Report Jewish Student Activist Group Under Surveillance by U.S. Army

The Jewish Student Movement on the campus of Northwestern University has been under surveillance by U.S. Army intelligence agents. The JSM was mentioned along with various other campus groups engaged in political or anti-Vietnam war activities by John O’Brien, a former Army intelligence case officer of Region I, 113th Military Intelligence Group in Evanston. O’Brien’s disclosures were the basis of articles in the Daily Northwestern, a campus newspaper, and in various newspapers in Chicago and other cities. O’Brien was quoted as saying that the intelligence surveillance covered all types of anti war or politically oriented activities on the Northwestern campus and in private residences. “We monitored any organization that had anything at all to do with politics,” O’Brien said according to a Daily Northwestern article by Baran Rosen.

“This included a very small YSA (Young Socialist Alliance, a Trotskyist youth group) movement, SMC (Student Mobilization Committee, an anti-war coalition), the Daily Northwestern, Jewish Student Movement, Young Americans for Freedom, and Evanston groups like Businessmen to End The War in Vietnam and North Shore Coalition to End the War in Vietnam,” Rosen reported, Jack N. Porter, founder of the Jewish Student Movement at Northwestern said his group felt “honored” to be under surveillance. “I had known for some time that the military intelligence or the FBI had files on me for various leftist activities and I also knew that local ‘subversive’ squads (‘Red Squads’) had been intrigued by an ad I took out in the Chicago Sentinel and Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle concerning support of the Jewish Defense League’s action vis-a-vis Soviet Jewry,” Porter wrote in an open letter to other cam pus groups. He said he had information from a Jewish friend who was a member of the Milwaukee police force that local police agents in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York infiltrated the JDL.