There’s a new documentary about the late ex-Beatle and his wife, Yoko Ono. One to One1 (Magnolia Pictures) focuses on the couple’s early-’70s peace activism, particularly in Greenwich Village. But documents published in the last few years suggest that elements of U.S. intelligence continue to feel haunted by John Lennon’s political influence.

Thanks to historian Jon Wiener, a great deal is known about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s harassment of Lennon during the 1970s. Much less is known about the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and other branches of U.S. power.

Deportation

In December 1970, the Nixon administration secretly established the Intelligence Evaluation Committee (IEC) to spy on domestic activists. The Committee was the administration’s answer to the FBI’s sweeping Counterintelligence Program (1956-71) and the CIA’s Operation Chaos (1967-74), which targeted antiwar groups. The IEC reportedly drew upon wiretaps provided by the National Security Agency. Members included representatives from the CIA, FBI, the Secret Service, and the Departments of Defense, Justice, State, and Treasury.

In February 1972, Republican Senator Strom Thurmond—or, as Lennon once called him, “Senator Thurmbold, or somebody…”—wrote to Attorney General John N. Mitchell, falsely alleging that Lennon was planning to disrupt the Republican National Convention scheduled for August that year. Thurmond’s allegations made it into an IEC report, available in the CIA archives. Mitchell’s office passed the letter to Commissioner Raymond Farrell of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Shortly thereafter, Lennon’s visa was revoked and the INS initiated deportation proceedings.

The excuse was an old, possibly false drugs-related charge against Lennon dating back to England in the 1960s. Nixon’s Department of Justice (DoJ) and FBI asked British intelligence for help digging up dirt on the peacenik. The Security Service (MI5) had placed Lennon under surveillance over his supposed sympathies with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Like their U.S. counterparts, British spooks had also put faulty intelligence into their reports, claiming without evidence that Lennon had financed both the IRA and the UK-based Workers Revolutionary Party (sic). After the Bloody Sunday massacre (1972), Lennon had participated in Troops Out marches, as well as penning the anti-colonial song, The Luck of the Irish.

Clutching at straws

Nixon’s IEC and Richard Helms’s CIA suggested that Lennon was tied to Project YES. A February 1972 memo from Helms to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover describes YES as a news service comprised of articles, films, and video. The memo alerted Hoover to the possibility that Lennon and Yoko Ono would use YES to create a “caravan of artists” to stalk and harass political conventions in the causes of the antiwar Left. The memo was discovered and published by Jon Wiener. It does not appear on the CIA’s archive site.

Rennie Davis was one of the famous peace activists, the Chicago Eight—better known as the Chicago Seven. Davis was acquitted on appeal of inciting a riot against the National Democratic Convention 1968. The CIA sought to tie Davis to Lennon. In another February ’72 memo, the Agency claimed that the Soviets controlled an organization called the World Assembly for Peace and Independence of the Peoples of Indochina. The Agency noted that the World Assembly had met in Paris-Versailles in February and had made an unsuccessful effort to demonstrate against the planned Republican National Convention.

Lennon was alleged by the CIA to have funded Project YES, which apparently paid the travel expenses of one of Davis’s representatives at the World Assembly. The Agency alleged that Davis’s unnamed rep was plotting to disrupt the San Diego Convention. The Agency also claimed that YES was an “adjunct” to the Election Year Strategy Information Center; a voter-registration initiative

A threat, both foreign and domestic

How can the U.S. Army use the protest music of occupied populations to gain strategic advantage? This is a question posed in 2015 by U.S. Army Major, Chad T. Alexander. His thesis seeks to identify information relevant to Military Information Support Operations “during the planning phase” of armed conflict. Such a strategy will be aided by the “creation of a Potential Behavior Conditions and [a] Vulnerabilities List.” The aim is “to influence the behavior of foreign target audiences.”

Lennon is a prominent figure in Alexander’s thesis. His songs comprise three out of nine popular antiwar songs performed by non-Americans: Imagine, Give Peace a Chance, and Happy Xmas (War is Over). Imagine is considered the gold-standard of protest music because it is simple, poignant, and rubs against elite “American” values, including private property (“Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can…”). Alexander quotes Lennon as describing the song as basically the Communist Manifesto put to music. To succeed, said Lennon, you’ve got to “put your political message across with a little honey.”

In 2020, documents were published concerning Lennon’s influence closer to home.

Border Patrol Agent, James B. Briggs of the Department of Homeland Security, argued that music contributes to the formation of identities and worldviews. Using Vietnam War-era pop music as a case-study, Briggs demonstrates that art can inspire social action: “larger-than-life performers … fuel[ed] youth activism.” This is important because younger people tend to be more susceptible than older ones to peer-influence. The implication is that antiwar artists could be neutralized and/or replaced with performers more in line with the interests of political and military elites. Lennon takes up several pages of the thesis. Briggs writes that in Imagine:

“…removing religion was suggested in support of more holistic goals like doing away with nation-states and private property in favor of peace, fostered by utopian collectivism … [T]he song in its chosen theme further showcased the counterculture’s search for a belief system that did away with a society and its religion altogether.”

Conclusion

These documents demonstrate that, four decades after his death, elements of U.S. intelligence and the military continue to consider John Lennon’s historic peace advocacy to be a threat to their warmongering and attempts at social control.

After a well-documented, protracted legal battle, Lennon won his immigration case and in 1976 was issued his green card. The British cop, Norman Pilcher, who pinched Lennon for the alleged drug offense was later charged in England with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. At the time of writing, John N. Mitchell remains the only U.S. Attorney General to have served time in jail (for conspiracy, lying under oath, and the obstruction of justice.)

Lennon lived in the United States, mainly in New York, until his murder in December 1980.

The documentary One to One is out now.

T. J. Coles is director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research and the author of several books, including Voices for Peace (with Noam Chomsky and others) and Fire and Fury: How the U.S. Isolates North Korea, Encircles China and Risks Nuclear War in Asia (both Clairview Books).

—CounterPunch, June 15, 2025

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/15/us-intelligence-still-afraid-of-john-lennon/

---

1 https://www.onetoonefilm.com

John Lennon - Imagine (remastered)