and early 50s, the director's concern had grown when scores of faculty members refused to sign a special loyalty oath for university employees.

So far, the 60s were posing an even greater challenge to authority, with the university generating one provocation after another—that "vicious" essay question about the dangers of an organization like the FBI that was optional for applicants in 1959, student participation in the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall, the Free Speech Movement, attempts to stop trains carrying troops bound for Vietnam. The old Communist Party had been bad enough, but now there was the New Left, the hippies, the Black Panthers, Allen Ginsberg. Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his second in command at the bureau and his most intimate companion,saw Berkeley as the vortex of a youth movement fed by "free love," drugs, and a general disrespect for authority spreading all too quickly to other colleges. Stepping up its efforts at Berkeley, the bureau mounted the most extensive covert operations the FBI is known to have undertaken on any campus.

The FBI has long denied investigating the university as an organization, and that much is true. But a legal challenge I brought under the Freedom of Information Act, entailing five lawsuits over the course of 27 years, forced the bureau to release more than 300,000 pages of its confidential records concerning individuals, organizations, and events on and around the campus during the cold war, from the 1940s through the 1970s. This is the most complete record of FBI