FBI spied on Kerry

last updated 8 January 2015

Washington, D.C.

The FBI tailed John Kerry for more than a year in the early 1970s, as part of its monitoring of anti-war activists, the Los Angeles Times revealed this week. Agents discovered “nothing whatsoever to link the subject with any violent activity,” concluded the extensive file on the future presidential candidate. The agency began following Kerry in 1971, after he testified before Congress as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Agents assigned to Kerry eventually decided that he was using VVAW for his own ends. “Kerry is an opportunist with personal political aspirations,” said one report. The Kerry campaign this week said that having aroused the suspicions of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover was “a badge of honor,” though the candidate was surprised at the extent of the surveillance. “I’m offended by the intrusiveness of it,” he said.