejia said.
She ran out of the lavatory and reported the incident to her supervisor, who called police, Mejia said.
The woman pointed out Seese to an officer taking her report. When the officer tried to stop him, Seese ran into a parking garage just north of the Student Union, where he was caught, handcuffed and cited, Mejia said.
Though Seese told the officer he was with law enforcement and the officer verified him to be an FBI agent, it was unknown why Seese was at UA or where he was assigned in Arizona.
Seese's attorney, Leo Plowman, could not be reached Friday. FBI spokeswoman Deborah McCarley said Seese worked for the FBI but she would not confirm whether he was an agent, in accordance with FBI policy.


Vol.25, No. 07 Oct. 29, 1999
Sigmund Diamond, Sociologist, Historian and Liberal Activist, Dies at 79
By A. Dunlap-Smith

Sigmund Diamond, a professor of sociology and history at Columbia for many years and a defender of radical ideals in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, died at Backus Hospital in Norwich, Conn. on Oct. 14. He was 79 years old.

Diamond died of esophageal cancer, his wife, Shirley Diamond, said.

Diamond demonstrated a deep conviction and courage in his support of what were considered revolutionary causes during mid-century: racial equality, fair labor practices, women's rights and the anti-war movement.

Both his courage and his conviction were tested often in his life and always proved unfailing. During Senator Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt in the 1950s, for example, Diamond was asked by the FBI to name names. Although it cost him a job offer from Harvard, he refused.

The episode later inspired his 1992 book on the period Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community 1945-1955.

"Sig Diamond was a courageous man who fought against the infiltration of political ideology into university decisionmaking," Columbia Provost Jonathan Cole said. "He was victim in his own day of McCarthyism at one of America's great universities.

Columbia can feel proud that it took a quality person like Sig Diamond in when others rejected him because of his background and political views. It can also be proud of what he did for Columbia through his teaching and research."

Born in 1920 in Baltimore, where he stayed to attend college at Johns Hopkins, Diamond's development as a leftist began early in life. Soon after college he joined the United Auto Workers Union. In 1945 he participated in a UAW-CIO sponsored meeting for shop stewards in Tennessee. At night he violated state law by sleeping in a dormitory for blacks, thereby integrating public sleeping quarters in Tennessee for the first time since Reconstruction.

The following year Diamond was a negotiator of the UAW-CIO contract with the Bendix Aviation Corp. When ratified, it became the first contract to give women equal pay for equal work.

He returned to school at Harvard in 1949. There he earned a Ph.D. in history. It was upon his graduation in 1953, his wife said, that McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard professor and administrator who later became special assistant to the President for national security affairs in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, withdrew the offer of a job at Harvard when Diamond refused to cooperate with the FBI.

The incident stained his reputation and caused him to be turned down for teaching posts at all the American colleges and universities where he applied except one. On their way to join the faculty of Cambridge University in England in 1955, the Diamonds received a phone call from Columbia asking him to come to Morningside Heights. It would remain their home until Diamond's retirement as Giddings Professor of Sociology and Professor of History, Emeritus, in 1986 at the age of 66.

"Sig Diamond was a remarkable colleague and friend," Cole said. "Among the preeminent historical sociologists of his time, Sig was one of Columbia's extraordinary teachers and scholars. He guided students for generations and insisted they focus on the quality and nature of evidence in historical writing. He produced a generation of historically-oriented sociologists who have helped develop this specialty into one of the leading components of contemporary sociological study."

Among Diamond's many activities during his years at Columbia were founding and directing the history department's program in social history and consulting on the American Jewish Committee oral history project on the Holocaust.

His books and articles include The Reputation of the American Businessman, published in 1955; The Nation Transformed: The Creation of an Industrial Society in the United States, 1963, and In Quest: Journal of an Uneasy Pilgrimage, 1980.

Diamond is survived by his wife, Shirley; a daughter, Dr. Betty Ann Diamond of Riverdale, N.Y.; a son, Stephen Diamond of Coral Gables, Fla.; two brothers and four granddaughters.