Wiretapped on Drury Lane:
Journalist Bernard Fall and the FBI

Few books were as influential in the early years of the Vietnam War as Street Without Joy, a 1961 critique of the French involvement in Indochina by scholar and journalist Bernard Fall. Widely read in Washington, it shaped the thinking of many in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and established Fall as one of the most perceptive, controversial and outspoken critics of Western involvement in Vietnam.

What’s not as well known is that Fall wrote this remarkable book in Hollin Hills (he lived on Drury Lane from the late 1950’s to December of 1963) – and was subject to intense FBI surveillance while he lived here.

Tragically, Fall was killed on a research trip to Vietnam in 1967. But decades later, his wife Dorothy obtained the FBI’s records on him via the Freedom of Information Act – and they reveal a pattern of surveillance of the Falls that included a phone tap, searches of their trash, and what the FBI described as “attempts to develop neighborhood and other sources against subject.” (In other words: informants.)

“The FBI surveillance of Bernard picked up in earnest in 1963,” writes Dorothy in her book Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar. “First, there were hints of it in odd sounds on our telephone, mail that was late, and men who sat in parked cars outside our house for hours.”

They were well aware that their Drury Lane home was being watched. “At the time, I wondered why the wife of a navy officer who lived nearby would come tripping in at all hours of the day to see what we were doing, although I suspected it was to flirt with Bernard,” she writes. “Later I thought she was one of the ‘neighborhood sources’ the FBI had recruited.”

As it turns out, the Falls were not the only Hollin Hillers being watched by the FBI. The diplomat Richard Moose, who lived on Glasgow and was appointed to the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger, later sued Kissinger for having the FBI tap his phone.

None of this snooping surprises Bobbie Seligmann, who has lived on Recard Lane since 1952 and knew (and liked) the Falls well. “The FBI,” she says with a laugh, “thought we were all communists!”

– Stephen Brookes