Piecing Things Together: The End of the Pauling Case File

[Part 7 of 7] “In significant ways, by the 1970s the FBI had become an anachronism. It kept tilting at the illusory communist menace. It ran a sleazy campaign against homosexuals. It floundered in its perception and pursuit of the modern Mafia. It persecuted black citizens just when much of America was trying to help [...]

Informants, Committees and Travel

[Part 6 of 7] Over the course of their thirty years of keeping tabs on him, the Federal Bureau of Investigation utilized a wide variety of tactics to monitor Linus Pauling and his activities. They kept track of his travel, saved references made to Pauling in the media, charted his participation in various groups and [...]

The FBI Begins its Investigation

[Part 5 of 7] As a researcher in a private institution, Linus Pauling was initially spared from the FBI investigations made legal by President Truman’s Executive Order 9835. However, when Pauling initiated a trip to Europe in January 1948, he was approached by a Navy representative with an offer to become an intermittent contract employee. [...]

Opening the Pauling Case File

[Part 4 of 7] In early spring of 1979, after citing amendments to the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act of 1974, most of Linus Pauling’s personal FBI records were finally transferred to him. Following years of correspondence and various appeals, the rest of Pauling’s files from other agencies were released throughout the [...]

Pauling Obtains His FBI File

[Part 3 of 7] On March 8, 1971, several people broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of files from classified record storage. Information from these files was gradually leaked to the press, and in time newspaper articles began divulging information about COINTELPRO, an FBI operation that targeted both groups and [...]

Pauling’s First Interaction with the FBI

[Part 2 of 7] In contrast to the adversarial tone that would later come to define their relationship, Linus Pauling’s first interactions with the FBI were largely benign and without conflict. The earliest known documents in the FBI’s records concerning Linus Pauling date to 1935. That year, Linus and his wife Ava Helen were members [...]

The Pauling FBI Files: An Introduction

[Ed Note: This is Part 1 of 7 of a series of posts taking an in depth look at Linus Pauling's lengthy FBI file.] “[J. Edgar] Hoover’s imposing presence gave much of the country a sense of stability and safety as he gathered to himself the strands of permanence that connected Americans to their past: [...]

Louis Budenz, Informant

“Uncover a red doing his stuff on a college faculty and a hue and cry is raised over ‘academic freedom,’ as though these people had a God-given right to infect our children with their made-in-Moscow virus….We should understand that this ’cause of peace’ as peddled by the reds is the destruction of the government of [...]

The Story of Sidney Weinbaum

Sidney Weinbaum, born and raised in Western Russia, came to the U.S. in 1922 after studying at the Charkoff Institute of Technology. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree at Caltech in 1924 before working for several years in the chemical industry. Weinbaum was a talented mathematician and, as chance would have it, met Linus [...]