activities at any college ever released. The documents reveal that FBI agents amassed dossiers on hundreds of students and professors and on members of the Board of Regents; established informers within student groups, the faculty, and the highest levels of the university's administration; and gathered intelligence from wiretaps, mail openings, and searches of Berkeley homes and offices in the dead of night.

Although the bulk of the documents were released in the mid-90s, continuing litigation has compelled the FBI to release more than 50,000 additional pages, some as recently as this year, that provide a clearer picture of the agency's relationship with Reagan and suggest that it profoundly influenced his political development. These records—including material from the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO operation to discredit domestic political organizations—also provide a moreKerr."

In response to my reporting on some of these records, the FBI's current director, Robert S. Mueller III, acknowledged in 2002 that the bureau's surveillance and harassment at Berkeley during the cold war was inappropriate. "Such investigations are wrong and anti-democratic, and past examples are a stain on the FBI's greater tradition of observing and protecting the freedom of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights," Mueller declared.

FBI documents also show that in the 1950s Hoover ran a secret operation called the "Responsibilities Program" to get professors whose political views were deemed unacceptable fired by surreptitiously giving anonymous and unproven charges of disloyalty to Gov. Earl Warren, who then ordered investigations of the faculty. In fighting suspected radicals, Hoover also made common cause with State Sen. Hugh Burns,